Ok, I'll put it simply. Pay no regard to spelling errors, specific religions, age of religion or what anybody had for breakfast:

Why do some people blindly follow the spoken and written words of other men, often written and spoken hundreds and thousands of years ago, and not apply the same reasoning and/or logical judgement to those words that they would if they were spoken by a man or woman today who announces that the Universe was created by a giant tomato?

Just that question, plain and simple. Nothing else, no meanderings down random alleyways of equivocating musings. Just that, a question about human behaviour, nothing more nothing less.

Because my Father did, and his Father before him and so forth. So it has always been, and so it shall remain.

That way we don't have to think too hard, and our words have the gravitas of centuries of perceived wisdom.

I believe you have neither the intellectual capacity nor the moral authority to come to a conclusion without paying heed to a person's breakfast choices to be honest.

You are loading the question. It is your decision to describe it as blindly following words of men.

They don't believe that it is blind, most believers in a religion feel that they are making a perfectly sensible choice.You may not agree, but that is nothing but your opinion, which is also just the words of a man.

Nor do they necessarily concede that they are the words of men. Most religions believe these are the words revealed to them by the heavens through the medium of a man. And many also add a doctrine of grace by which they believe that the heavens communicate subtly with everyone who is willing to open up and listen.

Now you may well decide to keep on describing this as a blind following, but you are repudiating, not refuting, so there is no worth to it.

No there is a difference between following the words of men with evidence and the words of men without.

One man shows you the evidence and you can evaluate it yourself, the other shows you the evidence and it is impossible to evaluate it yourself, you just have to accept it, because that is what faith is.

You say you can't use science to evaluate religious evidence because faith isn't rational.

But that is the point! We're saying that is why it is bad. And that, granted is just an opinion. But religious people have the ability to change their minds so it might one day become their opinion too. and we think that would be a good thing.

But you don't have any evidence that they are wrong. Your religious opinion is nothing more than that. Your demand to be taken more seriously than you can justify is illogical and betrays the fact that your claim to rational superiority is false.

It is not more rational to say that the universe cannot have a designer than it is to say it must. The rational response is to recognise that you don't believe, and that not believing is not the same as knowing something to be false.

Lol, talking louder to aliens. How very English

"belief in a creator" is not the same as religious practice - religious teaching can be proven to be contradictory, the locations in the Bible can be proven to be inaccurate etc. etc.

Hypothetical.

Let's say God never existed.

Everything about religion would still be possible - it could have evolved and propagated in exactly the same way as it has done. Churches would still be able to be built, chapel ceilings could still have been painted.

Let's say evolution has never occurred on the planet.

Would evolutionary biologists have been able to produce a chronological sequence of fossils going from less well adapted to more sophisticated adaptations EVERY time? Would Darwin have been able to produce any evidence for evolution? Would The Origin of Species have been as popular?

I don't think it would.

So it is not wrong to claim superiority for an idea, because we are producing the criteria to judge that superiority. Wouldn't adopting your way of looking at the issue mean everyone would have to treat all ideas with equal worth? (because no human is omniscient, perhaps only David Icke has got it spot on)

Sure, certain particulars of a religion can be challenged. It's not rational to go beyond that to claim that all religion is therefore false though, which you have done.

And this also is true. Let's have an alternative hypothetical, in this case there is a god, and all of that stuff still happens. With evolution. All that changes is whether there is an observer who knows what is going to happen.


Quite true. However you imply a false dichotomy. The implication is that either evolution must be true, or religion, and there is no grounds for both to be true. The Pope believes in evolution, so this is wasted effort.


My way is to stop muddling up things that have no bearing on each other, like empirical data and metaphysical belief. Always and in all cases, never to accept a religious answer to a practical problem, never look for practical answers to religious questions. This idea is superior because it based on real logic.

When you have competing explanations and no viable method of turning the beliefs you hold into indisputable facts, only inferior reasoning could lead anyone to make factual claims. To base those claims on the supposed superiority of what is clearly an inferior reasoning process is just religious dogma.

