Religion, what's the point?

MrMarcello said:
Lastly, if there is a 'god' it would be nice if this god would actually ensure starving kids are fed, that amputees are healed, that disgusting violations of rape and molestation would be intervened prior to the act, and so much more.
Click to expand...

Sounds great. Almost like heaven.

In all seriousness, I'd say those are all things humanity is capable of correcting, without God or any other deity's intervention. Now obviously if you believe in a God/Creator/etc, you'd believe he could correct these things. Wave a magic wand or whatever. But from a religious perspective, I think it makes more sense that the ideal or goal for humanity is to create that situation using our own God-given gifts.

From an atheist perspective, I'd say basically the same thing (minus the "God-given").
 
This is fecked up.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2012/1114/1224326575203.html

603960_10151165760401158_2007671256_n.jpg
 
How is that even legal? Is it really like that in Ireland?

Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar (34), an engineer at Boston Scientific in Galway, says she asked several times over a three-day period that the pregnancy be terminated. He says that, having been told she was miscarrying, and after one day in severe pain, Ms Halappanavar asked for a medical termination.

This was refused, he says, because the foetal heartbeat was still present and they were told, “this is a Catholic country”.

She spent a further 2½ days “in agony” until the foetal heartbeat stopped.


The dead foetus was removed and Savita was taken to the high dependency unit and then the intensive care unit, where she died of septicaemia on the 28th.
Click to expand...
 
niMic said:
How is that even legal? Is it really like that in Ireland?
Click to expand...

Abortion is illegal under most circumstances down south. Even if the mother's life is in danger it's still unclear whether it's legal or not to terminate the pregnancy.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Euro...ate-heats-up-in-Ireland-as-law-revision-looms

But in 1992, the Irish Supreme Court ruled that abortion was permitted if there was "a real and substantial risk" to the life of the mother. This judgment came in the wake of the X Case, when a 14-year-old girl, who was suicidal after becoming pregnant following a rape, was sequestered by the state in order to stop her obtaining an abortion in the UK. She subsequently miscarried.

Despite the ruling, Ireland's abortion ban was never revised to incorporate the court-mandated exception, leaving a legal limbo.

So in 2010, the ECHR, part of the 47-country Council of Europe (as opposed to the EU), ruled that Irish law was unclear on whether abortion is legal if a woman's life is threatened by pregnancy. It also ruled that Ireland must clarify this in line with the amendment in its own Constitution outlawing abortion.
Click to expand...
 
you can make up any old shit while stoned and call it religion thesedays, just look at mormonism, it's basically a cult of braindead morons yet it gets all the legal crap religion does, as long as you allow any old shit like that to be called religion, I am sorry but I have 0 respect for people arguing religion has any right to anything.
 
surf said:
The strongest intellectual case you can make for this creator stuff is that there is no good evidence against it, which really isn't an argument in favour of it. Wouldn't it be better to keep an open mind in the absence of evidence for a creator?
Click to expand...

I think so. Which is why I'm not religious.

But it's hardly a "ridiculous" belief. No intellectual argument exists on the topic whatsoever. And everything is created by something. That "something" is what people believe to be God. And then once they believe that, all the other stuff around manifests.
 
amolbhatia100 said:
I think so. Which is why I'm not religious.

But it's hardly a "ridiculous" belief. No intellectual argument exists on the topic whatsoever. And everything is created by something. That "something" is what people believe to be God. And then once they believe that, all the other stuff around manifests.
Click to expand...

Following this logic: What, then, created God? Invoking a supernatural intelligence doesn't get you anywhere. It doesn't solve anything. The case for a God fails both evidentiary and logically, which is why it is a ridiculous belief.
 
What created the "Big Bang"? What came before the existence of the Universe?
 
niMic said:
I think you misunderstood something. That's not a very good gotcha question for an atheist.
Click to expand...

I'm just asking what the scientific point of view is. Not everything is asked to try and catch people out. I'm a christian and it seems that the "Well who created God" type thing is always thrown out there so what is the answer from the other point of view?

Look on it as Science for Dummies (christians) ok?

:)
 
It's not an other point of view thing. Look at it this way. The only thing "god did it" does is add another level of complexity, that doesn't actually explain anything. That's where you get the question "then what created god?"

