RoseyORyan
member
Reged: 04/03/05
Posts: 128
Loc: Scotland
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Hi All,
I believe all human-thinking & everything-else-that
-follows, is based on a process of fundamental oppositional neccesity, whereby/wherein, the principle opposites either morph into each, or, are so diverse they provide the playground for world philosophy... religions as such being merely ideologies. Technology is no longer the handmaiden to art (fire, burnt sticks, vegetable and mineral elements which were exploited by early man); technology is art! At one level it is amusing and benign and on another level it is miraculous and terrifying: "I am become death. Destroyer of worlds."
From the outset the pursuit of the Grail has many roads to choose from...and many outcomes!
Rosey 
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Sephia
Supreme Goddess
Reged: 11/28/03
Posts: 876
Loc: MA, USA
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ooh, the Dark Ages seem nice right about now. So much calmer and comprehensible...except not.
Seriously, the idea of a world without science is an impossiblity. As long as people have eyes with which to see and observe (and other senses, too), there will be theories to answer the endless string of "Why"s that plague our existence. Whatever can't be explained is attributed to some powerful invisible force (aka: a diety). with time, more is explained and less attributed to god(s).
I personally think that religion will never completely die off, but as time goes on, it will be purely a matter of morality, rather than explanations.
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"Your life is yours alone, rise up and live it" ~Terry Goodkind
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SoDrktheCnofMan5
stranger
Reged: 02/05/06
Posts: 13
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Wow! I seemed to have created a very hot topic.
I am a Christian. And to answer Monakos question (Roman Catholic or Protestant) I am Protestant.
Some of these things that people of have written seem almost offensive to me. It also seems that I am and oddball in this forum...a lot of you seem to be atheists. I am not going to try to be a missionary here, I just wanted you to know my personal opinion. "Religion or science" was the topic of my post, obviously, and I was thinking from day one. For example, what if everyone in the entire world from day one, believed in one faith vs. what if everyone from day one believed in evolution (a Godless world) I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear.
As I said, I am not going to try to be a missionary, I 'm not that kind of person. I am not a really devout Christian, I don't go to church every Sunday, I read Harry Potter and Dan Brown books. But, I would appreciate it if you would do the same for me. You are wasting your time if you try to convert me to athiesm. I hope we can all respect our own faiths.
Now on the subject of faith, evolution is not scientific fact. If it was, there would be no such thing as Christianity. No one would go to church, have a Bible, or speak of Jesus as the Messiah. Like I said, if one thing in the Bible is proved wrong, the whole thing is false. Evolution is based on faith, I say, because there is no absolute proof that that is what occured. Evolutionists must have faith that that is what happened.
And Arras, the person who told me that Evolution is based on faith is a Christian minister, so I don't think he'll be getting fired/ignored anytime soon.
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Isabelle
journeyman
Reged: 02/01/06
Posts: 54
Loc: florida
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Thanks for the reply it was very insightful but I can help but wonder. If any of the people that don’t want to do good, would religion be able to change them? Is the fear of going to hell able to change ones decision?
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Isabelle
journeyman
Reged: 02/01/06
Posts: 54
Loc: florida
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Dear SoDrktheCnofMan5, I don't think anybody in here is trying to convert you in any way. I believe that we are merely stating our own opinions about this topic that you started. I don’t understand why you are taking it so personal, when none of us pursued you into changing anything about your self. We obviously thought it was an interesting topic so we are just sharing opinions. I regret that you feel offended but I really see no reason why you might be.
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Draven
stranger
Reged: 02/19/06
Posts: 5
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SoDrktheCnofMan5, simply because we aren't 100% sure of something, does not make it a matter of faith. It is a theory, with sufficient scientific evidence for it to be widely believed. If it was simply a bunch of scientists saying "Believe it or not, we all evolved from the same blob of organic mass, and I back that up with no evidence whatsoever," then it would not be so widely supported.
And also, evolution does not take anything away from the bible. As Arras stated, many people would believe that evolution is the way that god created us. An increasing number of religious people are not interested in "God made us out of nothing, end of" and want to know how he/she did it. For many, evolution is already considered the method god has used to make us what we are now.
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doodoobutter
journeyman
Reged: 02/20/06
Posts: 70
Loc: New York City baby!
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Woah, chill SoDrk!  You're amongst friends. No one here is tryng to convert you to Atheism, or so I believe. Anyway, I would say I'm just like you. I'm Catholic, not devout though, and I also don't go to Church every Sunday and read HP and the Dan Brown books as well. I, having grown up with an interest in Science my whole life, don't exclude any possiblities, though. I know that faith is not, nor ever will be, scientific fact. Faith depends on the individual and what's in his/her heart (I'm sure you know what I'm talking about). I, for one, like this topic and think it's great that you brought up the idea. Count me as your friend, SoDrk...lol 
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So dark the con of man...so dark indeed.
