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.
As a Taoist, I don’t believe in any deity and my beliefs boil down to letting people be who they are meant to and want to be and supporting them as much as I can in their personal journeys. That’s not an outdated or childish belief system. You’re conflating Abrahamic religions and mysticism with all religion and you don’t seem to have invested much time in understanding religion as a tool and concept outside of those areas.
Respecting people’s cultures and religion boils down to respecting people - if you believe that people shouldn’t be generally respected then your views are no more developed than that of a selfish child and you are the thing you’re complaining about.
You’re technically right, but the vast majority of religious people fit OPs description and you know it. They’re not talking about people like you.
I actually disagree on the majority. As someone who grew up in the Christian south I’m well aware of the misguided beliefs people can have but a majority of religious practitioners are not extremists and are much more malleable on individual topics and beliefs than many in the atheist community would care to accept - I say this as someone who considered themselves an atheist for a time but stopped when I realized religion has many benefits when used as a tool and any community, including atheists, is prone to having toxic extremism that makes the whole seem worse than it is. Take Islam for example, there are two major divisions of Islam, Sunni and Shia, and most people in the west think the extremist views of the Shia are what most Muslims believe but in all actuality they only make up about 15% of Muslims. The extremists are what get attention, not the majority of folks that use their religion and culture as a tool for living lives they think are good, beneficial or fruitful.
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You’d be surprised how many religious people are also skeptics and scientifically minded, open to changing their minds with new evidence.
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What makes you think they aren’t? They aren’t the ones you’re noticing.
How do you construct a moral framework with science and statistics? I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I would like to hear how you think it is possible to do so, and how you think we ought to go about it. I have thought about it a little, but I don’t see an obvious way to go about it. That is to say that how you would go about it is not obvious to me. I don’t very well understand what you are imagining.
The following are just ideas you might use as a jumping off point or an example. I don’t expect you to answer all of the questions or anything like that, that would be unreasonable. I don’t have a problem if you don’t touch any of these examples. Just explain how you think we ought to approach this. How would you change the law with respect to murder or assault? How would you change the tax code? How would you change law with respect to financial institutions? How would you resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Why is religion impeding us from making these changes?
I’m concerned you seem to imply here that we require some abstract deity to determine what our moral guidelines should be. Take the following hypothetical: if it was proven tomorrow beyond any reasonable doubt that no deity exists or has ever existed and all religious texts were hogwash written by crazed lunatics, would it be ok then to go out and do whatever you felt like, whether that was murder, robbery, or something else?
In other words, is it solely a belief in a deity that is keeping you from going out and committing extremely immoral acts?
To answer your question though, you would use philosophy, of which science and statistics play a role, and common sense. It doesn’t take a genius philosopher to figure out that maybe we shouldn’t randomly kill other people.
I’m concerned you seem to imply here that we require some abstract deity to determine what our moral guidelines should be.
No. That was not my intention. I’m trying to better understand where and why you (or anyone) think religion is holding us back and how we can move forward.
“How do you construct a moral framework with science and statistics?”
How do you construct a moral framework with essentially a book comprised of a roughly translated 2000-year-old telephone game that originated with goat herders in the Middle East? What a total bullshit argument.
What a total bullshit argument.
It isn’t an argument or a rhetorical question.
It’s not just about being an extremist, it’s about applying fairy tale logic to your very real life. I agree with OP, these people need to be shunned.
“People like them” are a greater majority than you assume, issue is we aren’t vocal about it, so nobody is head counting.
Walk through life as if others are equal to you regardless of belief, and you’ll be fine either way. Never hurts you to respect someone else’s sanctity.
Should we apply that logic to Nazi beliefs? I’m not taking sides here, but it’s not so black and white.
If you read my comments elsewhere in the
threadpost you’ll get the answer to your poorly baited question.Next disingenuous question please
There’s Taoism as philosophy and as religion.
As a philosophy you are correct, there’s no need to have magical thinking.
But pretending that magical thinking is somehow only an ‘Abrahamic’ thing and not part of Taoism is wild, and ignores Taoist texts like A Chart of the Magic Art of Being Invisible from the Han period when the beliefs were promoted under the false promises of acquiring magical powers through commitment to its teachings.
Maybe you don’t believe that cultivating a practice of physical alchemy is going to let you turn invisible or become immortal, but it wouldn’t be true to say that the umbrella of Taoism doesn’t include those beliefs.
