b’shalom

bananabrain

and it may only be an electron to you, but it’s a principle of faith to me. if i’m getting a movie about this, i want charlton heston in it – it’s the least you should demand if we’re going to take subatomic particle science as seriously as religion.

“take your hands off me, you damn dirty proton!!”

“you idiots! you blew it up! my lovely atom!”

b’shalom

bananabrain

You are often the voice of common sense on here. It is a fact that everyone takes a lot for granted, don’t require proof of it and get along with their lives quite well. Two more lighthearted points:

Someone on the World Wrestling Federation Thread on CiF – sorry, Sunny -v- Inayat – quoted an old Hebrew expression, which went something like this:

“if someone in right 50% of the time, admire them, if someone is right 75% of the time trust them, if someone is right 100% of the time, shoot them!”

I think you and I could subscribe to that!

I give you a photo that doesn’t only show you where it’s been, but also the path it might have travelled. Whaddya want, a movie? With close ups and mood music? It’s only a bloody electron. For Jessica Parker, we’ve got the budget…..

incidentally, i feel i should point out that i fundamentally disagree with the notion that one should try and “prove” that G!D Exists, or that Revelation happened, or that the Torah is from heaven. i thoroughly dislike the sort of people who think it’s been proved, because they are not open to nearly as much scepticism and doubt as the rest of us – a doubt-free religion is a terribly dangerous thing as i think all of us would agree. this is why you’ll see that, apart from the Revelation, *all* the miracles in the Torah have a plausible natural explanation (under most circumstances), to leave room for doubt, like the “strong east wind that blew all night” the night before the splitting of the red sea.

b’shalom

bananabrain

Thanks for your reply. I did read the justification for reading the Genesis story as something completely different from what it purports to be. Fair enough, if thats the contortions one has to go through to convince folk that there is no conflict between science and religion….

Here’s a picture of an electron:

http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2005/bubble_chambers/BCwebsite/gallery/gal3_electron.htm

Just as I do not condemn all the people of Iran because their government has a predilection for hanging homosexuals in public.

The former is experiencing creeping theism, the later a fully fledged theistic state. The dangers are obvious.

” The far right government with the full support of the Polish Catholic Church is ploughing ahead with its anti-gay agenda.”

There was a radio programme last year about this on which they interviewed a Catholic priest. The priests attitude was really scary and openly biggoted towards gays in a way which I am sure he would not get away with in many places. It was openly we hate gays stuff and stuff anyone who questions it and stuff the interviewer for questioning it. I am not sure how widespread his attitude was but scary yes!!

El Cid replied,
Lithcol for brains,
i think i know a lot more catholics than you.
i’m also less prone to rampant generalisations on the basis of people’s nationality or religion.
it’s self evident that you sir, not me, is the ignoramus here. so run along now and go play with your lego.

THRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPP

b’shalom

bananabrain

you’re right, soru, so i shall try and define my terms more carefully from now on.

@lithcol:

I am what may be described as a passionate sceptic, passé Bertrand Russell.

good! in that case, you should be sceptical about scientific axioms as well, then. i am a great fan of russell myself, especially his “orbiting teapot” theory. in fact, my beliefs are strongly influenced by logical analysis of the balance of probabilities, whether you like it or not – i happen to have come to a different sceptical conclusion.

You try engaging any theist in a rational discussion of the central tenets of their faith. A brick wall. Incomprehension.

this is rhetoric. you haven’t engaged me in any discussion of the central tenets of my faith and if you wish to so do, please feel free. you will not find me shy about it – with the proviso that i can’t always post on here as often as i’d like. i haven’t yet provided anything like a “brick wall”, let alone showed “incomprehension”, so i’d appreciate it if you didn’t declare victory just yet, dubya.

It is the appeal to this supreme being as the source of views that acolytes of particular faiths wish to impose on their own and others.

again – i challenge you to show me one place where i have attempted to impose my view on others by reason of my faith as opposed to logical argument.

Believe what you want in your personal life, however in the public domain understand that all ideas are up for critical debate or ridicule.

except you’re not actually critically debating them. you’re assuming you make sense and i don’t. and you don’t – and i do. ner, ner, ner-ner ner.

I believe rational debate is central to human progress.

so do i.

@zinzin:

Richard Dawkins found such an example when filming his anti-religious polemic Root of all evil.

look, i’m the first person to bitch out religious liberals who won’t take on their own extremists, but dawkins is not someone to whom one should appeal in this case – i can tell you that he was not above using his editorial control to avoid showing the arguments he couldn’t answer or rebut during the actual interviews. you’ll notice he wasn’t exactly seeking out the religious liberals, was he? part of that is because nobody liberal will talk to him any more because he’s such a damn fundamentalist himself.

