Amaranthian

People don't really see much past their own front door sometimes, or they just don't care. There's not a whole lot that encourages people to think of us all as a global community, things like TV just make us more insular and reinforce our own world views, as people watch what they like.

I don't think religion really mixes with science. Where science uncovers the unknown, religion tries to fill the shrinking gap. Something will have to give.

Hahahaha.

Hmm, sorry. I guess I should have said a melding of spirituality and science, not so much religion.

i guess i just don't understand how a scientist, who's entire life's work is about logical conclusions based on measurable result, could buy into something which requires faith, the accepting of something that cannot be proven. or even worse, the ignoring of things that are proven to be false by altering the original argument to be untestable. a great example is the seven days for creation thing becoming "not seven literal days". i am not able to say that i'm a rational person, but then believe in things that are obviously, based on measurable evidence, not true, nor can i take a holy book, interpret the hell out of it so as to make it nearly unrecognizable from its original form (no no no, when it says they're killing all those babies, they aren't actually killing babies), and then say that i follow what that book says. if you reject everything that doesn't make sense in the religion, then you are no longer part of that religion. you're just finding meaning in the bits and pieces of the world that connect with you, like the golden rule and the idea that perhaps there is something unique about humans when compared to other animals. you're no longer christian, you're just spiritually thoughtful. the rules and regulations and the requirement to believe things that seem untrue to the logical mind are the prerequisites for religion, and it's that last bit that make it incompatible with science in my view. religious scientists are like jewish nazis to me.

okay, maybe that last bit went too far lol

Just because you've never met an open minded religious person, doesn't mean they don't exist.

I'll use the example of my good friend Mike. He is very religious. He goes to church at least once a week, sometimes more frequently. He participates in bible study groups at least once a week, in addition to church related social functions. Most of his friends are from his church. He talks about god a lot, and god and faith plays a very important role in his (and his wife's) life. He's also one of the smartest people I know, and really good at science, experiment design, data analysis, etc. He believes in evolution, because the data supports it, but that doesn't mean that god didn't create life, or even guides it (maybe god is present in the laws of probability, or in the atomic forces that drive all life). The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I think in some ways they are inseparable. If you really, truly, believe in God, then there is no way that data and facts and proofs and laws that we have described could disagree with him. Therefore, you allow your idea of god to fluidly encompass the truths you know while explaining what you don't. Living a life that seeks proof and data and questions things doesn't mean you can't have faith that what you don't know can be explained by things outside your understanding.

Literal interpretations of the Bible are not required for faith in god. The lessons of the bible are taught in parable. If you take it literally, there are too many ridiculous inconsistencies to count. Like if Adam and Eve were the only two humans, then all their kids are going to run around having incestuous babies with each other. So incest is okay AMIRITE? Of course not. Anyone who has a thinking and rational mind knows that. The bible endorses slavery and rejects homosexuality. Well now we know slavery is wrong. So...uh...what's the problem with homosexuality again? "The bible says so?" I don't think so. "Butt sex between guys repulses me and I hate gay people?" There you go.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who glorify ignorance and disregard obvious logical fallacies, and many, many religious people are like that. They take the bible as gospel, ignore science, and have little capacity for reason or rational thought. I scorn these people. However, there are people like those I describe above, and almost without exception my religious peers within the scientific community are in that general group (with some variation). Some even have a conservative political bent which I can respect, even if I disagree, as opposed to the batshit crazy right.

One of my favorite quotes is from Goethe:

"The highest happiness of man is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable."

To me, that encapsulates the intersection of science and religion.

I thought Fap's point was simply that faith and logic were two separate entities, which are pretty well defined under the umbrella terms "religion" and "science", respectively. Although I would say philosophy instead of religion.

i didn't mean to imply that religious people were inherently close-minded or dumb. also, i really enjoy this conversation, so please imagine me being pleasantly engaged. i say this because there have been some long-ass post conversations on the old site that resulted in people getting mad, and sometimes it's hard to convey tone in text. if i accidentally offend, i don't mean to : )!

i just find that there is a conflict of interest between Religion (not belief in god necessarily, but belief in a specific religion and its definition of "god"), and Science (the land of logic and skeptics), which i cannot accept as being non-noteworthy in individuals who wholeheartedly pursue both fields. also, i cannot understand the willingness to accept as truth parts of the bible (or other holy book) that are supernatural, while deciding that other parts are just supernatural enough to reject.