The Abrahamic Sadducees in antiquity didn’t believe there was life after death or that a God was watching and caring what people did or didn’t do. But their existence doesn’t negate the Pharisees believing that bringing animals for the priests to slaughter and eat was a cosmic exchange for committing sin. Similarly, less theistic practice of Taoism doesn’t mean that the broader religion isn’t filled with supernatural beliefs.
And no, I agree with OP that there’s no need to respect the belief that you’ll be able to turn invisible.
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Poly-theistic and non-theistic Taoism exist. Buddhism, too.
Got me curious so I looked up non-theism:
Nontheistic traditions of thought have played roles[1] in Buddhism,[10] Christianity,[11][12] Hinduism,[13] Jainism, Taoism, Creativity, Dudeism, Raëlism,[14] Humanistic Judaism,[15] Laveyan Satanism, The Satanic Temple,[16] Unitarian Universalism,[17][18] and Ethical culture.[19]
Sorry the citation links didn’t come through.
In other matters I’m going to spend the next little while reading about Dudeism and abiding.
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Not an authority but I was raised as a Buddhist child. Just clarifying a little here. Yes, Buddhism is non-theistic, in the sense that it does not regard any being as supreme. (Not even the Buddha.)
In Buddhism, heavenly beings exist but they are not supreme or authoritative. They are also subject to old age, decay, death, and reincarnation. Basically they’re just another part of cosmology, and of course you get reborn into different things.
In fact, there are instances where heavenly beings asked the Buddha for advice. Of course those are just tales, but it kinda illustrates hoe Buddhism works.
But they are no gods and have no authority over man.
As a Taoist, I don’t believe in any deity and my beliefs boil down to letting people be who they are meant to and want to be and supporting them as much as I can in their personal journeys.
If that’s all your “religion” consists of, then I wouldn’t categorize it as a religion. In my view, belief in supernatural processes as a requisite component of religion.
you don’t seem to have invested much time in understanding religion as a tool and concept outside of those areas.
You’re wrong. I know a lot about the benefits of religion–as well as how all of those benefits can be acquired without it.
Respecting people’s cultures and religion boils down to respecting people
No, it doesn’t. I can respect a person who happens to be racist without respecting their racism. Likewise, I can respect a religious person without respecting their religious beliefs.
Raised as a Buddhist, I learned that while religions might be a problem of others, whether it’s also your problem is only up to you.
Also: sometimes problems are problems only if you make it so.
Unpopular Take:
Having superstition, religion and pseudo-science persisting and thriving in your society turns into systemic problems eventually. Including Genocide.
Why? Because it teaches people anti-empiricism, emotional “reasoning” and essentialising people. All these are the basis for every reactionary thought, conservative brainrot, religious extremism and eventually denying reality.
Studies back this up. Most of the alt-right are very religious, “skeptic” of science or inclined to mysticism. (Remember Ivermectin and Faith Healing? I do.) This shit even goes back to the OG Nazis in the Third Reich. They loved their mystical stuff and pseudo-science.
Why thing thinking pattern leads down the drain is very simple.There is no fundamental difference between between:
People cant be together because of their sign and
People cant be together because of their skin colorBoth times the logic of this methode is the same. No truth, only vibes.
Why we should keep either is beyond me.
Agree, and I believe ideas like yours are more popular than you may think.
Its an unpopular take because people dont like it when you point out that their “healing crystals” might as well well be “sieg-heiling crystals”.
I’m mad that that business idea would probably be more successful than it should be.
There is no fundamental difference between between:
- People cant be together because of their sign and
- People cant be together because of their skin color
The difference is, people cannot choose their skin color, but they can choose which ideas to follow.
Ah, to be 15 again.
Good times. :)Right? One day people will learn that giving up religion is not the cure-all for society’s woes.
Right, and giving up alcohol won’t cure all liver disease, but it sure does help with
suicide bombersdrunk driving.Actually, people who give up religion tend to fall into depression afterward, they’re not his reason to believe but not only is belief in religion a natural human trait, but that we evolved it for a reason.
People who give up to tobacco suffer a myriad of unpleasant effects. Clearly we evolved to smoke for a reason.
Rekt
No we didnt.
