Topic: The function of religion ? - page 22. (Read 18693 times)

Religion and god are separate, you must forget any preconceived notion you have regarding god, to find god.  Religion is based off spirituality, but as we see today, is often perverted to give power and control to the church.  Man created religion as a guideline of spiritual living and to attempt to explain the nature of god.  Religion did not create god.

Hell is largely distorted, as well.  Hell is a mind state, which manifests into reality if allowed.  To be in hell, you would need to act with your ego, which is essentially sinning.  Greed, power, war, any negative emotion is all a product of your ego.  If one has much on their conscious when they die, never admits what they bottled down, the sudden true realization of their actions would cause a hell-like state.  To be happy, you must act in love, with your conscious.  Acting for others before yourself, to love, this is the basis of religion.

dancupid, I agree, the illusory self, ego, is nothing but an illusion, as is life.  Consciousness, is not, however.  Consciousness, god, is everything, it's the universe, which we know exists because we are it.

When you start to think of god as the universe, one soul comprising everything, it makes much more sense than the man-made perspective of something we attribute human-like qualities to.

Those are excellent questions for which I have no answer. Why do living things want to survive and diversify? What is heading toward? Of course, there may not be a "reason" as we think of it. I'm ok with not knowing. I don't feel the need to create a mythical character to explain the unexplained.

So apply your logic to your own life and tell us why you do the things you do - what are they for? Why do you continue to exist?
Provide a rational explanation of why you do the things you do - go through the the things you did today and rationally justify them.
I've done it and everything I do is ultimately to ensure I survive (ie Darwinism) - but there is no rational reason why my survival or otherwise matters - in fact it doesn't matter.
I am pre-programed to pursue my own survival genetically - that genetic imperative is completely pointless outside of the context of my personal existence. It's a genetic illusion.
A belief in the value of your personal self is as illusory and irrational as belief in God.

For me it's just about evidence. If there were a god, she knows where to find me and how to prove her existence to me. Instead she chooses to play an illogical game with my free choice.  She wants me to make free choices because she loves me. But if I use my choice and determine that she does not exist, she will send me to hell forever.
See how crazy it becomes when you apply logic to religion. It has to be magical or it all breaks down.

It's easy to define God into existence (and then God exists by definition) - but once you have your definition what do you do with it?
What religion tries to solve is the the answer to the question "what now?" - belief is actually a minor part - it's possibly an after the fact justification for certain types of behavior.
I'm faced with my life; it's unclear what it's for; it's unclear how I should behave - religion provides a neat set of ideas and principles.
It allows you to mark the year and the years as they pass. It allows you to acknowledge birth, adulthood, marriage and death; the passing of the seasons. It allows irrational yet necessarily behavior. It allows one to justify ones existence.
Though I'm an atheist (because I haven't seen a satisfactory definition of God) - I'd still at my core rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn.

Science has never, and will never prove anything. There are only levels of plausibility. Only logic can prove something. The concept of omnipotence requires accepting logical contradictions, so either our basic rules of logic are wrong or something else is going on that is beyond explaining words because human language is based on logic.

Either way, science has nothing to do with disproving god, it will only propose explanations for what we observe around us. The thing that will come closest to "disproving" the current batch of gods (or not) will be natural selection.

I'm not sure of the purpose of redefining god to be the universe, or how that differs from atheism.

Hear hear Dank, Atheism is a religion centred around the existence of the "non god" and as such they deserve as much respect as other religions. the moment they claim to be more scientific they step out of bounds, as they have the same difficulty of proof as other religions.

The famous Einstein quote: "The absence of proof is not a proof of absence." Was it Einstein? I can't remember.

God is not a person, god is the universe, god is everything, our consciousness is god.

Evolution and creationism are both correct.  We certainly evolved to the point we're at, as we're constantly evolving every second.  We were also created, by the universe (god), by intelligent design (consciousness, god).

Atheism is just as much (if not, more) of a religion than any other.  You cannot disprove spirituality with science.

Ex-atheist.

This source is out of date or ignorant. Current theory is that the driving force behind polymer formation was the concentration of monomers in lipid vesicles (bubbles of oil which spontaneously form underwater). Some of these monomers reacted to form polymers, at which point these polymers were less likely to escape the lipid sphere since they are less porous to larger molecules.

Trapped polymers that could retain their own building blocks (a subset of the available monomers that randomly diffuse into the vesicle) by hydrogen bonding would increase the possibility of increasing in length and forming further polymer chains. As the concentration of polymers/monomers in the vesicle rose due to these electrostatic forces, water was sucked in by osmosis, and the vesicle increased in volume. Eventually the volume became to great for the surface tension to hold... and two new vesicles split from the first, each containing half the polymers and monomers.

After this natural selection kicks in, and vesicles that retained the most new monomers deprived lesser vesicles of this raw material as they split more and more often. Over a very long time period and very many iterations the polymers inside the vesicles became more and more complex, diverse, and specialized. Eventually some vesicles (cells now) began producing glue-like materials and clumping together, floating around the ocean like that. Next the cells themselves began specializing within these clumps, etc.

So according to this theory, abiogenesis IS NOT EVEN A BIG DEAL. New "life" is probably being generated all the time, but it just can't compete due to the first-mover advantage of existing lifeforms. This makes it hard to detect in nature, and the timescales involved make laboratory experiments currently infeasible. I always thought it would be cool to somehow take advantage of time-dilation to make this happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUe0_4rdj0U&feature=g-vrec

Nothing like a bit of Dicky Dawkins

Christ, only Atheists and creationists debating in this tread now?

