As LG often says, if you're not willing to look into what you actually mean by terms like "real," "evidence" and "true," then there isn't really much point in discussing the thread topic.
Concept of God arising in multiple, different cultures
- Thread starter rodereve
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As LG often says, if you're not willing to look into what you actually mean by terms like "real," "evidence" and "true," then there isn't really much point in discussing the thread topic.
Why do you think they screw it up?
Frankly, I think one can only be pissed off with variety (religious or otherwise) if one operates out of a sense of entitlement according to which the world and people should be as one desires them to be.
And you haven't answered my question:
How do you know that religious doctrines are merely made up (or fantasized, or guessed or whichever term you wish to use)?
What evidence?
That there exist reports from meetings of church officials where they debated on how to interpret a particular scripture and what is to be considered doctrine and what isn't?
Compare the doctrines of say, Roman Catholicism and a Protestant doctrine. On principle, they have the same source text for basic premises, ie. the Bible, but Catholics and Protestants have come to different conclusions. That seems like it is due extrapolation (extrapolation being a biased, selective, unpredictable process).
I've never stated that I have come to such a conclusion, only that there are things in religious doctrines that seem off. Ie., the question is, Whence religious variety, if they all supposedly have the same source?
Extrapolation (and the variety that comes with it) could explain religious variety.
You can see right in this thread that even though we start off with the same idea of the omnimax God, by extrapolation, I come to different ideas than you do.
I'm just considering possible explanations for religious variety.
Maybe to see the common denominator, we need to consider the mode in which the extrapolation may have been conducted.
A simple example: an angry person will interpret "God loves all living beings" differently than a person in a good mood, and they'll make different extrapolations, come to different conclusions.
Maybe here you should consider why you'd need to judge them by their legitimacy or lack thereof.
It's not like you actually intend to take up any of them, do you?
Maybe superheroes were invented after the model set by God.
I'm discussing a topic.
You need to add the atheist religion versus other religions to this list, since it is the modern bully. The dynamics are the same, which is why you project onto the past but can't see the present. The atheists think their way is the proper way to salvation and find it necessary to undermine and convert all the other religious infidels. It is not about co-existence. The unconscious dynamics are the same even if what is on the surface defines itself as not a religion. Liberalism is known for a dual standard.
The philosophy of science makes it unable to address religion in a rational way. If I had a dream, is this natural data verifiable by science in terms of details? The answer is no, because there is no machine that can see my dream so it can be investigated in the third person. It is real in the first person, only. Therefore, my particular dream does not have proof according to science. What is real has no proof simply because you cannot investigate it, in the third person.
Let us try this experiment. Let one of the religious critics tell us about a dream they remember. Then we will use the philosophy of science to determine whether this naturally generated data is subject to verification. Then we will tell you are did not have a dream since you have no proof. Science is lame in certain areas of the mind. Science was designed to factor internal data out, not include it. If someone said they saw god, this would be even be harder to investigate in the third person, than a dream, for science.
Let us run an experiment to define the rational limits of science. The denial of a real dream due to no third person verification is not rational but based on faith in dogma. Objective science will accept its limitations. Science religion due to atheism will not accept these limitations since it has to bow to the atheist religion, who needs this technicality.
I will tell you a dream and you tell me is it is real or not? This is baby food litmus test since this data is part of billions of data points generated each day. You tell us if this exists according to the rules of science?
I have a graduate degree in engineering and have liked science since I was a child. I am aware of the limits of science, since I like to push the boundaries in all directions to test those limitations. I am pointing the above out, so science will up its game and not stay restriction by an association with the atheist religion. Science is supposed to be objective, even to it own limitations. But the atheist dogma and fanatics will apply pressure to make sure the deck remains stacked. Science held hostage. My beef is not against science but against the corruption within science. This is a case in point.
That even before there was a church, stories were stolen from multiple sources and presented as truth. That there are passages which contradict other passages within the same book, and phenomena explained incorrectly based on the information we have now. That iconography within various religions are exactly as you'd expect them to be for people of that given time and place; that the rules and laws within various religions are exactly as you'd expect them to be for people of that given time and place. That so many important facts are flat-out wrong, or omitted completely. That religion at its most rudimentary form seems to be nothing more than ancestor idolization and the worship of celestial bodies based on superstitions (which are based on misunderstandings of how the world works), meaning that this alleged "first cause" that all other religion is extrapolated from told its people to pray to the sun and the moon for good harvests, and to kill people for giving them the evil eye and other such nonsense. If you think that's a more plausible explanation than "They made it up," more power to you, but you've got all your work ahead of you in explaining why I should believe it instead of the simpler, better answer.
