Belief... or lack thereof

[ericc]

It would just take one example to undo your reasoning, no?

From one species to another. One of the most studied animals on the planet, the fruit flies:
talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB910_1.html

Didn’t see your point. Still fruit flies. Even if they have legs growing out of their heads. Dog breeders too. You can have poodles and sheep dogs. Still dogs. Won’t become a snake for instance.

Is that different from the one people feel for one another?
Is the love people feel for one another something that’s generated within the person, or is it something that comes from the outside? (is there a Cupid throwing arrows?)

Something like that. Just not lust.

yeah, I did mention it…
So, if no one has experience of the afterlife, why should I be concerned about believing in the existence of God?

It is like I never been to Heaven. I have not met anyone who has been there. But I’d like to go there someday. And I have heard of the other place called Hell. No I also haven’t heard of anyone who has been there and back. But I heard it is not a nice place. And I don’t think I want to go there or the company there. And there is a chance that if I take the wrong road, I may end up at a destination that I don’t want to be at. Pascal Wager anyone?

 

[ericc]

Guys, you need to take this offline. Argue it out in PMs or something or you will get the thread closed.

Noted. Thanks for the reminder. I forgot. I am done.

 

[Bradski]

Didn’t see your point. Still fruit flies.

Well, you know what they say. Time flies like an arrows, fruit flies like a banana.

You KNOW my God don’t exist? How quaint to have such a conviction.

There appears to be a lot of it about.

 

[pocaracas]

Some of the more interesting cosmological arguments have been offered by St. Thomas Aquinas (as in newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article3 ). It is only natural that, in order to understand those arguments, you should understand the terms used in them (“act” and “potency” are mentioned in the very first one). That’s why the first step in Feser’s list was “Metaphysical prolegomena”.

And at the moment it looks like you have next to no idea about all that. That’s OK, hardly anyone does.

As you can guess, there’s a lot of material to cover - that’s why I have asked you to move this part of discussion to a separate thread in “Philosophy” subforum. But I suppose we can do it here as well…

Thus, to begin, “act” is how things are. “Potency” is how things could be. For example, a whiteboard can be clean actually and have something written on it potentially.

Now “change” is when something potential becomes actual (for example, whiteboard gets written on). Principle of causality tells us that such change requires an actual cause. That is, something that is only potential does not really exist yet. Thus it cannot get anything done - it cannot bring itself to existence all by itself and it cannot bring anything else into existence.

Please note that I am not deriving anything from example - just from the fact that things that do not exist do not do anything.

So, anything in here that is unclear or disagreeable to you at this point…?

So far, it makes sense… but we must take care at how we apply this to unknown states, such as “singularities”.

Sure - I am not trying to get you to accept that miracles happen at this point. I’m just pointing out that they are still being claimed - as you have said it was strange they are not.

Well… they are claimed, but they hardly make it into the big book of Testament.

I’m afraid you missed what this part was about. You have claimed that changes of behaviour after brain injury prove that behaviour is determined by brain alone. I have offered a counterexample that demonstrates that such argument doesn’t work.

Not “prove”… if I said “prove”, then I was in error. It’s more like “hint towards”.
Your counterexample was that of a broken radio receiver which doesn’t disprove the fact that there are radio waves to be received… yes, that’s right.
I countered with the radio emitter whose malfunctioning would deny the existence of those particular radio waves which would have been emitted by the emitter.
Certainly, it doesn’t deny that radio waves “cannot exist”, nor that a particular radio wave cannot exist… arghh, too many negatives!

I think I see your point - if the brain is just a receiver, then it’s to be expected that it will wrongly convey the soul’s “intentions”, when damaged, right?

I think you answered thinking that I was talking about the “previous” argument (one quotation above) - “visions” and “physical changes”. I was not. (But such things do happen in threads that are a bit too broad.)

Not the first time… I anticipate it won’t be the last…

 

[pocaracas]

Well, again, you’re just putting it back one car on the train whose existence you still need to explain.

I may need to explain, but did those philosophers think this through? Did they consider this scenario?
If yes, then, by all means, I want to learn what they concluded.

