Is there anything we lose from not being religious?

[Lillefix]

Just another misquote. I did not say that. Anywaym I'm done discussing here.

Befor eyou go. How are you supposed to interpret that statement?

 

[UNpatriot]

Good, in relative, human terms.... In terms of absolute good and evil, every human being tends to be more on the evil end of the sliding scale.

Proof or it isn't so!

Comparing the differences between a good human, a bad human and God is like comparing a 100 watt light bulb, penlight and the sun... Yes, the 100 watt light bulb, in absence of anything else, appears to be much, much brighter than the penlight, however, they both are as nothing compared to the sun!

And comparing God to absolute good is like comparing the sun to the Big Bang; sure, it's impressive when you have nothing better but it's awfully tiny when you have the absolute to compare it to. By being religious and believing that God can dictate what is good and evil you lose the absolute ideal of goodness; that nobody will face any hardships or suffering and all of that will be eliminated by it. No god of any religion fits that definition, or if they do, they are just about as powerful as flies in a hurricane. Otherwise the world would be perfect, as a perfectly good god would tolerate nothing else, and would do anything it can to accomplish that. And free will isn't an excuse, because the Perfect God could just tinker with our brains so that we have free will but we just wouldn't like being bad.

 

[thescaryworker]

While I agree with much of what you say on the surface, I'm still not convinced that you're right in your assumptions.

Oddly enough, some of my religious friends say the same exact thing to me ...

One of them is the fact that personal experience and gut feelings are irrelevant... I happen to have talked to a man who is a semi-retired researcher for the NSA, and he said the exact opposite, based on his years of research for the government, and he was one of the few people who didn't treat me like I was crazy because I said that when I was working on a particularly difficult problem in my overly-complex radar system, I'd go sleep on it, and the solution would come to me in my sleep... Quite a bit of his research was investigating that exact phenomenon. The biggest mistake that MOST modern science makes is that it completely ignores and/or sneers at intuition.

I should have clarified when speaking about gut feelings and personal experiences. While gut feelings may have a large chance of being correct, so much that they may even be reliable, they never count as proof in logic.

I take advantage of gut feelings, and use them when I need to get an answer, but I never use them as evidence. For example, when I tackle a hard calculus problem, I know what the answer is even before I set out to work on it. I know what the answer is supposed to look or sound like before knowing how to get the answer.

While my gut feeling does get me to the answer, it does not work as proof. I either need to backtrack from the answer or work from the evidence that I have been given.

However, being unable to prove something using pure logic does not disprove its existence. It simply means that the existence is in question.

When arguing on forums, I use attempt to only use logic* when discussing things because it is universal. I would never go so far as to apply a purely logical approach to my life as it would be impossible to get anything done: I would be unable to even prove that the meal I wanted to fix for breakfast even existed. (or even the bed, door, and microwave for that matter) This is a case where logic and assumption must meet in a state of equilibrium.

Science does take into account that certain things must be assumed, wheras pure logic does not. It simply assumes much less than the common person would take for granted. The ultimate goal of science, then, is to become closer to pure logic by reducing the number of assumptions through time (the Ultimate Occam's Razor). Whether it is possible for us to reach this state is a completely different question.

If we take personal experiences and gut feelings into account, we are increasing the number of assumptions in our argument, eventually reaching a point in which it is no longer scientific. The proof of the atom is scientific, whereas the proof unicorns is not. I have no method of deciding exactly where the line is drawn of whether an argument is scientific or not, so we'll just call it a grey area.

*I will amend this statement to mean "scientific reasoning" as defined in the paragraph above in order to avoid confusion.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the whole religion thing... If you want to be a mere "puppet dancing to the strings of your DNA" (as Dr. Dawkins put it), then go ahead;

The validity of Dr. Dawkins's statement is irrelevant concerning what we are supposed to do. Why we exist is different from what we are supposed to do with ourselves. Method of existence does not necessarily define function.

Oh, and thanks for being civil and respectful.

No problem. Thanks for being civil and respectful, too.