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Arras
enthusiast
Reged: 05/24/04
Posts: 263
Loc: B.C., Canada
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Quote:
SoDrktheCnofMan5 said:
Some of these things that people of have written seem almost offensive to me.
[...]
You are wasting your time if you try to convert me to athiesm.
I'm not trying to "convert" anyone--what you believe is your business. What I'm doing is defending science, and the Evolution model in particular, since you made some patently false statements about it in your post. You may have no idea how frustrating, infuriating, and offensive it is to scientists to constantly have their work dismissed as "just a theory," or "not proven fact," as if their work should not be taken seriously. If science were simply a matter of "faith," as you assert, we'd have no need to painstakingly gather evidence, mount expensive experiments, and suffer the humiliation of the peer-review process to have our work validated. Accusing a scientist of relying on "faith" is almost akin to accusing a Christian of worshipping Satan. Forgive me if I'm trying to set the record straight.
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Now on the subject of faith, evolution is not scientific fact. If it was, there would be no such thing as Christianity. No one would go to church, have a Bible, or speak of Jesus as the Messiah.
"Spirituality," to use the most general term for this kind of faith, may ironically be an evolved trait, have you considered that? Researchers in recent years have been exploring the possibility that we may possess a "spirituality gene" that's more developed in some of us than in others. Our need to believe in something greater than ourselves may well prove to be rooted in biology--a genetic trait that evolved to give us a coping mechanism.
Biology aside, there's no reason that an "evolved" person couldn't wonder about where he came from, and come up with elaborate stories to explain it all. Every religion's creation myths are essentially that--ways to satisfy our curiosity about the "big" questions, and to give us answers when our two-year-old daughters look up at the sky and ask, "Daddy, what are those lights up there?" Before we developed scientific approaches to finding the answers, we had little choice but to make up plausible stories to explain such things. Just saying, "I don't know," would have been honest, but it would also have frightened people, leaving them feeling lost in a world beyond their understanding. Their own imaginations might feed upon this void of knowledge and come up with something even more fearful--something that today we'd call "superstition." It was in the interests of early peoples, then, to agree upon certain fables so that their societies could get past those frightening unknowns.
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Like I said, if one thing in the Bible is proved wrong, the whole thing is false.
Perhaps your particular Protestant sect takes the Bible to be "literal" truth. Most do not, however. Most Christians recognize that the Bible is filled with moral teachings and metaphorical explanations. It was a series of books written with an audience of simple shepherds in mind--uneducated people whom the authors believed would not be capable of grasping particularly complicated explanations. As such, many of the stories in the Bible were intended to "get the message across," even if in some cases the actual events they describe never happened (or didn't happen precisely the way they were described).
Mind you, I'm not knocking the Bible--as a collection of moral teachings it serves a useful purpose. I'm just saying that you have to be willing to view its stories metaphorically, and not always literally. I could tell you Aesop's fable about the Tortoise and the Hare, for example, and you'd get the message that "slow and steady wins the race," but you wouldn't really believe that there was ever a real race like this between a turtle and a rabbit, would you? There doesn't have to have ever been an actual Tortoise or an actual Hare for the purposes of the story--they're just used as symbolic figures to help get the moral of the story across.
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Evolution is based on faith, I say, because there is no absolute proof that that is what occured. Evolutionists must have faith that that is what happened.
It's not "faith," it's the recognition of a very strong pattern of gathered evidence. If I give you a collection of numbers, say, (2, 4, 6, X, 10, 12, 14), and I ask you to "predict" the value of X, what would you answer? X could be any number, of course--37, 129, 186286, etc.--but when you look at the collection of numbers, you see a pattern, and your mind very likely tells you that X should be 8, because that "fits the pattern." Even without knowing the value of X, you can see that the numbers before it are spaced apart by 2, and the numbers after it are spaced apart by 2 as well--the pattern exists on both sides of the "unknown," so you can infer what that "unknown" probably looks like.
Likewise, scientists have fossil records that carbon-date (and sediment-date) back millions of years, along with much more recent evidence in the form of living organisms. They "connect the dots," in much the same way that you figured out the value of X in the sequence above--it fits a strong pattern.
Besides, if you really want to get down to it, we don't know 100% about any scientific discipline. Newton thought he'd figured out most of the physics of motion, for instance, but there were small nagging doubts--his experiments produced results that were very close to what his hypotheses predicted, but there was a very tiny difference he couldn't account for. When Einstein came along, he refined Newton's model further, helping us to understand why the existing model seemed to break down when objects neared the speed of light. His refined model is still not "perfect," though, and modern physicists continue to try to refine the model. Now, because we don't know 100% about how the physics of motion works, does that mean that we shouldn't "believe" in movement until we do?
Quote:
And Arras, the person who told me that Evolution is based on faith is a Christian minister, so I don't think he'll be getting fired/ignored anytime soon.
That doesn't change the fact that he's scientifically ignorant, and not qualified to teach you anything when it comes to science. Trust him, by all means, when he talks about religious issues, but understand that when he talks about scientific issues he's clearly uninformed. I would urge you to do your own research on the subject.
Turning it around a bit, would you blindly accept being taught about religion by a scientist? When scientists talk about God, do you take them seriously, or do you presume that they don't know squat about faith and have an anti-religious agenda?
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Arras
enthusiast
Reged: 05/24/04
Posts: 263
Loc: B.C., Canada
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Quote:
Isabelle said:
If any of the people that don’t want to do good, would religion be able to change them? Is the fear of going to hell able to change ones decision?
For a certain proportion of them, sure, but bear in mind that deterrents like this only work with premeditated crimes. Criminal acts perpetrated in the heat of passion, so to speak, don't tend to allow for a lot of conscious reasoning about the potential consequences. Typically in cases like that, rage overwhelms reason, and so the fact that the criminal might go to jail, receive the death penalty, and/or go to "hell" doesn't factor into the decision to commit the crime. At that point we're dealing with a cocktail of hormones that makes it very difficult to think clearly, with ancient instincts trying to short-circuit the higher reasoning faculties that ordinarily keep them in check.
Where premeditation is involved, though, deterrents can work quite well. If the fact that you're likely to get caught and punished scares you enough to keep you from going ahead with your criminal enterprise, then those deterrents have served their purpose. In some ways, I imagine the "hell" deterrent fills in the gaps of more mundane forms of law enforcement--even if you don't think the police stand much of a chance of catching you, you may believe that God will witness your crimes and you'll be punished for them in the end. There's no escaping the notice of an omniscient deity, after all 
For "hell" to be a meaningful deterrent, though, people need to first believe it exists. Today we take it for granted that Christians believe in "hell," figuring that it goes hand in hand with "heaven." But "hell" as we understand it today did not develop until the Dark Ages. The Jewish and Christian scriptures in their original languages don't contain any such concept, nor do a great many English translations of the New Testament. It is the popular King James version that added the interpretation we know and love today. In the King James Bible, for instance, the original Hebrew word "sheol" (meaning "grave") is mistranslated 31 times as "hell". The Greek and Hebrew texts say nothing about "hell" or the concept of eternal punishment--Jerome's translation into Latin was the first to introduce it, and this version predominated as Latin became the official language of the Church.
For an interesting look at "hell" from the perspective of some very concerned Christian scholars, check out some of these sites:
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Arras
enthusiast
Reged: 05/24/04
Posts: 263
Loc: B.C., Canada
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Quote:
Draven said:
Sure, the Bible says that God made Eve from Adam's rib, but like I believe with many things in the bible, I believe that it is simply a metaphor - man is not complete without woman, and woman cannot exist without man - of course, it works both ways.
It's interesting that you should happen to mention this, now that biologists are beginning to wonder whether the male of the human species is doomed to extinction (see Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes' "Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men", or "Y: The Descent of Man" by Steve Jones, or "Sex Wars" by Machael Majerus).
In a nutshell, the Y-chromosome that males possess is less robust than the X-chromosome, less able to withstand gradual degeneration, and so it has been losing genetic information gradually over the course of many years. Within about 125,000 years, it seems, that cumulative degradation and information loss should make it effectively impossible for males to contribute genetic information to the reproduction process.
The most startling revelation to most people, though, is that the eventual extinction of men does not, biologically speaking, mean the end of the human species. Women preserve genetic information well enough to reproduce among themselves, it appears, albeit by artificial means. Genetic information from one woman's body can already be used to "father" a child in another woman.
There's also compelling evidence from other species that suggests that there may exist natural biological mechanisms to deal with a shortfall of males in a population. Many species of fish, reptiles, and some mammals, for instance, have evolved a mechanism for spontaneously developing the genitalia of the other sex, in response to a shortage of breeding partners. Take all of the male bluehead wrasses out of an aquarium tank, and overnight some of the females "become" males. As humans, we may (in most cases) only express the genitalia of one sex or the other at birth, but in the womb we're given both sets of equipment, and we retain some of the vestigial bits whether we need them or not (e.g. nipples on males). It could be argued that this is part of an evolutionary "failsafe" inherited from earlier mammalian ancestors to make later sex-change mechanisms possible.
In still other species, the male became extinct millions of years ago, such that they no longer have two sexes. These animals exist exclusively as females and reproduce asexually. Some of these are "synchronous hermaphrodites," in that they have both sperm-producing and egg-producing organs, and a few of these can even fertilize their own eggs. Others are "unisexually female" in that they reproduce with males of related species, but don't use any of the genetic information from the sperm, such that the offspring are exclusively female. There are no known "unisexually male" species anywhere in nature.
In short, while men need women, it's no longer clear that the reverse is true: An all-female society is a technical possibility (and perhaps a genetic inevitability), but an all-male society is not.
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