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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dracin72 who wrote (11313)	2/18/2017 2:12:49 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 362111

I've always felt, if you want to believe in made up stuff, why not make up your own? Why go with these tired, canned, 'religions', so full of contradictions and rules no one follows? Most Republicans have taken this route:

To: Dracin72 who wrote (11313)	2/18/2017 2:44:29 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 362111

You have created a false dichotomy. There is another (in my opinion) saner option- to leave the question of the unknowable and untestable open. There is no need to make Pascal's wager- not with the number of possible contenders for one's faith, nor do you need to believe there is nothing. It makes more sense to just wait. We will all journey to the "undiscovered country" (as Hamlet puts it) and we will all find out if there is something, or we'll just disappear if there is nothing. I get why people who want to take one's money in this life want to push people to decide now (who would give money for the wait and see "religion"?) But logically, wait and see makes the most sense- unless you're actually running the cult and profiting from it.

To: Dracin72 who wrote (11313)	2/18/2017 3:30:48 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 362111

For some to believe that a supreme being, God, said let their be light is easier to believe in then that from nothing a sudden explosion came by mere chance and life began. I find that a reasonable point. Deism vs atheism seem to me to be leaps of similar size. But how many deists do you know? I have only known of one person, someone on SI, who identified as a deist. Every other religious identity has a bunch of stuff attached to it that you are also expected to believe. The more stuff, the lower the probability that the package is true. The leap from deism to Bible-believing Christianity is like from here to Alpha Centauri.

To: Dracin72 who wrote (11313)	2/18/2017 4:16:35 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 362111

People have a tendency to misunderstand atheists. For myself, I'm not saying I believe in nothing. What I'm saying is that I don't believe in conventional religion as there are no facts or logic to support them. We know that the human species just makes up stuff. There's like 10,000 religions on earth. Primitivve people ascribed all sorts of things to phenomenon they did not understand e.g.spirits. Are they all real? Does anybody believe those religions are based on logic or that they are real? If so based on what? Are there like 10,000 different gods out there and zillions of spirits and stuff? And how come we have found no proof of any of them. Because they are as real as the easter bunny. The refuge of people who do not engage in critical thinking. A normal mind would know that religion is stuff we just made up. I take a scientific approach to reality. Physics knows for sure there was a big bang and they can identify pretty much the exact age of the universe at 13.82 billion years old. What I think is that biological systems evolve out of inorganic systems. And then they evolve over time and some of those systems reached the point where we are i.e. able to build sophisticated technology and consciousness evolves out of that i.e. consciousness is a third system in the universe. In fact I think it is our manifest destiny to evolve. The $64 question is what happens when we pass through this human singularity? For myself, I think this is a process that happens all the time throughout the universe, because it happened here and does not seem unusual at all. Furthermore all you have to do is ask yourself how far can intelligence progress say over 1 million years when we've seen how far artificial intelligence has reached in just a little over 70 years. So what I think is that the way the universe works is that you have big bangs, probably caused by some sort of vacuum fluctuation, the gas turns to inorganic matter and that metamorphosis into organic matter and that metamorphosis into intelligence, consciousness, thought. And then if you extrapolate this out further it would tell me that intelligence is probably pervasive throughout the universe. To recap though if you read the Bible it is clear that it is just a primitive text written a couple thousand years ago by people that knew almost nothing. It could not possibly be the word of God because it has too many mistakes in it. Did God not know that the earth is round? Did God think it was okay for people to sell their daughters and sisters into slavery? The Bible is filled with terrible things that God did, like a tribal chief not the least of which is when he says I am a jealous God. God's are not jealous. Tribal chiefs are jealous. And if you read the Bible and transpose tribal chief for God the Bible make perfect sense because that's how it was written. The only mental image the writers had of a supreme being is a tribal chief, albeit a a kindly tribal chief, well at times. The Old Testament allows for slavery and all sorts of horrible things.