Religion, what's the point?
- Thread starter TheRedFlag
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Let's listen to Dawkins:
"...look at the details of molecular biology or bio chemistry you might find some signature of some sort of designer and that designer could well be a higher intelligence elsewhere in the universe"
Also doesn’t mean a deity fills it.
But really, the god of the gaps is a great way to turn a tri-omni deity into a pointless one.
I'd have to look back but the one about Job and mysterious ways etc
Just a bit out of context there…
You said you were going to read up on it. I’ve read the book of Job several times, so whenever you wanna talk about it, let me know.
Here is a thought, and you will have to pardon the specifics, but if a a self replicating/splitting cell was able to evolve/develop into what we know or see today. Then is it far fetched that the initial development/evolution was of a creator and that is what happened and then that creator created us?
How does faith help you understand the concept of eternal existence?
Feel free to add context.
I will read up on job. Possibly over weekend. But help a brother out and give me some detail as to what you meant. You can be awfully vague at times.
If humans are able to invent the large hadron collider and clone animals, then is it far fetched that the initial development / evolution of god was in the human imagination?
umm hope you have listened to that full conversation before posting that. He's answering a hypothetical question after a lot of "who, how, who, how" prodding, and even with that the portion you picked out is so out of context.
Of course, that’s why I also referenced capitalism as another construct that has helped & harmed the world, just like religion. I preemptively whatabouted as I figured that you would use such at some point.
So what about conflict? Religion has played its part in conflict causation. Religion had also virtually wiped out cultures as well, thus perverting history. We can quibble over specifics, but there’s no doubt that religion has perverted history. None.
If you cannot see that, it’s almost that you are taking the piss. Let’s keep whataboutery out of it & focus specifically on religion. If this cannot happen, we need to end this tête-à-tête as it will continue to get banal.
Context:
Cliff notes on Job…
Job was a guy with a great life and a great family and was super devoted to god. Satan told god “I bet you if you took his nice stuff away he’d forsake you” and god took him up on that and allowed Job’s life to be destroyed just because he knew he’d win the bet.
Indeed
The mind is a wonderful thing. Humans have travelled to the moon, split the atom, as you say hadron collider, cloned animals all that in a short space of time relative to human existence. So another entity potentially older would have progressed even more surely.
But then you do have the chuf chuf crowd and what's happening in America so
You're seriously quoting the notoriously shit "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"?
If you want to use Dawkins to support your point, I think you'll find his arguments fall rather heavily in the other direction:
“The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.”
“Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?”
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
“My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.”
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. [...] Somebody else must be responsible for my well-being, and somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar infantilism that really lies behind the 'need' for a God?”
“A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.”
And so on and so on. You could have used any of those.
The context is even worse no? And my post above about evolution/development of creator seems to be a bit like what Dawkins is saying.
Oh yeah I know that bit about Job. I know about his good times and his basically not being patient with his bad times. I'm just not sure where you are linking the poem of mysterious ways to this story.
No.
Because that’s exactly what the last 5 chapters of the book of Job are about.
It was tongue in cheek as i knew it would rile some tbh.
Ive actually met Dawkins, name drop, and he talks rubbish. Like Shapiro he likes to argue with people he knows are unlikely to challenge him or within a certain set up. Her him outside of that and he isn't much of an atheist. I'd say more agnostic and even more kerching (as in this is money maker) which to be fair isn't just him. Plenty of religious blokes making a lot of money doing similar.
I am not equipped to understand. There is a being more powerful and capable than myself in every sense imaginable.
I have faith in the above.
Thing is, no one has a "fool proof" argument. Else there would be no religious people on earth or no atheists. At the end of the day we all chose what makes sense to us. If an hour long debate could knock someones logic that easily we wouldn't be here.
So within that context I don't think Darwin takes "rubbish" but he's not some religious kryptonite. No more so than skilled religious orators.
I’m not equipped to understand abstract algebra, but I don’t see a reason for god to exists since some folks can.
*faith
To pervert means to disrupt the original course, meaning or state of something. So for starters you're proceeding on the premise that there was some preordained course set out somewhere, and the emergence of religion somehow altered this predestined route. A route which presumably was free from the negative effects of religion.
And in respect to conflict then, of course religion has played its part in conflict causation. But the part it has played has been comparatively small relative to non-religious reasons, as the facts show. That's the significant point!
Finally then...on the capitalism point, I'm pretty sure that you haven't examined those assumptions either. But that's for another thread.
I think you'd like to end it because you can't gather the hard evidence to bolster your argument.
Perhaps you draw on something like the effect religion/belief has had on the scientific or artistic areas of human development?
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It's not about having fool proof arguments for me. It's having perimeters with arguments that aren't contradictory or hypocritical.
A simple example would be (and I'm not saying I believe this or agree or anything just using to highlight a point) being asked who made God. If the response is i dont know. So there follows mockery. Now ask a person to show, I don't know, big bang or something. Oh its a working theory and we don't know the answers how dare you mock.
I don't really disagree with you there, Dawkins is kind of insufferable. He is a great evolutionary biologist, though. Just don't get him talking about cancel culture or whatever.
No? I don't know mate. Our Richard has some confusing points for me.
And I get you now about job. But I disagree. I see no mysterious ways here more an increase in understanding by getting to know God.
Which is kind of my argument. If folk delved into religions (and I mean the plural here not just lunatic sects) as they do in science them some things maybe would be more clear. I certainly feel thats what my journey has lead me to anyway. I'll have to hunt out the notes ( a lot of notes) I took during halaqa (lessons) with a few scholars from different regions of the globe on free will and predestination. It certainly have me an understanding is never had or would have got from local mosques/churches etc.
