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I'm downvoting you, not because of what you're saying, but primarily for your incendiary tone.

Content-wise, your musings on religion seemingly fail to take into account the existence of other religions outside of Christianity (or at the very least, outside of the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, & Islam). There are many non-biblical, non-revealed religions. There are many non-theistic ones as well. I don't feel the need to list them off here. Feel free to research.

Back to your tone, I kindly request that you be respectful of those who do not necessarily agree with you and do not assume you are preaching to the choir, otherwise you do nothing but hurt your own cause. If you reduce the entire concept of religion to nothing but "the ramblings of bronze age goat herders," do you honestly expect anyone who adheres to one of those religions (or to any other non-"goat herder" religion for that matter) to listen to what you have to say?

For the record, I agree with a lot of what you said, especially about awe and amazement not being exclusive to religion. Likewise about how many people (not entire religions mind you, or religion itself, but individuals) claim a monopoly on morality. Again, my issue isn't so much with your content, but more so with how you're presenting it. Just some food for thought.

Why should lies and delusions be respected? Something is either true or not. We now have evidence that all religions are man made inventions. Most people are either unwilling or unable to look at evidence or understand it. Willful or otherwise ignorance.

Respecting beliefs no matter how wild is exactly what got us into situation we are now, where politicians have to associate with some kind of brand of delusion before they can be elected, or when a senator of the most powerful country in the world is saying we don't need environmental policy because Jesus is going to return to earth within 50 years, so who cares what happens with the planet.

Moderate, respect religion view that you are advocating is exactly what gives platform and legitimacy to more wild and extreme fundamentalist beliefs.

Your points are correct for the most part, but still a little restricted by your implicit assertion that all religions are Abrahamic in nature. There is, for example, a tradition of atheism in Hinduism[1] - rejection of the "fact" that there is a guy in the sky who created everything. It deals mostly with human action - its nature and motivation. And fwiw, very few, educated, Hindus I know (anecdotal) are even aware of this. You are correct when you say advocating religious views can lead to encouraging extremists, but I think you might be also dismissing, with little study, the moral teachings and the focus on self without the need to resort to a god-figure that some religious traditions espouse. (I only know of this in Hinduism, there might be more.) I'd rather learn from that rather than dismiss it as irrelevant gibberish.

This is not to say that religion is some sort of magic cure-all, but that some traditions do exist - possibly out of our individual experience - which cannot be easily dismissed but which should be merged into our views as well. I treat religion as a conduit to self-improvement, not as a way to book my place in heaven, which is why your pretty angry,dismissive view of religion seems restrictive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism

Edit: added wikipedia entry

If you want to improve yourself you should look into what evidence based reasoning has to say about what you want to discover the answer for, and in particular what modern science has to say about it. Think of it this way. Think of any question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one.

Abandoning evidence based reasoning leads to error quickly. Arguing from absolute certainty, which is what faith is (it claims to posses the absolute truth, the words of the creator of the universe no less), is bound to lead to errors. Not testing your ideas does that to you.

Take for example animal rights and if it is right to kill animals. Judeo-Christian faiths are clean on this: god gave humans dominion over the earth, and in particular animals for food. End of story. Why should I give rights to my food?

But what is right follows from what is true. If animals are indeed sentient, if they are self-aware even, if they can suffer, are scientific questions. If scientific answers to these questions are positive, then some of us sufficiently evolved, aware humans can't ignore the fact, and we have no choice but to treat animals differently than what we do now. Some countries like Spain have gone so far as to give protection and right to life to higher primates, our closest cousin apes.

I see where you are going, but I fear this is getting way too meta for the thread :)

I never said that I blindly followed what was being taught to me; if it sounded like that, then its just poor phrasing on my part.

I do test what has been handed down to me by my elders. For the most part, because of the loss of most of the reasoning behind "religious teachings" - loss of books, extremists killing off opposing points of view, colonial trauma etc etc - it's very easy to dismiss religious traditions as random musings, because there is no textual evidence for ideas and thoughts. For eg. Hinduism is a little mixed about animal rights. I was specifically brought up as a vegetarian because of the tradition in our sub-sub-sub-branch of Hinduism that animals had rights. OTOH, there is some random garbage about women being second-class citizens which I never aim to follow, because it is patently unsound.

I guess my point is, I am not going to dismiss years of thought, just because they are years old, without putting some amount of thought into figuring out if it makes sense - in that sense I think we agree with each other. Religion tackles more things than we imagine when we learn to become atheists - its sole purpose need not be cataloging a list of dos and don'ts and it might end up provoking you to ask more questions about yourself.

