I would say you can understand religion as the cultural phenomenon that it is as well as an attempt to explain and/or produce extraordinary experience.


PairTheBoard

Bump

Good bump. I am so far from either you or Aaron that if I'm being honest I find it hard to believe someone could believe some of these things. Not that I think you are lying, of course that wouldn't make any sense, but that I'm just dumbfounded about a lot of the belief structures devout (is that the right word??) people have.

I have some friends who are quite religious but they are immediately defensive in a way whenever we discuss. I certainly don't want to make them uncomfortable. I'm perfectly open in my atheism and happy to respond to any questions about it.

Anyway, I digress. Mostly just posted here so it shows up in my feed.

Welcome to the discussion! I'll post something interesting ITT probably this weekend, if not sooner.

There is probably an analogy here.

I've been posting heavily in several threads here on 2+2. Haven't gotten around to posting anything "new". Sorry about that. Still "Putting out fires", as they say, in other threads, in addition to dealing with some "life issues".

Have a blessed day.

Maybe he just understands a "day" to refer to an unspecified long time, potentially over a billion years.

This.

I expect to post again in the year 1000002020.

What I find so interesting/amazing/(scary?) about religious people (and YEC/literalists in particular) are those that follow whatever their theism is can be otherwise logic-driven and evidence based but simply have a blind spot to their religion.

I believe this is largely the result of childhood indoctrination that makes individuals blind to the realities of how absurd the claims of the religious really are.

Take two modern US based religions...Mormonism and Scientology. One was developed and created by a known huckster who duped people into thinking he could translate these ancient texts (he couldn't) while the other was invented out of thin air by a failed science fiction writer that fancied himself a navy captain.

Perhaps the only difference between these prophets and more traditional ones is the absence of time. Perhaps if we were only 150 years out from people claiming a man walked on water, or raised someone from the dead or turned water into wine or w/e we would view that person with the same level of criticism.

I guess my point is that I suspect far fewer would buy into this notion from religion if it weren't so aggressively passed down from generation to generation as proof. I doubt many would knowingly elect to follow religious doctrine or accept the entirety of religion if they made an informed, logic driven decision as an adult without the familial or societal pressures of fitting in.

I believe the answer to be far far fewer would do so.

Funny. I find the same thing true for atheists and blind followers of scientism and Darwinism.

I sometimes use atheist and agnostic interchangeably which I shouldn't. I think agnostic is the more correct term for my belief structure though I may not appear so. Sorry if that confuses.

But I wonder how you reconcile the fact that claims based on evidence based science is somehow equivalent to stories written in a book thousands of years ago with little to know evidence.

Are you equating this evidence in some way?

And I agree that some strident atheists sound similar to strident theists even if the message is the polar opposite.

1. Neither of my parents were religious, and only one of my four grandparents were religious.

2. I became a Christian at the age of 30. At the time, I was a philosophy instructor at a community college. So in my case, the "pressures" were AGAINST me becoming a Christian.

3. Coming to faith in Christ is a supernatural act by God, who replaces the unbelievers "heart of stone" with a "heart of flesh."(Ezekiel 36:26)

4. While there are rational arguments for the existence of God, ultimately the arguments BY THEMSELVES can't convert the sinner, because the things of God are "spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14). Arguments can "grease the slide", so to speak, but ultimately it is surrendering to the wooing of the Holy Spirit that brings about faith in the heart and mind of the child of God.

Definitely interesting though I suspect unusual. What drove you there or at least brought it to you? Spouse, close friend?

Serious question that I don't mean to sound disparaging in any way...have you ever done psychedelics? I've heard of some people using them and feeling like they felt something bigger than this earth.

As a non-believer points 3 and 4 seem like a bunch of words just mashed together. Do you just discount contradictory scientific evidence (whatever that may be) and the feeling that you have trumps that?

