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Religion vs Atheism Book 2


Stubby

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Now we're stretching the definition of religion pretty far. I know about neanderthal and early modern human burials, I'm an archaeologist (not to sound condescending, but yeah that's what I got a degree in and what I've been employed as). Ritualized burials could just have easily been ancestor worship, or any number of other things. As you said, we know nothing about what those people were thinking or how they really saw the world. If we are going to redefine religion as believing in the supernatural, then sure it is possible that those burials constitute evidence of that. Remember, though, that we could always bring out the examples of elephants showing behavior around their dead that could be described as 'ritualistic' if we want to stretch that definition (and strangely, not even other primates or even apes show behaviors like that, although I might be ignorant of some examples).

I agree with you that religion is not merely belief in the supernatural, but I think the burials are more significant that the latter. I would define religion as a system of beliefs regarding the nature and meaning of existence. Two big parts of that are the question of origin and the matter of what comes next. We cannot conclusively prove anything about their society, but I think that the manner of burial implies that they had ideas about at least one of them (the afterlife). It could be something completely different, but leaving tools and weapons for the deceased strongly suggests that they believed the latter would need them, wherever he or she had gone.

Elephants are fascinating creatures and their attitude towards the dead is evidence that we should be treating them a lot better than we do, but I don't think it amounts to quite the same thing.

I will even buy the evo-psych arguments that spiritualistic or ritualistic behavior is linked to pattern recognition as an evolutionary advantage (eg, seeking to assign a 'creator' to the observable patterns in the natural world, as one might assign a predator as the cause of rustling bushes or the like). That is NOT what religion means to me, though.

I think we'll just have to disagree here. I consider things like ancestor worship a religion (as long as there is an actual belief that the ancestors stick around after death) and the same for Deism (i.e. the existence of a creator based on observation of the natural world). They are minimalist religions that don't offer much in the way of explanations compared to the Abrahamic faiths, but they do try to answer at least some of the basic questions.

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How does one make the distinction between spirituality and religion, in your opinion, Altherion?

"Spirituality" is a tricky word -- randomly selected people aren't that likely to agree on what it means. For some people (including myself), it is very nearly synonymous with religion. For others (i.e. much of the "spiritual but not religious" crowd), it is essentially a minimalist religion, but they prefer to use a different word to distinguish themselves from followers of an organized religion. For yet others, it refers to mental states and not necessarily anything to do with religion.

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Yeah I'd agree with that, Altherion, there is definitely potential for a lot of overlap in the meanings of spirituality and religion. For me the distinction is all about having a codified doctrine and more formalized social structure when it comes to religion, which is why I tried argue that it is more logical to view religion as emerging from pre-existing aspects of human behavior rather than being a human trait in an evolutionary sense. And from your point of view it makes sense to argue that the earliest human burials DO represent evidence of some form of religion (though I'm not sure if that necessarily implies that religion is an innately human trait)

btw, did you see the video on the burials (or similar ones from the same region) that I edited into my last post? 

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Yeah I'd agree with that, Altherion, there is definitely potential for a lot of overlap in the meanings of spirituality and religion. For me the distinction is all about having a codified doctrine and more formalized social structure when it comes to religion, which is why I tried argue that it is more logical to view religion as emerging from pre-existing aspects of human behavior rather than being a human trait in an evolutionary sense. And from your point of view it makes sense to argue that the earliest human burials DO represent evidence of some form of religion (though I'm not sure if that necessarily implies that religion is an innately human trait)

btw, did you see the video on the burials (or similar ones from the same region) that I edited into my last post? 

I would say early human ritual burials fall under the category of superstition and spirituality rather than religion.

