[Gary Wassner]

You also hear it from people like Charles Manson and Jeffrey Daumer.

[Miriamele]

Good point. I guess people can use "God told me to do it" for almost anything. And most of them probably do believe it (a scary thought).

[Gary Wassner]

Isn't that precisely part of the problem? Claims of faith are not verifiable in any way at all. They are totally personal and a good actor is really no more ore less believable than a lunatic. How do you begin to test someone's claim in cases like these? But what astounds me even more is that people so readily believe claims of this sort, when they cannot even truly recognize and act upon the causal effect of smoking on lung cancer!

[Archren]

The lips may be soft but the teeth of religion are sharp. And historically, they have bitten harder than most any other institution, except perhaps National Socialism. And where were the church fathers then? Where was the church Father?


I have to take issue with this: when I first became an atheist, I liked to think that religion was the cause of all man's problems and that if we did away with it that things would be better. However, I then looked at the problems caused by secular regimes such as Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia & Mao's China.

Religion is not the cause of problems, it is one of the most popular excuses for our problems. Take it away and people immediately find other excuses to wreak havock & destruction if they so choose.

[Gary Wassner]

I don't disagree with you actually. Man is just a horrid beast. Left to our own devices, we kill. Religion in general, practically regardless of which one we might be talking about, is at least is pacifist on principle. It is what people do with the power that it bestows upon them that corrupts it. Yet, I do believe that anything that relies strictly upon faith and fervent belief is prone to exagerrations in behaviour. How different was the Nazi fever from a religion; Passion, ardent belief, outrageous claims, quasi historical justification etc. The crusades were how different? Slaughter the infidel.

Certainly these horrors of human history are not restricted to religious motivations. But as I said, the teeth of western religion bites the individual very hard, harder than any temporal jaw could grip. Your pain is eternal, is it not? Your punishment is everlasting if you stray. Your condemnation is total if you don't believe. How much harsher could retribution be? I was not only referring to physical pain, Archen.

[Scott Bakker]

But these "curveballs" that science so easily adapts to are based on facts and observations. At the basic level the scientist believes in his observable facts. He believes that what he sees and measures actually has a bearing on reality. He has faith that his senses and intellect are enough to understand the system even though they are a part of that system. Science doesn't live in "doubt".

This goes back to what I was debating with HE - the confusion of 'faiths.' That argument ran something like,

1) since all justifications run out somewhere, all claims come down to faith (for science it would be faith in reason and observation)
2) if all claims come down to faith, scientific claims can't be used to trump religious claims

What makes this argument so bad is that if it's true, then no claims could be used to trump any other claims, ever (!!), which is the same thing as saying all claims are equally true, which is absurd. All claims are not equal. If this were not the case, then science and technology would in fact be impossible, since both depend on the comparative superiority of certain claims over others. Obviously, having faith in reason and observation is quite different than having faith in God. To argue along these lines is to commit a clear fallacy of equivocation.

What you're suggesting, Clockwirk, is different, but equally (and just as obviously) mistaken:

1) since all justifications run out somewhere, all claims come down to faith (for science it would be faith in reason and observation)
2) science does not 'live in doubt'

The assumption here is that if any claim-maker depends upon 'faith' - even if it's as minimal as faith in reason and observation - then it's impossible for them to be skeptical, which is to say, to employ doubt as an integral part of their claim-making process. This is to simply say that skepticism itself is impossible. All of this, I think, is self-evidently absurd. Doubt is an integral part of the claim-making process of science - it's the engine of its success actually. Since all claims are exhaustively critiqued, only the 'fittest' survive, and our scientific knowledge becomes better adapted to nature as a result - something attested to by our ever increasing ability to manipulate its laws. If you don't think this is the case, I'm open to hear your explanation.

As for,

Now who's anthropomorphizing?

I haven't the foggiest notion as to what you're talking about.

You hear this kind of talk a lot from fundamentalist preachers, the kind on television. They're always saying that God said this or that to them, they were eating breakfast when God told them what to do that day, etc. It sounds incredibly odd to the unbeliever but to those preachers' followers I suppose it gives them a great deal of credibility. The funniest thing though is when they say that God told them to ask for money, or that God told them they're going to get a lot of money, or that God will bless the people in the audience if they decide to give them money, and so on...

If I may be so cheesy as to quote from The Thousandfold Thought, "those who rule in the name of an absent king, rule period..." Transcendent claims, by definition, cannot be evaluated, since their objects are inaccessible to us mere mortals. When those claims involve authority, they have the 'happy' consequence of rendering that authority - for those foolish enough to believe them - unimpeachable. I suspect this isn't a coincidence, since so much religion seems bent on control.

[Gary Wassner]

Isn't one of the best principles of power one which makes an assault upon authority impossible? Religion benefits from having more than physical means to insure that. The consequences of skepticism and defiance are eternal and horrific. Why else would the concept of punishment be so horendous? It takes quite a mind to invent hell and an even more interesting motivation.

[Scott Bakker]

Religion is not the cause of problems, it is one of the most popular excuses for our problems. Take it away and people immediately find other excuses to wreak havock & destruction if they so choose.

I agree with you entirely, Archren, though I would qualify and say that it's our hard-wired tendency to unjustified certainty, in combination with our agressive, acquisitive nature, that's the main culprit. Religion is only culpable to the extent that it, like racism or nationalism or sexism, turns on this penchant of ours to think we absolutely know. We humans are self-deception machines.

Like I say, doubt begets learning, and learning begets compassion. Dogma closes the possibility of learning down - when it's so painfully evident that we know so bloody little, if not in comparison to our past, then certainly in comparison to our future.

But we're hardwired to hate uncertainty - so what can we do?

[Scott Bakker]

Isn't one of the best principles of power one which makes an assault upon authority impossible? Religion benefits from having more than physical means to insure that. The consequences of skepticism and defiance are eternal and horrific. Why else would the concept of punishment be so horendous? It takes quite a mind to invent hell and an even more interesting motivation.

Like I say, if there's no free speech in heaven, then why do we keep calling it 'heaven'?

Imagine, an infinite being threatened by the spirit of open inquiry... Call me cynical, but it sounds more like the priests to me.

[Gary Wassner]

Tell me what certainty might feel like? Though we may find uncertainty to be uncomfortable, I don't know that we would even relate to certainty. We can fool ourselves, as we do so frequently, but do we ever really believe that we know?