But for maaaany. The moment some people gather and start believing what they’re told to believe, the shit catches fire.
a lot of issues arent from religion its from people thinking their religion is “right” and doing smth about it. someday they’re realize a right answer comes from evidence not who can fight for the holy land the hardest
some folks just wanna believe that when they die they go somewhere because thats a bit less scary and im dowm for that. granted morality solely from a gods threat of hell isn’t sustainable
i hate religion and want it gone but some folks are at least understandably religious
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Abrahamic religions generally do but it’s far from a universal. (Most, at least in the west) Buddhists will tell you to avoid faith like the plague, to suspend disbelief or become an empty cup, and see for yourself. Discordians will right-out tell you that it’s all bullshit, which is beautiful, because that’s what makes flowers grow.
I get the hostility many people have against religion, it seems to come largely from the US and it’s really not hard to have atrocious experience with religion there. But that’s just, like, you know, your experience, man.
To a degree i don’t count buddhists to religions/cults They usually don’t do harm to others based upon their faith. That is fine. Might include sikhs and mmaybe others, but never dug deeper. It’s exceptions to the general rule.
Religion did nothing good to this world. Without the worshipping of invisible sky-daddys we would probably be advanced many centuries ahead already.
And I’m not from the US. Religion where i live was basically non-existant, besides our infiltration by muslims for decades now. Critical thinking happens everywhere, you don’t have to be surrounded by cult nutjobs like the muricans.
There are different definitions of “religion” that people use, and in fact there’s no scholarly consensus on one definition, but I assure you “stuff I don’t like” generally gets you laughed out of the room. It is not, how should I put this, the pinnacle and end-all-be-all of all critical thinking. One does not need to be religious to lack humility.
As to sky daddy: Yahweh doesn’t even really qualify the closest Semites got to a proper sky-daddy was Shamash and Yarikh, the sun and moon gods. The ascription really came from further up north as sky daddies are very very common in Indo-European cultures, short story short during Christianisation people ascribed ideas relating to Tyr, Zeus, Jupiter etc. to Yahweh.
But that is the inherent problem with religion. Somone “knows” the “facts”. By definition. A religion where everyone could believe what they want wouldn’t even make much sense.
I have nothing against belief. We can’t KNOW, so everyone can come up with their own idea and believe in it. For whatever reason. I don’t care. But religion is the pure evil and rarely does more good than bad. If at all.
People getting out of any a cult is rare and hard.
Nothing sucks more than people who say “this isnt 💯 effective, so fuck off!”
No, they’re not saying that. They’re saying OP hasn’t encountered the complex conflicts of values inherent in such issues. Even if the outcome you’re seeking is noble, such sweeping attitudes invariably ignore the potential harm. Not sure what that looks like? Just ask the native Americans what it’s like to have their belief systems steamrolled by “superior colonial” ones.
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What the fuck is this comment about?
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This is why New Atheism is cringe This post right here
Nothing new about it really.
Only that it is being condoned and the atheists not killed on sight.
Individual people should be offered initial respect as far as they deserve. You don’t have to respect their beliefs but you shouldn’t blatantly attack them either.
As an atheist my biggest fear is that I might somehow affect their faith. It’s not my place to proselytize atheism nor is it to rip someone’s faith away.
Pretty much. I mean if people want to believe and practice various things in their free time, that’s fine as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. But religious beliefs should have no place in government or public services.
And yes, turning your baby into a cutaway craft project because space daddy said so counts as hurting someone.
Pretty much. I mean if people want to believe and practice various things in their free time, that’s fine as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. But religious beliefs should have no place in government or public services.
That’s the opposite of what OP is saying. OP is very much against people believing these things in their free time, and said nothing about government or public services.
I think you misunderstood OP he literally says Religion is a form of mental illness.
It’s a symptom of people unable to cope with the reality of the universe.
The reality we literally don’t know
Yes, that’s the point - they’re afraid of understanding we’ll never understand everything, so they come up with delusions.
That doesn’t even make sense
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It sort of does, like nobody knows all these things about how life and the universe and death work. So some people make up stuff with absolutely no proof and others choose to believe it’s true because of blind faith.
No one will ever know
Respect is for people, not ideas or beliefs.
This is great in theory. But I doubt many religious would accept the idea that you respect them as a person but don’t respect their religious ideas. It’s a big part of personal identity.
