LHC portal

I am a dedicated agnostic

I won't go out of my way to cause offense, but by the same token I won't go excessively out of my way to avoid causing offense.

I'm very much of the let and let live philosophy

Don't really believe in anything. I'm cool with people expressing their beliefs, as long as they are not saying that certain people shouldn't be equal to others.

I don't really believe in anything either

Hello, lanejared

Your post puzzles me.

Certainly, you would not need to know a person's religion to converse in a non-offensive and intelligent manner.

You state that you are apprehensive of "making someone uneasy". This should not be any problem as long as you follow the lenient forum rules.

Please excuse a direct question as I request a little enlightenment.

As you have created this thread, may I humbly ask you to clarify your intentions, pertaining to the purpose and direction of this thread, in order to determine if I would desire to participate.

Thank you and I patiently await your response.


JAS (Just Another Singularitarian)

Skepticly reformed Pastafarian.

And You?

I find no logical reason or any concrete evidence for believing in any form of religion, generally speaking.

I don't believe in belief.

I think I believe that its all far too complicated. and if there is some form of Deity/s that he/she/it/they will understand people who tried really hard to understand it but finally just gave up on the whole thing.

The question is, what is a religion and what is a belief.
Religions usually (IMO) have two purposes:
1/ provide normal people answers to some hard-to-answer questions such as "where did I come from" or "what is my purpose in life"
2/ provide "better" people means of manipulating the "normal" ones

And belief is a set of answers to point 1

I think everybody needs some kind of answers to point 1, i.e. everybody needs some kind of belief. Note that "we are here because of pure coincidence and have no purpose at all" is also answer. In fact, this answer is what I believe in.

And for that, I don't need a religion.

Personnaly I'm a convinced atheist. I think there's simply no "need" for a deity of any kind in this world... Educated humans are (or should) be intelligent enough to be able to solve their problems alone (or with the help of others, of course) or to answer questions like "where do we come from"... About the "purpose of life" (of course every sensed person knows the answer is 42...): why should there be a purpose? We live, we try to do it the best as we can, we die, and that's it! Humans are not more valuable than any other living form as to be on earth for some kind of pre-programmed purpose...

Generally I don't have any problems with other's beliefs, except in some cases:

What I don't like at all is all kinds of superstitions, dogma-following, religious institutions and rituals, litteral (not sure of the word there) reading of religious texts (which should be regarded the same way we regard ancient greek or north myths), creationism, etc., and I can be pretty harsh with anyone trying to defend these horrors...

I've devoted huge amounts of time and energy to this question.

I have decided that...

a)...There is no way I can ever work it out.

Therefore...

b) ...I don't know.

Christian.
No way to disprove it really. No way to prove it either.
But if we may have faith that Science exists and that theories be true... Why not have faith in the unprovable?
That is my belief. There is no reason for me to fathom it more so. I've asked and received.
Plus, I feel religion(The Bible) and Science tie in well together.
I don't take the Bible for what it literally says. I feel it is either a big book of metaphors or analogies which set up morality for man kind, or a simplified version of the how Humans came to be.

God DID apparently create "Adam and Eve" (the First humans on the planet) from "dust" (reference to the Solar Nebular theory: how our solar system was once a giant disc shaped nebulae and from that dust and rock came Earth and the complexed creation of the first man came from it eventually as well)
There's a lot of views you can have on it. My personal view is a mix between Religion and Science both. I wish the conflict between the two would simply cease. I understand it is far fetched for Science to claim a being unprovable created something, but I also think Science is overlooking it.

Literature can be extremely ambiguous... You never know what God could really be in the Bible.
Once, the Church (which ruled the land back then) believed that "The World is the Apple of God's eye"
They speculated that the earth is the center of the solar system, which is clearly false based on Aristarchus, Copernicus, and Galileo's observations.
So you really never know. The Bible -- being the creator of most religion-- can be interpreted in many many ways.

Thein wrote: But if we may have faith that Science exists

You don't need faith to know that science exists. Science is provable.

You only need "faith" if there is no objective evidence.

Please note that I am not decrying your faith.....it is your right to believe whatever you wish.

What I am saying is that there is a difference between "faith" and "science".

mrgumby wrote:Science is provable.

Big mistake! Science proves nothing... It can only disprove! All scientists can do is build up hypothesises, and look how well they match with observation. If they match, we can move on. If they don't match, the hypothesis is wrong or needs to be refined... And we can never be sure there won't be an element which will disprove an hypothesis, even after many years of success!

But don't forget that these observations also provide some sort of probabilites that an hypothesis is wrong... If I say "somewhere in space there's a giant tea pot orbiting a star", you can't prove i'ts wrong (yet), but it's very, very unlikely, based on observations so far.

In a similar way, sentences like "I can't prove there is a god, but I can't disprove it either" are somehow mistaken... The idea that there is a god is like the idea of the giant tea pot! The hypothesis there is no god matches very well with obervation, and is therefore very likely...