What Do People Here Believe?

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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

huckelberry wrote:
Sat May 14, 2022 12:08 am
Doc, I think you have a different idea of neo orthodox than I do.
I must. To me it’s entrenchment, or better said, re-entrenchment into orthodox Christian beliefs humans were leaving behind thanks to the Enlightenment and Liberalism. I’m shocked people who ought to know better simply believe because it feels good, but it what it is - hence why I made a cheeky reference to 31st century Catholics waging space crusades. It seems us humans are in need of Zombie Jesus and the promise of yonder heaven.

eta: I had to come back to this post because I understand I’m being ‘le edgy atheist’, and that’s not fair for good-faith discussion on this forum.

My position, more or less depending on the religion or religion-philosophy, is that religious texts are a collection of stories which elucidate human nature and metaphysics. The “deepness” of the Bible is that it’s often layered in metaphor and history that takes time to figure out, thus it has a payoff factor when someone finally ‘gets it’. Likewise religious ritual is engaged in for a chiefly psychological purpose. The problem, of course, is that most humans are god-tier morons that require a priest class who subsequently take advantage of them and their existential dread. Fun times.

I believe touchy faithful types like to describe modern science as a religion, or cult, or belief system (we see DCP and mopologists do this all the time) that exists within a religious framework:

- scientists operate under religious assumptions such as ‘science discovers the Truth”

- Western science is born out of a religious movement - Christianity

- the scientific method is itself an act of faith based on hunches, hopes, theories, and other people believing in those hunches, hopes, and theories

- ‘science’ becomes the ‘god’ and scientists become the priesthood

- atheists usually don't understand religion, invariably straw-man it and steel-man their own ‘faith’ as supremely rational

- dogmatism ensues

So, circling back around to my first paragrpah above, I’m shocked we’ve fallen back into orthodoxy and fundamentalism, because it seemed like we were headed on a fairly rapid enlightenment trajectory. But that’s not the case at all. Apparently we humans need religion to contextualize our human experiences, we need religious ritual for psychological relief, and we need a priesthood, whatever form it takes, to keep our minds framed within that narrative. The real fiction from my referenced science fiction novel isn’t that there’s Catholics in the 31st century, but that’s there’s a space-faring civilization in the 31st century.
Last edited by Doctor CamNC4Me on Sat May 14, 2022 12:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by High Spy »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Sat May 14, 2022 2:05 am

... Zombie Jesus ...
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by bill4long »

KevinSim wrote:
Fri May 13, 2022 3:34 am
What do different people on this forum believe?
It's not what about you can believe, it's about what you can prove.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (Sagan)

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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by Physics Guy »

I remember The Mote in God's Eye. Its future human society was ridiculous but its aliens were interesting. The book almost posed a serious moral and theological question; the plot and setting raise the question, and the book's title even alludes to it, but none of the characters in the book ever seems to notice the issue. It's as if the author put a big hunk of prime rib in the fridge and then just let it go bad because he forgot to cook it.

I've never even known any Mormons in real life. I grew up in Christian denominations that don't claim so much about themselves as churches and don't make such claims on their members' time and money, either. I did also get to know some pretty fundamentalist evangelical Christians. I think it always seemed clear to me that there was a broad spectrum.

I'm a theist in much the same way that Isaac Asimov was an atheist. In his time the term "atheist" tended to mean someone who definitely believed that there is no God; for people who just didn't have any strong opinion on the subject either way, the label was "agnostic". Asimov decided to call himself an atheist, however, even though he wasn't really intellectually sure that God didn't exist. He just realised that in practice he never took the possibility of God's existence seriously. He didn't just judge the possibility as being unlikely: he found it uninteresting. So he almost always thought as if he were certain that God didn't exist, even though he actually wasn't so certain. I think I'm like that, just on the other side.