 

[pocaracas]

Hi ericc,

Oh come on. Just answer the question. Are crystals living organisms? Yes or no? If they are not , don’t pass them off as something that is living. Sugar is carbon based. It got all your C, H and O. It is not alive right? In your post #66, you stated “by some conjunction of events, these molecules would become self-replicating, thus starting the life cycle that still lasts”. C, H , O , then life starts. Brilliant! That is how one explains life began.

It’s not much of an explanation… “by some conjunction of events”… that explains little, but that is what we have to work with, right now.

If a crystal is alive or not?.. depends on how broad your definition of “life” is.
“Living organisms are autopoietic systems: self-constructing, self-maintaining, energy-transducing autocatalytic entities” in which information needed to construct the next generation of organisms is stabilized in nucleic acids that replicate within the context of whole cells and work with other developmental resources during the life-cycles of organisms, but they are also “systems capable of evolving by variation and natural selection: self-reproducing entities, whose forms and functions are adapted to their environment and reflect the composition and history of an ecosystem”

Under this definition, then crystals are not alive.

You gave me a book title. What overview? Dumping a book on my lap is not an overview. That book is almost 500 pages long.You don’t even quote which part of the book that actually disprove the so-call bogus line. If you don’t give me that relevant quote, I can’t read it and wouldn’t be able to refute it. Why are you so afraid of letting me know what it is? Because it is not there. Dawkins has no idea how to create an eye, bit by bit, mutation by mutation. When it comes to the detail part of how evolution actually get it done, scientists don’t know how it is done. Overviews are fine, we just need to zoom to the details to see how it is done. That is a a poor tactic to use “it is all in the book”.

For some books, in order to understand a part, you need to have read everything that came before…
For others, the main concept addressed throughout the book to form a coherent whole is what is truly interesting… and that is what happens in this case.
The underlying concept of the blind watchmaker, the workings of evolution, blind to the future, tells of how complex structures came about.

I think Behe described the way Dawkins created the eye as assembling a stereo set. Adding complex systems to complex systems. You connect the speakers, to the amplifier, connect the CD, plug in the interconnects and you have a stereo. No one bothered to explain where the speakers, the amplifier, the wiring come into being. There were just there.

My overview for an eye to work. You need:

1. The pupil
2. Iris
3. Lens
4. Macula
   5.Optic nerve
   6.Vitreous humour
5. Many other enzymes and proteins

Each of these items are in itself complex. For an eye to function, all of these must be present to work as a unit. Now how could gradual mutation and selection produce an eye, and each of these sub-systems needed to evolve to functioning units, simultaneously? This is irreducible complexity. The answer is not in the book. Answer is you can’t evolve that way. And this is not really an overview, just a fistful of ingredients needed.

You two are seemingly wrong.
Here’s Dawkins himself explaining it and giving examples of living animals which display the several stages of the eye (please excuse his horrible shirt - it was the 80’s): youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E

Yep, that is a gloss alright. No proof required. And you call that science?

Each field of science is concerned with itself and not with what originates its precepts.
Ultimately, it’s all physics.

And you have no idea how the information to build the shell comes from. They just build themselves.

Very likely, yes.

I just told you to watch out for artists rendering of nice pictures to depict evolution. And you did that again. Artistically drawn pictures are not proof, period. They can be used to bluff 7 grade students only. Haeckel’s embryonic drawings are a prime example of why they should not be relied on.

So… the photographs of the fossils themselves don’t count, huh?

Choose your favorite animal. I don’t actually care if it is fish or insect or worms. And you are hiding behind the magic word again, “Evolution” without a clue how it is done. You are stuck with the where the information comes from again because the specimen prior to that did not have it.

Of course… evolution doesn’t work from one generation to the next. That would be absurd.

 

[pocaracas]

I can use the same reasoning for God. Billions of people have claimed that God exists. Theologians have theorized on the existence of God. Miracles have been seen, experienced.

But which came first? The believer or the theologian?

Same logic for God. People theorized that God exist. And when they seek Him, they found him.

Did they really find Him?
Or did they delude themselves that they found Him?
It is rather difficult to discern one from the other.