I do find that while rejection of things that disprove aspects of the belief system is not exclusive to religion, it is certainly characteristic of at least the abrahamic religions, if not all religions. proofs against the religions are stamped out if possible (historically and currently), refuted with all the resources available, then, finally (in some cases) accepted as proofs that god intended all along. the "god created evolution" argument is a great example.

the philosophy that exists in some of the established religions are great; love thy neighbor, don't kill what you don't need to, be good for goodness sake. once you accept one physical description of the universe from a holy book then you have bought into all of that book's "truths", and if you haven't bought into all of them then why did you buy into the one or two? what is it that made those supernatural elements believable, while others were not? if the book feels so wrong as to make you reject parts of it as fable, what makes you decide that other parts are history? and how do you make that decision? if god did create the world, then it's only a small leap to say that it was created to seem old to test the faith of his flock. morality and wonder at the beauty of the universe doesn't have to have religion attached to it, which is my biggest point. by making people exist in a master/slave dynamic with an unknown force that exists outside of provable experience, religion ends up retarding almost every aspect of human civilization. science is discouraged because it calls into question "truths" that cannot be questioned. cultures resort to violence to defend or spread their version of these totally hypothetical sets of conclusions based on our primal ancestors trying to explain the yearly floods. people are oppressed or killed because the religion says that they follow the adversary. we know why it floods now, and if there is some invisible force outside of the multibrane, there is no reason to assume it has anything to do with the humidity levels in the atmosphere of our particular planet. this we know because we can do now what only god could do then: make it rain. or maybe god is altering the clouds that we're seeding to make us think we're making it rain. it's a slippery slope that can catch anyone. i personally think that the people who are smart enough to value logic, but still find themselves thinking that one day an all-powerful god is coming to earth to jump start doomsday, are victims of early indoctrination with these horrible images and ideas that religion propagates. if you're told when you're four years old that if you lie you're going to be tortured forever when you die, that makes a permanent imprint that is hard to kick. you may end up deciding that god created evolution or whatever, but you might still feel afraid at the idea of nordic black metal bands singing about satan, or even afraid at the idea of missing church. you may not know why, but you may still for the rest of your life find great comfort at praying on the bible, even though you know that much of it is clearly not true, and is only fable at best. it's this fear of moving away from it, and this forced compromise of your perception of the world to include room for the explanations in the holy book, that betray how insidious and damaging it is. it's like a drug that makes you feel great and you move your whole life around to accommodate it, never realizing that there are other ways to feel that good without the damaging side effects.

spirituality allows for the growth human kind, while encouraging learning, healthy skepticism, evolution even of ourselves. the question is the reason spirituality even exists. religion, on the other hand, sets itself up to be the ultimate answer. the rigid framework of religion exists only to restrict the things that open spiritual questions encourage. those who buy into parts of religion, but not all, do so totally arbitrarily (in my opinion) and, whether meaning to or not, encourage all those bad things religion does to us.

can you tell my family is pentecostal? lol

as a disclaimer, people can believe whatever the hell they want to believe. these are just my conclusions after trying to decide for many years what the hell i wanted to believe. i read and read, went to churches, monasteries, synagogues, temples, etc, and talked to a lot of various religious people, and the only thing i found was a few common threads that seemed pretty good, buried in these giant midden heaps of scary crazy talk.

i agree in one way, but disagree in another. philosophy is okay in my opinion because it seeks to play logic games with things that are untestable. religion seeks to give ultimate answers without the questioning that philosophy encourages, and it punishes disobedience, making it far more dangerous.

i agree with almost all of this, although i would say that the people who go to church passionately and really think that there is an invisible man on a throne watching everything they do are totally indoctrinated with the bad in religion, even if they believe he set evolution in place. if you asked one of those people if their religion is pure fact, they would probably give an answer like yours. meaning, they would say that it is a moral guide told through stories that give lessons from the past. if you showed them say, flying spaghetti monster for instance, they would either laugh at it or be offended. it would be impossible for them to say that this could be even a little true, that it would be able to offer anything worth living their lives by. you could argue that they would know it was made as farce, but that's not the point. the point is that it is a potential belief structure involving a supernatural element, complete with moral values, but because it's not their belief structure, it's wrong. their religion has already told them what's right, has already given them the "facts". it's already said that the bible, for instance, holds "truth" and that no other paths lead to god. even if it doesn't happen on a conscious level, they've decided that their supernatural book about an invisible man smiting people is true, and this other supernatural book is false, which is to me a false decision. it happens every time they speak in subtly reproachful tones about hindus and their elephant god, and it happens every time they read over a passage in the bible with a pillar of salt or a boat full of animals and say to themselves "this part is allegory, but the all-powerful deity who is an invisible superman, a human, and a spirit at the same time, and who watches everything i do every second of my life, is real".

