Taboo Topics (Heavily moderated)

[Kamak]

The burden of evidence is on the people who say that something exists, not the people who say it doesnt, since the lack of evidence is the basis of disbelief.

Both sides have the burden of evidence as both sides are making a claim. You cannot say "you haven't provided evidence, ergo, the opposite conclusion is correct". If you are making the claim that God doesn't exist, and are a part of a dialogue where you insist the opposing side provides evidence, you're just as culpable for defending your assertion as they are for theirs.

[Riku]

Stranger, can I ask why you are so aggressive against religion? You don't follow any of it, fine, that's your business. But you seem to actively harbor anger against those that practice religion.

[TheStranger]

Philosophical reasons. I consider the practice of organized religion to be actively harmful to social progress, like any other form of dogma.

[Riku]

I would offer up that each faith has had cultural relevance, and while some social effects may be seen as negative, they have also always had at least enough positive effects to negate it, otherwise they would not still be surviving organizations. Also, in much of historical western society, a lot of scientific research was never intended to conflict with any religion, because no one felt the need to. It was just "HOW THIS SHIT WORKS" not "HOW THIS SHIT WORKS WHILE PROVING THIS GROUP WRONG" like what many people outside of the research seem to take it as.

[TheStranger]

Im aware that science and religion never actually clashed nearly as much as pop culture would have you belive, my main gripe with religion is the impact it has on critical thinking and social behavior. If you think God is on your side, there is NOTHING you will hesitate to do.

[Reyo]

Stranger, I can't help but that that that is extremely absolute, and final reasoning for something so general an idea.

"Organized religion does nothing but hinder social progress and critical thinking" is a strange thing for me to hear when I distinctly remember that most, if not all, of the volunteering oportunities I had in middle/high school were church run.

Organzed religion isn't what causes the issues everyone associates it with, it's when it's corrupted by shitty individuals with their own agenda. When it's used as a positive influence, it provides direction and meaning. When you get those aformentioned shitty individuals involved, that's when you get genocide.

[Tall-Hatted Yanimae]

The Bible is a written work that has a lack of clear definition and somewhat ambiguous stories that allows readers to apply a new situation they may encounter throughout their lives to the same stories they've always read.

You will not read the same story twice when you compare it to how you interpreted it at an early age to one at a later age.

Your experiences change you. Your perception of reality and how you fit within the cogs that form the universe change constantly.

The book provides new insight with every new experience you may have. It is heavy with so much history and people of days gone by and perhaps you'll come to understand a person in the book that you once found detestable.

Perhaps someone you related to and felt was a saint no longer fits that notion because of how you see them and what you perceive as true sainthood has changed.

You understand yourself in this fashion. How has your experience in this reality, this dimension, this world changed you so dramatically that you understand a completely hidden side of this passage in this old book you didn't see before? Why have you changed in this way? What effected you to change?

You can come up with all the reasons in the world why people do what they do and try to boil it down to "because they interpreted the bible in this fashion and so it influenced them".
But how about you go deeper than that? The Bible merely states. It does not influence one's decisions. People influence their own decisions.

You can tell a lot about someone by how they interpret a passage in the Bible. (Or really, how they interpret anything ever.) But the Bible especially.

You can take it as literal or metaphoric but it doesn't truly matter. What matters is what YOU get out of it.
Reading the Bible is suppose to be part of your own personal journey towards understanding God. Each path begins with a different life experience then is paved through one's upbringing, beliefs and the challenges they 'll face. A path of an Atheist is different from a Christian and both have their own unique struggle over their beliefs. Therefore it's impossible to comment on how someone's path will end between them and God.
It's because of that, an Atheist's path will hold challenges that I'm not interested in having. I had a taste of it and it's definitely not the one I'm here to experience. This is why I stay clear of their paths by not mingling with any in my personal life.

It's sad and terrible when people attempt to use their holy texts as excuses for their behavior, but really blaming religion isn't the solution.
In fact, let me direct you to a few sources about a few known examples, Al-Qaeda and Religion as a driving force for Wars.

This is a good article.