It has.  Bacteria cultures in laboratory need only a few weeks to evolve and develop resistance to antibiotics.

So, Rassah has put forward a reasonable sequence of events, but I don't think that is what is important here. The important thing is to realize the difference between "KNOWING" and comparing how plausible different scenarios are. Anyone who says they KNOW anything is full of themselves, it indicates unreasonable confidence in their prior experiences. I suppose Baye's rule is my equivalent to God.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem

Actually, evolution is by definition a process. The theory is the explanation of how that process works.


I won't do any searching for you (you can find your own references), but here is how the eye happened:
1) some species developed cells on their skin that were sensitive to light. All they could feel was whether they were in a light or a dark area. There are examples of species living today that have patches of skin sensitive to light. Likely this allows them to hide, and tell if they have hidden themselves well enough.
2) The light sensitive patches progressed to be inside of a small dimple. Species with dimples containing those sensitive cells can survive better than those without, since they can not only feel the light, they can somewhat tell where it's coming from, based on which side of the dimple is lit up
3) The dimples progressively get deeper and deeper, thus giving more precision for feeling where the light comes from
4) Eventually the dimple would form into the best method for telling EXACTLY where the light is coming from, which is a hollow sphere with a pinhole towards the outside. This would mean the direction of the light would leave a precise spot on the inside of that sphere.
5) Next step would be some cells becoming sensitive enough to distinguish shades of that light. Cells being able to differentiate between bright light, dim light, and no light, is being able to "see" in black and white
6) Eventually the pinhole got covered by a membrane that would protect the primitive eye from getting junk inside
7) From there, you have your basic primitive eyeball, with the only improvements needed being the different types of light-sensitive cells that can detect different colors, and the membrane being able to focus the light a bit better to give better resolution images to those cells.
There you go. Your eyeball isn't magic.


Absolutely true. Which makes the supernatural irrelevant. If god, and the supernatural, has no means of being tested scientifically, because it can not affect the natural or the physical in any way, they why even take it into consideration? It would be no more rational for someone to believe in a supernatural god than it would be for the to believe in anything else that's supernatural (e.g. Chtulu, Thor, Santa Claus, etc)


You are VERY wrong there. Evolution is constantly created in laboratories. It's how we make medicines, test drug effectiveness on bacteria, and even create new types of foods and animals. The common household banana is the product of human guided evolution, where the guidance was based on the flavor we want, as opposed to natural guidance for survival (hardiness againt temperatures, weather, or predators)


Actually, just about 40 years scientists were only able to create about 20-30% of the chemical structures, so the only thing this furthers is that your god has only 10% of "hypothesis" to hold on to. In another 10 years he'll only have 5%, and in another 10 after that, he'll have no room left.


There is science, and it is based on observation. We can see exactly what early earth conditions were like by looking at rocks way deep underground, which show exactly what the air was made of, what kind of weather there was, and what kind of activity was happening on the surface, from chemicals, to water flows, to lightning strikes.

NOT that any of this will matter to you, obviously, since, if you think magic can be a rational explanation, the concept of rationality itself is foreign to you.

As I said already, they were all killed off by Christians and other religious types. Most during the Dark Ages.

I'll be happy to do that, if you write out the steps evolution took as it created a working eye. I can't find any solid data on that. Include references to peer-reviewed studies.


What you're saying is that anyone who suggests the existence of supernatural power, is irrational. Your call to shut down reason has nothing to do with rationality, its pure religion. Science has under no circumstances ever ruled out the possibility of a supernatural creator God. Science cannot tell us anything about the supernatural because science is a method for investigating ONLY the natural (ie physical matter).

Evolution is a theory and has never been replicated in a laboratory.

If scientists created "80-90% of the chemicals and structures needed to form early life", that only furthers the hypothesis that it requires intelligent engineering to bring about.

Furthermore, they only guess at the conditions of the early earth. There is no science that can tell what the conditions were like, because science relies on observation.

I'm sorry you hold such a dim view of your fellow humans.

People who believe in magical cloud-people are, by definition, not rational. The argument for God is, by definition, not rational. Evolution is a well-understood process. Scientists have already created 80-90% of the chemicals and structures needed to form early life simply by replicating the conditions of the early earth. Simple chemistry, no magical cloud-man required.

Human beings are generally irrational idiots.

Please write out each step of your reasoning and how you calculated the mathematical odds so that others can make sure there are no errors. I would also like to KNOW the truth, but unfortunately am limited to comparing the plausibility of different explanations using my prior experiences as a guide.

I'm not arguing that evolution appears to be magical, i'm saying it HAS to be magical because it is not driven by any reasonable, rational, engineering intelligence.

I'm not seeking an explanation, I KNOW evolution can't create a working eye, a perfect heart and circulation system, etc. Its simply a process of reasoning. The mathematical odds are impossible, for random chance (even guided random chance) forming a non-trivial biological system. Yet the claims are not only that evolution does create these systems, but that they work. That's the most magical element of all.

I'm not sure what you are asking. What are you seeking an explanation for?

Another thing is that the theory of evolution is indeed a magical explanation to most people (ie "sufficently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic"). Trusting the magical explanations of others is advantageous in complex, specialized societies, which is why we are bred to do it. If there are multiple competing explanations, in the end it boils down to the individual choosing based on a combination of argument from authority and argument from consensus. So the important thing is how to make the choice of authorities and peer groups.