As Above, So Below - the religion thread (formerly: People of California, beware)

No...?

You can access my FB?

You can't see a pic of a guy standing with a telescope and a model rocket saying 'sorry, I can't hear you..... ???

Oh well! It ain't that important.

How to choose your religion.

Let's hope THIS gets some notoriety.

Brilliant.

How to stop children from becoming atheist.

You forgot the third one; being black.

It is if you want to be the president of the United States, unfortunately. (Or get into politics in general.)

Stumbled upon this shining gem of stupidity today.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/st … s-and-god/

Interesting concept. How would anyone go about "believing" in hard data, or scientifically verifiable fact?
(That would suggest the option to NOT believe it, which would lead to odd notions like not believing in gravity...).

It's a silly straw man perpetrated by believers that somehow science is (like) a religion.
But that is nonsense. Science is like religion like a house is like a bypass. Not at all. To suggest otherwise is a massive fallacy.

But you say it yourself: theories are disputed by hard facts, which change theories and postulate new ones. That is what science *does*!
Belief simply doesn't come into it. It is not a "choice" as you seem to suggest: it's simply the current modus operandi, to be changed at any given time new conclusive data comes in! That has nothing to do with paradigms and CERTAINLY not on any level comparable to religious choices! Or do you see people suddenly converted to ignoring the atom? Or believing that gravity is now their personal saviour?

It just makes no sense. Science and belief are simply incomparable entities.

I never heard anyone say "I believe in science".
I've heard many stipulations like "I believe that science one day will provide <an aswer to {a question}>", but that obviously is faith in the process, not the entity. "Believing" in science makes as much sense as "believing" in tomatoes.

Whether or not atheism is "in" as you suggest doesn't mean much to me. That's like saying rationalism in the 18th century was "in". So what? What's that got do do with anything? (if you can even approach it on that level. To me it doesn't so much seem like a fashion but a logical step.)

And also notice one thing. Today the religious views of a celebrity is stated ONLY if their are atheist. So what Tom Hanks, due to marriage, turned Orthodox, so what that as far as I know, Denzel Washington is Christian and states it somewhere, so what Martin Scorsese is "a lapsed Catholic, but still a Catholic, there is no way out of it" as he said.

What matters is that Stephen Fry is a pretty rabid atheist.

In general, the religious side of things is not accepting discussion with people like Dawkins or the late Hitchens, not because they don't think that religion is not worth discussing (some religions make a point in discussing religion, like the Jehovah Witnesses - "let's talk about the Bible"), but because those particular characters are regarded as rabid fanatics, just representing the other side of the spectrum. Steven would probably scratch his head (though from his own statements, I regard him more as an agnostic than atheist), but I think one can speak of "fundamental" atheism and this point of view is defended quite rabidly.

The thing is that the lack of potential agreement between such atheists and even moderate theists (let alone fundamental theists, which I despise quite a lot) is that just the statement that "I am religious, yes" would end up in calling me an idiot and walking away. There would be no discussion at all, if all he did was trying to ridicule me, don't you think?

I don't think that science is taking over from religion in any way, really. I have a problem with the way the discourse is being handled in this particular case.

I am and I have always been religious (though I am pretty much lapsed, still a Catholic), but it doesn't mean that I reject science, evolution theory, quantum physics or whatever in any way. I just disagree to take the Bible literally, though that said, there is one thing.

Today, maybe except priests high in hierarchy, like the Pope and certain cardinals, the only people to have read the Bible in its entirety...

are atheists. I've tried. As a researcher of pre-Enlightement literature, I should know the Bible by heart. It doesn't help that I tend to fall asleep just around the Covenant with Abraham...