Concepts of The God, Gods, or physical embodiment of ideas like fate or love etc.. They go further back than any organized or written religion. They are more likely than not the attempts of an awaking intelligence to reconcile mushroom trips with reality. Imagine this your a neolithic hunter, your everyday reality is pretty understandable, you have animals, birds, occasional storm, your family group, etc.. But every once in a while you eat a bad mushroom and see ghoulish things like bugs crawling out of peoples eyes or see ecstatic things like a sunrise which never ends in the breadth of a child, etc.. How would you explain that? Would you just brush it off? You can't deny what you just saw and heard. There is no science to explain this yet, no priest to tell you what it meant, they haven't been invented yet.. Theres gotta be something more to reality than animals, birds, occasional storm, your family group, etc.. Thus The God, Gods, physical embodiment of love and fate, etc.. you make a little fetish to remind you of the "spirits", in time they grew up into Gods.. Now humans are arguing about the color of Gods skin or whether God is a vegetarian..
I wouldn't worry about it, the God/Gods/Fate/Love they are timeless, immortal, they will always exist, it is we who are their dreams.
-ddn
Debate me about the bible
There is no god...especially not a blond hair blue eyes jesus. Europe simply twisted ancient Egyptian stories and lore and changed it into the bible. Google "ancient egypt and the bible parallels".
Concepts of The God, Gods, or physical embodiment of ideas like fate or love etc.. They go further back than any organized or written religion. They are more likely than not the attempts of an awaking intelligence to reconcile mushroom trips with reality.
Many people believe that way.
If that is what YOU personally believe, and you are okay with that, then that's fine.
From what I've experienced of the world, there is no way I could believe that. I don't have a concept of a "blond hair blue eyes jesus", and I've never had "mushroom trips" or other psychedelic or drugged experiences.
The Wiki says 96% to 98% of the world believe in a higher power of some form, which is a very high number for something to be easily dismissed as "attempts of an awaking intelligence to reconcile mushroom trips with reality." In a world of 7 billion, that still leaves about two hundred million people who share your belief, so you have plenty of company. I believe such a longstanding global mass delusion of the rest of the nearly 7 billion people is unlikely, but if you want to believe that, it is your freedom to do so.
The Wiki says 96% to 98% of the world believe in a higher power of some form
Citation needed. What is "The Wiki"? Wikipedia? I did a quick search and couldn't find any pages that cited that statistic. One site that I know of that shows a religious distribution (including those that are non-religious) is adherents.com:
http://www.adherents..._Adherents.html
That estimates the non-religious population of the world at around 16% (8% which are non-believers), which I think is much more accurate estimate. America is a fairly religious country, but there are many more countries that have a significantly higher portion of non-believers. Japan, Scandinavia, and many western European countries.
Does it matter what percentage of the world believes in some faith or another? A large membership doesn't make a group objectively right or wrong. And a lot of the people within the believers have views that will contradict a lot of other people's-- at least some of them are incorrect, deluded or otherwise.
The validity of any given belief system, or of religious belief in general, is unlikely to be tied to how popular those beliefs are.
The validity of any given belief system, or of religious belief in general, is unlikely to be tied to how popular those beliefs are.
Does it matter what percentage of the world believes in some faith or another? A large membership doesn't make a group objectively right or wrong. And a lot of the people within the believers have views that will contradict a lot of other people's-- at least some of them are incorrect, deluded or otherwise.
The validity of any given belief system, or of religious belief in general, is unlikely to be tied to how popular those beliefs are.
I completely agree with you. No, the number of adherents to a particular belief or non-belief do not matter and have no effect on the validity or truth of the belief system. I just don't like it when people start throwing out numbers and statistics without citing their sources.
The humble reasoning of one man can topple the belief of an entire world. Faith is a personal decision which should take place beyond convenience or laziness, doing anything less is just a way to make things easy - which is fine...if that is what you want from your life.
The Wiki says 96% to 98% of the world believe in a higher power of some form, which is a very high number for something to be easily dismissed as "attempts of an awaking intelligence to reconcile mushroom trips with reality." In a world of 7 billion, that still leaves about two hundred million people who share your belief, so you have plenty of company.
I call bullshit on that. Given that the worlds most populous country is predominantly atheistic, I'd say the percentage of people is a bit lower than that.
Besides, the majority of people once believed the sun orbited the earth.
... Last time was in this video where the subject compares us to pots of clay questioning the motives of the potter.
I never said that we were pots of clay, or inanimate or any such thing, so we can let that go.
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For the record, I never claimed you said that. I said (as emphasised above) that I had seen someone else claim that as an extension of the "we're so far below god as to not understand it".
