₦airaland Forum

joseph1013:
LOL. Who said that?

hahn:
Tell me something

joseph1013:
Let me give it to you Trump-style: From my perspective, I think the deist is one of two things: confused or irrational.

Deists advocate believing in something while at the same time acknowledging that there’s no evidence for it. And that’s the sign of an irrational or a confused mind.

To be fair, I can see why it is emotionally appealing, but I do know that it is not intellectually satisfying.

juicydiceyjoe:
Really, a medical student (a friend). Don't know much about it though.

UyiIredi:
I once proferres 3 lines of evidence showing God exists. You were lacking in the intelligence required to comprehend it and yet you have the gall to say deists believe in God without evidence. Glaring foolery.

Okay. You have said nothing here. We can have a discussion on what you really have in mind to say, if not ad hominems will not work and you can as well 'come and be going'.

joseph1013:
Okay. You have said nothing here. We can have a discussion on what you really have in mind to say, if not ad hominems will not work and you can as well come and be going.

UyiIredi:
I have said all I needed to. Don't spout that nonsense about deists believing in God without evidence.

joseph1013:
Are you deist? Do Deists believe in God? What evidence do deists have for God?

UyiIredi:
See here.

https://www.nairaland.com/3218192/atheists-come-see-most-powerful

Reply there.

Your leap from consciousness to 'god' in one clean-sweep is astounding. Amazing! Who does that?

It's surprising that you don't find plaetton 's explanation sufficient. You are a very interesting person.

joseph1013:
Your leap from consciousness to 'god' in one clean-sweep is astounding. Amazing! Who does that?

It's surprising that you don't find plaetton 's explanation sufficient. You are very interesting person.

UyiIredi:
Your wilful ignorance of the reason I presented for inferring God from consciousness is unsurprising.

plaetton:
The Impetuousity of youth
When will you grow up?

joseph1013:
ONE QUESTION THAT SINKS THE ARK

It's rather easy to pick holes in the Biblical story of Noah's ark and the flood. There are practical issues about the building of the ark, the source of the water and its effect on the planet, the seaworthiness of a wooden structure that colossal and the collection and husbandry of so many animals.

Then there is the little problem that evolution would have to work much, much faster than it actually does for the "kinds" collected by Noah to have evolved into all the species that have lived in the past 4,400 years.

There are also historical, archaeological, geological and paleontological problems--too many to discuss here.

But there is one question that should make all the others redundant. The flood was an omniscient God's master plan to make a better world. That one question is, did it work?

ooman:
What has not been proven cannot be disproved. God is only an hypothesis of how everything got here. The idea of god is no certainty, this is why faith is the most cherished virtue of the religious. They do not really know if their chosen god exist, they only believe he's somewhere in the sky.

Science has not offered all the answer, but whats certain is that religion has no answer at all, it only stops you from asking the questions by telling you to have faith.

So its a good choice you have made. Life is a quest, enjoy it.

When you guys want to knock 'Religion', please specify the Religion you are knocking, so that we don't waste our time clicking on a topic that does not concern us.

Furthermore, you cannot condemn all religion; (as your title implies); if you are disenchanted with just one. It's like I have a bad experience with one vehicle and I conclude that all models of all types of vehicle are useless.

"According to a 2012 Gallup survey, only 15 per cent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention; 32 per cent maintain that humans may have evolved from earlier life forms in a process lasting millions of years, but God orchestrated this entire show; 46 per cent believe that God created humans in their current form sometime during the last 10,000 years, just as the Bible says.

Spending three years in college has absolutely no impact on these views. The same survey found that among BA graduates, 46 per cent believe in the biblical creation story, whereas only 14 per cent think that humans evolved without any divine supervision. Even among holders of MA and PhD degrees, 25 per cent believe the Bible, whereas only 29 per cent credit natural selection alone with the creation of our species.

Though schools evidently do a very poor job teaching evolution, religious zealots still insist that it should not be taught at all. Alternatively, they demand that children must also be taught the theory of intelligent design, according to which all organisms were created by the design of some higher intelligence (aka God). ‘Teach them both theories,’ say the zealots, ‘and let the kids decide for themselves.’

