Religion Hard-sell

last SG · 2009-07-08T01:01:04+00:00

To me religion is a personal thing. Don't tell others what to believe, don't let others tell you what to believe. You go find out for yourselfyup. Don't tell...

laurence82 SG

Militant or negative evangelism should be stamped out like the dirt they are

including those who support people evangelising to kids in guise of pedophilia

Jianye SG

Militant or negative evangelism should be stamped out like the dirt they are

including those who support people evangelising to kids in guise of pedophilia

Yup, that's right....there have been confirmed reports of sexual abuse on children..not only that, torture and coercion was also used...

Herzog_Zwei SG

how to prove that god exists? what abt ghosts?

The spiritual world doesn't exist.

S.gal83 SG

People should be allowed to believe in what they want, and left alone. Religions are good, but when to the extreme, they can become bad.

Herzog_Zwei SG

People should be allowed to believe in what they want, and left alone. Religions are good, but when to the extreme, they can become bad.

So? As long as their religion has conflict with science, then religion is bad as it causes people to be disjointed from reality.

Stevenson101 SG

So? As long as their religion has conflict with science, then religion is bad as it causes people to be disjointed from reality.

Belief in science doesn't neccessarily come with a grasp of reality either.

Herzog_Zwei SG

Belief in science doesn't neccessarily come with a grasp of reality either.

Yoh, knowing reality is knowing science, so what's the difference?

Stevenson101 SG

Yoh, knowing reality is knowing science, so what's the difference?

Eh not really from what i can tell.

Science offers the theory on how something in reality works, and not everyone really agrees on it. I'm not talking about the small theories like mass and simple chemical reactions.

Most people aren't schooled in the complex equations of the world and normally just take on faith whatever theory suits their understanding of the world around them.

Talk global warming for example, there've already been so much debates on whether human activity really caused it and each side has brought out their own army of scientists and theories to support it.

Senators in America have been applaused for calling global warming a hoax.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/26/broun-globalwarming-hoax/

I don't argue with the basic premise that understanding science would give us a stronger grasp on reality.

But the human brain however, is not a logic based engine. It functions by making leaps of faith about how something works and then figuring how it works in hindsight.

Religion isn't some foreign disease tainting the logic based engine, but a creation of it.

Thus the question would be whether we really "know" and "understand" science, or do we just take on faith that the theory explains what we understand?

The statement itself is sound, but in practice not as straightforward when applied to humans.

Midlusionz SG

Lol i love this topic .. Hard sell is the word

S.gal83 SG

So? As long as their religion has conflict with science, then religion is bad as it causes people to be disjointed from reality.

Not really. Religion can give people hope in life, sometimes. So long as people recognises that science takes authority over religion, it is all right for people to follow religion. For me, even though I worship Satan, I see him more as a figure that helps me when science fails to help me. Satan advocates freedom, and also favors seeking after knowledge. Therefore, my worship of Satan does not take away my belief in
Science.

(But I prefer humanity over Science. I prefer history, literature, more "arts" kind of subject.)

Talking about religions: Notice people usually just take the good side of the religion. (Example: Christians and muslims generally don't think much or talk much about how their god want all non-believers to die and even suffer in torture forever. They prefer to talk about how their god wants them to do good deeds.)

Some of them can follow their religions so blindly that they just believe everything their religion say. That is bad. For instance, when I tell Christians that I am a Satanist. They automatically think I kill babies and animals. Somehow, they cannot believe that someone who worships Satan can believe in doing charity works and helping people. To them, Satan is evil. Full-stop. They don't even bother to think that naturally, Satan is evil, only from the Christian bible's perspective. Other than the bible, there are no other proofs to say he is evil.

They also don't think that the bible will naturally say that Satan is evil. The bible is, after-all, written from God's perspective. And assuming God really is the author behinds the christian bible, he is definitely not going to write a nice story about someone who dares to stand up against him and rebels against him.

Some christians, therefore, cannot see that the bible is really a bias, one-sided account on the story of Satan.

If I, or some other theistic Satanists really believe Satan is evil, will we still worship him? I am not talking about all Satanists. Every religion has their bad apples. I am talking about the law-abiding, harmless Satanists.

I advocate looking from two-sided views. If I can accept that christians worship what, to me, is a violent God, why can't they accept me when I worship Satan?

I also advocate Equal freedom for all religions that don't kill people, don't kill animals, and don't harm others. That includes Jehovah Witness, Mormon, Satanism, Paganism and every religion in this world.

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

Actually I think some people have a misunderstanding of Science.

Science is an attempt to model reality based on the laws of reason and logic that exist beyond science. It is not the end all to the question of our existence. It is good at telling us the HOW of things, but not the WHY of things... that is a question for philosphy. What conclusions you draw from science depends on what MINDSET you bring to Science.

Hence Science is a tool to help confirm what you already believe, but it cannot tell you what to believe. Note that the worldview that says that only things that can be verified by science should be valid is not science itself, but an opinion coming from beyond science that results from a certain way of looking at the world.

So of course it is no surprise that if you start with such a mindset, everything is going to look to you as if Religion any anything non-emphrical indeed, is totally invalid.

marcteng SG

Actually I think some people have a misunderstanding of Science.

So of course it is no surprise that if you start with such a mindset, everything is going to look to you as if Religion any anything non-emphrical indeed, is totally invalid.

ya i know what you are trying to say. god is behind everything and our salvation is thru god and there is only one god lol.

I dun blame u.

Stevenson101 SG

ya i know what you are trying to say. god is behind everything and our salvation is thru god and there is only one god lol.

I dun blame u.

Don't think that's what he was going for there...

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

ya i know what you are trying to say. god is behind everything and our salvation is thru god and there is only one god lol.

I dun blame u.

I think you miss my point. That is not the thesis of my post, you assumed that anything I said would be an attempt to convince you of a theistic position. That is your assumption, not mine.

What I said is basic knowledge. What conclusion you get from science depends on what philosophy you bring to science. We cannot say anything about the human condition until we start to examine our own beliefs and the basis for them. If not you get the case of people who denounce religion on seemingly rational grounds, but yet adhere to a lot of worldviews that are equally irrational under the very same logic they use to proof, or disprove it.

SingaporeTyrannosaur SG

And that's the problem with naturalism, it saws off the branch it is sitting on. One might say the entirety of all religious experience is nothing more then a collective human delusion that arose from entirely natural processes, however if he does this from the viewpoint of science, and that is our entire world is entirely a close-system order or natural law in which the very minds who observe them are subject to... then there is no reason to trust our own senses at all.

In fact each and every thought and opinion is nothing more then a series of interactions of the atoms in our brain. Religious thought is just another arrangement of them. But neither really say anything about reality if we conclude that naturalism is the only cause and reason for things. Because we've questioned the very ground we stood on to make any judgement in the first place.

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