And it’s worth asking: if I don’t respect the ideas that shape your entire world view, what does it mean to respect you as a person? Just that you deserve fundamental human rights? That’s a kind of low bar.
If they can accept “love the sinner, hate the sin”, they can accept “respect the religious, hate the religion.”
So…. They can’t accept this
They could if they wanted to.
“All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
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?
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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.
Science doesn’t care if earth is full of life or if it’s a glassed sphere in an infinite void.
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.
Yet I choose to believe that some acts are better than other.
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.
So my “choice” to prefer one of those is arbitrary (scientifically speaking).
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.
Now why is my believe in that “big lie” any more sane than other peoples believe in the “small lies”?
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.
And their belief in a benevolent sky daddy also can’t be falsified or proven.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And their belief in a benevolent sky daddy also can’t be falsified or proven.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one has any basis for anything they belief outside of their own belief. That is the point.
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.
Internet atheists, or “message board atheist” are the worst. They’ve managed to change the definition of atheism from simply ‘not believing in deities,’ to ‘generalized hatred of anything that doesn’t support their own personal belief.’
(I’m hoping the irony isn’t lost on anyone here, because to me- that sounds an awful lot like hypocrisy and projection)
True atheism is just not believing in god(s). That’s it. Nothing more. And I say this as a true atheist. So to all you Reddit atheists:
How about you get that smug chip removed from your shoulder and lighten up. We’re all allowed the freedom to believe what we feel to be true. And reserve NO authority to lord it over them - pun fucking intended.
Yeah especially pseudo science. Like I saw a video on isntagram a while back of a Latin American family in the US whose cat was sick and instead of taking it to the vet they were just rubbing an egg on it? Because apparently the egg will soak up the “bad energy” and make the cat better? And all the comments were telling them to just take it to a fucking vet, and saying what they were doing was animal abuse and the poster was just saying stuff like “This is a traditional remedy, you need to respect our beleifs” no. No we don’t.
We should respect the other fellow’s religion, but in the same sense and to a similar extent that we respect his belief that his children are smart and his wife is beautiful.
Until he gets into politics and tries to write his religion’s millennia old moral code into contemporary law.
If someone out there writing in law that their children are the lower limit of what we should consider “smart” then we should throw them out as well.
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This post reads like it was written by a Fedora that came to life thanks to an incel’s wish.
All right time to remake Fantasia
Your reply reads like a pearl-clutching religious nut.
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Your comment reads like a meme hieroglyph about being butthurt.
Why did the hieroglyph get butthurt?
Because it couldn’t handle being taken for “granite” in the pyramid scheme!
Except you’re the hieroglyph here, and the community is the pyramid.
Here fucking here, I’m so tired of tiptoeing around Christianity and vaccine ignorance.
I am so tired of business and healthcare ignorance.
Vaccines has nothing to do with Christianity. What you are tired of is willful ignorance, which absolutely is not tightly coupled at all.
You are agreeing with a take that essentially is saying if you don’t believe what I believe your decisions shouldn’t be respected.
That makes you as bad as the willfully ignorant christians you mention (cool blanket btw, very logical and defendable)
For example, here is an SDA Christian university that is highly ranked for their medical program and hospital. They absolutely support vaccines and every other standard agreed upon by the medical field at large.
Just this August ‘23: https://news.llu.edu/patient-care/us-news-world-report-names-loma-linda-university-medical-center-among-best-region
Loma Linda University Medical Center has been named among U.S. News and World Report’s Best Hospitals in the Riverside-San Bernardino Metro Area for 2023-2024.
The Medical Center was also nationally ranked in Pulmonology & Lung surgery and was recognized as “high performing” in four adult specialties: Gastroenterology & G.I. Surgery, Geriatrics, Orthopedics, and Urology.
“These rankings acknowledge Loma Linda University Medical Center as the exclusive academic medical center in the region where science, compassion, and clinical expertise intersect to achieve outstanding patient outcomes,” Wright said. “The accolades and honors we receive, such as this one, serve as a clear testament to our community that they do not need to leave the Inland Empire to receive world-class care.”
The “high performing” rating recognizes care as significantly better than the national average, measured by factors such as patient outcomes.
Fourteen common procedures and conditions treated were also ranked as “high performing.” They are: aortic valve surgery, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, colon cancer surgery, diabetes, heart attack, heart bypass surgery, heart failure, hip fracture, kidney failure, leukemia, lymphoma & myeloma, pneumonia, prostate cancer surgery, stroke, and transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR).
