Oh please. It's a work of fiction. A heavily edited and revised one at that. You wanted one contradiction? How did Judas die? There are different accounts.
What happens now that Biblical Literalism has been completely disproven?
- Thread starter synthesizer-patel
- Start date
Oh please. It's a work of fiction. A heavily edited and revised one at that. You wanted one contradiction? How did Judas die? There are different accounts.
If his god told him to write board rather than bored, who are you to question it? You are obviously under the influence of evil & cannot comprehend the true meaning. It is sealed & has not been revealed to you.
Obviously, Judas died twice in 2 different ways. This was done for the glory of gods & to confuse you.
It just depends on your point of view.
In the field was the tree.
See, that's what I'm talking about.
Making an issue about something minor, and missing the real thought behind the words of the story.
You just made my point.
Are you looking at the tree of knowledge or the tree of life.
You are both missing the forest for the trees.
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What are they?
Why don't you go open a bible and find out?
Well, the latter part worked for sure. But then, you can't really expect the stories to be remembered accurately 30 to 40 years after the fact. Especially when they were a load of made up arse to start with.
This all sounds like a cop out. My Hebrew is good because I have studied the "Book that is sealed" as in...'Don't add words to it' as in 'Don't quote Peter as if he was the Torah' as in 'Don't quote Ezekiel as if he was the Torah'.
Of course there are multiple layers to it...none of those layers can be reached unless you actually understand Hebrew. For example all of the words that are similar and not similar...kadish, kidosh, kidushin...all the same word with different meanings. Sipur, Sefor, Sipoor also the same word but different things.
Your argument is "G*d told me himself" or "G*d revealed it to me." which to me...if I am not mistaken is argument against your own religion. Since the supposed jesus came to STOP such bigotry, rather to interpret things in a definable sense of the words. Which is historical fallacy on many different levels...yet you're willing to base your whole life on this "personal interpretation" that you've chosen for yourself, in all actuality even jesus agreed with "Do not take from or add to these words" and that "someone who doesn't obey even the smallest of laws has no place in heaven"...your sad at best English translation is a violation of the first, and your unwillingness to read the laws as laws and not metaphors a violation of the second.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
That "statement" is devoid of meaning.
Ophiolite
Valued Senior Member
When you are discussing semantics, when the debate revolves around meaning, when the debate centres on the interpretation of words, in these circumstances it is not a minor matter to use a word in a completely incorrect way.
Your faux pas would have been irrelevant in a thread on gravitation, or ME terrorism. That was not the case here. Such a basic error calls into very serious question your grasp of vocabulary and thus your ability to comprehend the points under discussion.
free yourself
Registered Member
From where I see it, this whole argument about religion and ignorance, the competition between what is true and what is just religious dogma, is unfounded. A common temptation is to explain religion in general human urges, for instance in people's wish to escape misfortune or mortality or their desire to understand the universe.
Many skeptics of religion believe people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn't one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; and most importantly because it obscures the real reasons why religion is so extraordinarily widespread in human cultures.
People receive all sorts of information from all sorts of sources. All this information has some effect on the mind. Whatever you hear and whatever you see is perceived, interpreted, explained, and recorded by the various inference systems I described above. Every bit of information is fodder for the mental machinery. But then some pieces of information produce the effects that we identify as 'belief'. That is, the person starts to recall them and use them to explain or interpret particular events; they may trigger specific emotions; they may strongly influence the person's behaviour. Note that I said some pieces of information, not all. This is where the selection occurs. In ways that a good psychology of religion should describe, it so happens that only some pieces of information trigger these effects, and not others; it also happens that the same piece of information will have these effects in some people but not others. So people do not have beliefs because they somehow made their minds receptive to belief and then acquired the material for belief. They have some beliefs because, among all the material they acquired, some of it triggered these particular effects.
So you see, we cannot criticize religious fanatics for being ignorant or blind to reason, because their religious notions come from very similar non-religious mental inference systems. You could say they are doing what the mind has done best for all of human existence. That is, create religion. Think about how most religions (at least the more developed and accepted ones) have human-like Gods who are present and act in the world. Why is there this trend? Because ideas like this are relevant to us, and relevance becomes communicability and communicability becomes widespread "belief" and "fact," as many claim. PASCAL BOYER says alot about this in his book Religion Explained. It is interesting how evolution provides insight into religious origins (and also explains why the scientific community is so small: because it is natural for people to value intuition over anything else). So we can't attack the beliefs of religious people as being ignorant and unreasonable, since they only believe it because it is what is easy and natural for them to do. However, I do not make the claim that religion is a truly viable source of information, because it is after all based on a subjective view of the world after a very conditioned history.
