Geek and... Religious?

[Akolyte]

I'm sort of religious.  But I don't talk about it because I view religion as a very private thing.  

 

but, I still view science as the way our world works and how it was created.  

[GuruMeditationError]

This seems to come up so much I feel like I should somehow indicate it in my signature.

 

If I'm just going to take the word of a bunch of people for the existence of anything, be it a solar neutrino or an all powerful omnipotent being that controls our lives surreptitiously through stuff that's completely indistinguishable from pure chance I'd rather that bunch of people be rational logical thinkers dealing in fact and measurable quantifiable factors, rather than people who are just inclined to tell you what you want to hear (and often for their own financial benefit) so that you can live in a delusion to protect yourself against the harsher realities of a very difficult world. 

[EpicAdom]

How can something be figuratively true? Just cause its in the bible it has to be somehow true when obviously its not? It's either true or not. The whole god created day and night on the whatever day is obviously false. Noah's ark is way false just cause its not possible. Adam and Eve is also not possible. Splitting a sea to walk through? Really? A stick turning into a snake? It all makes me chuckle.

Yes I'm atheist

@Vitalius stated it perfectly. The bible is 100% TRUTH but it's not 100% FACT. There's a lot of figurative language in the bible that conveys messages such as "God is powerful" or "God created the universe", but the message isn't literally "God created this, and then that, and then the other things, in that order".

I assume what he meant is that although he believes the Bible's story of Creation is incorrect, the point of the story, that God created it all, is still true even if the exact story of "He did this at this time, and that at the time, in this order..." etc isn't true. 

Saying a story is true figuratively is saying that it's purpose for being told is true, even if the story itself isn't true. If I tell you a story about how humans can be good, but that story isn't true, that doesn't mean humans can't be good, but that they haven't been good in that specific way. The moral of the story is the point and so it's figuratively true. Though that may be the wrong word.

^My understanding of what he said.

[1Scotty1]

I always say - Thank God I am an atheist

[The_Strict_Nein]

Newton was religious, and invented perhaps the most important math ever.

Ultimately, whatever floats your boat. As long as you're not, say, running a country and using your religion to decide on peoples lives, then I have no problem

[The_Strict_Nein]

I normally join in on these threads and do some information gathering/analyzing for statistical purposes but I'll sit out this time.

Gotta love Mcburd

[Dr_Orpington]

I'm an Atheist.

Religion isn't really my jam.

[jj509]

When I was growing up I was having the christian religion shoved down my throat and hated it. Never understood why I needed to believe in anything until I grew up. Now I just believe that we are the product of evolution for billions of years and any/all forms of beliefs of a higher power is just simpler mans way of making sense of the world. Back when early humans civilizations were first created it was easier to believe in a higher power making the world the way it is and the urge to believe there is something after this single life. Then just accepting this one single life is all we have and once we're gone we're gone, so make the best of it.

[paprikman]

Religion was necessary, when people couldn't explain some phenomena.

Nowadays science can explain almost every phenomenon, thus religion is not needed for those who studied well.

[GuruMeditationError]

Religion was necessary, when people couldn't explain some phenomena.

Nowadays science can explain almost every phenomenon, thus religion is not needed for those who studied well.

 

There's a saying that faith is it's own reward, and basically it's true in as much as it's the gateway to dillusional thinking that the world is like the pictures they showed you in all of the religious picture books when you were a child.

 

It does meet a need, but it's that of allowing people a form of positive denial about their lives and the state of the world.

 

But again, for anyone joining the thread late...

 

 

This seems to come up so much I feel like I should somehow indicate it in my signature.

 

If I'm just going to take the word of a bunch of people for the existence of anything, be it a solar neutrino or an all powerful omnipotent being that controls our lives surreptitiously through stuff that's completely indistinguishable from pure chance I'd rather that bunch of people be rational logical thinkers dealing in fact and measurable quantifiable factors, rather than people who are just inclined to tell you what you want to hear (and often for their own financial benefit) so that you can live in a delusion to protect yourself against the harsher realities of a very difficult world. 

 

 

One of my earliest memories is that of wondering, if God was a real thing, then why do we have to breathe? On one occasion I actually laid on my back and held my breath because based on what I'd been told I thought if God existed then I shouldn't have to need to breathe and so surely that way I could know whether or not God actually existed. :shrug:

 

But, at that age, I also used to jump in the air, grab my ankles and pull to see if I could float. :0/  :shrug:  

 

I also got a pretty severe telling off from a nursery school teacher for trying to see if my jello would stick to my spoon if I turned it upside down and if I could keep my milk carton in the air just by sucking on the straw. The telling off was for the mess I made of my dungarees.