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Yeah I'd agree with that, Altherion, there is definitely potential for a lot of overlap in the meanings of spirituality and religion. For me the distinction is all about having a codified doctrine and more formalized social structure when it comes to religion, which is why I tried argue that it is more logical to view religion as emerging from pre-existing aspects of human behavior rather than being a human trait in an evolutionary sense. And from your point of view it makes sense to argue that the earliest human burials DO represent evidence of some form of religion (though I'm not sure if that necessarily implies that religion is an innately human trait)

Right. I don't see how it can be argued that religions like Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, etc. are innate -- they are complex and more or less require everything that makes us human to make sense. However, minimalist religions like ancestor worship could certainly have existed long before. I don't know whether that means they are an innately human trait, but it's certainly possible.

btw, did you see the video on the burials (or similar ones from the same region) that I edited into my last post?

Yes, I saw it and it is interesting (I didn't know Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted like that). I'm don't remember him saying anything about religion though.

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I would say early human ritual burials fall under the category of superstition and spirituality rather than religion.

I would say not much has changed for a vast amount of practitioners and that superstition is still a major influence and underpinning for what is often referred to as religion.

Claims of revealed texts, miracles, virgin births, creation myths, ascendency, rising from the dead, heaven, hell, original sin, angels, godheads, etc.etc. all qualify as superstitions.

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I would say not much has changed for a vast amount of practitioners and that superstition is still a major influence and underpinning for what is often referred to as religion.

Claims of revealed texts, miracles, virgin births, creation myths, ascendency, rising from the dead, heaven, hell, original sin, angels, godheads, etc.etc. all qualify as superstitions.

Aye, but the terms aren't mutually exclusive; i.e. you can be superstitious and religious, or superstitious without being religious. Like an atheists who crosses his fingers for goodluck or doesn't walk under ladder, for example.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Firstly, DAEMRION scares me...a whole lot. I'm sacred of ISIS and their ideology; and it reads scarily similar to yours.

A few things currently confusing me, Daemrion, from one of your posts (first page of this thread) it seems as though mere acknowledgement of a god automatically guarantees one entry into heaven, an afterlife; it also seems that renouncing the existence of such a god automatically guarantees non-afterlife, absolutely nothing, the end. It seems contradictory to my understanding of one of the driving forces behind Christianity, which is that sinners and non-believers go to hell (thus guaranteeing us a hellish afterlife of our own). I don't know if you're adjusting the dogma as you go about the thread or if its written somewhere in the bible in unambiguous terms. I'll also search for it and post as soon as I can.

Re: Jesus -- I don't think the question is whether Jesus existed; in my understanding, it is about whether he was divine (which I don't think he was). As someone already said, using the existence of Jesus as proof of his divinity is the same as using the existence of a guy named Peter Parker as proof of Spiderman.

Re: Creation -- See now, when I was still in primary school and we were basically tortured into Christianity with fear of going to hell and other such things, I started to wonder a few basic things. I'm black. On a scale of President Obama to Seal (the singer), I'd say I'm very close to Seal. The conundrum I faced was this: this god they speak of, he apparently created everything in the world (it was never the universe; I believe religion has had to evolve in this regard), so god created everything. And when he was done, he made man in his own image. But the dude grew lonely and he made a wife for the dude. The dude and his wife populated the Earth.* Then where did I, a black child, come from? Where did my parents? Or, was a god actually a black guy? In other words: what is the image of god? This was the first time I think I started to have atheist inclinations. In my naive mind (yes Daemrion, even us arrogant atheists can be quite humble sometimes) it logically followed that god could not have created me (Or maybe the guy writing Genesis simply forgot to mention that every continent had its own version of Adam).

The reason I bring this up is because you treat your faith the same way my teachers did, you assert biblical scriptures as truth and nothing less. An example is your assertion that god created everything--which is a "truth" I reject since I am not of his supposedly-mid-eastern-though-often-depicted-as-Europeanish image.

And please trust me when I say this: atheists are more complex than the amoral, arrogant idiots you seem to believe we are.

Also, I'm still unclear on this inherent wickedness of children. I consider myself moral and I don't think what god did in the bible is cool. You can't just go around wiping out children (or justifying it) and then claiming moral superiority afterwards.