I have read alot of responses in this forum and am astounded at how little "free thinkers" tend to look objectively about issues concerning religious credibility. I think to often we have created the notion of religion vs. science, when it is completely misunderstood that the two are in all ways conflicting. Both are important to study and gain insight from. After all, even logic and unintuitive thinking and science may be limited to what our mind can process and conceive, therefore leading to the potential reality that humanity can only have the understanding of child in the broad scope of things. However, that is a debate in itself.
This obviously has not much to do with the original topic, but it was something I noticed and contributes to the idea that in the end, the claims of The Visitor are really based on his natural tendency to form religious beliefs and maintain them, therefore leading to the conclusion that to criticize religion is to criticize our mind's adaptation and development over time to produce inferences in the form of religious concepts. It's interesting, however, that he does not see his beliefs for what they truly are. He believes because he was impacted by the religion in a stronger way than anything else, and maintains his beliefs due to the salience of religious concepts to his mind's inference systems. THAT is the reason why religion is so widespread, THAT is the reason why religion is so resistant to argument.
What is also interesting to note is what PASCAL BOYER says in the website I referenced above: "Yet even scientists go through their daily lives with an intuitive commitment to solid objects being full of matter, to people having non-physical minds, to time being irreversible, to cats being essentially different from dogs, and to objects falling down because they are heavy." Thus going back to what I said about how knowledge is limited. Ultimately, the way we receive scientific information, however unintuitive and objective compared to religious intuition, itself creates new intuitions, which are therefore subject to scrutiny just as much as religion. WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?
Perhaps I should create a new thread about the very ideas I addressed above. It's just that I am new here and want to begin somewhere. So, I apologize for the long reply and will most likely stop my sentence now...
Many skeptics of religion believe people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn't one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; and most importantly because it obscures the real reasons why religion is so extraordinarily widespread in human cultures.
People receive all sorts of information from all sorts of sources. All this information has some effect on the mind. Whatever you hear and whatever you see is perceived, interpreted, explained, and recorded by the various inference systems I described above. Every bit of information is fodder for the mental machinery. But then some pieces of information produce the effects that we identify as 'belief'. That is, the person starts to recall them and use them to explain or interpret particular events; they may trigger specific emotions; they may strongly influence the person's behaviour. Note that I said some pieces of information, not all. This is where the selection occurs. In ways that a good psychology of religion should describe, it so happens that only some pieces of information trigger these effects, and not others; it also happens that the same piece of information will have these effects in some people but not others. So people do not have beliefs because they somehow made their minds receptive to belief and then acquired the material for belief. They have some beliefs because, among all the material they acquired, some of it triggered these particular effects.
So you see, we cannot criticize religious fanatics for being ignorant or blind to reason, because their religious notions come from very similar non-religious mental inference systems. You could say they are doing what the mind has done best for all of human existence. That is, create religion. Think about how most religions (at least the more developed and accepted ones) have human-like Gods who are present and act in the world. Why is there this trend? Because ideas like this are relevant to us, and relevance becomes communicability and communicability becomes widespread "belief" and "fact," as many claim. PASCAL BOYER says alot about this in his book Religion Explained. It is interesting how evolution provides insight into religious origins (and also explains why the scientific community is so small: because it is natural for people to value intuition over anything else). So we can't attack the beliefs of religious people as being ignorant and unreasonable, since they only believe it because it is what is easy and natural for them to do. However, I do not make the claim that religion is a truly viable source of information, because it is after all based on a subjective view of the world after a very conditioned history.
I have read alot of responses in this forum and am astounded at how little "free thinkers" tend to look objectively about issues concerning religious credibility. I think to often we have created the notion of religion vs. science, when it is completely misunderstood that the two are in all ways conflicting. Both are important to study and gain insight from. After all, even logic and unintuitive thinking and science may be limited to what our mind can process and conceive, therefore leading to the potential reality that humanity can only have the understanding of child in the broad scope of things. However, that is a debate in itself.
