Pythagorean
Poll: What is your religion?
311–320 of 368 posts
Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#312oblig. Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Fred Brooks, p. 184 The Mythical Man-Month 2nd ed. It's interesting to me that several people I greatly admire in comp sci/technology are religious: Fred Brooks, Knuth, Larry Wall and Clayton Christensen ( The Innovator's Dilemma ). To me, on…
So the more we know, the fewer thing remain to be labeled 'god'...
Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's assume that neither of us know if God REALLY exists...don't you think it might be safer to hedge your bet and believe in a god - for the afterlife? What will it cost you to believe in God while you are alive? Nothing. What will it cost you if there really is a god and you chose not to believe? Could cost you eternity. So why not believe? The upside is (in the worst case) the same as not believing, but the downs…
"What will it cost you to believe in God while you are alive?" Time. Money. Freedoms.
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Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apathetist is a better description. An agnostic says he doesn't know the answer; I'm saying the question is meaningless.
Studies have been done on the effect of (other people's) prayers in curing a patient. They've all shown no effect, but let's say the experiment had shown convincingly that prayers of the followers of a specific religion result in major improvements to the patients' health. Would you still say the question was meaningless? If not, how can a question be meaningless if it depends on the result of an experiment?
What you ask is whether the question remains meaningless when confronted by strong evidence towards the existence of a godlike supernatural being that answers to prayers of a given group.
I guess the question will remain meaningless until such evidence is uncovered.
Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apathetist is a better description. An agnostic says he doesn't know the answer; I'm saying the question is meaningless.
I'm saying the question is meaningless Why? Is it because we have not been able to answer it yet?
Can it be answered in any uncontroversial way?
Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#316It's fairly common for people to respond to this sort of question by saying something along the lines of "I disapprove of organized religion, but have spiritual faith." My own view is exactly the opposite. I see the value in the ritual, community, and psychological "anchor" that organized religion can provide. But spiritual faith seems absurd; why mix your emotional security and your sense of identity up with a bunch…
A Dutch comedian once described this as the church of Aliquid, for people who believe there is "something". Despite most people calling themselves non-religious, Aliquid turned out to be the most popular faith in the Netherlands.
For those interested (Dutch speakers)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvcb5hJuEgU
Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only does it have little value in explaining the world around us but it encourages people just to accept the world around them as is and not attempt to understand it better.
I strongly disagree. I think some forms of religion, Christianity included, are very good at explaining how to understand the world and the forces (especially good and evil) at work in it -- and it encourages its adherents to change the world for the better. I also happen to think that these religions' interpretations of the world are wrong.
Hmm, well I would separate moral guidance and a knowledge for how things around us works. On a moral level some of religion's teachings are great,
I personally though don't take more than that from religion and think that it promotes being content with knowing less about our world and universe in order to make it's stories and non moral teachings more relevant.
Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#318Whenever I (atheist) meet religious people and start nerd raging, I remind myself of the following: The world makes equally amounts of sense for a religious person as it does to an atheist. It's easy to dismiss religion when you're an atheist, because science makes so much sense that it is a perfectly adequate explanation of the world around us (in the sense that it acknowledges that proving things are difficult). Bu…
With the important difference science is repeatable and verifiable. Don't trust CERN's data? Build a particle accelerator and measure it yourself.
How do you test/compare different, mutually-excluding hypothesis on the existence and characteristics of god given by the various religions?
You know perfectly well an all-powerful god is a logical impossibility.
Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it different from "agnostic"?
Agnostic is, "I don't know whether god exists." Apatheistic starts with, "I don't care whether god exists." But it often continues from there, and apatheists can also include as their beliefs "Questions of theology should not motivate morality." Some apatheists are strongly atheistic and not agnostic, saying "God doesn't exist, but this fact is irrelevant to human affairs." I find apatheist theists not inconceivable,…
Frankly, to me this is like, instead of answering a question, a person starts moralizing. Right? In other words, the difference is not so much philosophic as it is pragmatic?
There are atheists and there are militant atheists. I guess what you described sounds to me as a definition of militant agnosticism. Have I missed something important?
Re: Poll: What is your religion?
#320I grew up attending the Methodist Church (which up in Vermont didn't used to be quite the holy-rollers that they are in the South), and for a time in my youth was very religious.
I attended a Catholic school for middle school, and convinced myself that I would become Catholic one day. I expected that upon going off to college and being able to decide my own life that I'd covert quite soon.
Instead, I became a mathematician in more ways than just study, and began trying to generalize and abstract everything in my life. The oft-observed similarities of religions at their roots, but divergence at the "dos and don'ts" level gave rise to this conclusion:
In my being (indeed, in all beings, I should think) there is a place, a little box often marked "faith". There are a very large number of things you can put there, but the _important_ things that come out of it are always the same: be good to others, be good to yourself, be happy. Everything else attached to religions only serves to cloud those ideas. Though I could thus put anything into that box, it will always have the same result, and so for the moment, I leave it empty, and draw on the same lessons.
It's like there is an abstract class definition for faith, and I'm using a _very_ trivial implementation based on constants, because it's quite a bit faster and more efficient than the other options out there.