What's Your Faith, Or Lack Of It?

[Chinahand]

Einstein said:

I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.

 

Your quote is slightly abbreviated - Clicky -but with no loss of meaning.

 

For me, I actively challenge the stupidity of most organized religions not due to any act of liberation from religion in my youth, but from an increasing sense that religious crack-pottery is damaging our society.

 

I am fine with Einstein's (or VinnieK's!) agnosticism, but when it comes to the zealots who wish to spread fundamentalist Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or whatever then I will happilly crusade against their brand of reality denying childishness.

 

From its attempts to replace science education with superstition, stiffle medical research, exclude homosexuality from society, shield itself from criticism through blasphemy laws or its own version of human rights I really feel religious bigotry is on the march.

 

If you work in stem cell research, science education, woman's fertility, equal rights legislation etc etc you will be increasingly opposed by dogmatics who believe their particular holy text ordains how the world is, including human behaviour, and any divergence from this is demonic or impossible.

 

I am perfectly willing to say I will oppose this imposition of dogma and really believe that thinking people should join together to expose it as the superstition it is.

 

Oh and when it comes to quoting Einstein - you've got to be careful - he wrote alot - even about his youthful liberation:

 

I came ... to a deep religiousness, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.

 

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression.

 

Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment — an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.

Einstein: Autobiographical Notes

cience has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.

 

It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.

Eistein: Religion and Science 1930

[Lao]

If they try to stop evolution being taught in the schools I'll join you on that crusade Chinahand.

 

But it would probably be just you and me, trying to get atheists to band together is "like trying to herd cats" and i cant do Tuesdays or Thursday nights! perhaps we could take it in shifts.

[Lonan3]

Any form of dogma is the antithesis of education. Whether the methods employed are religious, political, scientific or philosophical, they are all inutile without the key element of imagination.

[Chinahand]

I have great difficulty seeing how the scientific method stiffles imagination - religious dogma on the other hand ...

[Jimcalagon]

I have great difficulty seeing how the scientific method stiffles imagination - religious dogma on the other hand ...

 

Lonan didn't say the scientific method stifles imagination - he said scientific dogma, there is a difference.

 

I happen to agree - and I'm not the only one...

 

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

 

Arthur C Clarke

 

There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. ... Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness. .. Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.

Michio Kaku

 

When it is unhindered by dogma, the scientific method is one of the greatest tools mankind has at its disposal.

[Chinahand]

Erm - did he say scientific dogma - the second sentence seems more general.

 

Whether the methods employed are religious, political, scientific or philosophical, they are all inutile without the key element of imagination.

 

I DO agree with you concerning scientific dogma, but when the method employed is scientific I have great difficulty seeing how it will not include imagination.

 

I'd also add that I only trust distinguished but elderly scientists when they are talking about their own research area - also these oldsters are usually very happy to engage in the battle for ideas with the young bucks and DO admit they are probably wrong - but they fight like hell to make sure the youngsters have properly refruted their ideas - and quite right to.

 

Edit: you've added the quote by Michio Kaku which says the same thing as my last paragraph, but from the opposite point of view - the fight for ideas is what is important, and not some elderly scientist's opinions - fellow scientists will only listen to them if their ideas still produce a theory which better explains the evidence - and will abandon them if they do not.

[Lonan3]

Erm - did he say scientific dogma - the second sentence seems more general.

I actually said any form of dogma. The second sentence was intended to be supplementary to that.

[ai_Droid]

The Baptist church does regular 'why evolutionists will burn in hell' meetings. We should pop down and join in

[Chinahand]

Time and place?

[Karellen]

I was never able to understand why myths and stories handed down from middle eastern stone-age tribes became thought of as "true" and why these myths and stories were adopted in the west as the principal method of achieving social cohesion and control of the masses.

 

I have wondered why contemporary european myths and stories (mannanan, the norse gods, the roman gods, the greek gods) failed to be adopted in the same way as their middle eastern counterparts. Maybe the egyptians and those tribes living in what is now israel just had better story tellers, or maybe they just had pointier sticks.

[Slim]

Time and place?

 

Baptist church in Onchan. Sunday evening from memory, there's often an advert in the back of the courier.

[Slim]

or maybe they just had pointier sticks.

 

That's it isn't it, the success of religions comes down to which side won. In the case of the nordics it was the Romans what stuffed them up and converted them to Jebus.

[La_Dolce_Vita]

or maybe they just had pointier sticks.

 

That's it isn't it, the success of religions comes down to which side won. In the case of the nordics it was the Romans what stuffed them up and converted them to Jebus.

 

Would it not be largely down the fact of simplicity. Whereas people used to worship all sorts of gods someone came along and said that everything was done by one god. And then added that you cannot understand his powers, you never will, don't question him, just believe in him, and lots did.

[loaf]

Isn't that a bit weird, though, the whole process of renouncing a whole series of gods in order for one to take their place?

 

That's effectively showing that the person involved now accepts that they were imagining the previous list of deities and is now accepting that they were in fact manifestations of one single being?

 

It seems that those who switch religious views like this really undermines the legitimacy of any of the religions they're involved in.

[keyboarder]

I'm not sure how a belief in evolution (which still demands a degree of faith) can rule out a divine hand in everything. I can see that God/s would be quite entertained by getting something started and then seeing where it all ends. Fanaticism is finely balanced.