Well, okay, that will get you as far back as the Bible. How do you go from there? How do you maintain this premise when faced with the lineage of the stories within?
Well, that's not entirely true. You said you thought there was a limit to what could be said of religious doctrine, and "made up" was beyond that limit. But anyway, I think extrapolation could be part of the explanation, but even so, it only takes the variety so far (such as the differences between Jews and Christians, but not Mohawk Indians and Buddhists)
Yes, very much so. But that doesn't explain the whole of religious variety.
You seem to have your mind made up.
But even in those cases--such as Islam versus Christianity, which effectively mirrors the bad mood/good mood example--the common denominators are apparent. As are the areas where they don't share common philosophical basis.
Maybe here you should remember that we're having a discussion about their legitimacy.
...is that it? You're just going to throw that out there without any supporting argument?
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
I am willing to look if someone can point out something to look at. Miracles always seem to have happened in ancient history. Of course they happened in ancient history. There was no scientific explanation of the phenomenon.
I am willing to discuss an abstraction, but not when the abstraction has undefined qualities. Creative Force is not very definitive.
I am making the claim that the concept of Potential expressed itself as a concept of a divine God in multiple, different cultures and I can define Potential as equal to a concept of God or Deity, or in Metaphysical science.
IMO, it was inevitable that man would try to interpret unexplained phenomena. One can make a fire out of sticks, but how do you get fire from the sky? Must be some intelligent being, animals can't make fires, not since Dragons anyway.
In the end every study of the universe is trying to fashion answers for a TOE. Physical science is restricted in investigation of abstractions, however the field of meta-physics is rapidly expanding, IOW, our knowledge of physical science allow us to extrapolate functions which are currently beyond direct observation.
Another concept of an abstract dynamic force is CDT (causal dynamic triangulation). This is a causal (as the name implies) geometry, which functions from gross reality to the most vague and subtle expressions and is consistent with both GR and QM and the concept of what Bohm calls a Holomovement.
I have a problem with this thread only in the interpretations of god. Which God? If variety in concepts of God are allowed, that opens the door for meta-physics to be discussed in the same arena. God is not an exclusive abstraction of Universal Wholeness , I believe this is often overlooked. But then all scriptural Gods are "exclusive" concepts of a Universal Causality in multiple and different cultures. As they say, "one man's religion is another's voodoo".
elte
Valued Senior Member
There's volumes of religious ideas all based on the wildly speculative concept of supernaturalism. It's a monumental process of circular thought.
I wish that humankind had been faster at admitting that it's quite obvious that the foundation is just a guess--a guess that looks wilder and wilder to observant onlookers as time passes.
Because what they are based upon, the idea of supernaturalism, is nothing but pure conjecture. It's somewhat like humankind doing all kinds of preparation involving huge amounts of time and resources to get ready for an exodus to Sirius or Betelgeuse to colonize a planet that the prophets of the Cosmos say will be a new pristine and resource-rich Earth. That could appeal to a lot of people in this age of ecological deterioration and imminent standard of living declines. It'd be like Heaven's Gate on a massive scale.
I have to ask. How is it possible that you have a degree in engineering? Why does it seem like you don't have a clue about science and physics. Even basic mechanics seem lost to you. Have you simply forgotten what you learned?
elte
Valued Senior Member
Atheists aren't any better or worse people than believers in the supernatural, and they support what they believe, which anyone might do. Atheists are nothing with respect to aggressiveness compared to Islamists who regularly kill people over religion.
Science can be used to determine that a dream is real. Brain waves can be monitored and rapid eye movement can be observed happening.
Understanding things on a fundamental level is key to understanding everything else.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Oh yes, science is to blame for all this spiritual confusion. Science has tried to drive a wedge in the peaceful exercise of religion for such a long time now, someone should do something about this.
Your particular dream has no proof of anything in any discipline, because it is but a dream and is not real. Religion has gotten away with unprovable but Revealed Truth through dreams for centuries.
No, no, obfuscation. A scientist will never tell you you did not have a dream. They will tell you only that dreams are not real to anyone else but the dreamer. Is mirage in the desert real? Try quenching your thirst at an oasis mirage.
More nonsense. You now have introduced another straw man into your vocabulary. SCIENCE RELIGION DUE TO ATHEISM? What on earth does that mean?
