[super_mario]

You know I don't really care if people are literalist fundamentalist bible thumpers or unitarians, muslims or even deists. They are all wrong, and they all believe in things unsupported by evidence or completely debunked lies. I only care about what is true, and I don't have any reservations about telling people what they believe isn't true, esp. when they bring it out to the open and implicitly invite the discussion on it.

There are two kinds of beliefs. One is based on evidence, logic, reason, testable repeatable experiments. Rational mind has no option but to accept their truthfulness (sometimes after laborious examination of evidence or step by step verification of logical deduction). You could go on and deny obvious truth, but that leads to cognitive dissonance and is rather mentally taxing. The other belief is opposite, it is not based on any evidence at all and it is called faith. You are believing things without having sufficient or any evidence for it. Note also that all religions are faith based. If they were based on evidence, religion would be a branch of science, it would be a scientific theory (which is the highest pedestal a scientific hypothesis can be placed upon, only mathematics has theorems).

There is now strong evidence that theistic gods i.e. gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, god who stops the motion of the sun around earth so certain people in the Bible can finish their work, god who takes "our" side in a war, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity are man made invention.

Religion comes to us from other human mammals who not only know there is a god, but they also know his mind what he wants us to do. And how do they know? Revelation of course, god told them something often times contradictory what he told others. And the religious never even seek evidence for their extraordinary claims. But revelation is useless and unreliable as a way to discover truth

Revelation can only ever be relevant to the person to whom something is revealed. As soon as that person shares and relates the revelation to someone else, it becomes a testimony at that point. And then it becomes a matter of trusting that person for the claim they are making. Also, the person to whom something is revealed should be apprehensive and wonder which is more likely that laws of nature have been bent in their favor no less, or if perhaps they are under apprehension.

Revelations are dime a dozen. Numerous people have claimed that something has been revealed to them. Even worse different people have claimed same god has revealed things that are contradictory to the things god has revealed to other people. In Christianity god reveals himself as a human, he dies on the cross, and resurrects. In Islam, Jesus is not only not the son of god, he never died on the cross and never resurrected. Believing otherwise will have you condemned to hell. In Christianity god says love your enemies, in Islam he says kill your enemies and apostates. Yet it's the same god, and both sides claim divine revelation for the "wisdom" they preach.

Content of revelation paints a picture of a god who is quite frankly incompetent, stupid and has morals lesser than average decent human being today. And most importantly he leaves it to chance what you will believe about him and if you will be damned to eternity.

What religion you get indoctrinated into has very little to do with its truthfulness, but everything to do with where you were born. If you were born in Saudi Arabia for example you would be a Muslim defending Islam right now. Yet both Islam and Christianity and Judaism (the three desert dogmas) all claim to posses the true and perfect words of the creator of the universe.

And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence? God would presumably know that people would invent scientific method as the only sure way to discover truth. Yet he leaves such important things as if you will be damned for eternity to belief without evidence leading to three desert dogmas that teach completely opposite things about him. Yahweh himself besides being stupid is rather evil god. Look how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age that invented him to behave (he orders genocide of neighboring tribes that worship other gods, enslavement of women and children etc, just read random book of old testament). By the way he was never meant to be god of all, he was meant to be a god of a single tribe (otherwise a lot of stuff god says and orders makes no sense). Evolution of competing religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made.

All metaphysical claims and especially all physical claims made by religion were proved to be wrong. And would you expect it any other way really? Religion was our first approximation of cosmology, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be completely wrong. Jesus casts out demons to heal people, he heals lepers instead of healing leprosy, no germs ever mentioned in the Bible (naturally no germ theory of disease either).

But now we know better. We know how solar systems are formed, we know how planets are formed, we know how life evolves, we even know how a universe can plausibly come from nothing. We really don't need god to kick off any of these things any more. Besides positing an intelligent god capable of creating universes, god that always existed, or that spontaneously came into being is assuming a lot more than assuming the same about the universe itself i.e. dumb matter. Occam's razor cuts him out of existence as superfluous assumption that does not explain anything.

I for one am really glad there is absolutely no evidence for this at all. Wishing this to be true is wishing to live under dictatorship. If it were true it would be a worthy goal to fight against this ghastly god figure.