[zonahbear]

@Geekazoid was banned for some reason otherwise he'd be perfect for this topic. 

he deleted his account actually

[zonahbear]

Agnostic, but if I did believe for sure I'd probably be deist

[SIGSEGV]

I'm Muslim, I believe in the big bang theory and evolution (excluding human evolution) and that things that people consider 'supernatural' (such as angels) are simply science that we do not yet understand.

[GuruMeditationError]

I'm Muslim, I believe in the big bang theory and evolution (excluding human evolution) and that things that people consider 'supernatural' (such as angels) are simply science that we do not yet understand.

 

But stuff like angels and visions have been found to have scientific causes. For instance climbing a mountain where the air is rarefied can give you effects similar to those described as occurring for people on mountains in religious texts.

 

Also, Dr. Michael Persinger has a device that can make a person sea angels, have near-death experiences and other various experiences that people experiencing these things naturally, tend to describe as 'spiritual'.

 

 

As for near-death experiences...they're actually culturally determined, i.e. people having near death experiences see what their culture has socialised them into believing they should see.

[SIGSEGV]

But stuff like angels and visions have been found to have scientific causes. For instance climbing a mountain where the air is rarefied can give you effects similar to those described as occurring for people on mountains in religious texts.

 

Also, Dr. Michael Persinger has a device that can make a person sea angels, have near-death experiences and other various experiences that people experiencing these things naturally tend to describe as 'spiritual'.

 

 

As for near-death experiences...they're actually culturally determined, i.e. people having near death experiences see what their culture has socialised them into believing they should see.

Ok first of all, like I said I believe Angels are scientific, so saying "angels and visions have been found to have scientific causes" doesn't make any sense.

Also, I believe that Dr Persingers experiment was flawed as it assumes the temporal lobe is the cause for 'religious experiences':

Persinger’s theory is based on the literature on religiosity in temporal lobe epileptics ... a literature that I argue above is both flawed and outdated.

However, it seems to me that the evidence for hyper-religiosity in TLE [A mental illness that affects the temporal lobe] isn’t terribly compelling. The widely-cited Slater and Beard study suffers from the fact that the individual cases described were cherry-picked by the authors during the course of their routine clinical practice precisely because they were unusual cases. Three quarters of the patients that reported religious experiences had TLE, but this is the same proportion of TLE patients in the sample as a whole, and as far as I can tell from their data, religiosity seems to be completely uncorrelated with the presence of temporal lobe symptoms in the patient’s history. Their data could therefore equally implicate epilepsy (in general), schizophrenia or psychosis in the production of hyper-religiosity. There are many case reports in the literature of epileptics with religious ideation or ecstatic vision (some are reviewed in Devinsky & Lai, 2008), but one wonders how many TLE patients don’t present such interesting and, perhaps crucially, publishable symptoms. Much has been made of a study by Dewhurst and Beard (1970) of ‘sudden religious conversions’ in six temporal lobe epileptics, but that paper itself cites 17 other studies (some with large numbers of patients) in which conversion experiences were not reported. The authors themselves state that such epileptic conversions are ‘uncommon’.

Source: http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-25/edition-7/neuroscience-soul

[GuruMeditationError]

Ok first of all, like I said I believe Angels are scientific, so saying "angels and visions have been found to have scientific causes" doesn't make any sense.

Also, I believe that Dr Persingers experiment was flawed as it assumes the temporal lobe is the cause for 'religious experiences':

Source: http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-25/edition-7/neuroscience-soul

 

You could also argue that that region of the brain might actually be the means of communication between the individual and a potential omnipotent force and that this guy's just found a way of triggering it artificially.  :shrug:

 

Basically if there were any evidence whatsoever that any kind of God had any kind of meaningful, measurable influence on our lives then it would already have been found, rather than having been disproven.   :shrug:

 

And I just have to say again...