FWIW and in full transparency I am one that believes that while religion (organized and not) has benefited some throughout history, I believe that it is a net negative to the human race. Not sure this is the venue to debate/discuss that but thought it would be only fair that I divulge that that is where I come from

1. I have never done psychedelics. I've never even had hard liquor or beer. I've had wine and champagne a number of times. And I didn't find your question disparaging in any way. I'm not offended by questions. If you ask me, "why are you as stupid as f*** ?" , I won't be offended. (fwiw, my answer to that question is, "I don't know?" )

2. It makes sense that #3 and #4 would be a bunch of gibberish to you. The Bible says as much: " For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. " - 1 Corinthians 1:18

3. I was lead to Christ by an college buddy that I hadn't spoken with for many years. Since I had last spoken to him, he had gone from being an atheist to becoming a Christian. In college, we both thought that Christians were nice people, but intellectually weak. (He was a Biology major.)

Evidence is always interpreted through a worldview. I interpret evidence through a Biblical worldview.

When confronted with contradictory evidence, one must create what astrophysicist Dr. Jason Lisle calls a "rescuing device". (Dr. Lisle is a Christian apologist)

The vast majority of astrophysicists believe that our solar system is billions of years old. We have comets in our solar system, and it is believed that a comet will "burn out" in about 100,000 years. In that case, where do "new" comets come from? The "billions of years" crowd have a rescuing device which is the existence of what they call an Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud occasionally produces new comets. Unfortunately, to date there is no physical evidence for the Cloud, hence it is essentially a rescuing device. (Btw, there is nothing inherently wrong with rescuing devices; they are to some extent unavoidable.)

The YEC has a rescuing device for the "evidence" that various dating methods show that diamonds, for example, are far older than their age is required for YEC to be true. The rescuing device here is that the YEC typically rejects the presupposition of the old earther that decay rates have been uniform over time. In short, the YEC rejects UNIFORMITARIANISM, but not THE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. (The latter is a prerequisite for a!l science, while the former is not.)

More later...

Not equating the two, but I think there's a lot more evidence than most
people realize, that the Bible is an historical book. I also think that
"evidence based science" has a hard time speaking to events that
happened thousands of years ago, not to mention billions of years ago...
And, it seems like as far as we progress in the areas of science, we
seem to realize (or should be realizing) that the more we know, the less
we know - and by that I mean that the more we know, the more we
realize that there is so much more to know. I.e. Darwin thought that
the cell was a very simple organism, since then we know that the cell
(and DNA) for that matter are outrageously complex.

Yale Prof Dr. David Gelernter touches on some of this in a recent
article where he denounces Darwinism:
https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/

Obviously parental coercion puts a thumb on the scale, and that's one reason people believe in things that contradict observed reality. (And honestly, parental coercion is one of the very worst things about organized religion. If the vast majority of Americans came to their religious beliefs as a matter of free choice as adults, I could much more fully embrace it on the level of people have the absolute right to believe things that I find to be irrational. No different than people who go to astrologers or go to tarot card readers or carry a rabbit's foot around, or who talk to their dead relatives or whatever. But to me the fact that people insist on forcing kids to believe these things is just an obvious, clear attempt to insulate a belief system from critical thinking that would rarely survive it. Digression over.)

But there's a more obvious reason than parental coercion why these beliefs persist over observed reality. And that is just basic wishful thinking. Who wants to die? Who likes the idea of eternal nonexistence? Who wants to never see their beloved relatives again? Who enjoys the idea that life has little meaning? Who wants the human species to be random, contingent, and unimportant in the grand scheme of things?

Religions tell people things they want to be true. Indeed, the popular forms of American protestant Christianity are particularly gross offenders at this. They tell people that not only do you get to live forever, but that you really don't have to make any particular material sacrifice or be a good person to do it- all you have to do is say your sorry for all the bad things you did. And we humans are placed in the center of the drama of God's creation.

Observing reality the way it actually is, in some strong sense, puts great stress on religious beliefs. Yes, it's possible to make convoluted arguments to reconcile reality and religious claims, but those require a great deal of intellectual gymnastics and many of those arguments are pretty obviously bad ones. So it's easier to just privilege the beliefs and ignore evidence that contradicts them. And that's what believers do.

