We’re in the 21st century, and the vast majority of us still believe in an utterly and obviously fictional creator deity. Plenty of people, even in developed countries with decent educational systems, still believe in ghosts or magic (e.g. voodoo). And I–an atheist and a skeptic–am told I need to respect these patently false beliefs as cultural traditions.
Fuck that. They’re bad cultural traditions, undeserving of respect. Child-proofing society for these intellectually stunted people doesn’t help them; it is in fact a disservice to them to pretend it’s okay to go through life believing these things. We should demand that people contend with reality on a factual basis by the time they reach adulthood (even earlier, if I’m being completely honest). We shouldn’t be coddling people who profess beliefs that are demonstrably false, simply because their feelings might get hurt.
With all the deserving credits to the late and great Terry Pratchett.
YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?
deleted by creator
Numbers wouldn’t exist in the universe dust but inarguably exist. Pretty prose and storytelling nothing more.
I leave it up to everyone to interpret it, but my personal interpretation is that there probably ain’t no thing such as gods, but there also ain’t no such things as “justice”, “mercy”, “duty”, “good”, or “evil”.
Yet I choose to believe that some acts are better than other.
I believe that helping someone achieve their goals is usually better than hurting them.
Why? Is there a “scientific fact” that makes it true? No, there isn’t. Science doesn’t care if earth is full of life or if it’s a glassed sphere in an infinite void. Both “work” just fine for science.
So my “choice” to prefer one of those is arbitrary (scientifically speaking).
Now why is my believe in that “big lie” any more sane than other peoples believe in the “small lies”?
My belief can’t be scientifically falsified (or proven).
And their belief in a benevolent sky daddy also can’t be falsified or proven.
You have a very poor understanding of what science is. Of course it does care, because those two things are different, and the purpose of science is to collect all information there is, discern everything, catalogue all differences of all things.
That’s simply morality, a human behavior. You needn’t “believe” that morality exists, as humans behave in such a way as to create morality.
But the fact you did so isn’t - unless you suffer from a mental illness, you were bound to choose something. That’s simply how your brain evolved.
Because “sanity” is a measure of how one’s brain behaves as compared to the collective of humankind - how “average” your brain is. Because morality is baked into humanity, it’s sane to make a choice regarding, say, murder being wrong or not. Believing in flying unicorn robots that sing heavy metal, on the other hand, isn’t.
Fallacy: Non Sequitur. Give me a description of a god, any god, and I’ll disprove them. No god can be described and exist, and a god which can’t be described might as well not exist.
If all there is a lifeless ball in space, what would science “care”? There would be no one to do science and “science” as a concept can’t care.
And now we’re slowly getting to the crux of the matter: just as our brain evolved to produce morality of some kind, it also evolved to make up stories (grand and small) to try to explain the world.
Some of those “stories” eventually formed into what we now call the scientific method (i.e. try to make sure your stories are verifyable and falsifiable and produce “facts”.
Some of those stories were used as a social tool to develop some shared morality, to agree on which acts were good and which ones aren’t.
And some of the latter category turned into religion.
Can you seriously look at human history and say with a straight face that religion (and made up stories) aren’t just as “baked into” the human brain as morality is?
It’s one thing to argue that a neutral, as-objective-as-possible brain should disregard religion (and I pretty much agree with that), but it’s an entirely different thing to argue that “humans believing in religion is abnormal” in a historic scale … that’s just being blind to the facts.
Last Thursdayism or the five-minute hypothesis is one great example. They don’t usually mention a god in the common phrasing, but it’s easy to rephrase it to include one: “There is a god that created the universe exactly 5 minutes ago with all the signs and properties that make it look like it’s a lot longer. That god created you and all your memories as well as all the uncountable cosmic radiation rays that have yet to hit earth and everything else as well. After that creation that god stopped interacting with the universe.”. Go ahead and disprove it.
I’m an agnostic atheist myself, but I really don’t understand the obsession of some people with “disproving god”.
If there was any kind of real scientific proof of the non-existence of god, don’t you think that several Nobel prices would have been given out for that by now?
Most current religions have developed to a state where the existence of their god is basically un-falsifiable, because if you can ever prove any specific thing about them wrong, then they can always just use the “gods ways are inscrutable” escape hatch.
That makes any god effectively un-falsifiable. And any theory that can’t be falsified is irrelevant to the scientific method.
It was more, these are all concepts and not provable things.
And what exactly makes them “not provable”?
And how do You answer questions that relate to them?
you can’t do so with pure science, so you need to pick some other system to consider them.
And some people pick ficticious stories about a benevolent sky daddy.
I pick some ficticious idea of human life ha in inherent value.
What basis do I have to judge one of those better than the other? only my own ficticious idea can give me that basis.
The fact that they are all faith based.
With careful study and consideration.
Not in the remotest. I try to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
And there you go with denigration of those you hate. Keep your bigotry to yourself to get along in society.
No clue what this is actually intended to mean, but you are close with the fictitious idea of human life. For in fact we are nothing but animals that taught themselves pattern matching and now attempt to impose our belief in that pattern on the world.
No one has any basis for anything they belief outside of their own belief. That is the point.
I don’t know why you brought hate into this, for I don’t hate in this regard.
Yes, that is exactly my point: there is no “inherent” value in any of this. Without some value system of some kind, there’s no way to know if a given situation or behaviour is good or bad.
And what I’m trying to say is that pure science (as in the ideas behind the scientific method) do not and can not give you that value system. They are as far from having “values” as is possible.
Agreed.
Some people just decide to call their own belief “religion” and others don’t.
So telling someone “your made up beliefs are less worthy of consideration than my made up beliefs” doesn’t really have a strong place to stand on.
However, if the argument is “your made up beliefs have effects that go against my made up beliefs” then that might be an argument, but we have to be aware that at the end of the day we’re all dealing with made up beliefs.
If you don’t know why I brought hate into it, perhaps you should think about the subject more before criticizing.
Perhaps, part of your study of “some People” should include your own personal denigration of others.
Numbers are symbolic representation of the concept. Are you really going to pretend that a dust mote has no count?
What is “count”, physically? Precisely, it’s just another concept - it exists only as a perception. Thus, perception itself must be something. I.e. things which aren’t symbolically linked to the stuff that makes the universe also exist.
A dust mote can have 1264 dust particles, whether we invented the number 1264 or not.
Which is completely irrelevant. The universe doesn’t care if a Helium atom has two protons or if there are trillions of stars moving in a galaxy. Those are human concepts which we need to understand the universe.