This obviously has not much to do with the original topic, but it was something I noticed and contributes to the idea that in the end, the claims of The Visitor are really based on his natural tendency to form religious beliefs and maintain them, therefore leading to the conclusion that to criticize religion is to criticize our mind's adaptation and development over time to produce inferences in the form of religious concepts. It's interesting, however, that he does not see his beliefs for what they truly are. He believes because he was impacted by the religion in a stronger way than anything else, and maintains his beliefs due to the salience of religious concepts to his mind's inference systems. THAT is the reason why religion is so widespread, THAT is the reason why religion is so resistant to argument.
What is also interesting to note is what PASCAL BOYER says in the website I referenced above: "Yet even scientists go through their daily lives with an intuitive commitment to solid objects being full of matter, to people having non-physical minds, to time being irreversible, to cats being essentially different from dogs, and to objects falling down because they are heavy." Thus going back to what I said about how knowledge is limited. Ultimately, the way we receive scientific information, however unintuitive and objective compared to religious intuition, itself creates new intuitions, which are therefore subject to scrutiny just as much as religion. WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?
Perhaps I should create a new thread about the very ideas I addressed above. It's just that I am new here and want to begin somewhere. So, I apologize for the long reply and will most likely stop my sentence now...
free yourself
Registered Member
Well sorry, there is no website referenced because I cannot show links until I have at least 20 posts. Just look up "Why Is Religion Natural?" in Google and I'm sure you will find the correct website.
Ophiolite
Valued Senior Member
By accepting the notions of these non-religious mental inference systems the 'religious fanatics' remain ignorant.
By refusing to consider alternatives to these non-religious mental inference systems the religious fanatics remain blind to reason.
Your concise description of the process demonstrates clearly that your central thesis is flawed. Arriving at religious beliefs may be a natural process, but it sure as hell maintains ignorance and involves the rejection of reason.
The Bible referred to Earth's rotation on it's axis?
The reference to Noah is interesting. Not to sharp shoot your post, It is not a myth that Noah built a boat to house a pair of every animal on Earth.
It's understandable that many have trouble with reading about supernatural events in a non-fiction context.
Especially on a science board like this.
Is there a problem with stopping time for 24 hours?
The Creator of Heaven and Earth needs what to accomplish this?
No Ark possible either?
I would hate to live in the dark little cage that limits possibilities to that kind of reasoning.
To quote a line from the "Matrix", which was an allegory to the Bible.
"You were born in a prison for your mind"
The truth is the only thing that can set you free.
Like a little child before they are told; "it's always here, it's always there"
Logic and reasoning are the bands the hold you fast.
I'll give you another example from the Bible of something supernatural.
The Bible says God turned Abraham and Sarah back from old age and made them young again.
You won't find any one scripture that says it.
You have to read the whole story about them and put it in context to see what happened.
Two Kings wanted Sarah as a wife because she was so fair and beautiful.
Once when she was young, and again after Melchesidec gave Abraham the promise of Isaac in one years time.
They were made young again so Sarah could have the child.
Abraham lying for fear a king would kill him to get her, happened twice.
The second time he was a hundred years old and Sarah was ninety.
You might as well add this one to your list with the 24 hour time loop, and the ark full of animals.
It's just as true.
Especially on a science board like this.
Is there a problem with stopping time for 24 hours?
The Creator of Heaven and Earth needs what to accomplish this?
No Ark possible either?
I would hate to live in the dark little cage that limits possibilities to that kind of reasoning.
To quote a line from the "Matrix", which was an allegory to the Bible.
"You were born in a prison for your mind"
The truth is the only thing that can set you free.
Like a little child before they are told; "it's always here, it's always there"
Logic and reasoning are the bands the hold you fast.
I'll give you another example from the Bible of something supernatural.
The Bible says God turned Abraham and Sarah back from old age and made them young again.
You won't find any one scripture that says it.
You have to read the whole story about them and put it in context to see what happened.
Two Kings wanted Sarah as a wife because she was so fair and beautiful.
Once when she was young, and again after Melchesidec gave Abraham the promise of Isaac in one years time.
They were made young again so Sarah could have the child.
Abraham lying for fear a king would kill him to get her, happened twice.
The second time he was a hundred years old and Sarah was ninety.
You might as well add this one to your list with the 24 hour time loop, and the ark full of animals.
It's just as true.
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How would you know if your thinking hasn't been affected by the devil?
The frightening thing is you may not be trolling.
If you are making some sort of point or statement, say it.