Why does the theory of evolution provoke such objections, whereas nobody seems to care about the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics? How come politicians don’t ask that kids be exposed to alternative theories about matter, energy, space and time? After all, Darwin’s ideas seem at first sight far less threatening than the monstrosities of Einstein and Werner Heisenberg.

The theory of evolution rests on the principle of the survival of the fittest, which is a clear and simple – not to say humdrum – idea. In contrast, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why?

The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn’t contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don’t care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care?

In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls. If you really understand the theory of evolution, you understand that there is no soul. This is a terrifying thought not only to devout Christians and Muslims, but also to many secular people who don’t hold any clear religious dogma, but nevertheless want to believe that each human possesses an eternal individual essence that remains unchanged throughout life, and can survive even death intact."

~ Excerpt from Noah Harari's "Homo Deus - A Brief Histiry of Tomorrow"

Tritri:
@joseph Something came to my mind now..What if Satan ask God for forgiveness ..would GOD forgive ? Is that even possible? how would human knows God has forgiven satan? what your understanding abt satan?

Bro, Satan can never ask God for forgiveness. He was created to never repent.

"The religious establishment proclaims that the holy book contains the answers to all our questions. It simultaneously forces courts, governments and businesses to behave according to what the holy book says. When a wise person reads scriptures and then looks at the world, he sees that there is indeed a good match.

‘Scriptures say that you must pay tithes to God – and look, everybody pays. Scriptures say that women are inferior to men, and cannot serve as judges or even give testimony in court – and look, there are indeed no women judges and the courts reject their testimony. Scriptures say that whoever studies the word of God will succeed in life – and look, all the good jobs are indeed held by people who know the holy book by heart.’

Such a wise person will naturally begin to study the holy book, and because he is wise, he will become a scriptural pundit. He will consequently be appointed a judge. When he becomes a judge, he will not allow women to bear witness in court, and when he chooses his successor, he will obviously pick somebody who knows the holy book well. If someone protests that ‘This book is just paper!’ and behaves accordingly, such a heretic will not get very far in life.

Even when scriptures mislead people about the true nature of reality, they can nevertheless retain their authority for thousands of years. For instance, the biblical perception of history is fundamentally flawed, yet it managed to spread throughout the world, and billions still believe in it. The Bible peddled a monotheistic theory of history, which says that the world is governed by a single allpowerful deity, who cares above all else about me and my doings. If something good happens, it must be a reward for my good deeds. Any catastrophe must surely be punishment for my sins.

Thus the ancient Jews believed that if they suffered from drought, or if King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia invaded Judaea and exiled its people, surely these were divine punishments for their own sins. And if King Cyrus of Persia defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jewish exiles to return home and rebuild Jerusalem, God in his mercy must have heard their remorseful prayers.

The Bible doesn’t recognise the possibility that perhaps the drought resulted from a volcanic eruption in the Philippines, that Nebuchadnezzar invaded in pursuit of Babylonian commercial interests and that King Cyrus had his own political reasons to favour the Jews. The Bible accordingly shows no interest whatsoever in understanding the global ecology, the Babylonian economy or the Persian political system.

Such self-absorption characterises all humans in their childhood. Children of all religions and cultures think they are the centre of the world, and therefore show little genuine interest in the conditions and feelings of other people. That’s why divorce is so traumatic for children.

A five-year old cannot understand that something important is happening for reasons unrelated to him. No matter how many times you tell him that mummy and daddy are independent people with their own problems and wishes, and that they didn’t divorce because of him – the child cannot absorb that. He is convinced that everything happens because of him. Most people grow out of this infantile delusion. Monotheists hold on to it till the day they die. Like a child thinking that his parents are fighting because of him, the monotheist is convinced that the Persians are fighting the Babylonians because of him.

Already in biblical times some cultures had a far more accurate perception of history. Animist and polytheist religions depicted the world as the playground of numerous different powers rather than a single god. It was consequently easy for animists and polytheists to accept that many events are unrelated to me or to my favourite deity, and they are neither punishments for my sins nor rewards for my good deeds.