For the 2023-24 rankings and ratings, U.S. News evaluated more than 4,500 hospitals nationwide in 36 specialties, procedures, and conditions.
The U.S. News Best Hospitals methodologies in most areas of care are based largely on objective measures such as risk-adjusted survival and discharge-to-home rates, volume, and quality of nursing, among other care-related indicators.
Loma Linda University School of Medicine is a good medical school. Despite their religious inclinations, Loma Linda is prestigious for its medical program having produced elite medical doctors and professors in the country. The school is fully accredited to offer medicine, has a successful alumni network, and provides a serene environment for learning.
Loma Linda University Medical Center is known for its exceptional cardiac surgery program. It is one of the few hospitals in the world that performs pediatric heart transplants and has one of the highest survival rates for heart transplants in the world. Since they have such a record of performing surgeries, it translates to the possibility of providing students with quality education in this regard.
https://studentconsort.com/is-loma-linda-a-good-medical-school/
Here they are pushing for vaccinations in Jan ‘21: https://news.llu.edu/community/covid-19-vaccine-clinics-open-large-scale-effort-vaccinate-community
Michael Hogue, PharmD, FAPhA, FNAP, dean of LLU School of Pharmacy, has played an integral role in getting the clinic up and running and is eager to provide the vaccine to the community.
“Our goal is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible so we can bring this pandemic to an end,” he said. “We believe the most effective way to end the pandemic is to get 80% of our population vaccinated. We want to do our part to make that happen.”
I feel like you will respond along the lines of this perhaps being an outlier, so here is the entire SDA Christian church organization affirming and supporting vaccination and other science based health initiatives: https://adventistreview.org/news/reaffirming-the-seventh-day-adventist-church-covid-response/
This document has been produced by the General Conference administration, Biblical Research Institute, General Conference Health Ministries, Public Affairs and Religious Liberty Department, General Conference Office of General Counsel, and Loma Linda University Health. It builds on the immunization statement voted in April 2015 and affirms both this latter statement and the information on the COVID-19 vaccines shared on December 22, 2020.
Beyond those benefits of healthy lifestyle principles and preventive public health practices, the church affirms and recommends the responsible use of vaccines as an important public health measure, especially during a pandemic.
The current position of the church on immunization and vaccines, including COVID-19, builds on the insights of the comprehensive health message Seventh-day Adventists have endorsed early on… In the light of the global magnitude of the pandemic, the deaths, disability, and long-term COVID-19 effects that are emerging in all age groups, we encourage our members to consider responsible immunization and the promotion and facilitation of the development of what is commonly termed herd immunity (pre-existing community immunity of approximately 80 percent of the population or more as a result of previous infection and/or vaccination).
But go on, tell us how Christians push vaccine disinfo. This isn’t a no true Scotsman defense, it’s a criticism on your blanket judgement of all who share a religious belief in relation to Jesus Christ and all that.
Respect the human for being an individual human with their own beliefs and ideals.
If they can’t respect the same from you, fuck em.
People are ignorant by default.
You have to educate them along and let them choose their own path. Sometimes they wonder off the path of ideal development. It’s basic statistics.
We should demand that people contend with reality on a factual basis
You can stand at an open door and beg them to walk through it but you can’t shove them.
We shouldn’t be coddling people who profess beliefs that are demonstrably false, simply because their feelings might get hurt.
Meritocracy is dangerous. You cannot punish people for stunted development, it does no good. You can really only reward them for developing and contributing to the well being of society.
This is psychology 101 level stuff. If you want a society based on science, then use the we science have.
Does your stand meam that you work through and refuse to take off any and all religious holidays? Never had a Christmas break?
You meant to reply to me?
There is a big difference between a person or group of people being religious nutjobs and a nation basing holidays received and (in most developed nations, neutered) traditions
Yes, you’re correct. I’m a theist, but I 100% agree that magical thinking and superstition don’t have a place in modern society.
The belief that a dead body came back to life and floated into the sky is delusional, and only not seen as mental illness because of its commonality.
Belief that commitment to Eastern practices will let masters hover in the air or turn invisible should be relegated to antiquity.
