Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we?
A lot of us actually seems to believe in some kind of deity/ies, we just dont mention it because we value HN as a common ground for technical and business discussions.
If not I could tell you some stories about stupid, stubborn evil ateists as well :-P
As a religious person, I find keeping religion out of normal discourse has been very counterproductive for both religious and non-religious people. I understand that the discussions are more prone to conflict and uncomfortable feelings, but they're nonetheless key to understanding other people and diversity of thought.
Keeping religion (and agnosticism and atheism) out of things produces the same problems we see with the 'Majority Illusion'.
I have nothing against discussing religion online but I think it is mostly offtopic on HN.
Edit: see also my reply to GPs answer to me
I understand that's surely not intended, but it's nonetheless the consequence of making religion off topic.
Would it be better if I said something like "keep attacks on religion out of HN"?
It's the stereotyping that really sticks out to me. It would be flagged or downvoted (justifiably!) if someone called women irrational or told homosexuals that their lifestyles should be kept private.
I'm convinced that the double standard here just doesn't register for most of the HN community, and almost all the English speaking world besides. I said something to raise awareness of the problem.
I think the difference here is that in one case one would be inferring a belief system from membership in a non-belief-related group, while the other would be inferring a belief system from membership in a belief system.
I don't think it's a double standard to treat those things differently (though there are corners of HN that get wildly out of control in either of the aforementioned cases).
This is related to a current problem in the US left, where tolerance of belief has to compete with intolerance of abuse, and sadly, belief often wins at the expense of the abused.
For context: did you read the comment that started this thread? I and others originally read it as a fairly broad patronising attack against all religions before the author came back and explained the intention. (and I still think it could have been written a lot clearer to begin with. )
So back to the point of creating tools for productive discussion, is there some solution to the problem that will allow us to communicate ideas without the offense and without the verbosity?
I'm not sure we can get there in one HN thread, but consciously addressing linguistic gaps would be worthwhile. When particular words have enough overloaded meaning to cause confusion and conflict, we need to find new words.
For the record, I'm for healthy (respectful) dissent. A lack of dissent is poisonous for all parties. But outgrouping is also poisonous.
Isn't HN supposed to be a place for civil discussion between people who disagree?
If you write off arguments you disagree with as "tiresome" and "beating a dead horse", especially on something as basic as "what is evidence", then you're providing a strong negative counterpoint to the original proposal - do people even want a place where people can agree on facts and then disagree on the results of interpretations of those facts? Or do they want, as you seem to want, to retreat into their comfortable social network of people who all agree on the same unwritten body of pseudo-facts?
As a semi-religious person [0], I would purely love to see religious tenets discussed dispassionately on HN, for a couple of reasons:
1. I've long thought that a corollary of the Summary of the Law [1] is "face the facts," that is, base your beliefs on evidence to the extent possible; as a group, the HN crowd is quite good at examining evidence from various perspectives.
2. Much and even most of the HN crowd is quite interested in knowing "what's going on," which ultimately extends to why is there something rather than nothing? [2]. I would greatly value the insights of others in that area.
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[0] I describe myself as semi-religious because I do try to base my beliefs on evidence; this is reflected in the title of my religion blog (largely inactive in recent years), "The Questioning Christian," at http://www.QuestioningChristian.org . The right-hand column there lists some of my favorite essays.
[1] See http://www.questioningchristian.com/2004/11/facing_facts.htm...
[2] For my "naïve conjecture" about what's going on (to borrow a phrase from the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne FRS, an English particle physicist turned Anglican priest), see http://www.questioningchristian.com/2007/02/another_way_to_....
Similarly, 'yoga' (by which I do not mean physical exercise) is etymologically related to connotations of union (from 'yuj'). Again, the implication is separation and a process of union.
If you take a serious look at your own experience (the evidence), you will arrive at a similar conclusion to Descartes; roughly, that the evidence of one's senses cannot be taken at face value because they provide similar evidences in a dream which is understood to be entirely illusory upon waking up.
Alas, most of 'Western' (I do apologise in advance to anyone who thinks I'm being too liberal with that word) thought takes the waking state to be absolute, and dream and deep sleep to be subsets of this state. This is an assumption but it runs so deep that it will be difficult for most to see what I'm trying to point out.