[cconcepts]

As someone who was raised in an intellectual atheist family, spent my younger years believing as such and has since converted to Christianity, I find the tone of this kind of "Anyone who believes in anything is stupid.....but I'm all inclusive and caring" rhetoric to be a contradiction in terms. I have personally only experienced it from people who have been wounded by Christians in some way. I think that sucks and I am sorry that there are so many people wounded by Christianity. Yet, that doesn't make Christianity untrue, it just means some of its adherents are jerks (like any other belief system).

As Mahatma Ghandi said; "I like your Christ but I do not like your Christians, your Christians are so unlike Christ". Look at the person and work of Jesus if you want to know about Christianity, not us broken individuals who attempt to follow him.

On another note, the argument that you know the method therefore the agency doesn't exist has always seemed illogical to me. I know how Toyota puts its cars together, that doesn't mean that Toyota doesn't exist.

We have different beliefs and I'm not here to argue, just presenting a different point of view. You have the right to say what you say and believe what you believe, I will even defends those rights for you. I just hope that you will be willing to do the same for me.

[super_mario]

I don't say anyone who believes anything. That would be stupid. I say anyone who believes things unsupported by evidence. We don't have to search the entire universe to find Christian god absent, we just have to look at the evidence put forward by Christians to be inadequate. You presumably don't believe in Zeus or Thor, or Mythras or Isis or Horus or any of the other gods that died with the civilizations that created them, and this is presumably because you find the evidence for these inadequate.

> On another note, the argument that you know the method therefore the agency doesn't exist has always seemed illogical to me. I know how Toyota puts its cars together, that doesn't mean that Toyota doesn't exist.

This is because people have used gods in the past as necessities needed for explanation of natural phenomena. Of course these explanations are not such thing at all, because you now have an ever bigger problem, by positing an intelligent being you are making bigger assumption than the phenomena you are trying to explain and now have a larger problem to solve, possibly leading to infinite regresses. All the above paragraph is saying is we don't need the hypothesis of deistic god ether. The evidence against theistic gods is much stronger though, and the idea can be dismissed completely.

Let me put it this way. You speak of god, but did you invent the concept, or did you hear about it from someone else? And if you heard about it from someone else, what evidence did they show you that convinced you with absolute certainty that there had to be such a thing.

[cconcepts]

Nice response - I don't want to hijack this thread by going through this with a fine tooth comb but a couple of points: 1) The God of the bible pursues relationship with the people he created, every other god is some form of "be holy, zen like, detached or well behaved enough and I might relate to you". 2) I've never used God as the only explanation to natural phenomena - condemning my argument by what someone else has said is equivalent to me condemning your argument because soviet/maoist leaders said illogical things in the name of atheism - it wouldn't be fair to you if I did that. 3) On a philosophical level, there is no such thing as absolute certainty. We all have to take faith in something. I have walked across a certain bridge 10 times and it has never collapsed. I will walk across it tomorrow having faith that it wont collapse extrapolated from past evidence. I believe animals evolve over time but I have never seen a fish sprout legs.

None of us have absolute certainty about anything we have to make our best analysis of the facts before us. I analysed the facts heavily and believe that the God of the bible is more plausible than any other explanation of our existence.

[super_mario]

> None of us have absolute certainty about anything we have to make our best analysis of the facts before us. I analysed the facts heavily and believe that the God of the bible is more plausible than any other explanation of our existence.

I don't agree with this view at all, and I would like to see an example of one such fact that is best "explained" by positing a supernatural agent. Invoking supernatural to explain something is not really explaining anything, and even worse, to rule out any possibility of it ever being explained. Because anything supernatural must by definition be beyond the reach of a natural explanation. It must be beyond the reach of science and the well-established, tried and tested scientific method that has been responsible for the huge advances in knowledge we have enjoyed over the last 400 years or so. To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say we don’t understand it, but to say we will never understand it so don’t even try.

Science takes exactly the opposite approach. Science thrives on its inability, so far, to explain everything, and uses that as the spur to go on asking questions, creating possible models and testing them, so that we make our way, inch by inch, closer to the truth. If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, we would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.