My religious tradition has primarily been a bunch of ideas and thoughts and there is no real "book" which lays down the law. Maybe that is why I think from this perspective and why I cannot just dismiss these ideas without some introspection.

You'll find more paths to self-improvement in this blog post than in all the religious texts that ever existed:

http://artofmanliness.com/2012/09/01/heading-out-on-your-own...

FWIW I didn't read any super-mario's posts as angry. Stripping religions of their gods and seeing what is leftover is an interesting thought experiment, it works particularly well with buddhist principles, but if you still seriously cleave to some sort of faith, either in gods or the authority of institutions and mortal peoples representing gods, then I can see how his posts could be seen as dismissive and confronting.

You have to take a hardline against the religious nutters - they imbibe everything with their craziness.

Understand that your position is one of naturalism, not one of science. Science does not presume to discuss what may or may not lie beyond the observable world.

Consider Carl Sagan:

"An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed."

It is as much folly to advocate militant secularism as it is to advocate blind faith. You are caught red-handed. Consider your ways.

"Come now, let us reason together" - Isaiah 1:18

Really? Think of any question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one.

Also, we are working with different definitions of gods here. Sagan is talking about deistic god, which I spent some time addressing above. But when it comes to theistic gods (the ones that care about you, that break natural laws for their people, the ones that care what you eat and on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, ones that give themselves body so they may kill it to save their people, who take "our" side in the war etc), then we have plenty of scientific evidence these things are man made.

Besides it's really not up to me to provide evidence against some god. People who invoke him should. It's the classical celestial teapot argument. If I claim there is a tea pot circling Mars, why should you spent time and energy proving there isn't such a thing. I should provide evidence there is one.

If science has nothing to say about something what else does? Ramblings of religious people who just make stuff up and never provide any evidence for their claims? And which ones? Scientologists? Mormons? Muslims? Which one of these you will adhere to is highly correlated with where you were born and has nothing to do with the truthfulness of the particular religion. Sometimes these teach completely opposite things about god at the threat of hellfire and infinite torture. They can't all be true, but they can all be wrong.

And how do the religious know what lies beyond? Of course it comes down to "revealed" knowledge. God himself spoke to some people and told them things. And others are required to trust these people for their extraordinary claims without any evidence? Let alone the extraordinary evidence required to actually verify their claims.

And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence? God would presumably know that people would invent scientific method as the only sure way to discover truth. Yet he leaves such important things as if you will be damned for eternity to belief without evidence leading to three desert dogmas that teach completely opposite things about him. Yahweh himself besides being stupid is rather evil god. Look how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age that invented him to behave (he orders genocide of neighboring tribes that worship other gods, enslavement of women and children etc, just read random book of old testament). By the way he was never meant to be god of all, he was meant to be a god of a single tribe (otherwise a lot of stuff god says and orders makes no sense). Evolution of competing religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made.

All metaphysical claims and especially all physical claims made by religion were proved to be wrong. And would you expect it any other way really. Religion was our first approximation of cosmology, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be completely wrong. Jesus casts out demons to heal people, he heals lepers instead of healing leprosy, no germs ever mentioned in the Bible (naturally no germ theory of disease either).

But now we know better. We know how solar systems are formed, we know how planets are formed, we know how life evolves, we even know how a universe can come from nothing. We really don't need god to kick off any of these things any more. Over the millennia people believed in all kinds of gods from Zeus to Athena to Thor. You are perfectly capable of dismissing them all as laughable, so you know what it is like to not believe in any of those as nonsense. Atheists just go one god further.

Your argument has departed from fact. You know, there may be times when one feels so right, so rational, but at the expense of a hint of aggression and anger. That's a good time to stop and think.

Your argument never had any facts. No argument that I have ever seen for religion ever does. What did I say that is a lie? I know how attack on your delusions can feel like aggression but there is never a polite way to tell someone that what they have based their entire life on is in fact a lie.

You realize that much of what you have to say in this is based on a leap of faith. You've limited your view to what you can learn from only your 5 senses and that nothing else exists.

If anything science DENIES that as a truth with the discovery of the non-visual light spectrum. Much of science denies exactly what you claim.

Science is a model to explain data and experience, while predicting what can happen. There are many theories, many of which change. A thesis (or leap of faith) is examined and DISproven. They are never proven to be 100% true.

Math has proofs, not science.

So please understand that it is important to realize that there is ALWAYS another explanation for something. You are irrational in your defense of Science.