Yes, cultures outside the influence of a specific religion being virtually wiped out perverts their history & history overall. This isn’t hard to understand.
Let’s stop the whataboutery. Really not germane here. We’re discussing religion as a singularity.
I’m going against what I just wrote, but you don’t believe capitalism has been good & bad? That’s odd. Which one do you think it is then?
Not at all, it’s just becoming rather predictable from your end. As I stated, it’s getting banal.
My question is not so much about the being itself, it's about the concept of eternal existence. Can you fully grasp the idea of an eternal dishwasher?
Tbf to Dawkins he's made what he can from it and good luck to him. And as a Muslim I find a lot of often quoted Muslim personalities also insufferable. They all have an angle that makes them popular but with time it gets grating for me.
Not just religion either. World events have meant some folk have had exposure that'sade th mega bucks because they chose a side and gave some quotes and became popular. You know your Katie Hopkins types.
I listen to a lot of things that I have interest in and wouldn't exclude Dawkins of learning about certain topics. I also listen to a lot of stand up comedy and liked Gervais early stuff and Chappelle was a favourite but too many people hold them in high regard for stuff that isn't comedy, so Gervais on atheism and Chappelle on LGBTQ. Not for me. Just make me laugh and that will do.
Then I seriously doubt you’ve read chapters 38-42 of that book.
To be clear, you're suggesting that the (already very wealthy) Richard Dawkins isn't actually an athiest and is milking an assumed controversial position to make cash in a similar manner to Katie Hopkins and reactionary right wing nonsense?
Not sure I'm following here as that's a complete non-sequitur, how a self-replicating cell led to life as we know it has no relevance to the idea that it was all started by a creator. Or are you saying that it's just as far fetched as a creator?
You should look into the Urey-Miller experiment, it showed that the building blocks for life on earth could've formed through 100% natural processes.
It's not whataboutery, you're just using circular reasoning.
And in the ledger book of history concerning war - the vast majority of it is taken up by conflicts with a non-religious cause. Using those facts then, I could then say that it's the non-religious people who are the real problem here - they're the ones who have done by far the most to pervert the course of human development...what's the point of them?
There you go again. You're wasting my time now.
Ha.
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I (as an agnostic) would be more inclined to mock you if you said "its god's mysterious workings", "its faith" and what not, and not for saying I don't know. And as for your other example, I think you are misunderstanding what science is. Science doesn't say we have all the answers (like religion/god-believing people tend to). It is just an iterative process of building on top of or deconstructing and replacing what we know based on new/current evidence. So, when you ask "show me/prove big bang", all science can tell you is what is based on current evidences (i.e. theories). If there is no evidence, then I don't know is a perfectly good answer from my pov (that's why most of the answers to questions relating to before big bang is I don't know). Maybe we'll find the necessary evidence soon enough or maybe not.
Just went over those specific ones and I still maintain what I have said.
It doesn't suggest the lord works.in mysterious ways. The chapters basically explain what God has done and Job wasn't aware but now is, Job has only heard but now knows God. Mystery solved.
Then, quite frankly, @Moby was right… because that whole speech is literally god berating Job for having the audacity to ask why he allowed what happened. A whole speech of “you silly human, my ways aren’t meant for you to understand” (are a mystery).
Tell that to Job’s dead family.
isn't Dawkins talking about the designer in the same kind of way that physicists talk about natural science showing the "mind of god"? not theistically but in the very abstract sense.
like musica universalis. the "divine" ratios between the planets. the scientists, after a certain point in history at least, almost never meant "divine" in the theistic sense.
It was just an example to try and highlight a point. I actually agree with you and have been arguing that there isn't any mysterious ways and isn't just about faith. I absolutely accept that these are answers given to questions by imams/priests and rabbis these days and it gets me wound up.
Without going on too long as a Muslim (not always one) the word la in the attestation of faith means no. It has six conditions attached to it (according to scholarly consensus) which does away with mysterious ways and simply the notion of faith. The whole faith issue is for newbies to the religion who have accepted the basic Tennant's but don't know about the other stuff. But they are not to remain newbies forever. And rely solely on faith or blind faith (taqleed) for ever.
He's literally saying that it's not impossible that there could be a species evolved so advanced that they were able to create and design life. Which, as an aside, aligns to his oft made point that any such creator would be a product of, and subject to, the laws of nature including evolution and inherently not supernatural.
He's trained to think this way and use that quote as some kind of "gotcha" against Dawkins is both disingenuous and ludicrous.
However, @Roane clearly thinks Dawkins is a chancer, pretending to hold certain believes to make cash just like Katie Hopkins, as well as a coward who only debates idiots who can't beat him just like Ben Shapiro
I honestly don't see it like that. Certainly not the whole "you silly human...". I think that is just your bias here. In a nutshell Jobs allegation is god's resting on his laurels during Jobs suffering. God explains the things he has done and Job accepts he didn't know God and now does.
The lord works in mysterious ways simply doesn't fit as the lord has just questioned and explained all he has done and does.
You have missed the point. Science understands things based on the current evidence and refuses or changes with the evidence getting a better and better understanding of things.
When it comes to religion/God athiests are merely applying exactly the same standard. While you can't prove none existence of anything, as there is no evidence, after a while you assume a total lack of evidence means the something is wrong/doesn't exist. Or you design a better experiment.