Similarly, the 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any mosque. See this, this, this, etc. Hardly the acts of devout Muslims.

He linked a lot more sources.
If they were SO devout that they were willing to kill so many people over their beliefs, why did they break their values?

Here's a interesting study.

As part of a special they were airing on the subject, the BBC asked Dr. Greg Austin, a research Fellow in the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, to investigate religion's role in the history of war. Austin, with the help of colleagues Todd Kranock and Thom Oommen, conducted the War Audit, where they evaluated all the major conflicts over the past 3,500 years -- 73 wars in all. The wars were rated on a 0-5 scale for religious motivation, with 5 indicating the highest religious motivation. So for example, The First and Second Punic Wars (264-241 and 218-201 BC respectively) rated a 0, while the Crusades (1097-1291) rated a 5.

Brace yourselves, those for whom religion equals war. The majority of all wars (44/73 or 60 percent) had no religious motivation whatsoever -- a zero rating. Only three wars -- the Arab conquests of 632-732, the much ballyhooed Crusades, and the Reformation Wars of the 16th and 17th centuries - earned a 5, and were thus considered to be truly religious wars. Only seven wars earned a rating of 3 or more -- less than 10 percent. Thus, the vast majority of all wars involved either no religious motivation or only a modest one. The authors concluded by noting that "there have been few genuinely religious wars in the last 100 years. The Israel/Arab wars were wars of nationalism and liberation of territory" (p. 16).

The authors of the War Audit claim that their work was not intended as "a piece of original academic analysis" (p. 1), but instead as something that would "stimulate discussion rather than provide the final word on the role of religion in violent conflict over time" (p. 15).

The question over what is driving people to commit senseless deeds in the name of the Lord is complex and it's rather ridiculous to try and say "religion stunts progress."
I mean really, what is religion in it's essence? A set of values that groups of like-minded people created through the experiences they've shared. Really, religions are basically the collections of history that different ethnic groups have compiled as time passed and was inspired by the experiences they all shared.
Religion seems like it was formed to provide a guidance. As spiritual guidance for a community.
Some fail because communities fail to be adaptive to change and fail to adapt their values to new challenges they face.

There is more to this story than just people going haywire because God/their Priest told them to.

My thoughts. Take with it as you will. I do my best to approach my reasoning in a practical manner but alas, I'm still rather young and uneducated.

[Lotharu]

Yeah, we have the Ten Commandments which specificaally say that you arent allowed to kill, but people still do, in the Bible, under Gods orders, and presumably, thats what these guys think theyre doing.

Just pointing out, in the Ten Commandments, they say "Thou shalt not murder" not kill. God telling people to kill this opposing faction is no murder, but war. Some may view it as murder, of course, but in the bible God telling you to kill these people is not murder.

[Riku]

In the expanded commandments and old testament law that the Israelites were said to have been given, it actually specifies that soldiers fighting under the orders of their king are not counted under the sin of murder. And according to old texts, the Israelites either had God acting as their king and passing down information through the judges, or in later generations, they had actual kings telling them what to do. So basically, if God or the king told them to do it, they were exempt from the damnation of the sin, though not the personal guilt.

[Shad]

Dire@ Itd be fine if thats all it was, but people demand that their bullshit gets to decide social policy, and they can go fuck themselves if they think Im going to obey the laws their imaginary friend sets up.

This is the kind of tone we do not want to see in this thread. Please remain polite, calm and open-minded, if you don't want Taboo Topics be locked.

[Brekkjern]

I see a lot of comments about prooving the existence or nonexistence of something, and quite frankly, from a scientific point of view, most of this is complete BS. I am going to pull an example from my science textbook from 8th grade. This should be fairly familiar to all of you.

I claim the moon is made of cheese. You ask me for evidence of this claim. I build a rocket to go to the moon and bring back a sample. The sample is cheese, thus the moon is made of cheese.

Wait.. That's not how it goes... I would laugh in your face and tell you to prove me wrong.

This is plainly not how science works. You make a claim for somethings existence and then prove its existence using facts. Atheists don't claim that God doesn't exist, at least if you follow the textbook definition of atheism. Militant atheism has a tendency to make these claims, which muddies the water rather a lot.

