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Poll: What is your religion?

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351–360 of 368 posts

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#351
post #71

Earlier 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…

This is known as Pascal's Wager. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascals_Wager

Very interesting...never knew about this. Thanks!

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#352
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might not be the best idea to comment on your personal feelings regarding an employee's religious affiliation. It'd suck to have a HN post submitted as evidence in a discrimination lawsuit. Edit: Why the down-vote? The parent has his company and website in his info. No idea what it's like in AUS, but in the states, if someone was fired and there was any ambiguity regarding the reason, this comment could be be admissi…

Thanks for the reminder - obviously it's something that some people might be concerned about and if I wanted to play it especially safely, I would. I don't discriminate against the guy. We are open about our positions and can discuss it at the right times, but all it is, is a difference in belief in one aspect of life (admittedly, a big aspect of his life). I pay him more than I pay myself and he is an invaluable emp…

The question about believing in Santa...as in...how do you do it? That's a very interesting question. I never thought of it like that before. The truth is, I don't know the answer to that.

Given that I don't know how to believe in Santa, I can't say I would stake my house and life on it.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you know it was god? How did you rule out being mad and hearing voices?

I haven't entirely. I accept that's still quite possible. I was told to read the Bible and after reading the gospel of Matthew I was told that what I was reading was reliable and to be trusted entirely.

And so you have no difficulty with this? I haven't been in your position, so I can't be certain, but I like to think that the first thing I would do if I was hearing voices would be to seek some sort of reliable independent corroboration, and failing to find it would be deeply troubling.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit that possibility freely. I'm not sure what you're trying to say that I didn't already. I do claim the Bible is true as well based on these experiences. I'm not sure a 22 year old programmer goes from reading Russell and Nietzsche one day to following Jesus the next day without something having happened. Whether that's psychological or spiritual something happened to me.

Sure, I grasp that, I'm just puzzled as to why you jump to the conclusion that requires logically inconsistent supernatural phenomenon rather than than the one that just requires garden variety mental illness? Not trying to offend you, in your shoes, I'd like to think I'd pick door number two.

In other respects I didn't act like someone with mental illness. Most mentally ill people have trouble functioning in society and contributing in a meaningful way.

These experiences didn't let up for two years and I found myself feeling strongly pulled to do things like buy Bibles and attend church. Eventually I did both of those things and my life only improved from there.

I'm not so sure that anything I believe is logically inconsistent. I believe that God intervened in human history in a big way and in such a way that makes it possible for me to approach him with confidence.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#356
post #122

Earlier 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?

Yes. "Does the act of prayer have beneficial psychological effects?" and "does God exist?" are two different questions, and I do not presume any dependence of the latter on the former.

Besides, I don't see how being dependent upon the results of an experiment has any bearing on the meaning of the question. The data collected in the experiment may be empirically valid, but the connection between the data and the question is inherently rational, not empirical, and you must already have a set of presumptive axioms in order to connect the concrete data to the abstract question.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#357
post #346
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the question is meaningless, it has no meaningful answer; the answer cannot be "no", so... no. Your line of thinking is begging the question; you pre-suppose that the question is meaningful before you address its meaning.

OK then, what does it mean to say a question is meaningless? If an answer to the question is important, how is the question meaningless?

When I say "the question is meaningless", I'm saying that the question doesn't identify a gap in useful knowledge of the world. It might be a purely definitional question for which the answer boils down to a tautology, or it may identify a trick of logic that appears to be knowledge but is not, e.g. a paradox, or it might simply be nonsense.

I say the question "does God exist?" is meaningless because:

(a) it is a simple Boolean yes/no question, but its is asking about the relationship between two incredibly abstract concepts: "God" and "existence". To address the question, these concepts must be defined in precise terms; but being abstract, there is no suitably objective metric to measure their precision against. Therefore, in practice, any logically consistent answer to this question will be a tautology.

(b) the validity of religion is not actually dependent upon the answer to this question; the concept of "faith" precludes the necessity of empirical validation. If you are religious, you may consider it important to believe in God, but this is not the same thing as it being important that God objectively exist.

(c) formalities of thought aside, my underlying metric is how useful answering the question is, not how true it is, and I do not see useful value in answering the question. Asking the question, on the other hand, opens the door to interesting conversations like this one, which give us an opportunity to analyze, exercise and improve our thought processes, which is why I'm participating in the discussion so extensively. :)

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fluctuate constantly between being an agnostic and being a believer in God. Truth of the matter is, when misfortune/tragedy strikes (like the loved ones having health problems) it really helps to believe in God. My wife just gave birth to a premature child. He's a boy and he's in very good health, but he was born at 30 weeks (now he's at 32). Her water broke at 27 weeks. We were on the cutting-edge with this pregna…

> People working in health-care have an easier time believing in God I know a great many doctors, nurses and other health-care workers and I don't know a single one who believes in any gods. Maybe it's just a UK thing, but watching good people die painfully and slowly is fairly destructive to blind faith in an allegedly benevolent god. > miracles do happen [citation needed]

[citation needed]

http://www.osborn.org/site/sections/1343

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#359
post #32

It seems disingenuous to mix Agnosicism with Atheism. Both are utterly different - one makes a knowledge claim (atheism) while the other is in a position of neutrality or indifference (agnosticism)

Atheism and agnosticism are orthogonal: 1. If you believe in a god but don't claim to have knowledge, you are a theist agnostic. (This is not that silly. Many people believe things they do not claim to know. For instance, you can believe that P != NP while acknowledging the question as unproven and unknown.) 2. If you don't believe in a god but don't claim to have knowledge, you are an atheist agnostic. 3. If you cla…

I think a lot of the arguments that conclude that believing in God is irrational are actually prevaricating on the word "believe".

You qualified definition '1' with "this is not silly" - on the contrary, I think it is in many cases the most reasonable option.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#360
post #176

oblig. 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…

That's all fine as long as you don't make the leap from "my imaginary friend is useful" to "my imaginary friend is real". I would however assert an unnecessary semantic overloading -- why use a word (God) that has so many assumptions built into it? Invent a new word, and confuse fewer people.

Not to get all solipsistic, but we can only validate our ideas against our experience of reality, not objective reality itself. If the imaginary friend is part of your experience of reality, and indeed something that you seek to experience because of its usefulness, what's the significance of the distinction you made above?
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