Good to know. God is everywhere, even in people.

At least, in people…

 

[PRmerger]

It is totally beyond belief that we would have everyone in America choosing Christianity and everyone in India choosing Hinduisim and everyone in Iraq choosing to be Muslim. That would be crazy. And I admit that if I had been brought up in one of those countries I might not now be an atheist. We are all, myself included, products of circumstance.

I’ve said before that there would be less atheist if there were only one religion. There would also be less, I believe, if there was a greater variety in belief. That the proportion of beliefs were not represented geographically.

This argument that we simply believe a religion because of where we were born (and therefore, no religion is actually correct) should be met with this response:

-if you were born (white) in 1860 in Alabama, USA, you would believe that slavery is just fine.

But that doesn’t mean that there actually isn’t a correct view on slavery, right?

–f you were born in North Korea today, you’d probably grow up thinking democracy is evil.

But that doesn’t mean that you’d be correct, right?

While it’s true that we may be influenced in our beliefs by our culture, there is a right or wrong and it’s independent of one’s geography.

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if you were a Christian, your brother a Muslin, your uncle a Buddist, your daughter a Hindu. I’ll tell you what, if that were he case, then there wouldn’t be blood flowing on Parisian streets tonight.

You seem to be suggesting that there would be no bloodshed in Paris this past week if there were no religion…but that’s as absurd as saying there would be no bloodshed in Paris this past week if there were no science, which created those guns.

Religion is no more to blame for Paris than technology/science is to blame for Paris.

 

[pocaracas]

The problem was that we have no idea what is an extraordinary claim. Mere evidence for the specific claim doesn’t help here.

Also, let’s look at it another way: do you have some evidence that “Extraordinary claims require…” is not a rationalisation only used after the claim has been rejected?

For that matter, we have one fact: in this thread you have noticed that QM was accepted without extraordinary evidence. My hypothesis can explain this fact: you used another method to find out if QM should be accepted, and thus didn’t try it with “Extraordinary claims require…”. Do you have an alternative explanation? (For all I know the real method is “Claims that people I respect happen to accept are true and claims that people I respect happen to reject are false.”) After all, if you really had tried “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” with QM, you would have rejected QM - or noticed that something is wrong at that time.

huh?
When QM was proposed, the evidence available for it was very slim… any evidence that would come up would be extraordinary…
It has grown since, quantized states have been observed in spectral lines of materials, in the dualistic property of mater at the quantum level, and, very importantly, quantum tunneling has been observed (and all our computers now depend on it).
This kind of evidence was unheard of, before.
But it came to convince the scientists at the time and, now, us.
To this day, physics students replay some of the experiments to arrive at the same results.
Certainly, they may be mistaken and the reality may be more complex, but it does confer with the present theory…at least as far as our experiments allow it.

The extraordinary character of the God claim resides in the high potential for psychological error in all the “evidence” presented by the people who claim divine experiences.

But universal enough for you.

After all, in this discussion you are not making much of a case for Shintoism.

My lack of belief also applies for Shintoism, you know?

Um, false negatives are claims. They do not present evidence themselves.

Anyway, you seem to be strangely OK with having false negatives. Let’s test it with a specific belief… So, are you OK with rejection of a claim that Earth goes round the Sun…?

yeah, but you know what I meant… until evidence for them becomes available…

In this hypothetical, what evidence do I have that the Earth goes around the Sun?
My own view from the surface of the Earth, where I have no idea of how far each of the stars is and the planets just look like fast stars? My myopia doesn’t even let me distinguish the stars…
Or do I have a compilation of detailed measurements, like Galileo did?
Or do I go even more detailed to include Newton’s gravitation?

With all the evidence available today, I’d be a fool to reject that claim.

OK, so, are you saying that you would be able to detect truth of Catholicism, or that you wouldn’t? That “Shouldn’t I?” would seem to indicate that you would (without an argument) and the rest seems to be a way to explain that you wouldn’t - and you’re OK with that…

The way Catholicism (and most other religions) has been built has excluded the expectancy of actual physical evidence for God, the expectancy of a physical interaction with God… an interaction that cannot be attributed to some faulty brain mechanism.