Greek historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides, and Chinese historians such as Sima Qian, developed sophisticated theories of history which are very similar to our own modern views. They explained that wars and revolutions break out due to a plethora of political, social and economic factors. People may fall victim to a war for no fault of their own. Accordingly, Herodotus showed keen interest in understanding Persian politics, while Sima Qian was very concerned about the culture and religion of barbarous steppe people.

Present-day scholars agree with Herodotus and Sima Qian rather than with the Bible. That’s why all modern states invest so much effort in collecting information about other countries, and in analysing global ecological, political and economic trends. When the US economy falters, even evangelical Republicans sometimes point an accusing finger at China rather than at their own sins.

Yet even though Herodotus and Thucydides understood reality much better than the authors of the Bible, when the two world views collided, the Bible won by a knockout. The Greeks adopted the Jewish view of history, rather than vice versa. A thousand years after Thucydides, the Greeks became convinced that if some barbarian horde invaded, surely it was divine punishment for their sins. No matter how mistaken the biblical world view was, it provided a better basis for large-scale human cooperation."

~ Excerpts from Yuval Noah Harari's "Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow"

On 20 December 2013 the Ugandan parliament passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which criminalised homosexual activities, penalising some activities by life imprisonment. It was inspired and supported by evangelical Christian groups, which maintain that God prohibits homosexuality. As proof, they quote Leviticus 18:22 (‘Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable’) and Leviticus 20:13 (‘If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads’). In previous centuries, the same religious story was responsible for tormenting millions of people all over the world. This story can be briefly summarised as follows:

-Ethical judgement
Humans ought to obey God’s commands.

- Factual statement
About 3,000 years ago God commanded humans to avoid homosexual activities.

- Practical guideline
People should avoid homosexual activities.

Is the story true? Scientists cannot argue with the judgement that humans ought to obey God.

Personally, you may dispute it. You may believe that human rights trump divine authority, and if God orders us to violate human rights, we shouldn’t listen to Him. Yet there is no scientific experiment that can decide this issue.

In contrast, science has a lot to say about the factual statement that 3,000 years ago the Creator of the Universe commanded members of the Homo sapiens species to abstain from boy-on-boy action. How do we know this statement is true? Examining the relevant literature reveals that though this statement is repeated in millions of books, articles and Internet sites, they all rely on a single source: the Bible. If so, a scientist would ask, who composed the Bible, and when? Note that this is a factual question, not a question of values. Devout Jews and Christians say that at least the book of Leviticus was dictated by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, and from that moment onwards not a single letter was either added or deleted from it. ‘But,’ the scientist would insist, ‘how can we be sure of that? After all, the Pope argued that the Donation of Constantine was composed by Constantine himself in the fourth century, when in fact it was forged 400 years later by the Pope’s own clerks.’

We can now use an entire arsenal of scientific methods to determine who composed the Bible, and when. Scientists have been doing exactly that for more than a century, and if you are interested, you can read whole books about their findings. To cut a long story short, most peer-reviewed scientific studies agree that the Bible is a collection of numerous different texts composed by different people in different times, and that these texts were not assembled into a single holy book until long after biblical times. For example, whereas King David probably lived around 1000 BC, it is commonly accepted that the book of Deuteronomy was composed in the court of King Josiah of Judah, sometime around 620 BC, as part of a propaganda campaign aimed to strengthen Josiah’s authority. Leviticus was compiled at an even later date, no earlier than 500 BC.

As for the idea that the ancient Jews carefully preserved the biblical text, without adding or subtracting anything, scientists point out that biblical Judaism was not a scripture-based religion at all. Rather, it was a typical Iron Age cult, similar to many of its Middle Eastern neighbours. It had no synagogues, yeshivas, rabbis – or even a bible. Instead it had elaborate temple rituals, most of which involved sacrificing animals to a jealous sky god so that he would bless his people with seasonal rains and military victories. Its religious elite consisted of priestly families, who owed everything to birth, and nothing to intellectual prowess. The mostly illiterate priests were busy with the temple ceremonies, and had little time for writing or studying any scriptures.