We don't know what came before the big bang. One possibility is that nothing came before the big bang. Without the universe, there is no time. The question becomes meaningless.
 
niMic said:
It's not an other point of view thing. Look at it this way. The only thing "god did it" does is add another level of complexity, that doesn't actually explain anything. That's where you get the question "then what created god?"

We don't know what came before the big bang. One possibility is that nothing came before the big bang. Without the universe, there is no time. The question becomes meaningless.
Click to expand...

So atheists say that God doesn't exist and that the Universe came about with the "Big Bang" and that doesn't add another level of complexity?
 
It adds a layer that explains something. Like I said, "God made it" doesn't explain anything, because.. what made God? What made the thing that made God? You don't need God to explain anything. You do need the Big Bang to explain all the evidence we have of the Big Bang.

Do you not believe that the Big Bang happened? It's pretty much as accepted as evolution and the shape of the Earth.
 
niMic said:
It adds a layer that explains something. Like I said, "God made it" doesn't explain anything, because.. what made God? What made the thing that made God? You don't need God to explain anything. You do need the Big Bang to explain all the evidence we have of the Big Bang.

Do you not believe that the Big Bang happened? It's pretty much as accepted as evolution and the shape of the Earth.
Click to expand...

Yes I do believe in the "Big Bang". I believe in evolution, I'm not a christian who believes that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.

However, I don't think that you can comfortably sit back after saying "Alright then, where did God come from?" without being prepared to accept that your own belief in solely "The Big Bang" is missing something. That there are gaps in both of our knowledge.
 
You're treating them as if they are equal answers. They aren't. One is a wild guess, the other is based on a massive amount of very solid evidence. Besides, the defining feature of science is that "it" accepts that it doesn't know everything. Or there wouldn't be science.
 
oates said:
Yes I do believe in the "Big Bang". I believe in evolution, I'm not a christian who believes that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.

However, I don't think that you can comfortably sit back after saying "Alright then, where did God come from?" without being prepared to accept that your own belief in solely "The Big Bang" is missing something. That there are gaps in both of our knowledge.
Click to expand...

You can ask the question, thought it will be impossible to answer it, simply because as we understand the universe before the Big Bang there was no time, no space, there was nothing.

In that aspect it's fair to say that the question is similar to 'what created God'.
 
niMic said:
You're treating them as if they are equal answers. They aren't. One is a wild guess, the other is based on a massive amount of very solid evidence. Besides, the defining feature of science is that "it" accepts that it doesn't know everything. Or there wouldn't be science.
Click to expand...

I accept a lot of your point of view however to say that (I think you are saying) Christianity is based on "A wild guess" isn't quite the full story. For Christians there is a quite admittedly fallible source of documented evidence, anecdotal, bastardised by more monks then you could poke a stick at of course, but one of the oldest books in the world. That Jesus as a person existed, is a person of historical record backed up by archeology. Christian faith is drawn from teaching that goes back centuries and millennia. So each christian doesn't exactly wake up on one particular morning and think to themselves "Okay, I'm going to make a wild stab at this and say that God exists".
 
niMic said:
Fair enough. But as long as the rest of my point stands ;)
Click to expand...

Fair enough so long as you accept that I contend that something must have initiated the Big Bang. :)


I know you won't, it's ok.
 
niMic said:
Not an entity. A state? Perhaps. I'm not a cosmologist.
Click to expand...

Alabama?

As far as I know the Universe consists of the same stuff, there is nothing new in the Universe, there never will be. But I think the two questions must be equal because nothing can come from nothing.
 
Actually, something can come from nothing. If we're going to start debating that, we need an actual scientist, though.

Start here, though. It's very interesting.



A particularly poignant point in that talk is roughly 40:30. It's best watched in its entirety though.

Just ignore the jokes on behalf of religion. It's a bunch of scientists coming together for a talk, what'dya expect? :p
 
niMic said:
Actually, something can come from nothing. If we're going to start debating that, we need an actual scientist, though.
Click to expand...

I'm sure we have one somewhere on here. However for you to believe in whatever his answer is maybe must be backed up by "solid evidence" otherwise you base your "belief" in theory.

I for the moment find it inconceivable to think that we can know that an event like the Big Bang can happen spontaneously from "nothing".