Under that premise, I should never be able to detect whether Catholicism is true or not, on my own.

But, if it is true, someone did have access to that information, somehow. I’d expect to have the same sort of access. I’d expect everyone to have the same sort of access.

Sadly, the only sort of access that seems available relies on exploiting some features of how your brain works. And those work equally well for any religion, any God, any belief… even the belief that my wife is not cheating on me.

The difference of knowing the truth and not knowing the truth? Maybe even the difference of burning in Hell and not burning in Hell?

For that matter, what difference does accepting or rejecting QM make to you?

The truth is the truth, regardless if anyone believes in it or not. And the truth should be accessible to all, with no requirement for self-deception.

Burning in Hell… There you go… fear-mongering to gain adherents Pascal’s Wager in a nutshell.
Not the best way to advertise the “Love of God”… but it does work on a great deal of people.

To me, accepting QM helps to explain some phenomena in our world.
Also, working in the field of nuclear fusion I sort of depend on QM being accurate.

I’m afraid that “educated guess” is not “a guess made by someone who is educated”… And no, I don’t think I can do it.

Oh well… I guess we’ll never assume that animals have belief in gods, then…

So, in other words, you think you do not have a belief in non-existence of God, because your faith in non-existence of God is weak…?

Yes… something like that…

Well, you started the thread saying you do not believe in God, thus, presumably, you should know…

But anyway, skipping ahead, “Unmoved mover”, “Pure act” or “Uncaused cause” would be definitions relevant to arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas.

I should know… but sometimes, I feel like there’s something I’m not privy to…

Those definitions seem to hint at our ignorance of the far past.
The potential infinity of space-time beyond this Universe would be a way to dispose of such definitions.

 

[pocaracas]

That is what the Cambrian explosion is. Body plans all of a sudden with no precursor. Microbes and simple organisms and suddenly complex body forms. They have gone through all those layers of mud. Accept it, they really tried.

We don’t have to be there. Nature recorded it. If it is there.

Ok don’t know the answer.

And I’ll remain a microbe may be with some enhanced capabilities or an impaired microbe. But I won’t become another species.

You are mistaken. I am not interested in quick answers. I am interested in detailed explainable answers. Advantages of having certain attributes does not caused such attributes to happen by itself. First you must have the capability to generate it in the first place, which they don’t.
OK, don’t know the answer. Just accept evolution as the answer. Wow, incredible scientific method.

Why bother presenting that in the first place? I do audit your sources for credibility and existence.

Here, this is from this year and it still deals with hypotheticals: astrobio.net/news-exclusive/multicellular-life-evolve/.

And, according to them, you should remain a microbe:
“Unicellularity is clearly successful — unicellular organisms are much more abundant than multicellular organisms, and have been around for at least an additional 2 billion years,”

This guy (science20.com/adaptive_complexity/how_singlecell_organisms_evolve_multicellular_ones) talks about a paper which describes how the individual cells in a particular organism, an algae, behave to make the whole. This algae can be formed by as little as 4 cells!

I already gave you the fruit flies example, and how they have, more than once and in the lab, produced new species.

I don’t know what else I can give you to paint the picture that no god is required to provide these features that slowly evolve over many generations.

 

[pocaracas]

+1 to this.

As posted by the mods in one of the sticky post:

*“For the foreseeable future, there shall be no discussion in the Philosophy Forum of evolution. Anyone who starts such a thread or revives an old thread on those topics will be banned. This ban is planned to be temporary, but there are to be no public or private petitions that the ban be lifted. It will be lifted only when the mod (yours truly) discerns that the atmosphere in this forum has sufficiently cooled.”

“This will also be in effect in Apologetics and Sacred Scripture.
God bless”*

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=410885

EEEEK!
I knew they disliked it, but… ban?!
Sorry ericc, no more replies on that subject from me!