This is a fools litmus test and would only work on babies. C'mon WW you can do better than this. A dream is a mental projection and not real to anyone else but you. Unless you can come up with someone having the same dream at the same time. If not, it is you who is lacking in corroborating testimony. And if you start citing religious ecstasy as corroboration of truth, then you should talk to a few psychiatrists about mass hysteria.
What is atheist dogma? Example please. Now you have accused science of being corrupted, because you cannot prove that your dreams are real, that god speaks to you, that angels bring messages on silvery wings. Please!!
Read up on Hypatia and see who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor.
http://www.womanastronomer.com/hypatia.htm
You are wasting your time talking to it.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
WW, I am sorry if I sounded ad hominem. That was not the intent, but when a religious person attacks atheism as somehow false and dishonest for having no belief in a Divine Supernatural being, I feel that I am being attacked from an argument of authority, and I have a right to vigorously defend my position.
Dreaming of God does not make God real, the same as dreaming of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night are also not real. Find comfort in your self generated spiritual revelations. You are your own God but you cannot define anyone else's God and that is a truth.
Dreaming of God does not make God real, the same as dreaming of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night are also not real. Find comfort in your self generated spiritual revelations. You are your own God but you cannot define anyone else's God and that is a truth.
No, please, it deserves every ad hominem in the book because they all apply.
Kant: "Reason inevitably creates objects for itself. Hence everything that thinks* has a God . . . [moral affairs] which [the subject] prescribes to itself, and yet as if another higher person had made it a rule for him." --Opus Postumum (21:83, 22:129)
[* A general tendency for such a "species", not necessarily every individual of it.]
Sure, but the notion of arriving at "fundamentals" via empiricism is technically as feasible as jumping over your knees ... hence its more about being a crutch for a weak ego than a valid tool for dissecting the essence of reality
Citing an empirical foundation as evidence for something that, by definition, is not an empirically approachable term
then I would argue that you incorrect to say that religion, or indeed any thing that revolves around an explicit term, has any requirement in the realm of scientific validity
Unless he has got something to say about how one can empirically approach a term beyond the tacit, there is not much point
The problem is that it is only a tacit truth .... hence anything labelled as "truth" in science has a host of conditions that come along with it
As much as I am not a catholic, the proceedings of the ecumenical council over the past several hundred years offers a good clue that even the orthodoxy of cathlocism can distinguish between a primary and secondary characteristic of religious practice to meet up with changing times
Then note how accepting something like evolution does not undermine the prevalent ideology of religion ... much like breakthroughs in the field of physics did not completely undermine and destroy the field of biology (although more than one physicist has ran away from the field of biology with their tail between their legs) .
No
Its the nature of any explicit claim that it lies outside of empiricism.
Geez, even the claim that everything real can be empirically validated cannot be empirically validated.
:shrug:
I am using it in the sense that one is advocating a particular take on reality for the sake of maintaining a certain status quo for the sake of power (whether it be political, academic, fiscal/economic or cultural)
I think you would be hard pressed to find anything that attracts vast swaths of money to be devoid of any ideological framework.
IOW its one thing to talk of the philosophy of something (whether it be science or religion) and quite another to talk of the institutions that represent it.
For instance there are good cases for companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Mosanto acting more in the interest of filling their coffers and maintaining their client base than enriching and furthering the fields of science they specialize in.
On the contrary, if one has difficulty approaching issues of "proof" outside of empirical models, the entire theological issue (or indeed any issue that deals with the explicit) is simply out of bounds for them.
IOW there is no basis for saying "there is no evidence", only "the subject in question is not capable of being in/validated by empiricism" ... which of course is something you will never hear come from the mouth of a person stacked to the hilt in ideology diametrically opposed to theism
:shrug:
On the contrary, the notion of reductionism is nothing but pure conjecture.
IOW if the notion that everything that is real is capable of being empirically validated is not in itself a premise capable of being empirically validated, your immediate problem is negotiating yourself out of the double bind before you start navigating others toward it.
Would you not be in danger of throwing baby out with the bath water?
We have to start with some basic assumptions.
If not you never start.
If those basic assumptions prove inadequate then we change them.
If those assumptions hold then good.
Issue arises when assumptions or lack of knowledge can not address an issue yet alternative assumptions can not be validated.
In that case either conclude ignorance or agnosticism.
In my view better to start with assumptions that can't be self-validated but allow understanding relative to those assumptions, than start with assumptions that are self-validating but lack explanatory capability.
What are your self-validating assumptions?