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Looking at you.
Major Religions of the World
Ranked by Number of Adherents
# Christianity: 2.1 billion
# Islam: 1.5 billion
# Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
# Hinduism: 900 million
# Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
# Buddhism: 376 million
# primal-indigenous: 300 million
# African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
# Sikhism: 23 million
# Juche: 19 million
# Spiritism: 15 million
# Judaism: 14 million
# Baha'i: 7 million
# Jainism: 4.2 million
# Shinto: 4 million
# Cao Dai: 4 million
# Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
# Tenrikyo: 2 million
# Neo-Paganism: 1 million
# Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
# Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
# Scientology: 500 thousand
This is just the first site I found when I searched Google for "List of world Religions". There are a lot more. You can find a definition to fit whatever you want, but most of the world disagrees with you. Also, your definition of faith is wrong. Even scientists have faith that the basic unprovable principles of science are true.
Gender: Male Location: Southern Oregon,
Looking at you.
I hate to get off topic, but... It is believed that the secrets of the universe can be determined by mathematics. This is such a strong belief, that it is in truth a faith, because it can never be proved.
Sorry, Digi if I have taken your thread off track, but I really liked your lack of generalizations. So, when generalizations started to fly, I just had to jump in.
I too left Christianity, but instead of calling myself an atheist, I called myself an agnostic. I realized after many years that a religious structure was missing from my life. I believe that I am one of those people who need that in my life. I also do not believe that to be a weakness. Weakness is needing to have other people agree with you to the point of belittling or dismissing them if they don稚.
Probably because people have a tendency to see faith and belief as identical. When atheists disparage "faith" they can be taken as saying it's stupid to believe in anything.
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I am always amused by Atheist who assume that Science and God cannot coexist.
I know a couple of these points are fodder for Atheist but here are a few to get you guys going.
1. First if God exist and his whole premise is too get people to believe/have faith on their own based on free will, what would be the point of him revealing himself? The whole point in religion is having faith and CHOOSING to be one with God, not doing it because you know you will be in trouble.
2. Why can't our purpose as humans be figuring all of this out? What if that is Gods plan? God could have set this up for humans to figure out how life started, what life is about and once we finally reach that stage, that could be the ultimate stage of enlightenment.
3. Morality and The Human Conscience. I have researched and read plenty of theories about both of these. To this date, I have not found any credible "Evidence." If we are really just chemical reactions, how do we interpret right vs. wrong.
4. And trying to attack the Bible, Torah, Koran...Whatever text you would like to attack, even if all those are wrong, that would still not dispute the possible existence of God. When discussing the possibility of A God, you need to leave religion out of it. It seems most atheist attack religion more than they attack the possibility of a God,Creator, Higher being. Religion is man made, therefore it will have flaws.
I have no issue with Atheist as I use to be one myself. I understand your point of view. I just do not believe that Random Chance and luck played into my creation.
All of those imply a deist type God, one that has little or no interaction with the world. Once you've stripped God down to something so irrelevant you've basically got atheism anyhow.
Atheism does not hold that "humans are just chemical reactions." Morality and conscience don't require God either.
"The possibility of a God" is not a compelling argument for theism or even agnosticism. I'm not on the fence about the jackalope simply because their non-existence has yet to be absolutely proven.
When I look at the world around me I see (hear, smell, taste etc) no evidence for an active God. From a position of strict intellectual honesty I cannot rule out a passive God, but that's not an argument for theism either. If God is unable or unwilling to do anything then even if we proven his existence beyond all doubt I would have no reason to care. Nothing about life would change from the way it is now.
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
Gender: Male Location: Southern Oregon,
Looking at you.
"a faith" and "faith" have different meanings. A faith would be a religion, while faith would be the belief in something to be absolutely true. It does not matter how much evidence there is to prove something, because you can never prove something absolutely. Often, faith is short-handed for blind faith, but blind faith and faith are not the same thing. One of the main principles in my religion is faith, but unlike blind faith, we require proof.
I don't think anyone here has proposed it... however, there are definitely certain religions that are incompatible with science, even if the concept of God is up in the air.
That makes sense, but then why would there be such a transparent reward/punishment system? When you have to choose between heaven and hell, you are forced to choose heaven.
Sure, that COULD be true, but why would it?
I doubt you understand this well enough to make a judgment call... the emotional side of the brain is no harder to simulate than the logical side. There's nothing magical about emotions, and if you have any evidence of phenomena that brain chemistry could not possibly explain in regards to morality, I have yet to hear any credible reports.
That much is clear, it is futile trying to attack "God", when any properties can be attributed to it. Only religion can be attacked, because religions give specific properties that are possible to analyze. God without any religion is an amorphous concept, similar to the "Ether" of pre-Einstein physics... it's impossible to debunk something that can have any properties attributed to it.
I'll admit that most scientists are either individually uninterested in the minutia of philosophy of science, and there is an air amongst mathemeticians that theirs is the "purest" of the "sciences", but the fact remains that maths are a simple system of logic that we have invented to build models around.
in no philosophical sense do our mathematical models provide any "truth" about the universe, math doesn't solve any problems, but rather allows us to express observation (probably the term you meant instead of math) in simple, logical, and universally communicable terms. Many scientific models can't be easily broken down to math, or the models are so complex, or formed from so many parts, the mechanistic algorhythms become the "trees" of the proverbial "forest".
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Jun 15th, 2010 10:26 PM