First consider that the three states of consciousness experienced (waking, dream and deep sleep) are completely different modes; that is, the dreamer can neither conceive the existence of a waking world which is more 'real' than his current experience, nor will he readily admit that his experience is illusory...until he wakes up and becomes the waker. At this point the illusory nature of the dream cannot be doubted. The money in the dream cannot service debts of the waking state.
Consider, then, that questions as to the origin of the world, the purpose of existence and the nature of God may arise only during dream and waking, because in these states there exists thought and thus by implication a mind -- the conclusion is then drawn that in the absence of a mind, there is also absence of a world (as in deep sleep).
Thus one may conclude that the 3 states of waking, dream and deep sleep have relative and not absolute reality. It will, however, be noticed that there is a substratum integrating these varying experiences and arrogating them.
These are all evidences available to any human being and perhaps could lead one to believe that there might be something to religion after all, beyond the paraphernalia of clothing, places of worship and specific texts.
"The kingdom of heaven is within you; he that findeth his Self shall know it"
On the contrary, it is possible to dream that one is engaging in neuroscience, even hook up (dream) friends and family to some kind of brain monitor and prove that they are themselves asleep/dreaming. That doesn't change the fact that the entire dream is illusory. One can never see one's own brain while dreaming or sleeping, it is upon waking that we rely on the testimony of others and thus, again, on the existence of a mind. In this way, thought precedes the brain, whose very appearance occurs in the medium of thought. This is inverted as compared to the Western view that brains produce thoughts. Thoughts produce brains!
I'm not sure (and happy to be corrected) if lucid dreaming is well defined enough that we can say it is awareness of the illusory nature of the dream, while dreaming. Dream money, earned lucidly or not, cannot service debts of the waking state. And vice versa! Hence different modes of experience.
I looked at your site and a few things I didn't see are a discussion about how identifying as Christian affects your daily life, how you came to consider Christianity as an option, how "cosmic coincidences" are evidence of any god, or even if so how those cosmic coincidences translate into your particular religious actions such as quoting the bible.
My perspective is that most religions have been spread primarily by violence and these violent interactions explain the overall picture of religion in the world today independent of the truth of the deistic claims of any particular religion (but potentially related to effectiveness of particular religions as a psychological hack to enable optimal violence for spreading that religion).
2) Why do you consider "a creator" as helping with that question? I am not particularly interested in "why something rather than nothing?" because I can't even imagine what a satisfying answer could possibly be.
Please note that originally Christianity spread in a peer-to-peer way until the Roman empire picked it up.
Even after then a lot of people have spread Christianity not by forcing people but by presenting it as a better option.
Personally I try to avoid forcing my views unto people ("many people who try to become fishers of men end up like scarecrows"). Instead I try to make an example and if anyone like what they see they are free to ask.
I don't expect anyone who is religious to see it that way though, even though I've met many devout Christians who happily admit there is no factual proof of God and that is why they place their energies in faith instead.
For me it was very easy to interpret as a general attack.
There are factual cases for God, some attempting to be proofs even. For example, many consider objective morality (race based slavery is bad, say) to be a case for absolute good, which is hard to explain by pure randomness.
Faith, to a Christian, is making choices in the face of this problem. A Christian knows that everyone has to decide whether to follow God or not, and in that way, everyone has faith in some set of axioms. Many people (intelligent, kind, smart ones!) have immense faith that only matter and energy exist despite basically no proof in that metaphysical axiom.
Despite how hard it is to explain this, it's actually a clear thought to a reasonably educated Christian. It's just hard to communicate since words like 'rational', 'proof', and 'facts' are overloaded and cause confusion in these sorts of conversations. In this way, the balkanization of our culture is a negative feedback loop as misunderstanding promotes division which promotes more misunderstanding.
> strongly believing in them anyway can make sense if membership of organised religion is attractive enough
The point of Christianity isn't being part of an organization. People who go to worship services because it's their favorite social club are actually criticized pretty heavily by Jesus in the Bible. To be fair, I think most churchgoers don't understand the implications of this.
There is no evidence of the Christian god, the Hindu god's, or the Greek gods doing what their holy texts claimed, so I'm of in the camp where I assume none of them are correct. It's senseless to be sure one is because it happened to be the one you were raised with.
And you wouldn't think that if you were born in other circumstances.
