Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Is there a God? If so, what is She like?

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Belinda
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by Belinda »

Immanuel Can wrote:
Belinda wrote:The universe is not evidence of anything except itself.
I disagree. I see plenty of evidence of design -- meaning the sorts of attributes I listed before, which everybody recognizes in other objects as proof of design. In fact, it baffles me that others cannot always see it...until I realize that humans tend not to recognize what they are unwilling to see. Then I understand.
The universe, i.e. everything that is, is existence itself. No artefact or indeed no particular event or thing exists because of itself as Immanuel who is a God-believing determinist would agree.
"God-believing Determinist". Not so. Yes to the adjective, no to the noun.
Is the God in whom you believe good or evil? There are plenty of evil designs lying about.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by Immanuel Can »

Belinda wrote:Is the God in whom you believe good or evil? There are plenty of evil designs lying about.
Good, of course. I'm no Gnostic. :wink:

But the disparity between what we feel should be (i.e. "evil") and what is does always require an explanation, whether one is a Theist or a staunch Atheist.

For the Theist, the answer is that the Creation is no longer under the exclusive dominion of God -- it being now in the hands of mankind, and consequently, it now also being in a state we call "fallen" -- that is, retaining features of its original design intention, but now imperfect and damaged. All this, we say, is eloquent testament to its now-troubled relation to the good Creator. Hence the need for redemption and salvation: now for mankind, and ultimately for the whole Creation.

For the Atheist...I don't know what the answer would be. Why is the world not what it "should" be? For I think Atheists have a strong sense of good and evil too...but it's never one they can account for. And unlike the Theists, they have absolutely no remedy for it of which I have ever yet heard.

Still, I'm open to hearing if they do.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by Immanuel Can »

Londoner wrote:'Prediction', 'interpretation' and 'suppositions' are not features of the material world; such that they are present or absent. They are things that are in the mind of somebody trying to make sense of that world.
Oh, absolutely!

So this raises an important question of how "consciousness" springs out of what Materialism posits as an entirely "material" world. By all rights, it not only should not, it CANNOT. :shock: We have no mechanism for such a transformation, and no material explanation for its result.
And so is 'chaos'; it is not a state of affairs, it is a description of our lack of comprehension.
Subtle but important change of word: it's a description of a lack of "comprehensibility." Chaos implies not a state in the mind of an observer, but rather a condition in which nothing can exist to observe at all, and nobody can exist to observe it anyway.
When you describe chaos you write 'No thing would stand in any predictable relation at all to any other thing'. But if that was the case, then there would be no 'things';
Absolutely. Whatever "existed," if we could even use such a word, would have no "thingness"; no feature that made it distinguishable from other "things."
...we only identify things by their relationship to each other. If you could make the judgement that 'things were chaotic', then you would have described their relationship, hence they would not be chaotic.
It's worse. (I wonder if you're keeping in mind the distinction between merely "random" and "chaos"?) There's nobody to make such a judgment...at least, nobody who depends on "existence" as humans experience it. Remember that in chaos, no two "particles-of whatever-chaos-is" stand in any relation at all to any other; including the molecules of an observer's body or the integrity of his consciousness to organize it.
'Chaos' is like 'universal' and 'infinite'; an abstract concept that does not - cannot - describe any possible state of affairs.
Right. It's a negation of our state of affairs, not an affirmation of a new state of affairs. That's a key realization.
If we try to insert such terms into a description of the physical world we just create paradoxes; our descriptions become self-contradictory. The only way we can resolve such paradoxes is to introduce a meta-paradoxical explanation, like a Being which is not a being in the normal sense.
Absolutely. And we get exactly the same effect if we try to speak of an "actual infinite." We can conceive of it theoretically, but put it into the context of a material existence, and immediately, every bit of predictability or coherence we can posit about it goes out the window.
But this is unnecessary since the paradox was only created by a misuse of language.
That's a supposition, but not one I find reason to share.
But the others...specificity, pattern, predictability, interdependence and so on...those can be observed by anyone. I tried to confine my terms to those sorts of things.
But they are not 'design' in the sense of needing a designer.
Most certainly they are. In the old "watchmaker" analogy, you immediately recognize a found watch as being a product of design...and you don't need to have met the designer to know for certain that there has to be a watchmaker to produce such an object. Maybe the only question, then, is what sort of "object" are we observing in the Earth? One that has these features (specificity, pattern, interrelation, and so on) or one that does not?