During the Second Temple period a rival religious elite was formed. Due partly to Persian and Greek influences, Jewish scholars who wrote and interpreted texts gained increasing prominence. These scholars eventually came to be known as rabbis, and the texts they compiled were christened ‘the Bible’. Rabbinical authority rested on individual intellectual abilities rather than on birth. The clash between the new literate elite and the old priestly families was inevitable. Luckily for the rabbis, the Romans torched Jerusalem and its temple while suppressing the Great Jewish Revolt (AD 70). With the temple in ruins, the priestly families lost their religious authority, their economic power base and their very raison d’être. Traditional Judaism – a Judaism of temples, priests and headsplitting warriors – disappeared. Its place was taken by a new Judaism of books, rabbis and hairsplitting scholars. The scholars’ main forte was interpretation. They used this ability not only to explain how an almighty God allowed His temple to be destroyed, but also to bridge the immense gaps between the old Judaism described in biblical stories and the very different Judaism they created.

Hence according to our best scientific knowledge, the Leviticus injunctions against homosexuality reflect nothing grander than the biases of a few priests and scholars in ancient Jerusalem. Though science cannot decide whether people ought to obey God’s commands, it has many relevant things to say about the provenance of the Bible. If Ugandan politicians think that the power that created the cosmos, the galaxies and the black holes becomes terribly upset whenever two Homo sapiens males have a bit of fun together, then science can help disabuse them of this rather bizarre notion."

~ Excerpts from Yuval Noah Harari's "Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow"

joseph1013:
ScienceWatch, you should change your moniker. It is a disgrace to science.

GrizzlyBear:
THE SILLINESS OF SPEAKING IN TONGUES


If there is anything that is starkly spurious in christianity, it's the whole notion of speaking in tongues.

What christians call speaking is tongues, is just someone saying random meaningless words and claiming it's of heavenly origin. Anyone can do this.

Just study any christian who frequently speaks in tongues and you'll notice that every time he speaks in tongues, he uses the same string of phrases. This is because his brain has already become accustomed to those words, and invariably made it his default "heavenly tongue."

I know relations who have been using the same string of meaningless phrases for years now. They are so used to it, that they don't even know that it's the same bland group of words that they use.

Christians need to know that whatever transcendent feeling they experience, that causes them to speak in tongues, such feeling is not exclusive to christians. People from other religions also experience this feeling when they engage in their own so called spiritual activities, which can range from worship, to prayer, or even meditation which is isomorphic to quiet prayer, and such feeling can be so profound and overwhelming, that it makes them susceptible to suggestion and weird behavior. And when they get accustomed to such weird behavior, it becomes a part of them.

The fact that there are branches of christianity that don't even believe in the idea of speaking in tongues, and still claim that they speak to and hear from God, and God assures them on a daily basis that what they are doing (not believing in his holy spirit and manifesting its presence by speaking in tongues) is right, then it raises the question of the validity of either of the beliefs, because both camps claim that God speaks to them. So it's either God is deliberately causing confusion, is confused himself, or both camps are just being delusional and their God doesn't exist.

In medieval Europe, the chief formula for knowledge was: Knowledge = Scriptures × Logic.* If we want to know the answer to some important question, we should read scriptures, and use our logic to understand the exact meaning of the text.

For example, scholars who wished to know the shape of the earth scanned the Bible looking for relevant references. One pointed out that in Job 38:13, it says that God can ‘take hold of the edges of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it’. This implies – reasoned the pundit – that because the earth has ‘edges’ of which we can ‘take hold’, it must be a flat square.

Another sage rejected this interpretation, calling attention to Isaiah 40:22, where it says that God ‘sits enthroned above the circle of the earth’. Isn’t that proof that the earth is round? In practice, that meant that scholars sought knowledge by spending years in schools and libraries, reading more and more texts, and sharpening their logic so they could understand the texts correctly.

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For example, in order to gauge the true shape of the earth, we can observe the sun, the moon and the planets from various locations across the world.

