RELIGION DISCUSSION THREAD
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shredtastical
SUX!
- Jul 23, 2007
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Flying Spaghetti Monster theory dude, it fails!
!
wtf?
However the beliefs of science are cemented in logic and proof. I'm not discounting the beliefs of atheists etc, however believing in no god without being able to prove it is where science and religion diverge. that's called faith.
Altitudes
Stay Frosty
wtf?
Flying Spaghetti Monster, you dig?
It is basically mocking the theory that you can't prove religion to be fake. I could say that Jesus is 1/1000th the size of the smallest particle known to man and he revolves around the world faster than the speed of light on a tricycle. Absurd, but you can't prove it false.
shredtastical
SUX!
- Jul 23, 2007
- 1,620
- 0
- 36
Flying Spaghetti Monster, you dig?
It is basically mocking the theory that you can't prove religion to be fake. I could say that Jesus is 1/1000th the size of the smallest particle known to man and he revolves around the world faster than the speed of light on a tricycle. Absurd, but you can't prove it false.
you have this habit of proving all my points wtf
thats what ive been ARGUING. atheism has beliefs cemented in postulates that have no logical proof to back them. god cannot be disproven, nor can he/she/it be proven.
Altitudes
Stay Frosty
you have this habit of proving all my points wtf
thats what ive been ARGUING. atheism has beliefs cemented in postulates that have no logical proof to back them. god cannot be disproven, nor can he/she/it be proven.
Whatever dude, I'm too tired for this shit
Go forth and worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, he pwns Raptor Jesus! (this smilie winks, never noticed!)I'm on the group of the best students on our school, and also since we have the best education, I should know lot about it. My chemistry is 9 and biology changes from 7-9 depending of the course and how I'm up to work for the number.
Indeed.
Interesting read here. Most of you know (I assume) that I am a Christian, do the whole contemporary worship church band every week (bass/guitar/sing lead), involved in my church etc. etc. - fire away haters!
I also play in a Christian Rock band (bass/vocals).When it comes to discussions like this (God stuff), I've read it all from users over the years on this and other forums. The same arguments/reasoning given in this thread has been given over and over.
Personally I hate the word religion any more, and agree that Christians are our own worst enemy sometimes. I actually left my last church because the pastor made some whacked out comments (based more on opinion/taking scripture out of context) that revolved around heavy metal music. I can't stand the close-minded bible thumping traditional Christians and they're judgmental finger pointing. I think they drives more kids/young adults to hate God/church than anything else!
I know that wind, gravity, (and countless other things) exist without having to see it or be able to touch it. I can feel it, I see how it reacts with things in and around it. I see the same with God and my faith. Call it corny or what you like, but I wasn't always a complete believer.
I heard something cool yesterday - a former self-proclaimed atheist kid at our church (metalhead - who I shall mentor with more good music!) who used to crack jokes during church to his parents, not care, avoid any church, etc. just accepted God last week. We're talking a kid who could have cared less last week (literally). Pretty interesting. We actually have quite a few metalheads at our church and I've been thinking about starting a metal music group at our church where we talk about music and conversations like the one in this thread.
Anyways, we all have our beliefs and should respect each other on those. You'll never see me ragging on an atheist, satanist or what have you. That's not my place, nor will you see me trying to push anyone into "church stuff".
WARNING LONG READ
This is why I am not a fan of religious moderates:
People of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. However, religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (i) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures-forces like greed, hatred, and fear-for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of judgment, he cannot possibly "respect" the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God.
Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question-i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us-religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities.
Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience.
Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago-while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate-or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.
With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us-culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive it.
Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world-to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish-is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
Excerpt of "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris
This is why I am not a fan of religious moderates:
People of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. However, religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (i) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures-forces like greed, hatred, and fear-for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of judgment, he cannot possibly "respect" the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God.
Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question-i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us-religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities.
Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience.
Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago-while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate-or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.
With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us-culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive it.
Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world-to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish-is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
Excerpt of "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris
Indeed.
Interesting read here. Most of you know (I assume) that I am a Christian, do the whole contemporary worship church band every week (bass/guitar/sing lead), involved in my church etc. etc. - fire away haters!
When it comes to discussions like this (God stuff), I've read it all from users over the years on this and other forums. The same arguments/reasoning given in this thread has been given over and over.