___________________________________________

*Did they? I'll try to search for it in the Bible.

Non-believers go to hell, believers go to heaven. You are either one or the other, you can't sit on the fence. Obviously, from that perspective people who don't acknowledge God's existence at all have no chance of getting into heaven.

People who can see know traffic lights are red, amber and green. But, someone who is incapable of seeing things can only ever trust that traffic lights are red, amber and green. They can read about it in Braille books, someone else can tell them that traffic lights are red, amber and green, but they will never be able to directly observe it for themselves (until we invent artificial eyes). And whether someone who is incapable of seeing things believes that traffic lights are in fact, red, amber and green doesn't affect the truth/not truth of traffic lights being red, amber and green.

In the same way, the question of whether the Christian God exists (or any other God for that matter) is either true or not true, regardless of what we personally believe. So in a way, whether you or I think that Jesus is divine/not divine doesn't really actually matter. He either is divine or not divine. If he is divine then it is right to have faith in him, if he is not divine, then it is wrong to have faith in him.

In terms of asserting biblical scriptures as the truth and nothing less, why should one assert a falsehood? 

My problem with atheism - and I'll say it again, is that when you boil it down to its essence, it either ends up being:

1. Valuing one person (or a group of people's) more than another person's or set of persons, which to me sounds like class-ism etc; or

2. If the majority is said to be making the right moral judgment - then, in my opinion, a tyranny of the majority is still a tyranny.

For example, take the question of whether it was right to overthrow of the democratically elected Egyptian government. If an atheist says that it was right to overthrow the democratically elected government, they are somehow arguing that their own morals somehow is of more value than those of the Egyptian people who decided that they wanted that government with all of its policies (point 1 above). Yet, if they say it was wrong, a lot of the democratically elected Egyptian government's policies would have resulted in a lot of problems for the minorities (point 2 above), it would have been quite tyrannical for the minorities living there.

I don't doubt that atheists are complex people, but atheism, when boiled down to its essence seems to be inherently problematic in that it ends up with one of the 2 numbered points above.

Re inherent wickedness: If the world was full of people worse than Joffrey in ASOIAF do you think it would be justified? If you made a mistake in doing something, would you not go and correct it? Granted this is probably on a much bigger scale than any mistake you or I will ever make.

In a way, this would be an imperfect analogy. Say you were building a Lego set with your child, and you made a mistake and it came out wrong. Instead of something that looked like the picture on the box, you got something else which looked really bad, and would be harmful for your child to play with (for example, it would have sharp corners or little bits that could easily be swallowed by children), would you go and dismantle what you made and then rebuild it properly so that it is good and safe to play with or would you leave it as is?

 

That is all that I will say.

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Re inherent wickedness: If the world was full of people worse than Joffrey in ASOIAF do you think it would be justified? If you made a mistake in doing something, would you not go and correct it? Granted this is probably on a much bigger scale than any mistake you or I will ever make.

In a way, this would be an imperfect analogy. Say you were building a Lego set with your child, and you made a mistake and it came out wrong. Instead of something that looked like the picture on the box, you got something else which looked really bad, and would be harmful for your child to play with (for example, it would have sharp corners or little bits that could easily be swallowed by children), would you go and dismantle what you made and then rebuild it properly so that it is good and safe to play with or would you leave it as is?

Why should I worship  a being so incompetent as to make a mistake of such magnitude that the only possible solution was the violent deaths millions of people? Seems like such a being deserves something between pity and scorn rather than worship.

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Daemrion,

Non-believers go to hell, believers go to heaven. You are either one or the other, you can't sit on the fence. Obviously, from that perspective people who don't acknowledge God's existence at all have no chance of getting into heaven.

 

I don't like to speak in absolute terms regarding God.  God behaves as God wills.