On a technical note, they do refer to threads on evolution, not a particular discussion within a thread about belief…

I know, this wouldn’t save me from the ban…
anyway, thanks Bradski and ThinkingSapien… I need to be careful with this subject…

 

[pocaracas]

Didn’t see your point. Still fruit flies. Even if they have legs growing out of their heads. Dog breeders too. You can have poodles and sheep dogs. Still dogs. Won’t become a snake for instance.

Right, won’t become a snake.
The fruit flies used in those studies belong to the Drosophilidae family, which is not a species, it’s a family. This family encompasses many fruit flies species and one of them is the one that gets used in these studies: Drosophila melanogaster,
A Family is composed of several genus and a genus is composed of several species.
You were referring to species.
I gave you speciation.

If you want to see the Drosophila melanogaster evolve to a different family, then… I’m afraid you’d require more time than a human has available… and, even then, they’d still belong to the superfamily of Ephydroidea, or flies.
Wikipedia is nice and lists all the classifications made in biology… you can see how many you need to go through just to get out of the insect class.

It is like I never been to Heaven. I have not met anyone who has been there. But I’d like to go there someday. And I have heard of the other place called Hell. No I also haven’t heard of anyone who has been there and back. But I heard it is not a nice place. And I don’t think I want to go there or the company there. And there is a chance that if I take the wrong road, I may end up at a destination that I don’t want to be at. Pascal Wager anyone?

So you heard of those places… the nice one and the nasty one.
Who told you about them? I’m guessing some person did that, huh?
How would that person know about those places?
If you go around asking people, what would be the percentage of people like you who say that they’ve never been to Heaven nor Hell and they don’t know anyone who has?

If no one has gone there and back to tell us about it, then how did people come to know about them?

 

[pocaracas]

This argument that we simply believe a religion because of where we were born (and therefore, no religion is actually correct) should be met with this response:

-if you were born (white) in 1860 in Alabama, USA, you would believe that slavery is just fine.

But that doesn’t mean that there actually isn’t a correct view on slavery, right?

–f you were born in North Korea today, you’d probably grow up thinking democracy is evil.

But that doesn’t mean that you’d be correct, right?

While it’s true that we may be influenced in our beliefs by our culture, there is a right or wrong and it’s independent of one’s geography.

Indeed, it’s independent of geography.
Why then are religions geographically bound? (well, they were before worldwide travel and spreading of the major European religion)

You seem to be suggesting that there would be no bloodshed in Paris this past week if there were no religion…but that’s as absurd as saying there would be no bloodshed in Paris this past week if there were no science, which created those guns.

Religion is no more to blame for Paris than technology/science is to blame for Paris.

The weapons were invented by a Russian fellow called Kalashnikov, in the second world war.
This bloodshed would not have happened if Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland.

Hitler wouldn’t have invaded Poland if Germany had won the first world war… or if he hadn’t been elected to rule Germany in the 30’s… maybe he wouldn’t have been elected if NYSE hadn’t crashed in 1929, sending the world into a financial recession.
There wouldn’t have been a financial recession if the US government had properly regulated the market.
But politicians are always thinking about after their term ends, so they can’t antagonize their future employers.

And this is human nature at its finest - greed, sticking out for number one.

If humans weren’t greedy, Paris wouldn’t have gone to sleep under the wailing of sirens, last Friday.

not all of this post is non-sense!

 

[MPat]

So far, it makes sense… but we must take care at how we apply this to unknown states, such as “singularities”.

Um, you have wanted me to speculate about thinking of cats and now you can’t even confidently assert that things that don’t actually exist cannot do anything…?

OK, let’s look at it a different way. Singularities are instances when something (density, mass or something) is infinite. God is supposed to be infinite in at least some way. If something infinite could do something without actually existing, there is no reason why God couldn’t too. And yet, do you think it makes sense to assert that God made any number of miracles - and, at the same time, that God doesn’t exist? If you agree that such claims would be absurd, why are you afraid to confirm that such reasoning holds for all cases?

Well… they are claimed, but they hardly make it into the big book of Testament.

True. But then, our hymns do not end up in the list of Psalms either.