> I'm of in the camp where I assume none of them are correct
Fair enough. My point was that everyone assumes some things and that there will be more peace and understanding when we acknowledge that instead of establishing outgroups.
On a side note, physicalist assumptions can and do lead to harsh utilitarianism and eventually the devaluing and ending of human life.
Finally, the "don't kill" part of the Bible is very clear. You don't have to be a theologian to know that people killing in the name of Christ aren't Christians. Just like you don't have to be a mathematician to know that 2+2=4.
The existence of God is not a fact, not even remotely close to being one. If it was then basically everyone would believe in God because any unbeliever would be seen as crazy as someone who doesn't believe in gravity. But lots of people don't believe in God. The existence of God is an article of faith, and that is simply not something you can blow off as "words like 'fact' are overloaded".
Really, this whole sub-thread is strong evidence for why edraferi's proposal would be very difficult. Such a website or tool could not even handle a debating-101 discussion on religion because people would have no way to agree on what the facts were.
But I agree with you on the tool. Even if we can assume a healthy community (a huge assumption) the tool would have to pick some first principles and scientific standards that would inevitably be controversial. We could maybe have different sections based on different first principles, but then we're back to a fragmented, insular culture.
The word "faith", for example, probably means something completely different to a scientist who has "faith" (confidence) in a particular experimental method, versus a religious person who has "faith" (belief/hope) in God, versus a parent who has "faith" (trust) in a child.
A tool for discussion could help elucidate these differences in usage and bridge the linguistic gap that can form between groups.
Probably the most famous words of Jesus, from John 3, say that "whoever believes in [Jesus] will not perish". The word 'belief' here is from the Koine Greek root 'pistis' (1), which is also translated as 'faith' in its noun form. It absolutely carries connotations of trust, relationship, and fidelity. To the point where it is nonsense to have faith without personal consequences such as changed behavior (see James 1). So I believe your last definition fits the ideas of the Bible better.
Anyway, both Christians and non-Christians in the English speaking world tend to use the word 'faith' to fit your second definition, something more like wish/hope/belief/feeling. So I can understand atheist's offense when Christians say atheism and science are each expressions of faith, but I think a lot of it comes from the sort of 'linguistic gap' you talk about.
Anyway, it's a shame we don't more words to distinguish between these overloaded ideas: faith, facts, love, etc.
(1) https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?str...
Is it? I really hope you're merely lying in order to socially signal religiousness, because the general form of this argument allows that technically, you don't know that this SMBC is false [0]. I believe that densely-packed Hitlers exist all around you. The inexistence of the densely packed Hitlers crowding just outside the cone of your vision is an article of faith. It's typically faith in the truth of a universe whose boundary conditions are subject to Popperian falsifiability.
I just want to clarify some incredibly common misconceptions here. There are lots of claims on these issues, so it can be difficult to get a clear picture of which claims are actually supported by evidence.
First, from an empirical perspective, all signs point to morality being an evolved phenomenon. This is studied scientifically by surveying different cultures, conducting game-like experiments, and testing for moral behavior in other species. You can find videos of monkeys who appear to have a sense of fairness, for example, and lots of other species (dogs, crows, other primates, etc.) all display varying levels of behaviors we call moral. This is what we would expect to find if these behaviors evolved as adaptations.
Second, "randomness" is not an accurate word to use to describe evolution by natural selection. Mutations are mostly random, but those rare mutations that survive DNA repair mechanisms and produce a reproductive and survival advantage persist and spread. Something similar occurs with cultural memes, including those layers of morality which do not come from instinct.
Finally, though you didn't mention this specifically, it's important to point out that scientists did not decide there was no God and then set out to prove it (a common misconception with some people I know). Most historical scientists were religious, but over time as more and more evidence was collected, scientists in aggregate found that what they had been taught about God was unnecessary for and often contradictory to their scientific discoveries. Thus, despite some scientists remaining religious, science itself is an atheistic process, as that is what has been proven to work.
It's this track record of epistemological success that leads people to accept metaphysical materialism, not an a priori assumption.
If you want more detailed summaries of the empirical support for these arguments, I recommend the book Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne.
Should this be non-religious instead of atheistic? When we say atheistic we mist often assume someone who is opposed to the idea of all religions, not just somebody who doesn't let it interfere with his work.
I think youre being a bit defensive. That statement might not apply to your religion, especially if it's one based on facts.