I think you know what I observe. I wonder that you don't.

That we observe these things says something about us, that we look for patterns, that we try to describe the world in a way that makes certain relationships predictable. Our description is artificial and deliberately restricted. If I describe a relationship between A and B, that relationship is a function of my choice to distinguish A from B. And my decision to leave C and all the other letters out of the picture.
To put it another way, I can describe a relationship between any thing and any other thing, since both are part of the same universe. If that was sufficient to show 'design', then no thing could not show design.
I would agree that all that exists does indeed show design features. The only sense of "undesigned" we get is actually from observing things which are damaged, corrupted or destroyed, and thus lack the design that things ought to have. We sort of "analogize" to the idea of "non-designed."
But since the description 'designed' must apply to everything, then it would be meaningless.

Non sequitur. We attribute "existence" to all "things," but we do not imagine that is meaningless. And as I say, we can analogize as above in order to conceptualize an opposite, or so it seems to me.
Why not ask the Designer?
Because, even if I could, I could not possibly understand their answer.
So let me get this straight. Your supposition has to be that because you do not understand the Supreme Being, it is not possible for the Supreme Being to reveal anything to your awareness? Gee, that looks considerably less than "supreme" of Him, especially since someone so "unsupreme" as me can apparently very easily achieve the thing you would be positing Him as being utterly incapable of doing -- namely, making a statement you could understand. :D
That is why I could not understand God.
Not on your own, perhaps. I suspect I could not either. And yet, as above.
Saying every-thing is a collocation of things does not solve the problem. Is 'everything' also a 'thing'? If 'everything' was a thing, then the set 'everything' would not be complete, since it would not contain itself. We would need a bigger 'everything', an 'everything that includes 'everything'', and then another... But if 'everything' is not itself a thing, then when talking about 'everything' we are not talking about things, but about an abstract entity.
"Abstract"? I don't see this is the right word. We would certainly be talking about something that transcends our understanding. But such things are known by us to exist, as baffling as they sometimes are.

Take for example, this very simple and well-known scientific observation: the universe is expanding. Do you doubt it? Do your observations (to say nothing of the expert testimony of every astronomer with a telescope, including the famed Edwin Hubble) not confirm it to you? Do you not believe in "the Big Bang"?

Well, if the universe is expanding, then let me ask you this: just what is it expanding into? :shock:

You see, we don't actually know. We believe the universe -- by definition -- is infinitely large, but also observe that it is expanding. How do we make sense of that, except to say that there is something very odd going on that we can indeed observe, but which we don't presently fully know how to explain?

So why should it make us marvel if we have some perplexities in describing the normal activity of the observable universe, and also a few in describing the nature of the Creator of all that?

However, if He should ever decide to speak to us...

So has God spoken? Maybe that's the only real question.
Belinda
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by Belinda »

Immanuel Can wrote:
For the Atheist...I don't know what the answer would be. Why is the world not what it "should" be? For I think Atheists have a strong sense of good and evil too...but it's never one they can account for. And unlike the Theists, they have absolutely no remedy for it of which I have ever yet heard.

Still, I'm open to hearing if they do.
The Christian narrative is a strong one, but its supernatural element is inconsistent with modernity.

I call my self "atheist" for convenience only as it's a vague and elusive category. I don't accept that God is either personal or supernatural. I accept that God is wholly immanent and that we can choose to support the immanent spirit of good. God is wholly immanent implies that God = nature, and is pantheism.

Many atheists account for their strong sense of good and evil by explaining that man is a social animal that nurtures his young for a long time. Both of those traits have been strongly established during the course of natural selection.

Pantheists account for their strong sense of good and evil according to the natural selection model and also sometimes according to the dictate of reason.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by Immanuel Can »