Not “prove”… if I said “prove”, then I was in error. It’s more like “hint towards”.
Your counterexample was that of a broken radio receiver which doesn’t disprove the fact that there are radio waves to be received… yes, that’s right.
I countered with the radio emitter whose malfunctioning would deny the existence of those particular radio waves which would have been emitted by the emitter.
Certainly, it doesn’t deny that radio waves “cannot exist”, nor that a particular radio wave cannot exist… arghh, too many negatives!

I think I see your point - if the brain is just a receiver, then it’s to be expected that it will wrongly convey the soul’s “intentions”, when damaged, right?

Yes, that was the point. And yes, I am content with “hints towards”.

 

[MPat]

huh?
When QM was proposed, the evidence available for it was very slim… any evidence that would come up would be extraordinary…
It has grown since, quantized states have been observed in spectral lines of materials, in the dualistic property of mater at the quantum level, and, very importantly, quantum tunneling has been observed (and all our computers now depend on it).
This kind of evidence was unheard of, before.
But it came to convince the scientists at the time and, now, us.
To this day, physics students replay some of the experiments to arrive at the same results.
Certainly, they may be mistaken and the reality may be more complex, but it does confer with the present theory…at least as far as our experiments allow it.

Um, I meant this one:

Yes, you may be right…
I did say it was an old saying… a rule of thumb, if you will.

But you are right, even quantum mechanics, that early 20th century extraordinary claim, required only sufficient evidence for people to accept it.

Thanks for correcting me, there.
I hope that my views on the kind of evidence required has become better tuned now.

The point is that if you would have used that rule of thumb here explicitly, you would have found that earlier.

My lack of belief also applies for Shintoism, you know?

Yes - that’s the point.

In this hypothetical, what evidence do I have that the Earth goes around the Sun?
My own view from the surface of the Earth, where I have no idea of how far each of the stars is and the planets just look like fast stars? My myopia doesn’t even let me distinguish the stars…
Or do I have a compilation of detailed measurements, like Galileo did?
Or do I go even more detailed to include Newton’s gravitation?

With all the evidence available today, I’d be a fool to reject that claim.

You have the result given by classifier, that has whatever evidence that is available.

If you can’t work with that, how about the evidence available at the time of Galileo. Or just before him. After all, we could say that Galileo’s opponents rejected the extraordinary claim that Earth goes round the Sun, as extraordinary evidence was not available at the time. Are you ready to say that they were right and Galileo was wrong…?

The way Catholicism (and most other religions) has been built has excluded the expectancy of actual physical evidence for God, the expectancy of a physical interaction with God… an interaction that cannot be attributed to some faulty brain mechanism.

I am not completely sure what exactly you meant by that “actual physical evidence”… There are things like Eucharistic miracle of Sienna (therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/english_pdf/Siena.pdf) or blood of St. Januarius (you can even find videos of that on Youtube). That’s evidence and it is physical enough. But if you mean spectacular evidence available on demand whenever you want and wherever you want - no, there is not much of a reason to expect it. Then again, you do not see diffraction of a car every day to confirm QM…

Under that premise, I should never be able to detect whether Catholicism is true or not, on my own.

So, do you think it is not an indication that you need another method for such detection…?

But, if it is true, someone did have access to that information, somehow. I’d expect to have the same sort of access. I’d expect everyone to have the same sort of access.

You would expect that? Why? Does anything in Catholicism indicate that you would get such access? Or do you just want to have such access?

Sadly, the only sort of access that seems available relies on exploiting some features of how your brain works. And those work equally well for any religion, any God, any belief… even the belief that my wife is not cheating on me.

OK, let’s try it. How many claimed miracles of other religions can you actually list right now, without “Google”? (Let’s skip “almost Catholicism” - in other words, other branches of Christianity and Judaism -, to make sure miracles from Bible are not listed several times.)

The truth is the truth, regardless if anyone believes in it or not.

Very true.

And the truth should be accessible to all, with no requirement for self-deception.

“And the truth should be accessible to all” - really? Why?

Anyway, I was pointing out that truth of Catholicism does matter. Are you saying that you would prefer to reject Catholicism even if it’s true, unless it is true under “your” conditions?