Err... I think if evolution had never occurred, we're unlikely to have any evolutionary biologists around to find anything. That's what meta-physicists call the 'anthropomorphisation conundrum'.

Put simply, it's a form of 'chicken and the egg'. There are several physical constants which, if you alter their value a little bit, you change the laws of physics such that planets would never form, or organic chemistry wouldn't work. So human life would never exist to carry out the experiments to find the values of the constants. Essentially, for human life to exist, a set of physical constants all need to have very specific values. Now the philosophical question is this : are the values of those constants what they were going to be anyway and we've just managed to figure them out, or are we seeing those values for those constants because they are the only values that would allow us to exist to observe them?

Equally, I think it's impossible to say if God created People, or People created God. All know is that we have people, and some of them believe in God. That of itself proves or disproves nothing.

Jon

No it is perfectly rational, if 99% of what I hear from church is rubbish, I'm allowed to go, right, I've given you a fair chance you know, and you haven't convinced me - and that guy over there with the hat on is saying the same thing, he's just changed the spelling of the names. And I can see that all religion has evolved in the same way, with typos turning into facts and people in power bending it to suit their agendas... I'm quite within my rights to say, you know what, it's probably all rubbish.

All religion is therefore false, and I'm confident in that assumption until the facts change and someone skypes us from the pearly gates or something.

Because humans are opinion machines, we have to function in this world without having all the knowledge and facts at our finger tips - and in such a world, science is the only consistent baloney detector we've invented. If you can't apply science to religion, then that very fact is enough for me - religion goes on the baloney pile along with Astrology, Chinese Medicine and Feng Shui.

Just been having a wash and thinking things through.

Let us say that there is a God and a heaven and it's exactly like in the Bible. Maybe God takes pity/liking to you and allows you to experience heaven. You're there for what seems days but not even a second has passed here. You're then returned to this world.

How would you prove you had been to heaven? Would you tell anyone? What would you say?

Take it one step further and this "God" tells you to spread forth word of heaven. What would you say to us? How would you prove tha heaven existed?

Take it further and this "God" tells you to guide others to experience heaven. Where the fudge do you start?

Big leap of faith between the first part and the second.
Additionally, the question of 'is there a God' and the secondary question of 'is religion a good thing' need to be addressed separately.

Whether science falls apart or the universe falls apart, it matters not to my point.

Show me one thing that has happened in the history of religion's evolution and growth that could have happened only if God exists.

I can show you a thousand things that have happened in science because evolution HAS TO exist in order for them to have happened (modern evolutionary theory being only one of them), but show me ONE thing that requires God's existence in order for religion to exist as it is today, in its current form.

You can still side with religion if you want, of course you can, but I feel I'm not straining the definition of rationality too much to say, wherever the two contradict each other, it's more rational to side with science (which is an atheist subject, it doesn't have a God at its core).

And if you allow that science effectively proves that those areas of religion, the bits that contradict science, are baloney, I think it's not irrational to claim that the few areas left untouched by science are probably baloney too, even though those bits are impervious to scientific reasoning.

Religion can constantly evolve and change its content, reacting to the spread of science, education and reason. (God has gone from being a literal sky monster in the clouds, and has retreated, and retreated, into the only sanctuary of ignorance left (another, undetectable universe) And it is this characteristic of religion, able to survive only in the cloud of human ignorance, that makes me distrust it.

Religion will say whatever it needs to to get people in.

I've been arguing that from the beginning

And is it really a leap of faith? Someone comes to your door and 99% of the time spouts jibberish, but then says something your're not sure about...

Do you close the door in his face or invite him in for a discussion and tea?

Say you're incredibly open minded and invite him in, and after an hour's discussion you just about are able to discern that humans will never be able to know whether what 1% of this man says is true, but you do know the rest of what he says is jibberish.

Do you go and walk the streets with him or say, you know what mate, your socks smell, and Countdown's on in a bit, take the rest of the biscuits and piss off.