The 2024 VT Belief/Non-belief Poll

[mjmooney]

2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Religion not worth fighting over, shiny metal, Maoism, opium sales, arguably worth fighting over.

Yes. 100%.

Obviously better to find a nonviolent solution if possible, but if somebody is plundering your country's resources, imposing a repressive regime, or getting people addicted to narcotics for their own financial ends, then yes, taking up arms would ultimately be a justifiable - or at least understandable - response. Even understandable (and arguably justifiable) from the point of view of the perpetrator. 

Others not adhering to your preferred superstition wouldn't be. Ever. 

Edited March 2 by mjmooney

[Mark Albrighton]

I don’t particularly care if someone believes in a god or an afterlife. If they find solace in it, who am I to judge.

I dislike religion more. I think some people who talk about believing in god or some sort of higher power but don’t follow any doctrine, sometimes I think they may as well be saying they love Mother Nature or some similar cosmic energy. They believe they are part of “something bigger than themselves”…well, yes I agree with that, the universe for a kick off.

I’d like to believe in karma. And look, I ain’t researched it. Because obviously I haven’t. I’m talking My Name is Earl level entry karma. It sounds like a nice idea. I don’t think it bears out…but I appreciate the sentiment.

Basically if someone believes in god, fine. But if someone whom you know doesn’t believe in a deity and has a child dying from cancer, please try and refrain from talking about “god’s plan” or similar.

[mjmooney]

Are we now duplicating the other religion thread? 

[limpid]

A bit late to this thread. I'm an atheist because I reject the claims of theism as they have failed to meet their burden of proof. I do not "believe there is no god" for any value of god or gods.

Christmas is completely secular. Which parts of the celebration come from the Bible? Most believers don't know how many wise men there were - or whether they were kings. Most believers don't know that the gospels all describe different events and scholars believe that all the baby Jesus narrative was added to the anonymous story generations after it was written, in very high-form Greek, 60-150 years after the events portrayed in the story. Most believers believe the gospels were written by the names given to them.

The RCC fought for many years to block the translation of the bible into other languages so they could continue to dictate what it said rather than let people read it. Which was probably wise as the god of the Bible is clearly massively immoral.

[mjmooney]

There seem to be two types of believer (any religion): 

Those who cherry pick the bits that suit them, and conveniently disregard the bits that don't

and 

those that buy the whole enchilada, down to the most absurdly specific detail. 

I don't know which is more worthy of ridicule. 

[limpid]

22 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

There seem to be two types of believer (any religion): 

Those who cherry pick the bits that suit them, and conveniently disregard the bits that don't

and 

those that buy the whole enchilada, down to the most absurdly specific detail. 

I don't know which is more worthy of ridicule. 

You shouldn't discriminate. Ridicule both types equally 

[Mark Albrighton]

Funnily enough just seen this on the subject of belief and the universe.

Puts forward a strong case.

 

[Marka Ragnos]

10 hours ago, Mr_Dogg said:

I feel like you are conflicted

I sometimes cultivate it, actually. I find that doubt fertilizes my outlook in helpful ways. But there's a time and place, too. When someone I love is feeling paralyzed by fear, I can dismiss my own inner conflicts quite instantly.

7 hours ago, mjmooney said:

This is a very common phenomenon. I personally know several people who identify 'culturally' as Catholics, Jews, Muslims or Hindus, often with little or no belief in the associated theology. The words 'familiar' and 'comforting' crop up a lot. My wife is an atheist, but as a girl used to attend her village church and sing in the choir. If we go into a church nowadays, she feels a certain amount of happy nostalgia - whereas I feel like an alien in there. 

Hard to be in the northeast in the USA and not encounter this phenomenon constantly. Remember when Al Pacino kisses his St. Michael medal at the end of Donnie Brasco? He's a murderer. He knows he's about to be bumped off. His kisses his Catholic medal and walks out the door. I have a hasidic friend who does all the detailed rituals required for being a Jewish orthodox woman, but the question of "belief" just isn't a relevant one in her life -- and she's very open about sex and drugs, etc. At church, when I go, I feel an alien sometimes, others not. I get more excited at the fact of people being together and seeking, in the same way I feel amazed and humbled by people in other religions and sects seeking. I've been to mosque, to Jewish religious services, have several close friends who practice Buddhism. I like it all. It's when they start telling others to do it, too, that I lose my respect for them, and it's very, very, very hard for people who are perfectly sure of things not to indulge in self-rigtheousness eventually. 

Edited March 2 by Marka Ragnos

[Marka Ragnos]

7 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

 

I’m not arguing that it isn’t, I’m arguing it’s another reason, no more or less spurious than the others. I’m not attempting a ranking system for good reasons for genocide. 

Jeez, yes. So much. Again and again through history.

6 hours ago, Villan_of_oz said:

What better way for small groups of people to control entire masses than to tell them that if they don't follow their rules, they won't be allowed into a paradise after death. 

What better way to keep people oppressed than to tell them that if they behave then they will get to exist even after their body is dead...

What better way to wage wars and to kill more people than any evil tyrant ever did, than to do it in the name of an almighty power.

It's been working for over thousands of years now, you actually have to kind of respect what they have managed to achieve....

 

You sound like someone who has studied early humans and the beginning of agriculture, too, and I mean that sincerely. There is a lot of good science and research to support these statements. It's looking more clear, in recent articles I've read, that "life after death" and the superstructure arose in mortuary practices in very early hominids. 

Quote

 

A MYSTERIOUS CACHE of bones, recovered from a deep chamber in a South African cave, is challenging long-held beliefs about how a group of bipedal apes developed into the abstract-thinking creatures that we call “human.” The fossils were discovered in 2013 and were quickly recognized as the remains of a new species unlike anything seen before. Named Homo naledi, it has an unexpected mix of modern features and primitive ones, including a fairly small brain. Arguably the most shocking aspect of Homo naledi, though, concerned not the remains themselves but rather their resting place.

The chamber where the bones were found is far from the cave entrance, accessible only through a narrow, difficult passage that is completely shrouded in darkness. Scientists believe the chamber has long been difficult to access, requiring a journey of vertical climbing, crawling, and tight squeezing through spaces only 20 centimeters across. It would be an impossible place to live, and a highly unlikely location for many individuals to have ended up by accident. Those details pushed the research team toward a shocking hypothesis: despite its puny brain, Homo naledi purposefully interred its dead. The cave chamber was a graveyard, they concluded.

For anthropologists, mortuary rituals carry an outsize importance in tracing the emergence of human uniqueness—especially the capacity to think symbolically. Symbolic thought gives us the ability to transcend the present, remember the past, and visualize the future. It allows us to imagine, to create, and to alter our environment in ways that have significant consequences for the planet. Use of language is the quintessential embodiment of such mental abstractions, but studying its history is difficult because language doesn’t fossilize. Burials do.