Belinda wrote:The Christian narrative is a strong one, but its supernatural element is inconsistent with modernity.
Maybe the fact that in spite of its successes, "modernity" was wrong about so many things accounts for the fact that we live in what is now being called "Postmodernity." Apparently, "modern" skepticism about these things was not, after all, the last word on human knowledge.
I call my self "atheist" for convenience only as it's a vague and elusive category. I don't accept that God is either personal or supernatural. I accept that God is wholly immanent and that we can choose to support the immanent spirit of good. God is wholly immanent implies that God = nature, and is pantheism.
I can't follow that line of explanation, Belinda...I can't see how it makes sense. You say you're an "Atheist," meaning "no-god(s)," but also "God" is "immanent" and therefore must also exist, and is also "nature," and is also "good" and then you say you're a "Pantheist," which by definition is not an Atheist. :shock: :shock: :shock:
Many atheists account for their strong sense of good and evil by explaining that man is a social animal that nurtures his young for a long time. Both of those traits have been strongly established during the course of natural selection.
That just means that man has a "sense" of good and evil. But what reassures him that his "sense" is more than a delusion? For many have had the experience of believing -- even very fervently -- in things that turned out to be untrue. Ancient man also believed fervently in gods...and yet the Atheist says that's just a delusion. What line of justification reveals "good" to be any better than that? I've never met an Atheist who can say.
Pantheists account for their strong sense of good and evil according to the natural selection model and also sometimes according to the dictate of reason.
If natural selection is a natural law, then it is not a moral property, anymore than "gravity" is. The Atheist philosopher David Hume made that perfectly clear. To suppose otherwise its to make what's called "the Naturalistic Fallacy." Hume argued that there are no moral precepts derivable from nature. And actually, I would agree with him.

Moreover, "reason" while a wonderful formalist mechanism, does not give us any moral precepts without first providing solid premises in truth. But what truths can we use to supply "reason" with the content it needs to tell us what "morality" is?

In other words, Atheism still hasn't got a clue what "evil" is. Sadly, Atheists still have to face whatever-it-is every day; they just can't do anything about it, because they can't even prove they really know what it is, or how they would even know it.

No diagnosis, no remedy. That's their plight.
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Dontaskme
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by Dontaskme »

uwot wrote:
Immanuel Can wrote: Not one plausible, and not one demonstrated with a scratch of historical evidence...
Duh! There is fuck all historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.

Jesus was a metaphorical symbol pointing to the obvious fact that no thing can die because no thing was ever born. Jesus was the concept known by awareness aka oneness. Oneness knows itself as and through it's reflected image, a conceptual image of image-less awareness.

And with a little help from science, because religion and science are working as a team... here is some more info just to clarify ... as follows >

Energy is not being destroyed. It's simply being transferred, converted, and spread out.
Heat death is when all or most of the energy of the universe is so spread out its no longer usable. You no longer have pockets of energy like stars or gas clouds. Any fissable matter has decayed, and any fusible matter has been fused to iron. There is no longer any way to harvest usable energy in the universe.
The energy is still in the universe, just spread out uniformly. Energy is only usable if you can move it around, and just like electricity, this requires a difference in "potential". If every part of space has the same amount of energy, everything is at equilibrium and no energy will move from one place to another. Entropy is the process that, on average, over the entire universe, equalizes energy levels. Of course, in this analogy, matter should be considered a concentration of energy.

In other words energy is always seeking for periods of equilibrium ...and that's the body need to rest when it falls asleep is essential to it's survival.
uwot
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by uwot »

Dontaskme wrote:Jesus was a metaphorical symbol pointing to the obvious fact that no thing can die because no thing was ever born.
That may be a fact, but it is far from obvious and the hypothesis that things are born and later die has a certain plausibility, not to mention the overwhelming weight of evidence.
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Dontaskme
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by Dontaskme »

uwot wrote:
Dontaskme wrote:Jesus was a metaphorical symbol pointing to the obvious fact that no thing can die because no thing was ever born.
That may be a fact, but it is far from obvious and the hypothesis that things are born and later die has a certain plausibility, not to mention the overwhelming weight of evidence.
The overwhelming weight of evidence is that no matter what appears to be born or appears to die makes absolutely no difference to the weight of the absolute state of energy there is in existence, for the whole universe and beyond always and ever retains the exact same constant weight. So nothing is ever gained, nothing is ever lost.
thedoc
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by thedoc »

Belinda wrote: The Christian narrative is a strong one, but its supernatural element is inconsistent with modernity.
That an Idea doesn't match "Modern" thought does not make it wrong. At one time most people believed the Earth was flat, most people believed the Sun went around the Earth, Some people still believe the Earth is only about 6,000 years old. Matching popular opinion does not make an idea correct, it can only be said that the belief is widely held.
Metazoan
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Re: Has religion been a boon or a bane to mankind?

Post by Metazoan »

Not sure where the balance is on this point.

But is does make lurking in a philosophy forum a mite tedious.

M.
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