461–470 of 649 posts
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you don't pick one at random. you pick one that makes sense. what makes sense for example is the positive impact a religion has on the world. which religion is doing the most good? that alone will narrow down the selection to a few dozen if that many. besides the good it does, another question could be: what makes sense to you? which religion has the better answers to explain the world in which we live in today? take…
Your arguments are a bit unsatisfying to me, though. > what makes sense for example is the positive impact a religion has on the world. which religion is doing the most good? I try to have a positive impact on the world by being vegan and donating to (secular) humanitarian organizations. I struggle to see how believing in a religion would improve on this (although I’m open to a good rebuttal!). > which religion has t…
that's not what i am asking. if you believe that religions are "wrong", then it's on you to verify that.
what evidence shows this, and if there is no evidence, why should I believe it
i can't tell you that. you need to look at each religion yourself and decide.
as i asked in another comment, have you looked at all the major religions (as listed on eg wikipedia), and can you say with confidence that none of them do better than secular scientific tradition?
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Purpose. That there was a purpose for all of this. If we believe there was no purpose for all of this, then what a hopeless thing. I just look at the erasure of Gaza and have become more and more religious, because my god what a hopeless end if this all isn’t saved at the very end. I feel that way about many of today’s ills. Purpose and hope, even if the answer is utterly magical.
If you're interested in some of the classic intellectual / philosophical arguments for faith (albeit from a Christian perspective) you should check out "Reasonable Faith" by William Lane Craig.
I do wish Craig had reframed from the personal shots he takes at various atheist/agnostic writers (which clearly cross into ad hominem at many points) but he is by far the most interesting defender of faith out there (IMHO). In his defense I think he was playing along with the at times very incendiary approach taken by Dawkin's and many other "new atheists" so it's not like he started the brawl :-). I think he's way too confident in Anselm's Ontological argument, but he has clearly studied it a whole lot more than me so I don't hold a strong conviction there.
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What is so special about reality?
Purpose. That there was a purpose for all of this. If we believe there was no purpose for all of this, then what a hopeless thing. I just look at the erasure of Gaza and have become more and more religious, because my god what a hopeless end if this all isn’t saved at the very end. I feel that way about many of today’s ills. Purpose and hope, even if the answer is utterly magical.
I actually find a lot of comfort in the Mark Twain quote after he was asked by a reporter whether he fears death given his lack of belief in God:
> “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” --Mark Twain
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People call Jesus a socialist because of the numerous times he commanded people to distribute their wealth to the poor and needy, help the sick, forgive debts and treat immigrants with respect and dignity. No one is literally claiming that Jesus was espousing some kind of proto-Marxist economic theory so much as pointing out that in the context of modern (specifically American) political discourse, Jesus would be con…
As a side note, tankie doesn't mean socialist, tankie is a slur against authoritarians that was invented by socialists to call people out for abandoning socialist principles in favor of authoritarian control.
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Your arguments are a bit unsatisfying to me, though. > what makes sense for example is the positive impact a religion has on the world. which religion is doing the most good? I try to have a positive impact on the world by being vegan and donating to (secular) humanitarian organizations. I struggle to see how believing in a religion would improve on this (although I’m open to a good rebuttal!). > which religion has t…
I struggle to see how believing in a religion would improve on this that's not what i am asking. if you believe that religions are "wrong", then it's on you to verify that. what evidence shows this, and if there is no evidence, why should I believe it i can't tell you that. you need to look at each religion yourself and decide. as i asked in another comment, have you looked at all the major religions (as listed on eg…
If you believe that religions are ‘right’ and/or have better answers than the scientific tradition, it should be trivial to defend your claims.
(Your other comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130369] is more agreeable.)
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“Socialist Jesus” is kind of a meme (or, maybe a blowback meme on Capitalist Jesus). But, he was apparently pretty into taking care of the poor, right?
The meme relies on assuming Socialism==being a good person. This is obviously not the case, as any economic structure is more complex than just being a chill dude, and the bible has a more complex view of morality than just "being nice to thy neighbor".
No, it doesn't.
It relies on understanding what views today have been described by their opponents as "socialist", and what views Jesus espouses in the Scripture. It does not require:
(1) thinking Jesus is good, or
(2) thinking socialism is good, or
(3) knowing or applying any actual definition of socialism (since it only involves the term "socialism" being used as a hostile epithet, not any concept of whether or not something actually is socialism.)
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> How many times did Jesus show violence or aggression? That’s the only one I can think of really. I think you might be forgetting about the bulk of the Old Testament
The pre Jesus books?