Religion!

[lumpley]

When I was little, they promised me that when I die, someone will answer all my questions.  No sense asking today whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or if lambeosaurs really used those crests as trumpets, what life is like elsewhere than on Earth (if anything), how brains work - just wait until you're dead.  All your questions will be answered.

I can't speak for any other atheists, obviously, but my obsession with science is because where else am I gonna find out about stuff?

It also makes me a little sad.  I'm going to live my entire existance, beginning to end, without knowing whether lambeosaurs really used their crests as trumpets, for example.  What a letdown that is after all their promises.  I wish they'd been honest with me.

-Vincent

[quozl]

I believe in loving God and loving people and Jesus said if you do that, you get to go to Heaven.  I hope to meet all of you there and play some really cool games.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Well, as cruciel already said, there's really a world of difference between an atheist and agnostic. The first has chosen a belief, while the second has not. As far as Reason goes, the agnostic definitely has good chances of trumping both the theist and atheist. "My axiom is that something is untrue if not proven true." says the atheist, and agnostic answers "Well, why is that?"

My own religious development has largely been premeditated by philosophy. I was born and raised as a lutheran, but the departure was quite painless and natural when I realized one by one how indefensible the christian notions were. And I'm not talking about cosmology or epistemology, either; the standard refusal of religion, while based on the said disciplines, isn't enough for anyone who actually considers the matter seriously. It's only stupid to refute christianity based on empirical proof, when the main point isn't in any way cosmological: if you disprove god but fail to disprove christian morality, you have gained nothing and lost all.

The linchpin of my agnosticism was then moral theory, ethics. After careful consideration I came to see that christian morality is inherently immoral in the kanthian sense; no doubt a simple fact in itself, but it takes time to truly penetrate, time and experience of true morality not predicated by social or metaphysical rewards.

Viewed apart from their moral pretensions it's simple to relegate all kinds of religion to their place as ultimately matters of faith; if you need it, good for you. Without moral dimension religion is singularily irrelevant to life on earth: why should I care what some all-powerful being might or might not do to me, apart from the moral ramifications of my own actions? Whether my road be towards heaven or hell, I walk there in peace with myself, certain of being right myself (or of being wrong, as it might be). Or if there is no afterlife, why, then there's all the more reason to judge fairly and without theological interference in the matters of life on earth.

Thus I come to the abovementioned conclusion: I've yet to come face to face with intellectually true religion, and thus all religious faith is suspect intellectually. Being that my own ethics approve of being true to your beliefs, I hold many religious people to high esteem simply because of their morals, despite their foolishness.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Eero, I don't think it's appropriate to require intellectual truth, as you call it, of any mystical, mythological belief system. Religions are the sediment of culture; they accrete through the ages, collecting stories, beliefs, and laws of behavior, some of which become obscured by later or more salient items. A religion doesn't require consistency or rationality of itself because that would be denying its humanity.

[Ben Terry]

Replying to 2 posts at once here.

I think Ben Lehman may be confusing me for what he thinks of as "capital 'A' Atheists", or using my childhood amazement of the world and science as a jumping point where he can discuss this particular type of atheists he dislikes or disagrees with.  As for morality, as described, I am a Humanist, and while science has a lot to potentially say about human behavior I think it is a mistake to say that science can lead to iron clad value judgements by saying things like "Humans are genetically predisposed to this, so we should accept it and not work against nature" etc.  The place where I can see a lot of this is "evolutionary psychology" that tries to explain things like the way our romantic relationships work and the different attitudes of men and women are a result of some evolutionary strategy to maximize successful breeding and survivial and all of this.  Even if it was solid science (which I do not think it is at this point), it would not therefor mean we should act in any particular way.  Science attempts to describe, it does not proscribe.

So, I just had to clarify that I don't think I am trying to make science more than it is.

