Quote:
Originally Posted by IamAman
I don't claim to have any answers and as such, I'm not going to make up fairy tales in order to take the easy way out and just believe what someone else tells me to believe. My feeling is that if we are reasonable, we can see that none of us has any special powers to know anything else about the universe other than what has been proven scientifically or based in scientific theory. What, you think that screaming, crying, condescending church guy on channel 67.3 yelling Cristo! Cristo!" knows any more about the meaning of existence than anybody else? Please. He wants you to send your money and recruit other gullible people who are lost and want an answer, any answer whether it's true or not. Those guys, OP, or nobody else knows anything more than anybody else and has no proof other than the book that the guy who calls himself a god wrote:
"I am god!"
"oh yeah, prove it!"
"It says so in this book"
"who wrote it?"
"I did!"
"Ok, I am sold. I'm going to protect this 'truth', kill anybody who disagrees with us, and recruit more and more people until it gets out of hand and generations and generations pass it on and in 2000 years, people will think you has special powers that they know they don't have. We'll be rich!"
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Well regarding the killing part I have already addressed that a bit and there is no sense in me repeating myself.
Quote:
Originally Posted by IamAman
I don't claim to have any answers and as such, I'm not going to make up fairy tales in order to take the easy way out and just believe what someone else tells me to believe. My feeling is that if we are reasonable, we can see that none of us has any special powers to know anything else about the universe other than what has been proven scientifically or based in scientific theory.
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To say that you don't make a claim is actually making a claim in this matter (you can read up on Russel and see what I mean). Now this fairy tail that you are talking about. If you mean religion as a social phenomena, then I agree with you. While I practice Catholicism, I sure don't think the pope communicates with god through some magical way that is more direct than the way I communicate with God through prayer. However, if you are talking about the existence of God, keep in mind that most serious scholars in philosophy agree that God's existence is independent of a religion being correct or incorrect.
Now being a scientist myself I can tell you that science is amazing, but only at small things. Certainly science can't tell you how we came to be (I hope you don't think Darwin's theory does that). And to be a scientist you have to take so many leaps of faith. For example, most hard sciences rely heavily on math. Yet, most mathematical proofs rely on a set of assumptions, namely the axioms of choice. Without these assumptions, you can kiss all of our beautiful theories goodbye. Yet, we believe these assumptions to be true because they "seem" to work. That is we have faith that they work.
But let me get to my point. Forget religion for a second. Let's just talk about God. I'm not saying that you or anyone should believe in God. That is never my objective. My objective is to arrive at a reasonable conclusion based on sound arguments (logic). And if you are saying that the hypothesis of a creator is a fairy tail, rather than a serious hypothesis, then my dear friend, I don't think you understand the arguments. Now if you are talking about religion rather than the existence of God, well I agree with you that there is a lot of stuff made up by religions just as there are a lot of stuff made up by or misrepresented by people in general (i.e. physicists saying that the universe was made of nothing, but that nothing is not the negation of something, rather it is the laws of physics, which are actually something.)
Hey, if you ever have some time, I have some videos I'd like to share with you on youtube. No they are not people saying cristo, cristo... They are scholastic debates between philosophers that are naturalist and theists. A lot of these debates take place in different universities like UCLA, Notre Dame, ect.
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Year arrived and age at time of arrival: 1989, 8
Education level: Two Master's (Econ and Math); Can't afford a PhD.
DACA: I was too old by 5 days.
Expanded Daca: I should be good now.
Bitter? Optimistic