Religion Sucks. Let me tell you why!

That is people changing with the times, not the intrinsic nature of religion.

And then because those things ARE changing, that religion is now being hypocritical unto itself!!!

So should the Bible be re-written to suit "today's" needs?

Religious followers seem to enjoy picking and choosing what verses they like or apply to TODAY'S SOCIAL STANDARDS.

While all the rest just "doesn't apply anymore."

Well how does that make sense? I thought your religion was your HOLY TEXT OF DIVINE REVELATION? To go against that due to some HUMAN SOCIAL CONSTRUCT should by nature be your sin against GOD'S LAWS.

Because I don't remember God, Jesus, or Muhammad coming down to earth 20 years ago and saying "hey everyone, I know society have changed so you can go ahead and change my holy texts to better suit the days of the modern man." NO. HE DIDN'T SAY SUCH A THING.

You're just digging yourself a bigger hole... the self-contradiction and circular logic is astounding. There is nothing but irony and hypocrisy.

Science doesn't change to conform to "social standards." It SETS new standards for medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, psychology/psychiatry, education, child-rearing, and even things like philosophy and epistemology. Science is discovering how the universe works, not trying to conform itself to appease to the masses!!!

 

Actually, the assertion that the founding text of a religion is the unerring word of God to be interpreted literally is the definition of "fundamentalism," not "religion." (The modern idea that "fundamentalism" means "violent religion," or "extremist religion," is a misnomer from a comparative religion perspective).

But not all religions are fundamentalist. Plenty of religions teach that their creation texts were divinely inspired, but passed through the filter of the human minds who actually put pen to ink and wrote them. This is particularly true if there's any period of oral transmission before it's written down. The theory is that this does not erase the divinely-inspired message, but taints it with beliefs and memes of society at the time it was written.

Many religions have taken the idea that you must analyze, distill, process the initial text and the core beliefs into something more usable, through an academic process of study and debate. The Jewish Talmud and the Muslim Hadith are two specific examples.

 

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZYaKOk-3B0"]YouTube - WAR ON MORON[/ame]

:whistle:

 

No. Sadly that understanding of science is becoming more and more common among the ignorant, but science functions in almost the opposite way to your average religion. Nothing in science is based on faith (unless you take the basic assumption that we can, at least to a degree, assume that what we experience is generally real) but should be tested, checked, experimented upon, checked again, attempts made to disprove it repeatedly, and if all attempts to invalidate a theory fail then it may be grudgingly accepted until it is later disproven, or another theory comes along.

Sadly it is becoming far too common for 'scientists say' to be spouted by the unthinking masses in place of 'the <insert holy book> says', but this is a failure of education and media rather than the scientific method itself.

As for unproven theories, no scientific theory can be proven. You can just fail to disprove them, and ensure that the predictions match the actual results. Then, one day, you find something that doesn't match and either have to find out where your theory goes wrong and correct it, or completely discard it and start over. There should never, in science, be an assumption that something is true or beyond doubt. Do not accept anything on faith.

As to the big bang theory - there is plenty of evidence supporting it. Look into it, get the data, and do the maths yourself if you have any doubts - all of the experimental results are publicly available.

 

VERY poor taste and a very hypocritical video. They say that "ONLY" the religions can destroy life by claiming a higher purpose for the killings, and they attribute all radicalism and violence to religion (no seriously, they do at 2:30 forward), but don't realize that by blaming all of society's ills on one demographic group, they're being as irrational and intolerant as the worst of the people they criticize. It's one thing to say "religion is irrational," it's another thing to blame ALL of society's ills on religion.

 

While religion does make a nice scapegoat, and I do have fundamental disagreements with the concept, I have to agree with you here. Society's ills are generally due to people who'll find whichever excuse they need. Any belief structure will do.

Having said that I'm not aware of any one being killed over the two different interpretations of quantum mechanics. But the Pythagorean brotherhood did have a habit of murdering anyone who worked out the same mathematical principles as them.

 

Religion is the rallying call for stupid bigoted people to do stupid things. The science that provides their fertiliser based bombs is the blunt instrument.

 

.....and this is why I try to stay out of discussions like these. It's all opinion. Really, that's what religion boils down to - my opinion of what I believe. The only real problem is when stupidity enters into it.

There's nothing wrong with religion - what's wrong is one person trying to force a system of beliefs on another. This is why wars are fought about religion - because one group doesn't like what the other believes. Yes, every religion thinks they are the right ones - so do the atheists, for that matter. Nothing wrong with that, until someone starts getting ugly, mean, cruel, or physical about it. Honestly, if you do some research into ANY organized religion, almost all of them are AGAINST the kind of behavior that is actually done in the name of religion. Again, that's the human factor right there.

You want to think religion sucks? Go for it. That's your right.

You want to think all Mormons are stupid? That's your right. I'm Mormon, and I really don't care.

But the real truth is, it's not the religion (or lack thereof) that makes people do anything. It's an excuse, and people will come up with any excuse necessary for them to feel justified in what they do. Any excuse.