I'll agree that the abilities to question and reason are important; in fact, I think that those are the very things that make us human, and are the proper behaviors of mankind (I'm non-religious, by the way). But the idea that the exercise of free will is necessarily good because our ability to reason is inherently good I don't agree with.
Some people reason badly, and so they do in fact exercise their free will based on faulty judgement. The ability to reason in no way dictates or even suggests that your reasoning will be good or correct.
Don't confuse the outcome with the ability. Being able to drive is useful. Driving badly can kill someone but it doesn't make driving itself bad.
And explain stuff to your kids all you want.
lol, actually I don't have kids.
I agree that that's an important thing to do for a lot of reasons. But you don't sit a toddler down and explain the dangers of drowning to him or her. You keep the kid away from the water, or you supervise them pretty minutely to keep them safe. You don't trust a toddler's free will to combine with their reasoning abilities to equal safety.
Agreed, but you do explain it to them at some point, once they have acquired rudimentary reasoning skills.
But the gap between children and adults is not very similar to that between god and anything else. "Because I say so" is a cop out for a parent, even if the child fails to understand the reasons for actions regardless of effort. But the rules for the omnipotent creator of the universe are going to be a bit different than for me talking to my kid.
Given what we've been able to reason and determine about our universe, we have at least shown that we are capable of learning and understanding. If god is out there, he owes us an explanation.
The humble reasoning of one man can topple the belief of an entire world. Faith is a personal decision which should take place beyond convenience or laziness, doing anything less is just a way to make things easy - which is fine...if that is what you want from your life.
[s]
What? You mean not having "faith" (whatever that means) makes you lazy and makes things easy?
[/s]Oh, sorry, I have comprehended your post now. And I agree [s]
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For the record, I never claimed you said that. I said (as emphasised above) that I had seen someone else claim that as an extension of the "we're so far below god as to not understand it".
Fair enough. I just wanted to be clear that I'm not responsible for defending someone else's stupid extension of a valid concept.
Don't confuse the outcome with the ability. Being able to drive is useful. Driving badly can kill someone but it doesn't make driving itself bad.
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I'm not. You said "Otherwise, we are basing our free will on faulty judgement". We do, because it is demonstrably true that people often reason badly. As I said (and on re-reading it, it does not seem clear that this is my position in the original post), I agree that questioning and reasoning are incredibly important human traits. But if your aim is to produce a useful conclusion about the nature of god or god's actions, which is the case in trying to assess the accuracy, validity, or purpose of a religious text, practice, or any given event, then you have to bite the harms of imperfect judgement and necessarily limited information.
As I said in a later post, you can and should reason all the time, as much as possible. But, and this is particularly true of religion, you cannot reasonably expect to reach a complete and objectively correct conclusion. This does not devalue the capacity to reason at all, but it does have large implications for the practice of a religion (i.e. you cannot determine with certainty what god wants of you, or the purpose behind some divinely driven event).
So for someone to say, "the Bible is the direct and perfect word of God, and I totally understand it, and the correct thing to do for purely theistic reasons is X" is a statement which ought to be beyond anyone who can, in fact, reason. You either accept all of the preconditions which preclude using your reasoning power, or you accept that you could be badly wrong about every point of it, regardless of how strongly you feel about your conclusion.
And explain stuff to your kids all you want.
lol, actually I don't have kids.
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Haha, me either. I was speaking generally.
Agreed, but you do explain it to them at some point, once they have acquired rudimentary reasoning skills.
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But only once their reasoning skills are sufficient to grasp the situation. If your kid can reason (If I cry, my pushover parent will give me cookies and juice, so I'll cry a lot), that doesn't necessarily mean that they can grasp things like drowning or death. You should still try to explain of course, but rudimentary may not be enough. This would be magnified dramatically between a deity and some guy. If it would take 500 years of reflection to reason your way to true thing Y, that's something that no human can do. And even if someone did do the requisite reflection, they might still be wrong-- and there's no objective way to analyze it. If humans pool their thoughts through generations, you can overcome the time limitation, but you introduce more people whom a reasoner must trust implicitly to make any additional progress, and any of them could be wrong as well.
Given what we've been able to reason and determine about our universe, we have at least shown that we are capable of learning and understanding. If god is out there, he owes us an explanation.
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Perhaps. I'm certainly in the camp of preferring to be guided by someone who knows than having to muddle my way through everything. But if god exists, it would be unreasonable to place constraints on him based in our own preferences, experiences, ideas, and hyper-limited knowledge. We may think that this is correct (and again, I'm with you in that my reasoning brings me to the same conclusion). But that does not mean that we are correct in any meaningful way (despite reasoning our way there); not any moreso than a five year old who thinks that because cookies and juice taste good and reduce hunger that they should be eaten exclusively.
There's too much relevant information that we don't have about the universe, and especially about abstract concepts like ethics and philosophy, for us to adopt such certitude.
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