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Comment by throwaway510921 | Hacker News Reader

>it's much better for people to believe in Jesus than the Kardashians

The problem is not what you believe in but how you do. Religion is by definition dogmatic and in a sociatal context very well suited to create/base a self image on. Its a nice layer 8 intrusion vector. To be fair, there can be dogmatic kardashian fans but its much more unlikely. Just consider the short news lifespan of this celeb world.

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Religions that we observe today are systems of beliefs with a shelf life measured in millenia. Modern cults tend to implode within a few short decades, if that.

I grew up in a Christian cult that is well over 100 years old and has survived many a scandal. Follower numbers took a big hit once the www emerged and was able to distribute information to the masses without gate keepers but they still have all of their land and wealth in place throught the globe and the system still works.

At one point there were over three million followers in the United States...those officially inducted or "baptized" through a program that closely resembles and is modelled after the "three degrees" of freemasonry. These people amount to a sleeper cell that will do exactly as they are told, immediately and without question.

It didn't start like this. The founder established the organization as a way to use Christianity to spread the tenents of freemasonry to the masses instead of just white males of means. His first successor was a drunken fundamentalist.

Gotta love America.

  > Religion is by definition dogmatic

What definition is that? I see that religion is an axiom, not unlike many other axioms that we take for granted. At what point do you "just believe" the physicists? When they talk about atoms? Subatomic particles? Fields?

I'm not religious and I'm strongly in the science camp. But I don't pretend that my choice of worldview is not based on axioms that I myself cannot test.

Aply the verification approach to religion and you will see many inconsistencies and contradictions. I believe no major religion would widthstand a scrutinizing critical look.

This sceptical approach down to the core is fatal for religions, thus discouraged, thus dogmatic.

Science is hard to reproduce, true, but it is non the less encouraged.

Well, I read somewhere that Theosophism stated that: Truth is our religion

Which I would sign, too.

(but probably not the specific truth, they found, I do not really know more of them, except that they were the base of Rudolf Steiners philosophy, I am not a huge fan of)

  > Aply the verification approach to religion and you will see many inconsistencies and contradictions.

Inconsistencies and contradictions like the fact that we observe neutrinos decaying in the sun, which proves that they change? But we observe neutrinos arriving together with light after a supernova, which proves that they move at the speed of light. How does that concur with our axiom that an object moving at the speed of light had no mass and experiences no time, so it cannot change?

Inconsistencies and contradictions are found as much in science as they are found in religion.

>Inconsistencies and contradictions are found as much in science as they are found in religion.

I dont think its "as much" but anyway, science works to resolve these tensions, regardles of personal believes. You had to reach for the edges of scientific progress to come up with these examples, whereas i was speaking of the foundation of religion.

At least in my religion, those versed in it and who deal with it have resolved or are working to resolve such tensions. Maybe some religions don't. But then your statement should be "Foo religion", not "religions".

When people "just believe" the physicists, it's shortcut. If you dig beneath all the turtles, there are facts there. Yes, there is great possibility and space for manipulation and distortion, but it is rooted in the reality, which percolates through all the layers of human interpretation.

Religion lack that root, there is nothing but human culture in it, which is then mistaken for objective truth about environment.

Science is part of culture. And what is “human culture” anyway? You seem to think it’s some fiction we all believe. This isn’t culture. Something like that would be worthless. Culture, which is related to “cult” and “cultivation”, is supposed to help you become more fully and better you and part of that is a better grasp of the truth.

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