My veiws on religion

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Please, consider what I am about to say, do not just flame it mercilessly. First of all, so everyone knows, I am an athiest.

Religion originally gained power by explianing the unknown. They would offer the "reasons" that such previously misunderstood events, such as the sun rising and setting, the seasons, weather, death, the origin of life and others would occur. People did not understand these things, and therefor feared them. When an explanation was offered, they gratefully accepted it. This is how the church gained power.

Leaders understood this, and used it to their advantage. For example, in Egypt, the Pharoah declared himself to be a god on earth. People would do anything for him, such as wasting vast amounts of resources, time and energy building giant pyramids to honor him after death. He could do whatever he wanted, noone would dare to defy him, and so he ruled with absolute authority.

In Europe, the pope was once the most powerful person alive. He controlled the church, which in turn controlled the entire population. Since his power only existed as long as people believed in him and his church absolutely, he was quick to execute any scientists who discovered anything that would disprove the church. If the King did something to displease him, he could encourage a revolt by spreading the word that God disapproved of the current king.

The Church offered rewards for obeying their rules and believing their ideas. Anyone who was a devout believer would go to heaven, and anyone who went against the church would go to hell for all eternity. Because of this, people also feared the church, and were very careful not to displease it.


*builds asbestos fortress to protect from flames*

I think that most people who have used religion to their own advantage have been more deeply embroiled in those thought systems than you seem to be implying here. I think the vast majority have believed what they are saying. Most people cannot handle the cognitive dissonance involved in pretending to be something that one is not. They must really believe in what they are doing, in order to continue doing it.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I suspect that this is increasingly the case as time goes on and violent behavior has fewer approved outlets in modern society. Everyone wants to think he is civilized and "good".


I'll contest your allegations that popes have regularly executed scientists for "disproving" God. What has happened in the end is that the rules of Christian faith have (in most circles) been reworked to accomodate scientific discovery without threatening any basic beliefs.

heres my view on religion, people needed it to explaine the unkown like you said also i think as our brains got bigger we liked being artists and making things up.

im agnostic and cant really be shure something didnt have a hand in our creation but i doubt someone appeared out of thin air and spoke everything into existance. more than likely what happend is an alien genetically engeneerd us out of himself and primates that were already here

and then everyone wrote a book about it and it became someones god and religion

A good point.

Also, we have egos to satisfy. We exercise our creativity in order to be more than machines or animals.

Evolution all the way!

You have brought up a major thing here which may end up being a topic of this discussion... Creationism vs. Evolution.

Creationism vs. Evolution (which is true?) is a funny thing, because the two are not alike. It's like comparing apples to rocks and asking which tastes better. If we were to ask Creationism vs. Atheism, that would be more akin to apples vs. organes. Back to the topic though, people have slandered Evolution as being some sort of belief, as if you could "believe" in such a thing... Evolution is nothing more than an observed natural phenomena, much like the Water Cycle. You can choose not to "believe" in such a thing (which would label you as willfully ignorant, if not an idiot), where you cannot choose to believe in evolution, because it is not an opinion.

Before I illustrate what evolution actually is, I will illustrate what it is not. Evolution is not, to use a popular example, my body adapting to a new climate. Let's say I live in the Sahara, and I move to Alaska during winter. Within 2 weeks, my body will have adapted to my new environment, and adjust to the exreme cold. This is not Evolution, though it can be said that our ability to adapt arose from Evolution. Let me explain: If I lived in the Sahara and moved to Alaska during winter and DIED, that would be Evolution. The reason I say this is simple: Evolution is nothing more than the elimination of genes that are unable to cope with an environment, through death and\or mate selection. If ten people lived in the Sahara and moved to Alaska, and 6 of them died, 4 of them survived and reproduced, THAT is evolution. Evolution is not the act of adapting, it is the elimination of those that fail to adapt. This in and of itself is a proven, observable, and testable FACT.

To throw Creationism into the mix... Creationists (or believers in Intelligent Design (not a scientific theory)) propose that because things appear to be designed to our human perceptions, there must be a designer. The reason this is not a scientific theory and not even debatable in the scientific forum is because the entire basis for this belief is based upon an objective opinion, or "I think that things look designed".

The sheer fact that religious people are trying to reinsert religion back into the scientific community is completely and utterly bogus and these people deserve no respect or scientific merit. This is my opinion, and is objective to my perspective.

Thank you for you time,
Legato

Another note: I've heard creationists come up with the argument that they can't believe people think that "Evolutionists"(a term I've already discussed) think that we arose from a massive explosion and random chance. They think it's much more logical to believe that there was a designer that poofed us and everything else into existance one dark day. Seems to me creationism takes much more faith to believe in than "evolutionism"

Yes, but don't we give creationists too much publicity? They are such a small group of people. Most religious folks are embarrassed to be lumped in with them.

Creationism and evolution are not alike, one is a naturalistic idea for the formation of life and the other is a more supernatural idea for the formation of life. Technically, evolution cannot be anything BUT a belief, as it is not proven but rather something considered to be the best idea given a materialist framework. What we have observed are things that point towards the truth of it, but nothing that could dispel the idea of miraculous creation, and certainly we haven't seen any macro-evolution, which is what people currently mean in discussing evolution. Evolution could arguably be an opinion, especially on the level that most people live, and certainly given the issues involved with disproving evolution, as the only way to disprove evolution is with irreducible complexity, but how do you prove that something is irreducibly complex? Certainly I disagree with the idea that evolution should be taken as a dogma, but rather the taken as the best product of induction that should be less questioned on pseudo-scientific grounds as found in the ID movement.

Evolution is more than adaptation or elimination, but rather usually refers to the idea of large-scale macro-evolution being the source of all variance in life forms. The ID movement already accepts the notion of micro-evolution and as such, this really isn't a disproof of their argument. Their argument is that evolution is impossible, because the formation of life and its diversity is not possible given naturalistic methods.

That merely shows your ignorance of the higher class IDers. ID is really based upon the argument that certain things could not have been created from naturalistic processes and therefore if naturalistic processes fail then a designer must exist. The scientific failure is that there is really no way to prove that something could never naturally happen in some form or fashion, and thus examples of irreducible complexity are difficult to verify as truly irreducible or not, heck, some of Dr. Behe's examples have disappeared due to new scientific evidence.

The bogus thing is that they use such an unscientific hypothesis and go with it. Whether or not religion exists or not in the subject of choice doesn't matter, that is not the crime, the crime is a failure to work within the given framework. Also, if something is objective to your perspective then it seems to me that it is technically subjective, and a subjective opinion doesn't matter so much as a logical argument.

Well, the real issue is what facts that they have heard somewhere. I heard one guy claim that because the creation of a cell was statistically impossible that evolution must be false. Now, I don't know the statistics to verify or vilify that claim and thus will not actually approach the scientific merit, but if true then that seems a valid reason to not believe evolution is not correct. The real issue comes down to the assumptions made anyway, if one believes in a deity then assuming he directly created everything is not such a leap, if one does not then assuming a deity and that he created everything is a much larger leap, but really such issues of Occam's razor are outside of evolution itself.

Probably so, especially since the heart of the debate of the scientific merit should have been settled a while back, and the rest of it ends up not being a question of science so much as foundational assumptions and philosophy.

I must correct an error. I used "objective" twice and meant to say "subjective".

A question for any creationists: Who created the creator?

IDers either:

1. don't understand how evolution works, such as claiming only microevolution occurs, witch is total BS because macroevolution is just lots of microevolution, or think evolution is all random chance.

2. are intellectually dishonest liars who use sophistry to fool laypeople (kind of like global warming deniers).

Hmmmm. This is a very good point, now that I think about it, I think that the pharoahs really DID think they were gods themselves. Sorry about that.

I am speculating just as much as you are. Very dishonest people exist... probably there were indeeed pharoahs and popes among the lot, like you said.

Well, creationists believe in a god who exists throughout all of time. The specifics are hard to pin down, but many claim that this entity exists outside of time and thus needs no more explanation than the issue of how the laws of physics came to be.

Well, there is a distinction though. Micro-evolution is just small adaptations, I think most IDers claim that micro-evolution, although it works, it does not work well and thus will not tend towards creating creatures that are truly more fit such as an example that they will use is that drug-resistant bacteria will tend to be inferior to drug non-resistant forms outside of the drugged environment, and also the argument that few changes that occur really are beneficial, finally, the argument that some things are irreducibly complex and thus evolution could not or is highly unlikely to create certain features.

I could understand the idea that they are intellectually dishonest and I think my own position was that their position was unscientific, but the question really ends up on motives. They do lose a lot of their academic credibility and any chance at working at a respectable university but they might gain some fringe popularity and perhaps book money compensates them for this risk. I really would not be surprised either way.

But that's just as unproven and illogical as Creationism.