Now for Jack.  I think that science is quite a different thing from religion in many aspects.  One notable aspect is that science does not have the same ceremonial structure relating to major life events.  Parents don't take babies to the science temple and promise to raise him as a warrior for science, I never had a puberty mitzvah where we reverently discussed the biological process of puberty as a rite of passage, there are no science weddings (May these 2 individuals, who have shown strong pair bonding, live a long life due to successful evolutionary strategies, praise science", or science funerals (My dear friend was blessed with elegant genetics, and was raised in such an envioronment that his behavior was aesthetically pleasing to me.  I will engage in the tell tale mouning phase of the human as his body proceeds along the path of decomposition, praise science).  Also, another aspect of many religions is an emotionally supportive community, and there really is not a "science as religion" equivilent to that.  I think that this is because science is dealing with a whole different set of concerns.  Science does not try to console, or explain the existential "Why am I here?" stuff, though some people look no further than science for it.  Traditionally religion has been the place a lot of people look for that sort of thing, and philosophy addresses it sometimes in a less warm way.  There are probably a lot of different other ways people go about dealing with it also.  Personally, I find the religions I grew up with too full of crufty stories about violent and barbaric nomadic tribes and supernatural fictions to use any one of them as a base that I could extract the meaningful "good parts" from.  Much of it seems unnecessarily obfuscatory, and leads to a lot of people crediting a supernatural God with happenstance events, or trying to draw moral conclusions from events where you really can not (like people I work with who saw 9/11 in part being a result of America falling away from God, and this sort of thinking).  As I mentioned before, Buddhism stripped of its supernatural trappings has struck me as pretty nice so far, but is is mixed in with some other things.  Science is not my religion, but I do use it as a guide in that I will not believe something that contradicts it.  Also, science has been part of what has made me think that it is important to realize when you do not know something, and that you don't have to fill up the empty spaces with guesses or hopes or attribute it to anything in particular, but just be at peace with it.

I am a sucker for these kinds of threads...

[contracycle]

Eero, I don't think it's appropriate to require intellectual truth, as you call it, of any mystical, mythological belief system. Religions are the sediment of culture; they accrete through the ages, collecting stories, beliefs, and laws of behavior, some of which become obscured by later or more salient items. A religion doesn't require consistency or rationality of itself because that would be denying its humanity.

All of these seem to me like good reasons for chucking the lot in the Marianas trench.  I don't want to live in a society that incorporates nostalgic exceptions to rationality, just because we did it that way in the past.

I also strongly disagree with the claim a religion needs neither rationality or consistency or it would deny its humanity.  Fine, humans are not relentlessly rational animals, but we certainly can achieve high degrees of rationality and over all I feel the progress we have made has demonstrated its worth.  If its going to be a moral code, it has to be consistent or its worthless.  If its going to be a description of the world, it has to be rational or its useless (possibly even dangerous).  It is not un-human to try to understand our world better, deal with it better, it is in fact IMO very human indeed.

Its also very human to seek dominance over others, and the obscurantism and irrationality of religion have made it a remarkably effective tool for doing so.

[Shreyas Sampat]

My point isn't that rationality and consistency aren't compatible with religion; it's that expecting accumulated religion to meet these requirements is like expecting the thickness of a tree's rings to match the Fibonacci Sequence. It's really, really unlikely, and doesn't make the tree any less valuable. It just doesn't make it a very good Fibonacci Sequence (or moral code) reference.

Requiring rationality and consistency of these things basically assumes you are willing to revise them and turn them into synthetic, codified items. This sucks. Synthetic mythologies are weak. Personally, I don't expect the texts of religion to be either a literal description of the world or a moral code to be taken at face value; either of those approaches are patently ridiculous. Religion still has worth as mythology, even if you discard the things that can be extracted from it through a willingness to resolve inconsistency through introspection.

I also happen to think that rationality is overrated, particularly by crotchety philosophical types who have nothing better to do than to write books to each other. It's only as much a tool as, say, a fork is; without injecting some creativity and emotional investment into the equation, you are not going to sculpt a David out of your mashed potatoes.

[Christopher Weeks]

As far as Reason goes, the agnostic definitely has good chances of trumping both the theist and atheist. "My axiom is that something is untrue if not proven true." says the atheist, and agnostic answers "Well, why is that?"

I'm not certain that I'm parsing this correctly, but if I am, then I disagree strongly.  I'm an atheist, not because the presense of the divine has not been proven, but because there is not a single shred or iota of evidence to support it in any way.  