I do not know that there is a God. I think people who claim such things are fools as you said. I have faith that there is one. It is a thesis of mine and as of right now there is no disproof.

To have doubt is to be logical :-)

> To have doubt is to be logical :-)

And this is why the article makes no sense. Religion cannot produce a testable hypothesis. It is, therefore, useless as a tool for explaining anything - it's as useful as a magnifying glass with a painting instead of a lens. The painting may be impressive and moving, but it's not about the bug you are examining.

There is always another explanation, but, unless that other explanation is as testable as what we currently assume to be closest to correctness, it should not be considered.

You are actually quite confused. Yes, science has theories (which is a highest pedestal a hypothesis can be placed upon) and only math has theorems (I'm a mathematician by the way so I know the distinction).

Scientific method is an approximation method. It converges on the "truth" but may never reach it. This is why Einstein famously said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right, but a single experiment can prove me wrong." I quoted truth above because there is no such thing as truth really. We only have models.

And even more there is not such thing as model independent reality. When you start talking about things (e.g. light) without using a particular model of it you run into all sorts of problems rather quickly.

You are also working under the assumption that things you can't see directly can't be considered evidence. This is patently not true. We can never see electron with our own eyes directly, but we can detect it by other means.

What god do you believe exists? If you are referring to deistic god (the one that may perhaps have kicked off the universe, but does not interfere in it any more) then no one can in principle provide a proof it exists nor that it does not exist. At most we can say is such a hypothesis is no longer needed. It presupposes a lot more to assume an intelligent being capable of creating universes who either spontaneously came into being or always existed than to assume the same thing about the universe itself (i.e. dumb matter). This is why Occam's razor cuts such hypothesis as superfluous thing, because it does not explain anything new, but poses more questions.

Theism on the other hand is not simply belief in gods. Theism is belief in gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity etc.

This theistic concept of god is quite distinct from a deistic god who may perhaps have kicked off the universe and set its laws, but who does not interfere in it any more.

And it is this theistic god that we now know is a man made invention.

Wow, very well written. I have a lot of respect for you.

Scientific models are man made abstractions on a reality that we cannot prove. You obviously put a lot of faith into those man made abstractions.

To say that a theistic god is a man made invention is an assumption on who created it. That would be distinctly eliminating the possibility of alien life forms.

Also you misuse Occam's Razor. It can't disprove anything without empirical data.

The bible is a man-made invention. The stories in it are disseminated by men. That does not disprove that there is a God who can interact with the real world in some way or other. It just means that as scientific knowledge refines their theories so must religion.

Also a few points, I'm an Aerospace Engineer. I know that there are tools that expand what our senses can observe, but they still must display information in a way that we can observe.

I'm curious though, would you mind clarifying this statement. >>It presupposes a lot more to assume an intelligent being capable of creating universes who either spontaneously came into being or always existed than to assume the same thing about the universe itself (i.e. dumb matter).

What about a hypothesis of a deistic God makes it no longer needed? If you move away from the physical sciences into those that study the human psyche, you'll see that much is left unexplained. It could be argued (albeit blindly) that any such hypothesis is no longer needed.

Natural sciences and behavioral sciences have no business explaining away each other. Religion is a behavioral science. You may deem behavioral science as superfluous, but it can't be cut away.

At least not yet.

Occam's razor was never meant to prove anything. It is a principle of economy of assumptions or hypothesis. In essence it says don't assume more than you have to explain certain phenomena. This is what I mean. We now have a good idea how universe itself can come from nothing, we don't need the god hypothesis to explain that one last ultimate question (why is there something rather than nothing. There is something because something is more stable than nothing). Our ancestors certainly didn't have that knowledge and for them god seemed necessary to "explain" this. Even though such god did not really explain anything, it just shifted the question further to where did god come from. Did he spontaneously come from nothing? Did he always exist? And why can't we just forgo such hypothesis (this is where Occam's economy principle comes in) and just assume universe itself either always existed or come into being from nothing (which is what current physical theory suggests). Why posit an intelligent being capable of creating universes, which raises more questions about where did this intelligence itself come from, rather than assume the same thing about the dumb matter (i.e. universe) itself.

I hope this clarifies what I meant above.

This whole argument is shortened into "deistic god can neither be proved nor disproved, but we no longer need him to kick off the universe for us. We now know how that too can happen without god".