@william:

Of course eternal progress/evolution in this sense may in itself be just a belief system.

that’s exactly what it is. i happen to believe in evolution myself, but i don’t kid myself that i’ve ever been shown it happening. i’ve seen evidence that it has occurred in the past, but as financial services companies are fond of telling us, “past performance is not a guarantee of future performance”. scientific evidence is by its nature *retrospective*, *heuristic* and *statistical*, which means that “on the balance of probabilities” it is likely, all things remaining equal, that its forecasts will be borne out. however, because of the geological timescales involved (and i’ve already explained that these are not precluded by my religious texts at least) nobody has yet demonstrated *any* species evolving into another species. and as for human progress being “ever upward”, i think there’s extremely strong evidence that it is nothing of the sort. there are ups and downs, but it’s far from being straightforward.

@don:

As a non-theist and secularist I am more than happy to confront any theist attempting to proselytise or demand extra privileges on the basis of their beliefs, or insinuate their religion into public life

i agree. judaism does not proselytise, nor does it demand extra privileges. if i ask for time off on friday afternoon and saturday, any time will be made up if necessary. nor do i expect judaism to receive public money or position by virtue of its existence.

Dawkins is an evolutionist taking the very long view that humans would be better off evolving away from their long established tendency to accept unsupported assertions which conflict with observable reality as being authoritative as long as they are uttered by soi-dissant holders of a revealed truth

Of course non-theists can engage with theists constructively. I happen to disagree completely with B’brain’s #21, but it’s the sort of disagreement one can approach with a certain relish, without characterising one’s interlocuter as a fool, a knave or an enabler of fanaticism.

thank you, don – and i return the compliment. in this you are far more reasonable than dawkins.

And by the way, appropos finding a more useful term than ‘atheist’, I really hate the word ‘Brights’.

as long as you apply the same logic to the word “progressives”.

I’d agree that just as one could adhere to a religious belief and still be a secularist (in not wishing that belief to intrude uopon the public sphere) then equally one could be antitheistic and not be a secularist, in wishing one’s antitheism to intrude upon others’ private beliefs.

elegantly put. in that sense, the first is a particularist position and the second is an universalist one. judaism is, of course paradoxically both in that it espouses universalist positions in terms of wider society but particularist obligations in terms of itself. dawkins, by contrast, is an evangelical, universalist atheist and in that sense he has far more in common with hizb-ut-tahrir than i do. it is only a shame that this contrasts so strongly with the pithy, clear-sighted insight he demonstrates so superbly in his professional field.

“There is nothing in science, religion or politics that is not just the fashion, for a time.”

Yes; science is based on that, politics pragmatically accepts it, but religion …

again, that’s not something judaism agrees with. there are some things that change, but these are the applications rather than the principles and that’s rather an important distinction.

Control reproduction, kill the dissenter, butcher the conquered, dominate every aspect of domestic life, post-mortem rewards for the faithful.

That’s a very Abrahamic view unfortunately

and a communist and fascist one, too, the post-mortem beneficiaries being of course respectively the proletariat and the race – and the state in both cases. however, the book of joshua notwithstanding, there were relatively few people we were actually obliged to kill and once that issue was settled, it didn’t come up again.

@leon:

Atheism and religion aren’t two sides of the same coin despite the best efforts of the polar extremes to make it so.

well that’s kind of my point. polemical atheists are to my mind, no different from evangelising theists – they certainly act in the same way and use the same arguments in my experience.

@el cid:

and for those of you who don’t believe in anything that requires belief without evidence — i hope that doesn’t mean you constantly spy your partner and kids, just in case they are up to no good, eh, eh?

correct – this is because of the statistical, heuristic nature of observational evidence, as i pointed out before.

@douglas clark:

You are unlikely to find yourself in court for eating shellfish, although the prescription probably had some merit.

this is the position of many liberal religious people particularly in judaism, otherwise known as the “pork goes off quickly” position. i strongly refute with this point of view, hopefully for obvious reasons. the shellfish rule is, like the pork and other dietary regulations and all but 7 of the 613 rules in the Torah, intended for *jews* and nobody else. and, of course, if i were on a desert island with nothing to eat, i would be religiously obliged to eat the shellfish despite my conditioning.

In other words if the religion does not seem relevant, it will be ignored, and finally lose adherents.

correct – and in that sense it is all the more statistically and historically improbable that judaism is still around 3500 years later, to say nothing of the impact of antisemitism and (to my mind) the miraculous reconstitution of the jewish state within the last century.