What would you think of a detective who, baffled by a murder, was too lazy even to try to work at the problem and instead wrote the mystery off as supernatural? The whole history of science shows us that things once thought to be the result of the supernatural, caused by gods (both happy and angry), demons, witches, spirits, curses and spells, actually do have natural explanations: explanations that we can understand and test and have confidence in. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were.

Put another way, show me one fact for which scientific explanation no matter how inadequate was once the best explanation but for which relgious/theological explanation is now better one.

[cconcepts]

Where did the protons and neutrons that initiated the "big bang" come from? What set them in motion?

The balance of the fine tuned requirements of our universe, once understood to be "just so" are now, accepted as having a probability so slim that the likelihood of them occurring in the balances we find them in the known universe is infinitesimal (I'm talking about the gravitational constant, our distance from the sun, gas balance in the atmosphere etc etc). Tweak one of these balances just a little and life would never have occurred. The only answer pure impericists have for this "fine tuning argument" is the multiverse argument - that there are actually billions of universes and we just happen to be in the right one....thats grasping at straws and has absolutely no evidence to support it except that it allows them to continue claiming "there is no intention behind any of it".

You're talking like all Christians are anti-science. Some are, but they're sadly ignorant. Western science began as an attempt to better understand the mind of God. God was not taken to be a convenient excuse to explore nothing but motivation to know him better was given as justification to explore more. I know there are vocal luddites who do what you say but they do not represent all of us.

I believe this debate is relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tU3-crvTDc

[super_mario]

Unfortunately, none of those questions are improved by positing a god. First, you do not have any evidence that there is a god, but we do have evidence that there is a universe out there. Second, even if I grant you deistic god who may have perhaps started the universe, you still have all your work ahead of you to show that this god is the god of the bible (this is pretty damning when we have so much evidence about invention and evolution of biblical god, which as it turns out is a man made invention, see for example "The evolution of God" by Robert Wright, and "The Early History of God" by Mark Smith).

On the other hand, as I have already said in my previous post, positing a deistic god i.e. an idea that some god might exist who may perhaps have kicked off the universe but no longer takes interest in it is pointless. No one can in principle provide proof there is no deistic god, nor can anyone provide a proof that such a thing exists. At most we can say is such a hypothesis is no longer needed. It presupposes a lot more to assume an intelligent being capable of creating universes who either spontaneously came into being or always existed than to assume the same thing about the universe itself (i.e. dumb matter). This is why Occam's razor cuts such hypothesis as superfluous thing, because it does not explain anything new, but poses more questions.

Basically, what ever you want to say about this deistic god, how it came to be etc. you can just say the same thing about the universe itself. And you would be assuming much less (no intelligence, just dumb matter). And like Pierre-Simon Laplace said, it works without that hypothesis.

And some of the questions you talk about do have scientific answers, like distance to the sun, balance of atmosphere etc. And others have plausible answers that don't require supernatural.

I think reading something like Victor J. Stenger's "The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning" would be useful.

And besides, the false dichotomy you set up, either we have an answer for everything or else Jesus is the Christ and we must therefore all be Christians is just not true. There is a spectrum of options in between. We could not know any answers and Christianity be false (as I maintain it is), or perhaps Hindus have it right etc.

You must get comfortable with not knowing, and seeking rational answers. It is those who are certain and who claim divine warrant for their certainty that belong to the infancy of our species.

Religion was the first and worst attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best we could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again. We are pattern-seeking mammals and owing to our intelligence and inquisitiveness, we will still prefer a conspiracy theory to no explanation at all. Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens. But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less quantifiable phenomena such as dreams and visions. All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.

There are some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record of any human being who was remotely qualified to say that they knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim, so modestly and so humbly, to possess. It is time to withdraw our respect from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over others. There is no moral or intellectual equivalent between the different degrees of uncertainty here. The atheist generally says that the existence of a deity cannot be disproved. It can only be found to be entirely lacking in evidence or proof. The theist can opt to be a mere deist, and to say that the magnificence of the natural order strongly implies an ordering force. But the religious person must go further and say that this creative force is also an intervening one: one that cares for our human affairs and is interested in what we eat and with whom we have sexual relations, as well as in the outcomes of battles and wars. To assert this is quite simply to assert more than any human can possibly claim to know, and thus it falls, and should be discarded, and should have been discarded long ago.