However, I have nothing against deistic god. People who want to believe in deistic god will not receive any objection from me. I'm primarily gnostic (I know there is no theistic god) anti-theist (I don't think religion is a force for good in the world). Religion is not about deistic god. Religion is about people who not only know there is a god, with certainty, but they know his mind, what he wants us to do. It is this argument from certainty (which all arguments from faith are), that can easily be disproved. Note that I have not actually offered proof in my posts, the time and space and the forum itself are not the right places to do this. But I can recommend a lot of literature on this subject that go into great depth if you care to look at the evidence we do have.

I'd love to get any references you have. I enjoy learning from anyone who can keep an open mind. I do have to say that your comment about sheep herders, while funny (and accurate) was a little over the top.

Deistic or Theistic, if someone doesn't suck at religion I think that they should be left alone. Especially if that leads them to give money to the poor, teach in developing nations, etc. While it can be argued that those things have negative effects I've also seen some of the good that comes from it first hand.

I love this comic. I believe it sums up most of what I think about religion. The only thing I would change is the one where the father is teaching his daughter. There does need to be room for a parent to "express" belief to his children and acceptance when the children differ from the parent.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/religion

Agnostic and atheistic beliefs can be added to the above comic as well. :-) That being said, if you see someone sucking at their religion please school them and tell them I'm asking them not to make the rest of us look bad.

Here they are before I forget:

A Devil's Chaplain

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation

Arguing About Gods

Atheism - The Case Against God

Atheist Manifest - In Defense of Atheism

Atheist Universe

Biblical Cosmology

Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief

Darwin's Dangerous Idea Evolution and the Meanings of Life

Demon Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark

Dossier Of Reason

Evil God Challenge

Forged

God - The Failed Hypothesis

God Is Not Great

Godless

History of God

Jesus Interrupted

Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

Letter To A Christian Nation

Logic and Theism

Love Thy Neighbour - Evolution of In-group Morality

Lying

Misquoting Jesus

Superstition In All Ages

The Ascension of Yahweh_ The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism

The Christian Delusion

The Dialogues of Plato

The Early History of Heaven

The End of Faith

The Evolution of God

The God Delusion

The God Virus How Religion Infects Our Lives And Culture

The Moral Landscape

Who Wrote the Bible

Why I am not a Christian

These are just some of the books I have read on the subject, but there are others highly rated and recommended that I still want to go through. However, these are really good.

If this list seems daunting I would recommend a shorter list:

"Breaking the spell" by Daniel Dennett "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkings "God is not great" by Christopher Hitchens "End of Faith" by Sam Harris

But books by Steven Hawking "The Grand Design", "Universe from Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss and "Your Inner Fish - A Journey into the 3.5 billion year history of the human body" by Neil Shubin, are also great although somewhat more technical. All other books are softer read.

I failed to address your other main charge. Putting "faith" in man made abstractions and scientific models, that is so often put forward by the religious (and the guy writing the nature article as well).

Let's clarify beliefs first. There are two kinds of beliefs. One is based on evidence, logic, reason, testable repeatable experiments. Rational mind has no option but to accept their truthfulness (sometimes after laborious examination of evidence or step by step verification of logical deduction). You could go on and deny obvious truth, but that leads to cognitive dissonance and is rather mentally taxing. The other belief is opposite, it is not based on any evidence at all and it is called faith. You are believing things without having sufficient or any evidence for it. Note also that all religions are faith based. If they were based on evidence, religion would be a branch of science, it would be a scientific theory. Put another way, if you destroyed all holy books they would never be re-created again in their present form by future generations. But destroy all scientific knowledge and it will be re-created again. Why? Precisely because science is based on testing your ideas and models. This is why science is often discovered and re-discovered by independent people, living in completely different cultures. This is why science in China, or India is the same as science in USA or Argentina.

It takes no faith to believe in Newton's laws. Who hasn't watched their physics professor use compressor to pump out air of two glass tubes and see feather and metal ball fall with equal speed, or seen the conservation of momentum demonstrated etc. Yes, it takes a lot of effort to test and devise experiments, but it is doable and many of us have done it for large sections of scientific knowledge. In fact, if it weren't possible to independently replicate an experiment and verify the results, then someone is doing poor science. It's simple as that.

Contrast that with faith based beliefs. It all really boils down to you putting faith in other people who say there is a god, and not only that, they also know his mind, what he wants us to do. And people never ask for ordinary evidence from them for their extraordinary claims, they just accept it. And what brand of delusion of this kind you get indoctrinated into is highly correlated with where you were born. And isn't it also amazing that what ever religion you get indoctrinated into feels like the right one? :D.

In fact, all discussions with the religious people always boil down to "evidence or shut up". The rest of discussion degenerates into psychology and dealing with fears of leaving various delusions.

> You've limited your view to what you can learn from only your 5 senses and that nothing else exists.

Not quite. The most basic description of science is that it deals exclusively with testable ideas, ideas that can be compared to reality. And if reality disagrees, the idea is abandoned.

So it's not that "nothing else exists" but that untestable, unfalsifiable ideas aren't a matter of interest to a scientist.

> It is a thesis of mine and as of right now there is no disproof. [emphasis added]

There's another important distinction between science and non-science -- in science, an idea without supporting evidence is assumed to be false (the null hypothesis). To a non-scientist, ideas that haven't been disproven are assumed to be true (as in your example above). That's a big difference -- it's why nonscientists accept so many unsupported ideas.

Because of the null hypothesis, scientists are described as skeptical of ideas unaccompanied by evidence. This posture is sometimes looked on as a handicap -- until a jury is empaneled, at which point a variant form of the null hypothesis is explained to the jurors (innocent until proven guilty).

It all depends on how important the outcome is. If it's just a philosophical debate with no practical consequences, then believing anything does no harm. But when our lives or our health depend on the result, the null hypothesis has it all over the undisciplined approach.

As per the senses, yes you are correct testable. But in order to verify those tests we have to be able to sense in some way shape or form the results. The natural sciences are limited in that nature. I can't feel, I'm using the abstract idea of feel not that of the sensation we get through our skin, the results of an experiment.

The point that I'm making here is that religion needs to stay where it belongs. In the realm of behavioral side of the argument. I'd argue that anyone who said, "God created the universe" means that they are uninterested in the science behind it and that it is immaterial to their belief in God.

I'd argue that most religious don't associate God with controlling the atoms of the universe and setting it to begin. Sure they get comfortable with this explanation if it is presented long enough (2k years or so), but it doesn't matter to the abstract idea of God.

The "proof" of God comes not from what we can prove through observation (using our 5 senses + any tools we can create), but rather through a sense, a feel, a concept that there is a sixth sense in our minds. There is something we cannot touch.

In that case there should never be a proof for or against God. It's an abstract idea coming from feelings that we have of a spiritual core.

Also, philosophical debates have a great deal of practical consequences. If someone takes a philosophy to heart they can do a lot of damage. I know that many people argue that religion has caused harm, but it isn't the religion, but the institution that harms people. I think people can use anything to justify their behavior, God or no. It is when people objectify others and treat them as such that we have a problem.

So I'd suggest that we could look at the different disconnected cultures in the world that have "religion" as a set of evidence that there is something in us that wants to believe in an external being.

My theory is that there is a God, and anyone is free to disagree.

That is at the core of religion. The only truth I hold is that the later part of that statement is the most important.

Also, I realize that a hypothesis like that above is subjective and not capable of being dis-proven, thus most scientists worth their salt should and would never waste the energy to create an instrument to test it.

But that doesn't mean that it isn't possible or a valid explanation.

I freaking love this topic :-) P.S. Thanks for the post, I love reminders of things long since forgotten, I've been working in the industry way to long and most religious people aren't interested in this kind of discussion.

> In that case there should never be a proof for or against God.

More to the point, there can never be a proof for or against god. It's not possible -- one can always argue that god lives in a parallel universe, pulling puppet strings in this universe. Maybe true, maybe false, but quite untestable.

This is why scientists (for the most part) try to avoid addressing religion at all.

agreed. also, why (for the most part) the religious try to avoid addressing science. There are some crazies out there tho...

"Precisely because believing is lot easier than thinking"

It took me 20+ years of being a skeptic to realize this. I remember on a SGU podcast there was a politician who refused to believe in evolution and was trying to get creationism back into schools. When he was asked why he didn't believe in evolution his response was "I just don't understand it. Creationism makes sense". It dawned on me it had nothing to do with any rational argument this guy put together, he just didn't like feeling there was a topic he didn't understand. While he understood creationism just fine, evolution came along with a heavy array of questions that he was not ready to deal with. I've had a discussion with someone who after a death in the family responded to the question of "Why do you believe in an afterlife" with the answer of "I'm not ready to deal with the fact it doesn't". People like easy answers, not going to the moon makes a hell of a lot more sense than we did. The fact that 'natural' or 'organic' are words that do not simply mean 'good' but also come with a heavy array of questions are just things some people can't be bothered dealing with.

Hey now, religion isn't just sourced from bronze age goat herders! To name a few, there's 19th century con-men (Mormonism), 20th century shysters (Scientology), 21st century street magicians (Sathya Sai Baba).. we should be so lucky that religion had ceased fabrication 2000 years ago.