Whilst many folk in this country describe themselves as Catholic they actually practice birth control. Pick and Mix, it’s the way to go/

and it’s not just catholics – it is everybody. i don’t care how big your beard is, even the ultra-orthodox pick and choose. nobody is telling them to concentrate so obsessively on kashrut and modesty rather than business ethics and “kiddush haShem” being seen to set a good example and showing judaism as something to admire, all of which are equally mandatory and important.

Bananabrain, for whom I have the greatest respect, is willing to read the Old Testament in a way that aligns with modern, scientific thought.

how kind. although i must of course point out that the *supernatural* events described in the Tanakh (we don’t call it the “old” anything) are literal descriptions of *natural laws and processes* being suspended temporarily by the One Who Set them all up in the first place. unless science can observe such a thing happening, it is not in a position to determine (much less replicate) its validity or not. it is not a scientific experiment unless you’ve seen it happening and established a control so there’s not really a way to deal with miraculous occurences other than treating them as anomalous, particularly if one rules out a priori anything which science cannot observe. i need hardly remind you, of course, that nobody’s ever seen an electron. we just know they’re there.

It is not something that I imagine a religious person of a couple of hundred years ago would have had to contemplate.

you see, that’s where you’re wrong. i suggest you take a look at a copy of maimonides’ “guide for the perplexed” some time. the sages of the Talmud used to conduct scientific experiments – in fact there’s one really interesting story about rabbi shim’on bar halafta who attempted to determine by scientific experiment whether ants had a ruler or not. the Torah certainly approves of hokhmah (wisdom) in all its forms and judaism has never been short of scientists throughout its long history. in fact, i encourage you to take a look at the “association of orthodox jewish scientists”( http://www.aojs.org ) which operates in exactly this space and has demonstrated more than adequately that science and Torah are not only not in competition, but extremely complementary.

Whether Bananabrain likes it or not, his thoughts are influenced by ideas that do not come from religious scholarship.

i like it well enough – but i’ve never yet found a good idea that i had about this sort of thing that some beardy sod hadn’t already come up with. fairly vexing, i know, but when you come from a 3500 year old tradition which includes some of the greatest minds in human history it tends to present a bit of a handicap….

@g.tingey:

all religion is an organised combination of moral and physical blackmail.

i fail to see how i’m morally or physically blackmailing anyone let alone you.

Also, re-using an earlier comments: if “god” exists, and loves EVERYONE … then why is there such gross and unecessary suffering around?

oh, my goodness me. look up “theodicy” and see if you can find any reasons, because it beats the rest of us. life is like a carpet. all we see is the pattern – the knots are all on the back.

can we define terms as to what this “god” thing is, please?

if you like – as long as you can define this “music” thing for me, because i am from this weird species that has no ears.

and can you define “logic” without using representation?

and can you define “maths” without using numbers?

and can you define “english grammar” for me without using language?

b’shalom

bananabrain

Actually Dawkins does spend some time on the theory of religion as an adaptive mechanism (like you, I find it an intuitively persuasive argument) in TGD, but comes out strongly against, for more or less the same reasons as he outlined for his rejection of Group Selection in this article;

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1994burying_the_vehicle.shtml

I was going to re-read that chapter as I wasn’t wholly convinced, but my daughter has taken my copy to Uni with her.

As for the religion(s) to which I was referring, I unreflectingly had in mind the Abrahamic ones, as Sunny correctly deduced. And since Judaism does not proseletyze or insist that outsiders adapt to their rules (although I believe that the latter does not always hold true in Jerusalem these days) I guess I was thinking of Islam/Christianity.

‘ As the intellectual environment alters, so do religions. It is like the apocryphal boiling frog. If it cannot adapt to the heat, it will die.’

I hope you are right, but I feel that increasingly the frog is trying to turn off the heat. Which is a clumsy way of saying that there are elements within both religions which are expending a huge amount of energy, money and political clout to reverse intellectual climate change, if no other kind.

They are fair questions, nothing unreasonable about them, just that they express assumptions that the truth must make sense to you here and now, and be expressible in ways you can rationally grasp, as well as other assumptions about how language works. And we use these assumptions all the time in rational discussions – there’s nothing devious or thoughtless about it, they are almost necessary assumptions.

But I think when people approach spiritual questions, they often suspend some of these assumptions. When considering how our own ways of thinking and knowing are so limited, so capricious, self-serving, lazy or whatever, it makes sense to see truth as something which may be independent of our understanding, or even being able to understand it. There are any number of texts, preachers and philosophies (religious or otherwise) able to take hold of such scepticism and convert it into a faith, or a search for truth, or a falling back on rituals or other methods for spiritual development.

What makes a particular outlook credible to people depends a lot on the person’s experiences and probably some degree of serendipity. I would try to respect this – as I am equally pushed by similar forces.