This is how the earlier example usually works:

I claim I have a unicorn in my garage. I could prove this by opening the garage door and let you see it. However, the unicorn can only be seen by me. This puts us in a predicament because then I can't prove to you that it exists because you obviously can't see that it is there. This would make my claim of its existence rather difficult. I would have to find some way of measuring it. We could try touching it, but it is incorporeal for anyone but me. Hearing it? I am the only one that can hear it. Smell it? I am the only one who can smell it.

You would naturally agree that the unicorn obviously is not there. Any form of measurement turns out to be negative. The only other conclusions would be that I am either full of shit or mentally ill. The unicorn isn't there. The proof isn't reproducible because I am the only one able to sense it. You don't have to prove that it doesn't exist because I can't prove that it does. How does this apply to religion?

The bible claims that God exists. The christian claims the bible is correct. The bible does not prove the existence of God. The burden of proof lies on the christian.

The militant atheist claims that the bible is wrong. There is no God. But since there is no evidence of a god to begin with, there is nothing to prove.

The neutral atheist thinks the discussion is stupid and goes on with his life.

[TheStranger]

Yeah, we have the Ten Commandments which specificaally say that you arent allowed to kill, but people still do, in the Bible, under Gods orders, and presumably, thats what these guys think theyre doing.

Just pointing out, in the Ten Commandments, they say "Thou shalt not murder" not kill. God telling people to kill this opposing faction is no murder, but war. Some may view it as murder, of course, but in the bible God telling you to kill these people is not murder.

Im fairly certain that the Israelites victims saaw it as murder, yes. Either something is a sin or it isnt, building up a complex system of "oh, its totally okay if you do it THIS way" makes the system so ripe for abuse that the morality becomes meaaningless anyway.

[Kamak]

That's not how science works. Science doesn't prove anything with "facts", it can only support or discredit a theory with the data collected. In your example, if you came back from the moon with cheese, the data supports the existence of cheese on the moon, but doesn't tell us that the moon is definitively made of cheese. Maybe just a small part of it is cheese, or maybe the outer layer is cheese, or maybe the cheese discovered is foreign. More data would need to be collected to test the theory. Even so, the theory can never be proven, as there's always the possibility of unforeseen factors. It can only be disproven through data that heavily conflicts with what the theory postulates. Therefore if we find rocks on a moon hike, then the moon isn't made of cheese (at least not entirely).

Also, in a debate, burden of proof, bar none, always falls to the person making a claim. There are many atheists that argue that the burden rests on Christians alone as they're the ones making the claim of existence, but the instant an atheist (or anyone) makes a claim about whether god exists definitively (as an assertion, not a simple statement of personal belief), they are responsible for providing proof that supports their claim (and, outside of science, proves it).

But the bad thing about this is that God's existence can't be proven or disproven with any certainty outside of personal interpretation, and nothing short of God appearing before everyone at once is going to end the issue for good (as there's not really a good way to disprove God either, you just get into Bigfoot territory at best).

All the same though, I wish this issue would disappear. I hate how heated it can get with both sides misrepresenting eachother's views, denying their side's responsibility in something, the constant need to show up or talk down to the other side, and the general ugliness that comes about. There are wonderful and terrible people on both sides, which is true of almost any group. It just seems silly to argue about something that likely won't change.

[Brekkjern]

I made the example simple for the sake of argument. You are correct though. I just generally experience that it is easier to start with the simple near-truth before going to the absolutely correct way of going about it. An example here would be atoms. In elementary school you are taught that they are the smallest thing because we don't know enough about it to learn about subatomic particles. We need the basis to understand how higher order systems work before we can go on to the lower order. The same goes for logic and scientific theory.

[Tammerath]

On the point about the Bible being the word of God, it's true that the books of the Bible were written down by people who were inspired by God. However, various political institutions (e.g. the Byzantine emperors, the English monarchy) had their own versions of the Bible commissioned that unavoidably altered what was actually written.

In short, the Bible contains what amounts to a millennia-spanning game of Telephone.