i know it's out of fashion, but i remember when i was about 13 or 14 reading the first sentence in a "holy book" that i had ever seen that actually resonated with me. it was, maybe unfortunately, in the book of the sub-genius. i had been reading religious books for about 6 or 7 years by then, and talking to holy folk for about 5 years. i had always felt like i was missing something, but was still scared in a way of going to hell, and then i read one of the central lessons about becoming a sub-genius. the first step was "pull the wool over your own eyes", and when i read that i feel like everything snapped in place. they said to pull the wool over your own eyes, accept all the crazy snake oil that we're selling. buy it all, because then at least you know that there's wool there. i know it's a mock-religion, but i think that part was brilliant because with every religious order i encountered i felt like the plan was to dangle this everlasting happiness in front of your nose like a carrot on a stick, but then to tell you that in order to get it you have to compromise your integrity as a thinking human being and believe all these very unlikely and in any other context totally crazy delusions, and live your life in a muted and fearful way. there is no place other than religion where it's okay to talk to invisible supernatural friends, but in religious context it's demanded. maybe it says something about my lack of character or something, but i found more positive life lessons in the book of the sub-genius than i did in any other religious or mock-religious text i ever read.

Yeah, we basically agree.

I think I underestimate generally the power of that indoctrination, and how difficult it is to look beyond it. I think anyone with a brain should be able to rationally observe the world around them. But what if you're told as part of the indoctrination that your rational mind is a flaw and liability that will do its best to deceive you at every turn? This is what you were getting at when you said that some (most?) religion says that facts are out there to deceive and tempt and mislead you. That is fucked up- a willful and systematic suppression of our best quality. I think this is more widespread than I thought, more subtle, and more pervasive.

I guess it even goes back to adam and eve and the tree of knowledge/life. Maybe what they're saying is that if you search for meaning in the world around you outside of religion, you forsake a eternal life of ignorant bliss, so you should choose to be ignorant. For me, it says that knowledge doesn't care about life, and you should seek to continually perceive the consequences of your knowledge and subsequent actions, and the effects they have on your life and the life around you. Religious doctrine view vs. spiritual view?

It's funny you mention the spaghetti monster, because it was the background on my lab computer, and I had a discussion about it with Mike at one point. He thought it was hilarious, as I do, because he knows that God is as likely to be a spaghetti monster as a guy on a throne, and neither of those as likely as something we have no comprehension of. How naive is it to think that god exists in some form that we can perceive? Why does he have to? He tells you the exact same thing whether he's an old dude, a dude in a turban, a spaghetti monster, or a c-c-c-combo of a 6-armed chick, a dude with a sword, and an elephant (i'm sure I'm offending some hindu person right now, lol).

I still think that religion SHOULD be an end-user experience, a tool to enrich your life, strengthen the bonds of community and society, and promote responsibility towards all life on this planet. Unfortunately, in a vast majority of cases, it seems to do the opposite- empty your life of striving for great achievement while telling you your mediocrity is a virtue, weakening society by telling you those not like you are to be at best pitied and at worst exterminated, and enable us to destroy the planet and all animal and plant life because we are god's chosen, and everything exists for our use and benefit. It disgusts me. Talk about an abomination.

For me personally, I have become more spiritual over the years, I was not raised religiously at all. A lot of what I've been saying are opinions I've developed on my own after years of studying science, as even you seek and possibly find novel understanding of a system, it reveals how wondrous the fact that that could even happen is. I know with certainty that there is something underlying the perceivable world that is utterly beyond our ability to ever fathom.

You've definitely put in perspective how unlikely it is for people with a religious upbringing to have this kind of spirituality. The people I know are a small group of aberrations on the fringe of a huge army of mindless zombies. I don't know how or why they would still group themselves with the others, possibly some small remains of the indoctrination process despite their more open and spiritual views. As for your original point, this bogus, bastardized concept of religion that is peddled today is antithetical to science. It's also antithetical to truth, reason, empathy, logic, and morality. GG religion!

Thanks for engaging me on it! I feel like I've evolved my views based on your input. It's an interesting topic.

yeah, no kidding! glad i could be a part of this. i love me some intelligent discussion!

holy fuck i hate my state

People voted for Bush.

Twice.

I just like to point that out whenever possible.

i think i have that on my computer right now. it was so funny and scary at the same time.

i would email it to you but it's like 700 megs

Is there any way to transfer a file that big over the interwebz? like AIM maybe?

yeah, i wouldn't know how to do that as an interpersonal file share

Yeah, i guess i'll try to torrent it. I'll have to take a break from my porn downloads, I suppose.

i was just told by my network specialist guy that there's a client called "tor" that we could use for this. basically, we both download it and log in at a specific time, enter each other's IPs, then we can do file transfers and stuff. or, i can just mail you a cd lol.

There's no statute of limitations on commenting here, as Bram loves to reminds us, you should share your thoughts anyhow.

DO IT.

Here's an interesting perspective from one of the Delegate-runners from my district. A good contrast to religion in relation to the ones shared here.
Clicky in hopes of not breaking the forum
It is a bit politically toned and written, but then again, it is what it is (and I'm positive Amaranthians can filter through such stuff).