Some things can be believed and some things simply cannot. I might choose to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin in Bethlehem, and that later he both did and did not die, since he was seen again by humans after the time of his apparent decease. Many have argued that the sheer unlikelihood of this story makes it fractionally more probable. Again, then, suppose that I grant the virgin birth and the resurrection. The religious still have all of their work ahead of them. These events, even if confirmed, would not prove that Jesus was the son of god. Nor would they prove the truth or morality of his teachings. Nor would they prove that there was an afterlife or a last judgment. His miracles, if verified, would likewise leave him one among many shamans and magicians, some of them mentioned in the Old Testament, who could apparently work wonders by sorcery. Many of the philosophers and logicians take the view that miracles cannot and did not occur, and Albert Einstein took the view (which some stubbornly consider to be a deist one) that the miracle is that there are no miracles or other interruptions of a wondrous natural order. This is not a difference that can be split: either faith is sufficient or else miracles are required to reassure those, including the preachers, whose faith would otherwise not be strong enough.

But here is something that is impossible for anyone to believe. The human species has been in existence as Homo Sapiens for at least one hundred and fifty thousand years (some would say even longer). An instant in evolutionary time, this is nonetheless a vast history when contemplated by primates with brains and imaginations of the dimensions that we can boast. In order to subscribe to monotheistic religion, one must believe that humans were born, struggled, and expired during this time, often dying in childbirth or for want of elementary nurture, and with a life-expectancy of perhaps three decades at most. Add to these factors the turf wars between discrepant groups and tribes, alarming outbreaks of disease, which had no germ theory to explain let alone palliate them, and associated natural disasters and human tragedies. And yet, for all these millennia, heaven watched with indifference and then, and only in the last six thousand years at the very least, decided that it was time to intervene as well as redeem. And heaven would only intervene and redeem in remote areas of the Middle East, thus ensuring that many more generations would expire before the news could begin to spread! Let me send a voice to Sinai and cement a pact with just one tribe of dogged and greedy yokels. Let me lend a son to be torn to pieces because he is misunderstood. Let me tell the angel Gabriel to prompt an illiterate and uncultured merchant into rhetorical flights. At last the darkness that I have imposed will lift! The willingness even to entertain such elaborately mad ideas involves much more than the suspension of disbelief, or the dumb credulity that greets magic tricks.

It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that antedated Moses. Our primeval ancestors raised temples and altars and offered the requisite terrified obsequies and sacrifices. Their religion was man-made, like all the others. There was a time when Greek thinkers denounced Christians and Zoroastrians denounced Muslims as "atheists" for their destruction of old sites and their prohibition of ancient rituals. The source of desecration and profanity is religious, as we can see from the way that today’s believers violate the sanctity of each other’s temples. Richard Dawkins may have put it the best when he said everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god, from Ra to Shiva, in which he does not believe. All that the atheists do is to go one god further. Human solipsism can generally be counted upon to become enraged and to maintain that this discountable god must not be the one in which the believer himself has invested so much credence. But the man-made character of religion persists in a terrifying shape in our own time, as believers fight each other over the correct interpretation and even kill members of their own faiths over doctrine. Civilization has been immensely retarded by such arcane interfaith quarrels and could now be destroyed by their modern versions.

[cconcepts]

You never mentioned whether or not you would be willing to defend my right to believe what I believe....

[super_mario]

Of course I would stand for your freedom to believe what you want and to say what you want. But the freedom to criticize is equally important counterbalance. It so common to see any criticism of religion suppressed and treated as tantamount to racism.

By allowing certain ideas to remain immune from criticism, we risk throwing away all of the advances made since the Enlightenment, and paving the way to a world where bad, unsupported claims are allowed to flourish unchecked. No free and open society can exist for long if certain ideas become sacred cows. If the ideas of any religion are strong or true, then let them defend themselves in the open market place of ideas without the crutch of political correctness.