Burning in Hell… There you go… fear-mongering to gain adherents Pascal’s Wager in a nutshell.
Not the best way to advertise the “Love of God”… but it does work on a great deal of people.

Do you think that statistics of traffic accidents also shows that Police doesn’t care about you? And that mention of such statistics is “fear-mongering” that should be avoided while discussing driving?

But seriously: you have said that truth of Catholicism doesn’t matter. Are you saying that possible consequences of being wrong are not relevant here? In that case, what is?

To me, accepting QM helps to explain some phenomena in our world.
Also, working in the field of nuclear fusion I sort of depend on QM being accurate.

And yet, this “dependence” is not “fear-mongering”…?

 

[PRmerger]

Indeed, it’s independent of geography.
Why then are religions geographically bound? (well, they were before worldwide travel and spreading of the major European religion)

Catholicism isn’t geographically bound.

In every hour of the day, in all time zones, from the rising of the sun to its setting, a Catholic Mass is being offered.

So, no. NOT geographically bound.

 

[PRmerger]

The weapons were invented by a Russian fellow called Kalashnikov, in the second world war.
This bloodshed would not have happened if Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland.

All possible thanks to science.

And yet I don’t see anyone here suggesting that science is the root of this violence.

But here’s that…

double standard again.

For some reason, religion is being blamed for this.

Why is this double standard permissible in your eyes, poca?

 

[Bradski]

This argument that we simply believe a religion because of where we were born (and therefore, no religion is actually correct) should be met with this response:

-if you were born (white) in 1860 in Alabama, USA, you would believe that slavery is just fine.

And, funnily enough, you’d be a Christian. In fact, you’d be a Christian if you were born there now. And you’d be a Christian if you were born in Greece or Peru or Ireland or Poland. There’s be a very strong chance you’d be Christian if you were born in the US or the UK. You’d be a certainty to be Catholic if you were born in Malta. Virtually certain if you were born in Cuba or Italy or Croatia.

But if you were born in Afghanistan or Tunisia or Turkey or Algeria or Saudi Arabia or Iran you will certainly be Muslim.

And if you were born in India you are almost certainly going to be Hindu.

And if you were born in Cambodia or Thailand or Burma (sorry, Myanmar) you are almost certainly Buddhist.

And no-one says that any of that proves that any one religion is incorrect. But I think that any claim that religion can be seen not to be geographically based is looking a little thin

You seem to be suggesting that there would be no bloodshed in Paris this past week if there were no religion.

I suggested no such thing.

For some reason, religion is being blamed for this.

No, it’s people’s use of religion which is being blamed.

 

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I suggested no such thing.

Of course you did.

It’s right here below.

No, it’s people’s use of religion which is being blamed.

This is a distinction without a difference.

What utility is religion if no one uses it?

It’s as inutile as science that no one uses.

Thus, if use (or misuse) of religion is being blamed so could use (or misuse) of science.

Religion and science both bear the blame–that is if one thinks (use of) religion is the source of this horrific and useless violence, so, too could one assert that (use of) science is the source of this horrific and useless violence.

 

[PRmerger]

And, funnily enough, you’d be a Christian. In fact, you’d be a Christian if you were born there now. And you’d be a Christian if you were born in Greece or Peru or Ireland or Poland. There’s be a very strong chance you’d be Christian if you were born in the US or the UK. You’d be a certainty to be Catholic if you were born in Malta. Virtually certain if you were born in Cuba or Italy or Croatia.

But if you were born in Afghanistan or Tunisia or Turkey or Algeria or Saudi Arabia or Iran you will certainly be Muslim.

And if you were born in India you are almost certainly going to be Hindu.

And if you were born in Cambodia or Thailand or Burma (sorry, Myanmar) you are almost certainly Buddhist.

And no-one says that any of that proves that any one religion is incorrect. But I think that any claim that religion can be seen not to be geographically based is looking a little thin

I think anyone who is a seeker is going to come to know God in the way that God revealed Himself to be, regardless of geography.

And that is why there are Catholics in India. And Catholics in Afghanistan. And Catholics in China. And Catholics in Australia.

All who seek will find Him.