I should mention stuff like this from believers really angers me. I don't have a heart of stone. Indeed, while I know some religious believers who are genuine and generous and in all sorts of ways good people (and I can be inspired by, for instance, the group of devout Christians that volunteers to feed the homeless in Los Angeles), I also know plenty of people who profess belief and are complete unethical jerks. Meanwhile, I know atheists and agnostics and non-Christians who are genuine and generous and do not need any Christian religious text to tell them how to act ethically.

One of the worst things that organized religion instills is this sense of superiority because you believe. Scientology teaches that scientologists will save the world. Radical Islam teaches that Muslims are superior to the infidels. Jews are taught that they are the "chosen people", and many of them believe that gives Israel the right to disposses Palestinians of land. And yes, many wars and genocides have historically been justified by Christian texts that teach that Christians are superior to nonbelievers.

If you want to believe, fine, believe! It's your constitutional right, and it absolutely should be. But if your religion is teaching you that believers have hearts and non-believers have hearts of stone, I'm sorry, but your religion is harmful to society. In a pluralist society, you can't go around thinking that someone in a different religious grouping has a heart of stone because of that.

A scientific hypothesis is not a "rescuing device". The ability of humans to directly observe astronomical phenomena is obviously extremely limited. We can see some small percentage of the stars and some other objects, such as nebulae, galaxies, and the like, using our eyes and optical devices. And we can use various scientific instruments to detect such phenomena as various forms of radiation, cosmic rays, ions, etc.

So there's going to be plenty of things in the universe that exist but where there isn't some piece of evidence observable to humans that you would count as "physical evidence". Nonetheless, we can figure out what some of these things are, by using inductive reasoning. For instance, by definition, we can't directly observe a black hole. It's black! No light escapes from it. But we can hypothesize the existence of black holes based on known, observable facts about such things as mass and gravity, and the observed life cycles of large stars. And then we can look for evidence that confirms the hypothesis, such as accretion disks where matter is being sucked into a black hole, and objects whose paths are affected by the proximity of a black hole, etc.

At no point in that process is anything used as a rescuing device. Rather, data is examined, hypotheses are developed regarding what COULD explain what is being observed, and then additional observation and testing allow us to confirm, reject, and/or refine the hypothesis or to develop new hypotheses.

The Oort cloud isn't a rescuing device in any sense. It is an explanation for certain observed phenomena, including the paths of comets, and it is consistent with various observations. As any scientific hypothesis is, it is subject to additional refinement and even to falsification. It's highly unlikely that the Oort cloud is completely incorrect as a hypothesis, but science leaves open the possibility that astronomers at some point make some new observation that points to a different explanation for the phenomena that produced the Oort cloud hypothesis.

You are using a term-- "rescuing device"-- that more properly applies to the various moves that religious believers use to explain away conflicts between science and religion. "God made it look like the rocks are millions of years old when they weren't" is a rescuing device. So is "God created the world by starting the causal chain that was human evolution and directed it at every stage". Those are devices deployed to rescue religious beliefs from some inconvenient truths that science has discovered about the world.

But science doesn't use rescuing devices.

This is a fascinating claim. Because, you see, I feel we have quite detailed information as to such things as (1) how the sun formed, (2) how Australopithecines and early **** species used tools in their lives, and (3) what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, whereas I don't think Christians know nearly as much about the life of Jesus (or whatever historical figure or figures the character "Jesus" was based upon) as they think they do.

It is in fact amazing how much we do know, based solely on the various forms of science that study the clues left behind in nature, about events that happened long before any human societies were around to write histories or chronicles. And, of course, it is worth noting that there have been many, many instances where science has produced knowledge that contradicted the historical claims in religious texts, including Christian religious texts.

I was unaware that a pluralistic society prohibits me from THINKING whatever I want.