re: #53 LudwigVanQuixote

OK as to atheism and montheism and isms in general.

The critiques of atheists to religion are necessary. They force religious people to stay honest. However, ironicly, any statement about a deity existing or not is a faith based statement. If one believes in God, the atheist will go on and on about how there is no proof for God. Very well… That is why it is called faith.

However, a definitive statement that God does not exist also is made in the absence of proof - and must always remain unproven since lack of observation can never prove lack of existence.

The irony is the athiest who gets himself in a bunch over this is being just as much a fundamentalist as those he excoriates and for the exact same philosophical reasons.

If you want to get scientific and say that faith is not scientific, you are correct. That is why it is called faith. Again ironicly, there is no scientific reason to definitively say God does not exist. The atheist who chortles about how enlightened he is by “disproving” God has no data to do so.Again, he is arguing his faith.

The only actually scientific stance on the question is agnosticism.

But this is all a side show. The excesses and horrors perpetrated by religious people are terrible to list and impossible to deny. Of course the same could be said about atheists as well. Last I checked the Khmer Rouge and the Red Army and the Chinese Army and the Cultural revolution were all atheist movements. Come to think of it, Imperial Japan was not a religious order either - nor were the Nazis.

From this we can conclude that the horrors of history have more to do with the way that people abuse their beliefs than what those beliefs actually are.

The end argument for thinking people to make, IMHO is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A good debate with a thinking atheist keeps religious folks like me smart and like all philosophical debates helps me to refine my arguments and thoughts. I ask that the other side remember that not every religious statement is horrible a-priori and the many of the teachings that would also be wiped away if you got rid of the whole enterprise, are things you might actually also admire - things like: social justice, duty to those in need, kindness and compassion for those around you, love of culture and continuity, self sacrifice, refraining from instant gratification in the face of larger goals.

Indeed. I’m in the camp of the jury that, when asked to render a verdict guilty or not guilty, returned the verdict not proved. Ethical humanism is a tough row to hoe. “We” owe a huge debt to religion. And here’s a metaphor: what are “go” proverbs, anyhow? They’re the religion of go players. Proverb believers play one way, free thinkers play another. Proverb believers tend to win. How’s that? We absolutely know that “go” is just a game with a decision tree, that there are no “go” miracles, and that everything depends purely and entirely on “if he goes there and I go there then he can go there and that would lead to this” type reasoning. By rights, the scoffer should win. He’s right. But—-not really. Because although those proverbs are not literally divine commandments, they are the distilled wisdom of many centuries of champions and go teachers. Human minds are incapable of chasing down all the by-ways and intricacies of the he-goes-there-then-I-do-that approach to go. Thus, it is entirely possible that go proverbs are true in the sense that the believer plays better than the scoffer.

Likewise, it is entirely possible that even if there is no miracle worker in the background, that even if there is no God, these religious teachings are nevertheless true—-in the sense that we would make less of a mess of our lives than we normally do if we treated them as true.

It is also possible that they’re true because faith is a resonance with something real in a sense that physics cannot capture.