God's warriors
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- BonSeff0
this is why the spin of intelligent design is, to me, just another parlor trick
- ********0
OMG!! Why are you guys so serious???
- BonSeff0
"OMG!! Why are you guys so serious???"
sincerely,
one hand washing the others dirt away
- hotroddy0
Religion was created to explain where we came from and where we are going. This knowledge gives many a sense of peace. To some people not knowing can be very unsettling.
I on the otherhand am ok with realizing we are spawned from monkeys and will one day cease to exist.
- incog0
Spawned from Monkeys? Hehe. Go read up on evolution bud.
Science was also created to explain where we came from. No one seems to have a problem with that.
Brookoioioi - God cannot be proven in a way you could accept, and he provides hints as to why he does not show himself in the Bible.
The questions you are asking are ones that must be answered after careful study and examination of scripture. There are no easy answers. It's like trying to understand Special Relativity without knowing Algebra.
Your words are far too loaded and biased to carry on a respectful and decent conversation - you are not open to anything contrary to what you present. Your phrasing and lack of humility say it for you.
- TheBlueOne0
Religion was created to explain where we came from and where we are going.
hotroddy
(Aug 27 07, 23:49)Nah. IMHO spiritual practices were invented so people can deal with things like "Yo, my buddy was just alive and now, after this giant saber toothed tiger ripped his head off he's not talking to me. WTF??!!"
Religion was invented when someone realized they could use said spiritual practices to lord it over the rubes by holding a monopoly on what to do when you're buds head was ripped off by said saber tooth tiger, and backed it up with some sorta social punishment.
"See, we're going to bury your buddy's body like this see, and you're going to pay us to do it, you know, correctly. And if you don't pay us we'll exile you out of the community or kill you just straight away, whatever's easier. Dig?"
- incog0
Very true. Great examples of Religion twisted to support someone's selfish cause.
But, we've already been through this - in this same thread, in fact. Religion, reason, atheism, science, or anything else can be twisted to support a selfish cause.
But can we really argue all those things were created solely for that selfish cause?
- incog0
Oh, and I'd like to make a distinction here. Faith is different from religion.
Faith = belief without proof.
Religion = spiritually-based cultural tradition.
My definitions for my purposes, anyway.
- tank0
incog.
science is objective and can be proven. so can evolution.
but sience is not as biased as religion and is open for change.who locked copernicus into a cellar agian for believing the earth is round and the sun is center of the sun...
right..the church...
- TheBlueOne0
I have no problem with the validity and very real need of (most) human beings to need spiritual solace in whatever cultural/personal form they require - and I say that as a card carrying believer in the Enlightenment.
And honestly, the history of religion is similar to the history of agriculture and industry - as you get more people into the system doing more concentrated bits of the labor (or whatever it is), you're going to need a systemic hierarchy. It's just how systems work. But unlike stuff based in the physical world, religions are just made up rules and things that get codified and then run into trouble when they no longer reflect physical or cultural reality over time. Now, there are a few ways to avoid that if you're a religion - a) co-opt shit over time (see Christianity, Islam, Buddhism et. al.) or b) stay selective and develop ways to handle heretics in house (see Judaism, other smaller sects and cults). If you're religion can't adapt you go the way of the dinosaur (anyone praying to Zeus these days? Yeah. Thought not.)
And all of these religions were very geographically rooted - and once we get civilizations bumping into each other outside their geographical centers then you get big "My god is bigger than your god" food fights. Good times.
But any hierachical system generates heretics within. Someone who points out that the emporer is naked or that the map and territory don't align. Oddly I find it amusing that Christianity is the most successful religion at spinning heretical movements into new christian belief systems yet so many proclaim that each of the spinoffs is the real deal - and even more amusing that the ones who are now farthest form the source (in time, culture & geography)are the loudest in proclaiming their legitimacy as the sole interpretation to the point of apocalypse.
I find the whole process funny.
- incog0
Wow, what thick skulls you have. Your argument that all religion or the church fundamentally oppose science is ridiculous. Religion was misused as a way for people to imprison him for fear of his ideas.
A true faith must be open to change, otherwise it becomes what you are describing - a foundation for people to act out of selfishness, fear, hate, misunderstanding, etc.
- ********0
It's funny, like you just typed all that for no reason, blue.
- flagellum0
Tank: Big science is indeed biased. It can easily be likened to stuffy intolerant religious elitists. They won't tolerate ideas which challenge the reigning paradigms. I could show you a list of institutions, review boards, etc... which have tried to silence dissenters. It's sad and frightening.
- TheBlueOne0
Great book to get, even though it's out of print:
http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Our…
Changed alot of my thinking about religion and spiritual practices in the West.
I found it most interesting that the author claimed (and I believe he makes a very convincing argument) that the rise of science was in fact a heretic movement within European Catholic system to find the Truth of God without resorting to priestly interpretations of the Bible. If you look at the writings of Newton, Galileo I mean they weren't "doing science" in our modern understanding of the word - rather they were searching for God and his Truth in their observation of natural systems. They were on a spiritual and faith based quest.
What we call "science" is really a heretically movement against the Church in Europe that became successful because it received the backing of political entities that were trying to break away from the Catholic church's sole and found science useful in both propaganda terms and in it's utilitarian function (the King that actually made use of physics equations were able to build more effective canon than say his "faith based" neighbor._
- flagellum0
need I remind you of phlogiston and ether and other rediculous ideas that were reigning paradigms in science?
- TheBlueOne0
It's funny, like you just typed all that for no reason, blue.
JesseJensen
(Aug 28 07, 07:05)I'm feeling chatty...and besides I had a few minutes to kill...
Like I said, funny.
- flagellum0
religion & spirituality are the inevitable product of beings wired to seek after their creator. Everyone is trying fill the God-shaped hole inside them.
- incog0
Blue - I completely agree with that last bit. It's comical.
One of the biggest struggles with Christianity today - in my opinion - is cultural. The Bible was written in a different culture, and modern Christians attempt to pull that culture out along with their doctrine rather than read in context. This is where many of the most ridiculous fundamentalist beliefs come from.
If you were to forget for a moment everything you knew about Christianity and sat down to read the New Testament, you would find it is not about rules. Christ came to fulfill the rules because no one is perfect. No one could live and never break one of the hundreds of Jewish laws. Rules are not enough - you must admit imperfection in humility. It is understood that everyone fails.
Christianity is the end all be all for human imperfection, which is why, in my belief, it is so often and easily perverted.
- Brookoioioi0
So the best an all powerful creator can muster is hints in a book. Surely if it wanted to prove itself it could do something like move Saturn so it was next to the moon tonight, without destroying us in the process. Something like that would be kinda hard to doubt....
- TheBlueOne0
My working definitions:
Spirituality: one's interior experience of the mysterious of life - birth, death, loss, love..etc.
Ethics: Mapping those experiences onto with others assuming that they too have interior experiences of like kind and modifying one's behavior accordingly.
Religion: Exploiting Ethics systemically to achieve co-oridinated goals (this is ethically/morally neutral to me..I mean religions do good stuff and bad stuff)