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What Daemrion describes is hardly "a" mistake. It's a fuckup of such massive scale than any human who came close would be considered the greatest monster in history, and in no way could be explained by simple incompetence. That's malice on an impossible to comprehend level.

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In a way, this would be an imperfect analogy. Say you were building a Lego set with your child, and you made a mistake and it came out wrong. Instead of something that looked like the picture on the box, you got something else which looked really bad, and would be harmful for your child to play with (for example, it would have sharp corners or little bits that could easily be swallowed by children), would you go and dismantle what you made and then rebuild it properly so that it is good and safe to play with or would you leave it as is?

 

That is all that I will say.

Lego is not alive.

This is not only an imperfect analogy - it's ridiculous.

Please justify the deaths of all but a select few animals and all plant life on the planet in the flood, when those living things had absolutely nothing to do with the reasons for the flood.

Further, if it were conclusively proved tomorrow that there is not and has never been a god, heaven or hell, would you immediately go out and start raping and killing?

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There is no need to speak like the animals in the fable wherein they observe and fail to understand the making of bread. There is a number of ways to make sense of the behavior in the story of Noah's Ark, the most obvious of which I have already pointed out: given the assumptions of the story, death is not the great evil you are making it out to be.

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There is no need to speak like the animals in the fable wherein they observe and fail to understand the making of bread. There is a number of ways to make sense of the behavior in the story of Noah's Ark, the most obvious of which I have already pointed out: given the assumptions of the story, death is not the great evil you are making it out to be.

So animals go to heaven too do they?

What about the plants?

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There is no need to speak like the animals in the fable wherein they observe and fail to understand the making of bread. There is a number of ways to make sense of the behavior in the story of Noah's Ark, the most obvious of which I have already pointed out: given the assumptions of the story, death is not the great evil you are making it out to be.

Most Christian that believe in Noah's Ark in my experience believe in the fire and brimstone kind of hell. That's, again, an impossible to comprehend level of malice.

ETA: There can be no greater evil than eternal punishment for a finite crime.

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So animals go to heaven too do they?

What about the plants?

There is no agreement among religions regarding the nature or fate of non-human life. I don't know where the line is drawn (would you also concern yourself with unicellular life?), but presumably whatever is worth preserving was, is and will be preserved.

Most Christian that believe in Noah's Ark in my experience believe in the fire and brimstone kind of hell. That's, again, an impossible to comprehend level of malice.

ETA: There can be no greater evil than eternal punishment for a finite crime.

To the extent that this is plausible at all, it's probably more of a sorting algorithm with distinct outcomes than crime and punishment and it's not obvious that the outcomes are eternal (it can't be done without changing the nature of humanity -- whatever the result, most people would eventually get accustomed to it).

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...

My problem with atheism - and I'll say it again, is that when you boil it down to its essence, it either ends up being:

1. Valuing one person (or a group of people's) more than another person's or set of persons, which to me sounds like class-ism etc; or

...

How is that any different from any religion? All of those put their own judgement over those of all others. Atheism (in its most common weak form) is at least fair enough to put everything on the same playing field, and pointing out we could judge evidence and that there seems no reason to belief in the absence of evidence.

eta: and of course we have the tools to determine the colour of traffic lights in ways even those who can't see can objectively understand. While that does not capture subjective experience, it does show the objective information that underlies it. Which is something religions seem to fail at, relying solely on the subjective.

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There is no agreement among religions regarding the nature or fate of non-human life. I don't know where the line is drawn (would you also concern yourself with unicellular life?), but presumably whatever is worth preserving was, is and will be preserved.

1. So how can you say that death is "not the great evil"?

2. Unicellular life may have avoided your god's temper tantrum as it is capable of surviving and adapting to new environments rather easily.

3. That last phrase is astonishing.  Are you seriously suggesting, in order to justify what was otherwise an example of great evil, that of all the animals and plants on the planet only a few were "worth" saving?  You do realise that this is pretty much the justification for every genocide ever don't you?

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