Edit. Okay, I see you've added the vid, I'll watch it, I may be some time...
 
oates said:
I'm sure we have one somewhere on here. However for you to believe in whatever his answer is maybe must be backed up by "solid evidence" otherwise you base your "belief" in theory.

I for the moment find it inconceivable to think that we can know that an event like the Big Bang can happen spontaneously from "nothing".

Edit. Okay, I see you've added the vid, I'll watch it, I may be some time...
Click to expand...

And yet you're perfectly capable of believing that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent super-intelligence can. Which was my original point. Adding "God" to the equation solves nothing.
 
oates said:
I accept a lot of your point of view however to say that (I think you are saying) Christianity is based on "A wild guess" isn't quite the full story. For Christians there is a quite admittedly fallible source of documented evidence, anecdotal, bastardised by more monks then you could poke a stick at of course, but one of the oldest books in the world. That Jesus as a person existed, is a person of historical record backed up by archeology. Christian faith is drawn from teaching that goes back centuries and millennia. So each christian doesn't exactly wake up on one particular morning and think to themselves "Okay, I'm going to make a wild stab at this and say that God exists".
Click to expand...

It's an accident of birth that you are a Christian. If you were born in Saudi Arabia to a Muslim family, you would almost certainly be espousing the truth of the Quran and Mohammed, not the Bible and Jesus. Your belief in Christianity has nothing to do with rational, impartial examination of evidence, I'd imagine. The scientific theory of the Big Bang is based on the examination of actual evidence.
 
oates said:
Alabama?

As far as I know the Universe consists of the same stuff, there is nothing new in the Universe, there never will be. But I think the two questions must be equal because nothing can come from nothing.
Click to expand...

What does this even mean?
 
I think he's referring to the common knowledge that energy is never created or destroyed, it only changes form.

Of course there can still be something from nothing, when you consider that there is such a thing as negative energy.
 
niMic said:
I think he's referring to the common knowledge that energy is never created or destroyed, it only changes form.

Of course there can still be something from nothing, when you consider that there is such a thing as negative energy.
Click to expand...

And what about dark matter and dark energy? It is very possible that with the expansion of universe dark energy is created.

Saying that nothing new cannot be created is not a certainty anymore.
 
Saliph said:
And yet you're perfectly capable of believing that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent super-intelligence can. Which was my original point. Adding "God" to the equation solves nothing.
Click to expand...

Well I'm only 16 minutes into my video that niMic kindly brought to my attention so all I can say for now Saliph is that you provide no answers either from my point of view so for the moment if you like "it's a big fat thanks for nothing" although I'm a big fan of your superior patronising, as I suspect is niMic. :)
 
rednev said:
It's an accident of birth that you are a Christian. If you were born in Saudi Arabia to a Muslim family, you would almost certainly be espousing the truth of the Quran and Mohammed, not the Bible and Jesus. Your belief in Christianity has nothing to do with rational, impartial examination of evidence, I'd imagine. The scientific theory of the Big Bang is based on the examination of actual evidence.
Click to expand...


Rednev, I appreciate you wasting one of your last posts on little me. Yes, it is true that if I had been born in Saudi Arabia I could be a muslim however I do not believe that Hebrew, Christian and Muslim faith can really be that far apart since we all call Abraham our father and that in fact all three faiths share some very common tenets. Of course they disagree on many more but if you are a disagreeable person than I find you tend to prefer to do that.

As I said, I'll be back, I may be some time but in the meantime if any of you want to keep the silly christian tied up all you need to do is find him some more vids to watch :)

As a side note on 16 mins through the vid I'm already finding out that Einstein back in 1929 was wrong by a factor of 10. Science has a way of developing doesn't it. As someone else points out we now have Dark Energy to think about. Who'd have realised that in 1929 eh? So, where did Dark Energy come from then? Is there the same amount of Dark Energy that there always will be? More vids please!
 
oates said:
Well I'm only 16 minutes into my video that niMic kindly brought to my attention so all I can say for now Saliph is that you provide no answers either from my point of view so for the moment if you like "it's a big fat thanks for nothing" although I'm a big fan of your superior patronising, as I suspect is niMic. :)
Click to expand...

I don't owe you any answers. And I'm merely pointing out your flawed logic and double standard. If that's patronizing then so be it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.