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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

>Basic assumption is that most/all are based on dated observations of seasons, planets, stars, etc -- things that were once mysteries in the mechanical universe.

I think this is pretty much propaganda from anti-religious people. I have read all of the major religious texts over the last two years and If you look at most religions and their scriptures they deal very little with the physical world in general and are more focused on psychology and sociology than having serious thoughts on physics.

Sure some of them have foundation myths which we may say is wrong, but that’s a small part of any given religion and I don’t believe anyone every took them serious in the way we think of something like the Big Bang.

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People seem quick to forget that religion/philosophy was originally married to the quest to discover more about our world.

Carl Sagan, before lamenting about modern astrology, reminds us in Cosmos that astrology was once an actual attempt to make heads or tails of an impercievably large cosmic system and understands these are largely attempts at answers that simply lack the information/ability to falsify them yet.

What psychological tendencies the common man has about those beliefs/theories presented to them is a whole other topic.

I've finally read enough texts from various sources to feel ready to start Aldous Huxley's book on The Perennial Philosophy which I'm finding a refreshingly well researched alternative to, as you say, propaganda from whoever passes by in conversation.

> I have read all of the major religious texts over the last two years

you're doing better than a lot of monks did over their entire life time.

call me a skeptic, but even if I was able to accomplish such a herculean feat over 2 years time I doubt I would have the time to grasp much of any of the content that I blazed through -- but of course we're different people -- allow me to express my awe.

Many of these texts have been around long enough for many dedicated people to put forth their own translations, and if relevant (like with many Chinese texts) with some kind of further researched commentary/citations to better explain linguistic concepts/cultural references that may not immediately be obvious otherwise.

It helps a lot of texts without/before involving deities can actually be quite short and sweet, comparatively. Personally, I've found the greek classics to be much more difficult to get into than most of these "sacred texts".

I’m extremely proud of your skepticism at something I really haven’t put much effort into.

To clarify I haven’t read every religious text, but I have now read the Old/New Testament, The Baghavad Gita, The Tao te Ching, The Quaran and currently working my way through the Buddhist Sutras (looking to start on Sikhism next). That is the main text of all major religions and I only read 20-30 pages a day (with some overlap/not reading one at a time.). It’s very possible if you stick to it

Buddhism is derivated from Christian heresy called Manicheism.

Created and spread in Asia from Pakistan by third generation after apostle, called Mani.

There isn’t any evidence of any existing trace of Buddhism before 4th century AC, most Buddhism art are based on grec, and Syrian Christian artists who followed St Thomas the apostle into the east.

Mani predated those early Christian with his fake teaching which founded Buddhism.

Time to learn history.

In short: Buddhism is just a Christian heresy (manicheism)

And in the same spirit, Christianity is just a Jewish heresy. What's your point?

The sources I've read say that Manicheism was a syncretism of Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism[0], rather than Buddhism being derived from it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buddha_in_Manichaeism

> The Baghavad Gita

It's The Bhagavad Gita.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita

Awesome correction!

Yes, thank you. Typing from memory on my phone

You're welcome :)

Seems like the natural gulf between a serf and an edgy quant. :shrug:

Do we take the Big Bang seriously? As far as I can tell it’s just a vague description of what a “rolling back” of the clock until we don’t know how to go further might look like, under a whole ton of assumptions that are almost never stated. It’s interesting to consider in basically the exact same way the 7 day creation story is, and it’s quite likely that neither one is all that true - or all that false. Indeed they are quite compatible with each other, and incomplete.

Y…yes? We do take the Big Bang seriously because there are observable effects of it.

“As far as you can tell” is doing a massive amount of incurious lifting. Is phrenology making a comeback next?

That’s tautological. We observe the effects, and assume they must propagate backwards under rules we think we know, then say that the theory must be true because we observe the current state is the forward propagation under those same assumed rules. It’s unfalsifiable and accordingly uninteresting.

The reason why we assume the same rules is because 1) we haven't observed anything that implies that they changed, and 2) if we assume that they did change, then any attempt to figure out what really happened is moot anyway.

From a religious perspective, there's a take in e.g. some mainstream Islamic madhabs that time is an illusion that is caused by God literally recreating the entire universe moment after moment. He just happens to do so mostly in a way that is consistent with stable laws of nature, but ultimately it happens that way because God wills it to happen that way and for no other reason - there are no actual laws. If you adopt this viewpoint, then for all you know, the universe can be literally one second old, and all your memories of past events are just pre-created. That is unfalsifiable and uninteresting; the assumption that there are stable laws that hold, to the contrary, is interesting because it allows us to make interesting conclusions that also turn out to be practically useful in some cases.

aka, all models are wrong, some are useful.

We’ve been making detailed observations about a system in a sort of “steady state” for ~100 years and have the hubris to imagine that steadiness carries back 100,000,000 times as long as the observation period, all the way through the start state, into the origin. It boggles the mind.

And yes, any attempt to figure out what happened is moot. As you detail in your second paragraph. I don’t think much of it one way or the other, besides to interject when someone makes any sort of claim that “the science” points to their particular faith’s origin story.

Can you give an example of any of the practical use cases for the Big Bang origin story?

It would be silly to assume that the criteria that yields a law (or a system) be itself subject to that law or system. Logically, that criteria must encompass the system and cannot at all be subject to it

Considering that the Big Bang theory came from a Catholic monk (who wasn't even burnt at the stake for theorizing about it!) I'd say you're probably right there.

Sometimes folks are quick to paint religious people with the brush of the most radical of fundamentalists. Which is sort of ironic when you think about the statistics of how many actual religious people believe such nonsense as "the world is 6000 years old" and "woman was formed from the rib of a man, literally."

You'd think science minded people would have a bit more regard for statistics.

IIRC the "rib" thing is especially funny to take literally because it might be a translation error. The original Hebrew word did not necessarily refer to an actual rib.

I used to be strongly anti-theist and anti-religion in my teens but a few decades later now I've realized my opposition is more to the way religion is used to justify unjust hierarchies and oppression. There are absolutely scammers and quacks who will use religion to make health claims or sell woo but there is a lot of religious tradition that can exist alongside a scientific worldview and can be helpful to process reality at an emotional level rather than rationally (and after all, humans are foundationally irrational no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise).

   I don’t believe anyone ever took them serious

I was surprised when I asked a religious person. They don't talk about it much, but they believe all of it in a literal way. Like they believe humanoid translucid creatures called Angels live with us. We think it is a metaphor when they say the word, but it is not for them.

Thor creating lightning by striking his hammer on metal is a false explanation for what lightning is. A part of religion was about "explanations" for physical phenomena. Another example is the horse drawn cart that carries the sun across the sky. LOL!

Did you include the shobogenzo?

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