What ****es me off? People using anything for an excuse for their decisions. Man up, world. Nobody makes you do anything except you. Not religion, not government, not anyone or anything but you.

So please, stop blaming religion for the ills of the world. Blame the myopic and moronic people that use it as an excuse to justify their bad behavior.

*steps off soapbox*

 

Cait just pwned this thread. Fact.

 

Yes it got very quiet all of a sudden lol * watches the tumble weed roll on by *.

 

I blame aikiwolfie. He's the one wrote me a note to come hold up the Mormon side

 

Hardly.

It's not opinion. There is no tangible evidence of a God. That is a fact. Now you may have an opinion that contradicts this fact, but I'm certain you're smart enough not to give an opinion the same weight as a fact. Now you may be willing to lower your standards of evidence when it comes to religion but, again, I would credit you with the intelligence to know that you're using special pleading because of your personal feelings for religion.

That's a different issue. The point you're making there is that people have the right to hold individual opinions, no matter how ill informed or rude and that this doesn't necessarily lead you to make a value judgement about them. The main argument against religion isn't that believing this makes you bad (a value judgement) it's that believing this makes you incorrect (a matter of evidence).

People do things for a reason - no-one acts in the absence of motivation. They may lie about their motivation (I'm convinced, personally, that the leaders of Iran cannot believe that God would want them to oppress their citizens, so they are using religion as an excuse to hold on to power) but motivation is always there. The problem is both that some people genuinely do believe in religion as a motivation for their actions (like the man in the US who shot a doctor in church because the doctor performed abortions) and some people use the fact that religion demands a framework of thoughtless obedience to manipulate others on a large scale (Iran; Scientology; all the weird bible belt states of the US who believe that Jesus loves guns and capitalism). In both cases the fact that religion builds a mindset of following your leader without question and believing that you have a divine mandate despite any evidence to the contrary leads people to either be irrational or easily manipulated by the unscrupulous.

 

Actually, most religions encourage free thought. Those that don't were usually created as a means of control, disgused behind the thin veneer of a belief in God. Which simply goes back to my point about it being an excuse for behavior.

I believe in a lot of things that have not been proven fact - so does science. Hence the use of theory - that which has not been proven false, but then still hasn't been proven fact. Science has neither proven nor disproven the existence of God, but there's also a lot we know for fact today that they hadn't proved a hundred years ago.

I still maintain that religion is not a cause of poor behavior - simply an excuse.

...but I'm also happy to agree to disagree.

 

That's not correct, but my dinner's ready so I'll pop back later and elaborate, unless someone wants to beat me to it.

 

Supporting evidence, yes. Irrefutable proof? No. That was my only point. Theories are disproven regularly as science advances. I'm simply suggesting that we're not advanced enough yet to prove or disprove the existence of God.

 

I'm not sure it's a matter of advancement. It almost comes back to Epicurus' dilemma: If God is able to prevent evil but not willing, he is malevolent. If he is willing but not able, he is not all-powerful. If he is neither willing not able, he is not a God. If he is both willing and able, how is there evil?

We would need a clear definition of God that has explanatory power (i.e. can generate hypotheses about how his presence would affect the world - if his presence has no effect, there's no point in having a God concept at all) in order to test whether He's there.

As the postulators of the presence of God, it is up to the religious to provide this definition while staying within their belief system - e.g. a Christian saying that God is an electromagnetic field that passively creates life would not be acting within the Christian belief system which holds that God can act wilfully.

 

God supposedly granted all people free will. If god gets involved with every act of man then man has no free will.

 

I think Moosey's point was that scientists are not supposed to believe that theories are fact. The theory is a tentative proposition, as your quote says, which is not to be fully believed until proven

Your first statement implies "Science believes in things that have not been proven fact". As an ideal, it does not. It develops theories and tests them. But those theories are not believed until proven. (At which point they're no longer theories).


*Insert quote about how even established fact is merely well-tested theory.*

 

Ok, I can see your point here.

My religion, for example, hypothesizes that God allows man to make his own decisions within a given rule set, as this life is a test to see how we manage when all knowledge of our previous life and origin is stripped from us on birth - therefore, to test our core selves. Because of this, there must be opposition (equal and opposite reaction, as it were), so good as well as evil.

We also believe that God not only creates the laws of the universe, but also operates within that same ruleset; also that we only know a small portion of that ruleset, but are not only free but also encouraged to discover more of those rules, and that attaining knowledge is an important aspect of this life.

I can't give you the hypothesis you want because I don't know enough and KNOW I don't, aside from stating that I believe God to be a personage of infinitely more knowledge and intelligence than our current selves. But I also believe there is so much more out there that we don't know that given 200 lifetimes, I'd still never figure it all out. I don't feel like science and God must be mutually exclusive; in fact I believe firmly in the mutual coexistence of both.

 

On the off chance you're expecting a reply from me, I have no particular ideas about all this. I just wanted to help the conversation along:hat: