Togs said:
Hopefully dleting this will stop the quotes.
SO MANY QUOTES......
(I didnt reply to any of them! I think Ive grown
)
99% of the time I don't reply to what people say to me on the Escapist. I'm not here to fight so its not worth my time.
98% of the time I don't even read what they said.
There is nothing I can't wrap my head around because I'm willing to think about anything abstractly. I still won't think its correct or even logical but I don't mind trying out any thought experiment.
texanarob said:
Those of you who say they can't understand religious people who have no evidence for their faith, neither do I. That's because there are a small selection of religious people who fit this bill, the others have sense.
There are as many different kinds of Christianity or any other faith as there are people practicing that faith. The greatest failure in discussing the topic is to make the error that it is at any time a single entity.
We label it as such to feel as part of a group but no two people ever express their beliefs in the same way. Groups are inherently silly and become less relevant as you add more people. 2 people tend to be close, 3 is a little looser, 4 even moreso, 8 is a stretch, 16 is unlikely, 32 is highly unlikely, and anything beyond is probably less likely to actually be on the same page than say...the sun is a marshmallow and we just don't know it.
orangebandguy said:
Metal, I just can't understand what's so amazing about it and I can't get into it.
It's more resilient than wood. Wooden cars tend to fare much worse in auto accidents.
KAPTAINmORGANnWo4life said:
On the other, Atheists: They run on rationalism, proof, and scientific method (and no, that scripture doesn't count, you smelly caveman skyworshiper); and patently refuse to acknowledge that there is no way to disprove the Divine and that no matter how infinitesimally small the probability of the Divine's existence, it is not disprovable, plug their ears and go lalala whenever the religious are doing things other than molesting children and fighting the infidels.
This is a special point. Because Athiesm has two sides (It has many more than 2 but let me simplify please): People who follow the scientific method and people who are anti religion.
The first group is just folks who value knowledge and science. They are all related by the fairly straight forward concept of the scientific method. A big part of that is that there is no reason to believe in something that has no evidence, because it basically invalidates the system. If all reality is is making stuff up for lulz and comfort then why even bother? It's not anti religious because it doesn't have anything to do with religion.
Most of the frustration these folks have is when people try to pass off religion as if its the same thing. Religion simply tells us "How to go to Heaven, and not how the heavens go?" - Galileo Galilei
It's utterly harmless when it is treated as such and I doubt anyone would mind if that was all it ever was. It's no more beneficial than optimism from a psychological standpoint but it isn't necessarily harmful unless it interferes with learning.
Now the second group are militant anti-religious people. As I said before there are TONS of different people, but I'm lazy and probably won't come back so I'm just being binary. These people are (online) genuinely annoying and (offline) usually pretty interesting. I really like listening to folks like Dawkins, or Hitchens (very sad that he has cancer), or Silverman. I enjoy hearing their rationale for what moves them.
The hardest part about Athiesm, besides the fact that the name is retarded (since it suggests to some that it is a system of beliefs), is that it requires work. There is no additional research needed to defend a faith in debate. Bible (or related book), we are here, can't disprove it, and it was all because of god. But to discuss the merits of science you need to actually read, be versed in physics, chemistry, biology, history, and even be versed in the faith you are discussing/debating.
It's a very
very skewed and unfair debate. I applaud anyone willing to actually enter in a "why I'm not a believer" discussion because they have the mountain to climb.
It is much harder to explain the fundamental operations occurring in your microwave than to just say "god makes your food warm".
So yeah. The reason "they can't disprove it" is a naive and annoying point to bring up is that that isn't the point of science. There are an infinitely many things you can disprove, it is a waste of time and utterly moronic. However seeing what you can prove, what you can repeat, and what you can improve are noble efforts.
I like to tell folks that if there is a god I find it highly unlikely that god built this entire universe merely so that people could chill on Earth for 100 or less years as a stepping stone to an afterlife. This would make god highly irrational and I'd have a great difficulty finding them acceptable of my respect or prayers. It would seem much more reasonable that this universe was created for us to uncover its secrets, to stretch beyond our planet and to colonize the galaxy and beyond.
The universe was not made to give a man a fish, it was made to teach a man to fish. (apologies for male centric line)
Perhaps we are not meant to die and move on to live with god but to become gods ourselves. To truly raise ourselves into the image of what so many praise as perfection.
ANYWHO that's the thought experimenter in me leaking out, I'm willing to propose that there could be a cognitive base to the universe (as unlikely as that is) but the odds of it having been involved in writing any book for humans specifically is far less likely than its existence at all. But none of that helps us understand a bacteria any better.
(If we ever replace evolution with creationism exclusively we literally kill any chance of children understanding biology when they grow up, because it doesn't answer anything, its just taking credit for a process.)