 

...personally, if I'm just going to take the word of a bunch of people for the existence of anything, be it a solar neutrino or an all-powerful omnipotent being that controls our lives surreptitiously through stuff that's completely indistinguishable from pure chance I'd rather that bunch of people be rational logical thinkers dealing in fact and measurable quantifiable factors, rather than people who are just inclined to tell you what you want to hear (and often for their own financial benefit) so that you can live in a delusion to protect yourself against the harsher realities of a very difficult world. 

 

Proof that delusion can make you feel better isn't proof of God, you can get the same effect believing a range of different things totally unrelated to religion, theism or polytheism.

[cjm86]

@Vitalius stated it perfectly. The bible is 100% TRUTH but it's not 100% FACT. There's a lot of figurative language in the bible that conveys messages such as "God is powerful" or "God created the universe", but the message isn't literally "God created this, and then that, and then the other things, in that order".

I'm sorry but you can't state that the bible is 100% fact when you have no proof to back it up, and someone saying "I have faith it's 100% fact," is not proof. I hear that a lot.

Edit--- Sorry read your post wrong, but to me truth and fact go hand in hand

[Hans Christian | Teri]

I'm an agnostic. There is sooooooooo much that science still can't explain, and that's probably never going to change. The idea that there may or may not be a god or other divine / spiritual beings / powers keeps us sane.

[Sauron]

I love how people always talk as if science and religion where opposite and incompatible.

 

I'm Christian, and evidence IS there to support my belief although not to prove it conclusively.

[GuruMeditationError]

I'm an agnostic. There is sooooooooo much that science still can't explain, and that's probably never going to change. The idea that there may or may not be a god or other divine / spiritual beings / powers keeps us sane.

 

To be honest I think there's some truth in that. I think the only reason such a ridiculous idea can possibly get as much consideration is that it helps people to deal with something very frightening, i.e. our own demise.

 

If I said I've got a cow dressed as Elvis living in a stables on the Moon most people would just immediately deem it total insanity. But what if that cow could stop us all dying and send us to live in absolute pleasure for all eternity, but be careful because if you don't hedge your bets and at the very least say you believe in it (and by the way if you do do that we'll love and accept you and give you a home), it'll burn you alive repeatedly for all eternity. And by the way these five million people over here (five million people wave and say hi) also believe this. The downside is there is no proof but belief in it, is reward in and of itself because it will allow you a delusion that will release you from anxiety and fear.

[Thorium19]

I'm church of England protestant by birth, but atheist by choice. Personally I don't believe in a higher being and so on, but I can appreciate that some people do, and I'm willing to listen to them so long as they aren't trying to ram it down my throat. I've been to religious based schools all my life, so I have a decent understanding of Christianity and Judaism, as well as a bit about islam, sikhism and buddhism.

The only religious based thing I seriously believe in is karma, due to its link with the scientific reasoning that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Religion in my personal opinion is a number of cults, most starting largely at similar origins, that have grown extremely large due to a human need to believe in something greater than themselves.

If religion can give people hope, belief and motivation do do good in the world, then I can't complain. However it can so easily be tainted by political motivation, such as proven by Al Qaeda, IS for example, where they use the pretense of religion for a politically, power motivated cause.

Also, religious extremists who are not politically driven but follow the religious texts to the word with their own interpretation, such as extremist christian priests in America, as well as ultra orthodox Jews and orthodox Muslims are something that frustrates, worries and annoys me, largely due to my position where I have lived a very liberal life, so I do not understand fully a conservative lifestyle.

[othertomperson]

No.

[Volbet]

Haven't we had this discussion a million times before? I might aswell explain my position in-depth for later reference.

 

I conisder myself an igtheist, also known as a theological noncognitivist. Put simply, this means that I don't believe in any god(s), becuase I can't make any sense of the concept. 

I have yet to be presented with an idea of a deity that makes sense, either on a naturalistc plane or on a philosophical plane. Usually they don't make sense on both.

Of course this makes me an atheist, but atleast it puts a perspective on why I hold this position. 

 

And OP, what is up the religion vs. science discourse? A religious person is more than capable of understanding, using, and expanding science.

Just like non-religious people can be ignorant of science. 

[Pony080905]

One word... Aliens

[Nowak]

Wow this thread is still open? I'm impressed.

 

Anyway, might as well chip in what I believe now. I'm agnostic-atheist, and have been so my entire life. My family is supposed to be Catholic, but I just found it hard to believe any of it. The extensive history of corruption and... other... things in the Catholic church and even my own parents trying to force it upon me at a young age have helped repel me from religion altogether.