I do use science to help me determine likely truth.  And science doesn't prove things.  It never has and never will.  That's not part of the game.  All it can do is disprove things.  As a hypothesis gathers supporting evidence, it becomes more likely to be adopted as a small-T truth, more widely.  To my experience, no evidence for a divine experience of any kind has accumulated.  Nor has it been disproved.  It remains an interesting theory except for the untestability of it.  I suppose there might be a creator, but it seems pretty unlikely given no evidence whatsoever.  We could also be living in a VR penal colony where our meat is slowly harvested to feed the burgeoning population of sentient rats from Alpha Centauri.  But with absolutely no evidence to support that hypothesis, it remains an interesting  -- if bizzarre, notion.  I find it also interesting to note that if someone insisted that the latter of these two equally plausible unsupported hypotheses were true, and behaved daily as if it were, that person would be very likely to find themselves incarcerated in a rubber room.  You Christians have it easy.

Christ                                ...opher

[Rich Forest]

It's strange that I find myself in the position as the defender of religion as an alternative to science, given that I'm a skeptic and an agnostic and a science fan.

I'm more concerned by intolerance. And I constantly see the same kind of intolerance of religion by my fellow science fans that they are accusing religion of perpetuating. It's a bit pot/kettle, frankly. It's the same kind of superior attitude that led to all kinds of imperialist programs to help improve "the natives." Science is hardly blameless, as much as it makes sense to me and has a good system of "truth seeking"--emphasis on the seeking. Truth is a pretty slippery issue, but that's never stopped people from claiming a monopoly on it. Religion and science can both be used and misused for that. Flat out dismissal of competing viewpoints, to the point of claiming that the world would be better with them rooted out and destroyed? Religion fans? Check. Science fans. Yup.

Meh.

Rich

[Shreyas Sampat]

I find myself saying this a lot. Great post, Rich.

[Rich Forest]

Thanks Shreyas. I know what you're saying. I think I need the sentiment written on a shirt or something.

Heh, we're beating the Iraq thread by at least a page. So take that, Iraq thread. (Sure we had a head start, but let's keep that little detail hush-hush.)

Rich

[Jonathan Walton]

Yeah, Rich, you officially rock in all sorts of ways.  

(I mean, he's this hip dude living in Hong Kong who loves coffee and playing the Street Fighter RPG. Holy fah-sniggle! If I'm in Nanjing next year, I'll definitely take a train down so we can sip some joe, talk about Chinese politics, and HADUKEN! each other into submission.  I'm so there.)

[Rich Forest]

Jonathon, Street Fighter and coffee are on. And we love to talk Chinese politics in Hong Kong. When you get to Nanjing, let me know. My wife and I need, need a good excuse to go up there.

(Meanwhile, I am quietly planning a trip to Beijing where another certain... I'll go with "Forgista"... lives. Oh, he doesn't know it yet. But that isn't slowing my plans any.)

Hm, topic drift is endangering the flames of war! We're going to lose our lead on Iraq if this keeps up. Group hugs always fade away more quickly than wars. A shame, that.

Rich

[BPetroff93]

I am a Thelemite.  Essentially this means I follow the Law or Thelema (or at least try to )  It can be found in the signature of my posts.  This is not a lisence to engage in every passing whim or fancy but rather an instruction to discover the true purpose of your existence and follow it.  I am a member of the largest and oldest Thelemite group in existence, the OTO.  More information can be found at: http://oto-usa.org/ or feel free to email me: Bpetroff93@hotmail.com

[Jonathan Walton]

Sweet, Brendan!  I didn't even know such a thing existed.  My brother and I picked up a copy of "The Book of the Law" at a used book store several years ago, and really enjoyed flipping through it.  Not the path for me, but really interesting stuff.  

Why can't there be a mainstream gnostic denomination these days?  That's what I want to know.  Anybody want to come found the Gnostic Church of America with me?  Come on, anybody?  If I were God, the first thing I'd do would be to bring back the Gnostic Christians and the Taiping and then make Sufism the main branch of Islam.  Abrahamism would be so much cooler with a bit more more mysticism, especially in the mainstream.  None of this touchy-feeling New Age Unitarian stuff either.  Old school "Sophia, the Wisdom of God" mysticism.