Whether proof is important depends on what you want to prove, I think, and what you mean by "proof". If by "proof" you mean establishing with certainty that something is true, then it would sure be nice to prove as much as we can, but we can hardly prove anything. Talking about how great proof is, in that sense, is like talking about how great beachfront mansions are. Yes, that would sure be nice. If we can't prove anything about God or life after death, can we maybe just prove the Riemann Conjecture? Quark confinement from quantum chromodynamics? The Second Law of Thermodynamics from mechanics? Those would be great proofs to have.

There's an older use of "prove" to mean "test". One applied a standard and rejected things that failed to meet it, but the standards weren't proof in the mathematical sense that the item was perfect. The standards were set because they were at least somewhat informative about the quality of the item, but also because they were easy to check. In this sense of "proof" I am quite keen on proving things. A lot of things can indeed be proven in this sense.
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by K Graham »

Mormonism effectively killed my belief in God.
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by Dr Exiled »

I believe that if a God existed he/she wouldn't demand worship. That seems to be a clue that the God concept of Christianity/Mormonism is flawed. Also, the belief that God somehow couldn't forgive sin without a bloody, horrific sacrifice is another problem. Then there is the problem of evil, but for me, I guess I can make that work if this were some sort of place to get experience and see how evil we could be. I don't know exactly what the future holds but all will soon see. So, live a good life.
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones." ~ Marcus Aurelius
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by malkie »

Physics Guy wrote:
Sat May 14, 2022 1:09 pm
I remember The Mote in God's Eye. Its future human society was ridiculous but its aliens were interesting. The book almost posed a serious moral and theological question; the plot and setting raise the question, and the book's title even alludes to it, but none of the characters in the book ever seems to notice the issue. It's as if the author put a big hunk of prime rib in the fridge and then just let it go bad because he forgot to cook it.

I've never even known any Mormons in real life. I grew up in Christian denominations that don't claim so much about themselves as churches and don't make such claims on their members' time and money, either. I did also get to know some pretty fundamentalist evangelical Christians. I think it always seemed clear to me that there was a broad spectrum.

I'm a theist in much the same way that Isaac Asimov was an atheist. In his time the term "atheist" tended to mean someone who definitely believed that there is no God; for people who just didn't have any strong opinion on the subject either way, the label was "agnostic". Asimov decided to call himself an atheist, however, even though he wasn't really intellectually sure that God didn't exist. He just realised that in practice he never took the possibility of God's existence seriously. He didn't just judge the possibility as being unlikely: he found it uninteresting. So he almost always thought as if he were certain that God didn't exist, even though he actually wasn't so certain. I think I'm like that, just on the other side.

Whether proof is important depends on what you want to prove, I think, and what you mean by "proof". If by "proof" you mean establishing with certainty that something is true, then it would sure be nice to prove as much as we can, but we can hardly prove anything. Talking about how great proof is, in that sense, is like talking about how great beachfront mansions are. Yes, that would sure be nice. If we can't prove anything about God or life after death, can we maybe just prove the Riemann Conjecture? Quark confinement from quantum chromodynamics? The Second Law of Thermodynamics from mechanics? Those would be great proofs to have.

There's an older use of "prove" to mean "test". One applied a standard and rejected things that failed to meet it, but the standards weren't proof in the mathematical sense that the item was perfect. The standards were set because they were at least somewhat informative about the quality of the item, but also because they were easy to check. In this sense of "proof" I am quite keen on proving things. A lot of things can indeed be proven in this sense.
I'd guess that you like pudding. :)
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by Physics Guy »

Mmm, pudding.

But what kind of pudding has a crust, actually? That’s a little disturbing.

I get a pudding with a crust, I might not want to dig into it further, you know.
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malkie
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by malkie »

Physics Guy wrote:
Sat May 14, 2022 7:52 pm
Mmm, pudding.

But what kind of pudding has a crust, actually? That’s a little disturbing.

I get a pudding with a crust, I might not want to dig into it further, you know.
I was thinking of the pudding of which the proof is in the eating thereof.
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Re: What Do People Here Believe?

Post by Physics Guy »

That’s better. The version that sprang to my mind is about the proof being under the crust.
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