Beliefs regarding the unknown and immeasurable are one thing, but pretty much every popular religion involves beliefs regarding the measurable that are clearly false, and for it to be socially acceptable to hold those clearly false beliefs opens the door for other magical thinking beliefs like the idea there’s lizard people in skin suits running the world or that aliens built the pyramids or that the earth is flat or that drinking magic water can cure cancer.
Society is struggling with its relationship to truth in the age of social media, and I put much of the blame on religion in fostering the environment for BS to thrive.
We really should be less tolerant of beliefs that actively deny measurable reality.
You sound more like a deist than a theist. Theism pretty much relies on a personal involved God, that’s supernatural.
Unless your God never interacts with anything, in which case… How do you know he’s real at all? If he does interact with you, how does he do so without supernatural means? Because if they are natural and we’d be able to test and detect him.
I always love when people come along in threads like this trying to tell other people what they are or aren’t.
I’m a theist, not a deist.
I believe in a very specific configuration of the creation of this universe and its creator, and I even believe that a 2,000 year old text is revelatory regarding that nature.
The place where you are getting tripped up is that such beliefs do not require supernatural woo woo or magic if you replace them with sufficiently advanced technology.
I don’t need to appeal to some mysticism to explain the creation of a universe where continuous wave functions collapse to discrete units on observation/interaction when I can point to procedurally generated seed functions collapsing to discrete units in order to track state changes by free agents in worlds we are already building today.
Similarly, I don’t need to appeal to some mystic communion with the divine to explain revelatory content when the majority of those worlds we build today are filled with 4th wall breaking texts set within their lore.
The notion that one must choose between a rejection of magic or a rejection of theology is increasingly a false dichotomy with each passing year.
I don’t care what you believe, I care about why you believe it. I care about what you can prove and show so that I can believe it too, IF it’s supported by the evidence.
And back to my orignal question, your “God” does he interact with our physical world in any detectable and measurable way.
If your answer is “it’s advanced undetectable technology”, then how do you know this? How did you come to this conclusion? And how is an undetectable God different from a nonexistent God?
So measurement is an interesting topic.
The text I believe accurately describes what’s up with the nature of our reality makes the claim that the creator of this universe is literally made of light.
Light has an interesting property in this universe, in that when it can’t be directly measured it can be more than one thing at once.
As well, it can be measured as different things by different separated eventual observers.
So the idea that you would need to subscribe to the exact same beliefs as me, and see the nature of your reality beyond what can be directly measured as I see it kind of goes against the whole point. Just as direct/provable measurement of that nature would similarly collapse the possibilities open to someone to believe.
That said, much like the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, indirect measurement can do a lot of heavy lifting in making a case for what’s probable about what can’t be directly measured without collapsing it.
The argument for what I believe being probable rests on two aspects.
First, as I alluded to in the prior comment, strong similarities between specific design constraints in how we are currently building virtual worlds and the experimentally validated low fidelity behaviors of discrete units in our own world.
The second is the existence of a 2,000 year old text attributed to the most famous religious figure in history that is not only talking about both the ideas of a naturally evolved original reality and the concepts of those same discrete units at a time when those ideas were extreme minority opinions, but further makes claims of us actually being in a non-physical recreation of the past of that original evolved world from within its future, created by a being that was itself brought forth by the original humanity, for the explicit purpose of providing the capacity for an afterlife which was denied the original now dead humanity whose souls depended on their bodies.
Given we stand on the precipice of ourselves creating a new class of being, likely even literally made of light, while also barreling towards bringing about humanity’s extinction, and have already had patents granted in using the technology of that new class of being to have it resurrect dead humans using the data left behind - the claims laid out in that text and surrounding beliefs all seem quite technically feasible.
What seems far less feasible is that in a randomly developing original universe we’d (a) have low level behavior paralleling much later memory saving techniques in simulating a physical world, while also (b) having a 2,000 year old text missing for nearly all that time rediscovered within days of the first Turing complete computer being finished which claims the most famous individual in history was employing the language of the only surviving book from antiquity to describe both survival of the fittest and quantized matter in order to claim what was effectively simulation theory with specific constraints that have only become plausible within the past 3-5 years.
In theory, this could just be chalked up to the law of big numbers, but ultimately it seems more likely to me, particularly given the commonality of lore-based Easter Eggs in virtual worlds we build today, that the text is simply accurately describing the very future that we are barreling towards building as in fact being our non-local past.