Once we have amassed enough observations, we can use trigonometry to deduce not only the shape of the earth, but also the structure of the entire solar system. In practice, that means that scientists seek knowledge by spending years in observatories, laboratories and research expeditions, gathering more and more empirical data, and sharpening their mathematical tools so they could interpret the data correctly.

The scientific formula for knowledge led to astounding breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, medicine and countless other disciplines.

~ Excerpts from Yuval Noah Harari's "Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow"

In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand twenty-firstcentury technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.

These powers are far more potent than steam and the telegraph, and they will not be used merely for the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons. The main products of the twenty-first century will be bodies, brains and minds, and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dickens’s Britain and the Mahdi’s Sudan. Indeed, it will be bigger than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.

Socialism, which was very up to date a hundred years ago, failed to keep up with the new technology. Leonid Brezhnev and Fidel Castro held on to ideas that Marx and Lenin formulated in the age of steam, and did not understand the power of computers and biotechnology. Liberals, in contrast, adapted far better to the information age. This partly explains why Khrushchev’s 1956 prediction never materialised, and why it was the liberal capitalists who eventually buried the Marxists. If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

Radical Islam is in a far worse position than socialism. It has not yet even come to terms with the Industrial Revolution – no wonder it has little of relevance to say about genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Islam, Christianity and other traditional religions are still important players in the world.

Yet their role is now largely reactive. In the past, they were a creative force. Christianity, for example, spread the hitherto heretical idea that all humans are equal before God, thereby changing human political structures, social hierarchies and even gender relations. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God’s favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries.

In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley.

The Church established Europe’s first economic corporations – the monasteries – which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods. Monasteries were the first institutions to use clocks, and for centuries they and the cathedral schools were the most important learning centres of Europe, helping to found many of Europe’s first universities, such as Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca.

Today the Catholic Church continues to enjoy the loyalties and tithes of hundreds of millions of followers. Yet it and the other theist religions have long since turned from a creative into a reactive force. They are busy with rearguard holding operations more than with pioneering novel technologies, innovative economic methods or groundbreaking social ideas. They now mostly agonise over the technologies, methods and ideas propagated by other movements. Biologists invent the contraceptive pill – and the Pope doesn’t know what to do about it. Computer scientists develop the Internet – and rabbis argue whether orthodox Jews should be allowed to surf it. Feminist thinkers call upon women to take possession of their bodies – and learned muftis debate how to confront such incendiary ideas.

Ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of the twentieth century? That’s a difficult question, because it is hard to choose from a long list of candidates, including scientific discoveries such as antibiotics, technological inventions such as computers, and ideological creations such as feminism. Now ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of traditional religions such as Islam and Christianity in the twentieth century? This too is a very difficult question, because there is so little to choose from. What did priests, rabbis and muftis discover in the twentieth century that can be mentioned in the same breath as antibiotics, computers or feminism? Having mulled over these two questions, from where do you think the big changes of the twenty-first century will emerge: from the Islamic State, or from Google? Yes, the Islamic State knows how to put videos on YouTube; but leaving aside the industry of torture, how many new start-ups have emerged from Syria or Iraq lately?

Billions of people, including many scientists, continue to use religious scriptures as a source of authority, but these texts are no longer a source of creativity. Think, for example, about the acceptance of gay marriage or female clergy by the more progressive branches of Christianity. Where did this acceptance originate? Not from reading the Bible, St Augustine or Martin Luther. Rather, it came from reading texts like Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality or Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’.

Yet Christian true-believers – however progressive – cannot admit to drawing their ethics from Foucault and Haraway. So they go back to the Bible, to St Augustine and to Martin Luther, and make a very thorough search. They read page after page and story after story with the utmost attention, until they find what they need: some maxim, parable or ruling that if interpreted creatively enough means that God blesses gay marriages and that women can be ordained to the priesthood. They then pretend the idea originated in the Bible, when in fact it originated with Foucault. The Bible is kept as a source of authority, even though it is no longer a true source of inspiration.

~ Excerpts from Yuval Noah Harari's "Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow"