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All of this is pure speculation on your part . I'm not knocking it, or you for believing, but it's all subjective opinion without a shred of factual evidence behind it .
People assume religion would be reinvented , but would it if society had no knowledge of it to begin with and were advanced past the point of attributing physical phenomena to invisible gods due to a lack of scientific knowledge ? Those that claim this operate from a culturally biased mindset of accepting religion as valid . What if this mindset didn't exist , and the concept of invisible beings affecting humans lives was not known ? What then would be the impetus for creating a god ? If you understand that all natural phenomena have natural scientific explanations, what then becomes the root cause of creating a religion that does not yet exist ? Remember here, all memory of religion has been erased , and full scientific understanding, or as full as our understanding is today at any rate , informs us of all natural phenomena . In this case, what becomes the basis for believing in invisible supernatural beings ?
Man was just as inquisitive then as they are now....
Sure there is evidence backing Tzaphs' claim.
Right now...people in this world that are highly educated, that were previously Atheist, and many being exposed to Religion for the first time, are adopting Religion by the millions.
By your logic...they would not do that. But they, in fact, are.
Where are the statistics on that "by the millions" statement?..
I don't give a damn what you think you are discussing. As long as you make the NON-EXISTENCE and NO EVIDENCE claim for the EXISTENCE of God you are a fraud! You cannot claim"we do not know" what it is, then name it, and say what it is NOT, all the while pretending that is scientific! That is dishonesty and dissembling. Try to employ SOME integrity in your discussions.
Mystic, Mystic. There is really no decent or valid evidence to support any god-claim whether that god is described in any way or simply claimed to exist without any description of what it is. As usual, all the time you fail to see the sound rationale of this very simple stance on the god -claim, you are unable to enter into any coherent discussion of it, before you even start.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LuminousTruth
Their hearts are already shards of glass due to their upbringing (life experiences and religion), you have to step lightly with your words, they require for themselves special privilege because they know not what else to do. Of course, you yourself seem very reactive too (not in too negative of a way). Sort of like you are fed up with it (religious/spiritualist grandstanding) at least a little bit, especially from certain flavors of the incessant proclaimers in the various and contradicting religions.
O Luminous one, it takes a bit of time to cultivate an amused cheeriness when discussing with those whose minds are welded shut wih the supaglu of faith, who refuse to hear and grasp the simplest and most obvious refutations of their position and who pour scorn and deprecation on any who do not accept what they say, simply because they say it.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 06-27-2016 at 01:26 AM..
You are probably correct. There are always people who have to believe in some kind of woo. Look at all the promoters of the anti-vaccination stupidity. Or homeopathy.
Those people, like the religious of the world, do not WANT to accept reality, but instead, build their own, and justify it by being supported by their fellow woo followers.
I see it as an academic point,though quite an interesting discussion. I take the position that our aims would be achieved if religion eventually occupied the same place in our society as does astrology - and you would be shocked at the results of how many people believe in it. But it occupies no position of influence in our society, politics, workplace, law, education or science.
But we must be eternally vigilant. Just recall the swiftness with which homeopoathy penetrated proper medicine, and without a shred of credible evidence to validate it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LuminousTruth
Their hearts are already shards of glass due to their upbringing (life experiences and religion), you have to step lightly with your words, they require for themselves special privilege because they know not what else to do. Of course, you yourself seem very reactive too (not in too negative of a way). Sort of like you are fed up with it (religious/spiritualist grandstanding) at least a little bit, especially from certain flavors of the incessant proclaimers in the various and contradicting religions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Albert_The_Crocodile
I don't agree with that at all.
I don't think anyone here asks that anyone else "step lightly with their words" - they just ask that the people they're conversing with not be condescending, taunting, intellectually dishonest people who deliberately distort what others say in order to provoke them, and then throw up their hands and say, "who, me?" while patting themselves on the back about how clever they are. That's a long way from having to "step lightly." Many of the people who are calling out wallflash have long histories here of being able to conduct perfectly respectable debates with people who strongly disagree with them, but we all have serious issues with him. What's the common denominator there?
I'd say that you are both right. And it looked to me as though you were both talking about the same thing (some theist apologists) and thought that you were talking about different ones. There is a trigger -action touchiness about those who talk about their faith and I have already explained why, elsewhere - as Luminous puts it "they require for themselves special privilege because they know not what else to do." which is why they start a fight about the rudeness of the other side, because it's all they have.
And as always what fascinates me now is not the debate with theism (long since won) or even the mechanism of faith -based denial (long since sussed) but whether they really are patting themselves on the back for their cunning tactic of holding their own without a decent argument or they really believe that they are arguing honestly.
It's worth bearing in mind that simply being ignorant (1) is an excuse...once. When it has been explained ..many times, in some cases, andd they still persist in the same arguments, then Hovind's "Willfully ignorant..dumb on purpose" sums it up splendidly. My own "Do not understand and do not want to" and "The evidence only serves to prop up what they believe on faith, anyway" is appropriate, too.
I believe that all argument is not about what is valid evidence or even evidence at all, but about what wins the argument for what they know is true on Faith - not evidence.
Thus they do not care whether the argument is valid, relevant or intellectually honest. All that matters is winning.
Or at least "Agreeing to differ" which means scraping a draw, which is actually a Win for theism since it enables to claim they they were not refuted and their faith is just as valid as the argument based on sound reasoning and valid evidence put up by the other side.
(1) I don't mean being stupid - I don't believe that any posters here really are stupid - they show how quick their brains are all the time - I mean just not knowing something. That's Ok - I am learning all the time.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 06-27-2016 at 02:12 AM..
And as always what fascinates me now is not the debate with theism (long since won) or even the mechanism of faith -based denial (long since sussed) but whether they really are patting themselves on the back for their cunning tactic of holding their own without a decent argument or they really believe that they are arguing honestly.
Where are the statistics on that "by the millions" statement?..
For just a peice of it, Google:
"Growth of "Third Church" In China"
and
"Growth of Religion In China"
Study what you find and you will come to know about it.
Actually...it is not "millions", but "tens of millions". So much so, it results in an overall global increase in Religion. Losses in low population areas of the world are a small fraction of these gains.
Religion is growing in this world on an overall basis.
For just a peice of it, Google:
"Growth of "Third Church" In China"
and
"Growth of Religion In China"
Study what you find and you will come to know about it.
Actually...it is not "millions", but "tens of millions". So much so, it results in an overall global increase in Religion. Losses in low population areas of the world are a small fraction of these gains.
Religion is growing in this world on an overall basis.
There you go, Richard. Just as the West is about to go irreligious, we will be invaded by hordes of Chinese, armed not with assault rifles but with Jack Chick tracts.
Probably the same illogical misconceptions upon which it was based in the first place, and to which humans of all generations are still prone.
Look at some of the crazy things that people even today are finding to believe - humans never landed on the moon, you can't see the sun from space, the earth is flat, aliens are running the governments of every country in the world, chemtrails, there's an RFID chip in your driver's license that the government is using to control your thoughts... all of these things have no rational basis at all, and are easily disproven, but numerous people believe them anyway.
You don't have to have been born 3000 years ago to dream up really bizarre things to believe in, and the only "basis" that's needed is that someone is sitting on a beach somewhere and it just pops into their head. If you put a billion typewriters in front of a billion monkeys, eventually one of them is probably going to randomly type out the complete works of Shakespeare. You put 7 or 8 billion people on a planet, it's inevitable that some of them are going to say, "nah, that's all bull****, there's a god who's behind all this." Presto, there's your "completely new and original belief in invisible supernatural beings."
I have to agree here. Humanity isn't that far along in its development that it wouldn't just reinvent religion. Even if you could remove it magically from the world to the extent that the memory of it didn't exist ... if you could somehow remove the religiously inspired cultural artifacts ... all of it ... there are still too many people mired in magical thinking to imagine that in a generation or two we wouldn't have new religions in place.
My guess is that the new religions would be of a somewhat different character, with less cruft to explain away at first ... in other words they wouldn't be based on holy books that are thousands of years old and have things in them like how to be a good slave owner and so forth. And because of technology it would be hard to make extraordinary claims of the miraculous on the kind of scale that the gospels do for example because it would be too easy to fact check -- unlike the way it was back in the day.
I would also expect that new religions wouldn't be as widely or quickly adopted as they originally were. I would expect that religion as a world force would be greatly set back and would never re-achieve its former dominance. Science and reason have accomplished that much. But it would reassert itself and it would have a significant following. Humanity is still in its childhood, if not its infancy. Too many people would still need crutches to cope with their existential issues.
Of course in ANOTHER two thousand years the original doctrines and promises of the new religions would look just as ridiculous in the light of knowledge in the year 4016, as the actual holy books look to us in 2016.
And no I'm not being condescending here. I used to be a devout Christian fundamentalist myself, after all. It isn't a question of people being stupid or foolish, it is a question of wanting superficially easy and flattering ways to deal with one's mortality and other existential issues. I've never denied that religion isn't seductive at a primal level. Of course it is. That is why it exists, and doesn't just vanish in a puff of logic.
Religion as currently constituted at least is on the way out but I still believe it'll take another millennium or so for it to become a unimportant to the vast majority of humans.
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andd they still persist in the same arguments, then Hovind's "Willfully ignorant..dumb on purpose" sums it up splendidly. My own "Do not understand and do not want to" and "The evidence only serves to prop up what they believe on faith, anyway" is appropriate, too. 