Personally I hate the word religion any more, and agree that Christians are our own worst enemy sometimes. I actually left my last church because the pastor made some whacked out comments (based more on opinion/taking scripture out of context) that revolved around heavy metal music. I can't stand the close-minded bible thumping traditional Christians and they're judgmental finger pointing. I think they drives more kids/young adults to hate God/church than anything else!
I know that wind, gravity, (and countless other things) exist without having to see it or be able to touch it. I can feel it, I see how it reacts with things in and around it. I see the same with God and my faith. Call it corny or what you like, but I wasn't always a complete believer.
I heard something cool yesterday - a former self-proclaimed atheist kid at our church (metalhead - who I shall mentor with more good music!) who used to crack jokes during church to his parents, not care, avoid any church, etc. just accepted God last week. We're talking a kid who could have cared less last week (literally). Pretty interesting. We actually have quite a few metalheads at our church and I've been thinking about starting a metal music group at our church where we talk about music and conversations like the one in this thread.
Anyways, we all have our beliefs and should respect each other on those. You'll never see me ragging on an atheist, satanist or what have you. That's not my place, nor will you see me trying to push anyone into "church stuff".
That's cool heh. When I first time heard about gospel music and such stuff, I thought that, hey why not make a christian metal band. As music means lot to me and so does religion. And I'm really interested about music itself too and wanting to create something great souning, not just anything metalcore or sth. Like the heavyness/melodical influences from other more melodical genres combined with God's word.
That's cool heh. When I first time heard about gospel music and such stuff, I thought that, hey why not make a christian metal band. As music means lot to me and so does religion. And I'm really interested about music itself too and wanting to create something great souning, not just anything metalcore or sth. Like the heavyness/melodical influences from other more melodical genres combined with God's word.
Why not just make a normal metal band? Does it have to spread christian lies throughout the music industry?
Religion should stay out of music.
Like the separation of Church and State occurs, so should the separation of Church and Music.
Night Reaper
ooo the reaper wants more
holy shit spirit crusher could you put your book into like maybe 3 phrases it seems really interesting but im a very lazy guy now
unfortunately putting that into three phrases doesn't work, you have to read the whole thing to understand my disliking for religious moderates. Sam Harris does it best, so i have quoted him.
Night Reaper
ooo the reaper wants more
Leandro
¬¬
wtf?
However the beliefs of science are cemented in logic and proof. I'm not discounting the beliefs of atheists etc, however believing in no god without being able to prove it is where science and religion diverge. that's called faith.
The first law of thermodynamics has never been proven.
Neither has been the second.
Or the three Newton's laws, which are the basis to classical mechanics.
Or Maxwell's equations for classical electrodynamics.
Or Schrödinger's equation, in the realm of quantum mechanics.
Or the Schwarzschild's solution, of utmost importance to orbital mechanics, for Einstein's equations of general relativity.
Which have never been proven either.
Or the Lorentz transformations for special relativity, while we're at it.
And finally, the Lagrange formula which pretty much covers up all physics regarding motion has never been proven.
And I didn't even scratch the surface of physics. I could literally spend the whole day here citing scientific formulas and works which have never, ever been proven. And will never, ever be.
The reason why science is valid and religion isn't hasn't got anything to do with being proven or not proven. It's all about method[/b]. A scientist observes reality, comes up with a model based on a set of basic assumptions, derives mathematical expressions which explain some characteristics that can be observed, and compares the theoretical results of his model with the experimental results. If his model proves wrong, he goes back to the chalkboard and go over his initial assumptions to see what can be done to refine it. He then keeps trying until the theory matches the experiment within the accepted margin of error. If later discrepancies are found, the model can be corrected or thrown away in favour of a new one which can explain the observations.
Religion, on the other hand, observes reality, and makes up a set of assumptions, period. No method. And that's where atheism comes in, and says "Hey, you made that up".
The choice of being an atheist has to do with the question: "Do we have any concrete evidence whatsoever to believe divine entities shaped this universe?". The answer is clearly negative(no, folks, the bible is not evidence. And quoting any versicles would be plain circular logic). So, why bother?
Atheism is a religion in the same way that bald is a hair colour.
/rant.
You know, any more, I think I see more anti-Christian/religion folks trying to force their non-beliefs and opinions down other people's throats way more than I see any Christian folk trying to "convert" and put down non-believers - talk about being hypocritical.
that's the beauty of choice, if you don't want religion in your music, don't listen to band's who do so! Same reason I avoid the fanatical satanic junk in the music I listen to. I don't care that they recorded it, their choice, but I don't have to listen to it so whatever.
Live and let live.
- Status