[cconcepts]

I agree with everything you say in this comment, however, I could well be in the minority soon. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech were initially given to the masses by people of faith who didn't see value in imposing their faith on others even though, at the time, they held the political upper hand and could have if they wanted to.

My concern is that, when people of non-faith hold the political upper hand (in some places they already do) will they have the moral objectivity to say that all people are of value and their opinions worthy of respect?

This was not the case under previous faithless systems. Soviet Russia and Maoist China saw people as expendable for what was perceived to be the advancement of their greater ideals. The Christian west may have acted like dicks and used God to justify their selfish atrocities, but at least they could be pulled up on a moral objective standpoint (the bible) and be told; "this is not OK because your bible says so". Most have since stopped listening to this kind of questioning however.

Nice talking with you super_mario, would like to hear your thoughts on the discussion I linked to above but we should probably talk somewhere else rather than steal a thread meant for Tim Cook.

[uid]

It doesn't surprise me that you also make an assumption about what I believe, considering you sprayed a dozen comments of bile about what Tim Cook believes based on almost nothing.

How about you drop the faux intellectual superiority and just accept what others choose to believe - be it their religious beliefs, political or sexual orientation?

That is the very definition of tolerance - and, ironically, the exact thing that Cook standing up for.

[super_mario]

I don't make any assumption about what you believe. When ever I say "you" in the text above you could replace it by "religious people" and this is the intended reading (if you believe X you are doing Y). Of course I accept what others choose to believe, how could I not. I have to hold people to their word. But of course this is not what you are really saying, you are really saying why don't you stop criticizing what people believe, because their irrationality and superstition is just as good as your reason. Of course everyone is free to believe what they want to, but we are also free to criticize them and ridicule stupid beliefs.

Tim Cook on the other hand is a Christian of the Southern (Alabama) brand.

[uid]

Criticism? Don't flatter yourself. A prerequisite for criticism is being informed, and you not only have little clue to what I or Tim Cook believe, but you have mischaracterized Christianity, Islam and all monotheism - 3.6 billion people and their views stereotyped broadly.

I don't have answers for myself, so i'm not going to pretend to have answers for 50% of the world population. I'm certainly not going to assess their beliefs on the basis that what I might believe is somehow more correct than what anyone else believes.

Intelectual or theological superiority combined with moral authority is what leads to intolerance and hate. I'd rather somebody believe in the easter bunny or pray to Kim Kardashian 5 times a day and be tolerant of others than be closer to my own agnostic view and attempt force it on others because they are more correct.

[super_mario]

Religion is about certainty, but there are multiple religions.

It seems obvious that if people are capable of believing different certainties, then no version can be reliably considered true. Yet there are people who are killing each others children for the kind of Christian they are, let alone Muslims killing Christians, as we speak in fact, because they both believe in opposite certainties. Yet neither side is losing any sleep worrying if the other side might be correct.

Yet it is people like me who point out this most salient of facts that the problem in your mind. This makes you either a complete idiot or a hypocrite.

Faith is the problem. Believing things without evidence is the root cause of most evil on this planet.

[Zaheer]

"Islam he says kill your enemies and apostates"

Your interpretation of Islam is flat-out wrong.

[super_mario]

Ok, disagreement isn't an argument. Show me the supporting evidence that demonstrates I'm wrong.

[Zaheer]

I'm a Muslim and can tell you it's wrong. #1 mistake most people make when they find contradictory facts in the religion is not taking the context of the verses or quotes they are examining. Arabic is a very rich language and a direct translation in most cases does not yield the full meaning. We believe in Jesus' _original_ teachings as much as the other prophets. I think the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that. Also remember that the actions of a terrorists that claim to be Muslim does not reflect the actual substance of the religion.

[super_mario]

That's a pretty poor defense in this day and age. Countless books have been written on the topic and I have read many myself, youtube search will easily bring countless imams explaining the death penalty for apostasy and what the hadiths say about how to treat infidels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infidel#Islamic

so you can't go pretending those things are not there. If you feel embarrassed by barbaric desert god who behaves like 8th century human, then perhaps proper reaction is apostasy and not defense of the bronze age mythology.