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Originally Posted by JayJamJah
Lennon said God is a concept by which we measure our pain (then he said it again)
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You base your beliefs on the words of John Lennon? >_>
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I have always felt fairly certain that less then 1 tenth of 1% of religious folk actually "believe" it.
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That is a pretty damn pretentious thing to say.
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They like the idea, and if allowed to make their own revisions and interpretations to religious doctrines and texts can find a Church whose principals and morality they share and that gives them comfort not only in their lives but in death.
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Or maybe the whole idea of us all being just a happy accident and having no actual purpose just dosen't make a whole lotta sense to people.
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Imagine the overwhelming confusion and fear humans must have felt when they realized their own mortality.
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Do
you realise your own mortality? Are you absolutely sure of that?
We don't know jack sh*t about our own mortality.
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That everyone dies. Obviously this would blow your effing mind, so since the dawn of time, Man has created various religions either by the passing down of stories, the continuation of traditions or whatever manner.
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More complicated things have influenced the development of religions than just that. People want explanations for their purpose in life, why we are here, what will happen to us when we die. Evolution while a nearly impossible theory to debunk dosen't offer explanations for any of these things. Like I said before it only disproves the whole "god created the heavens and the earth in just 7 days" thing. It dosen't disprove the existence of god. In fact god using evolution as a creative tool actually makes more sense than any other theory on creationism.
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No as time has gone on and our understanding of the world around has grown thanks to Science and Philosophy (and most of all experience) we have ironically evolved our religions to be more aprapo of the times.
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Correct, our understanding of
this world, we don't know anything beyond that.
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Of course no right minded person believes the bible as a historical text,
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This is true. The Bible is just one big pile of BS after another. Its full of inconsistancies and improbabilities. I'm pretty amazed by how many people actually believe that some old guy built an arc big enough to support every non-marine animal species on earth.
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far too many of it's stories have been disproved by archeology.
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That is true.
But may I ask the relevence of all this? Surely you don't think disproving The Bible disproves the existance of god, do you?
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But this does not make faith crumble, or even flinch. You see the absence of reason to believe is not comforting at all to most. We still need answers or at least feel like we do. Science in time will bring us closer and closer to understanding where we truly came from.
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Science is important only in explaining how things work in our
own reality. I doubt that some scientist is going to disprove the existence of the afterlife anytime soon.
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But we are still humans are our natural instincts to carry on traditions and find solace in the lose of friends are still as strong as they were in the days of the Flintstones. So a lot of people choose to follow. Most of them live good lives in the name of the Lord, though all are hell-bound hypocrites if their beliefs are taken literally, this is the evolution of religion which fun-house mirrors the evolution of Science and logic.
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The Bible shouldn't be taken literally at all, and since many Christians do obviously that presents a problem. The Bible has been used to justify many horrible things.
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In addition it is human instinct, in times of great personal despair, trepidation and loss to search for solace, and the unknown offers very little. This is why more then 1/3 of those who describe themselves as "deeply religious" in prison became so once they got there. Or why, while not entirely true, we have the phrase "there are no atheists in foxholes" Undoubtedly when there are no more answers to be found for suffering it is easy to just have "faith".
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Those are some good points. I especially agree that searching for the unknown is pointless. Because we don't know for certain if theres something beyond this plain of existence or not.
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What do people do when there team is down in the fourth quarter or bottom of the ninth? What about when a family member is bed-ridden or ill? They have faith, and don't feel the need to complicate it with possible explanations from doctors or experts, they want to know the truth, and if the truth is unknown, they almost exclusively choose faith in the best outcome. Faith is what's left when nothing else is going your way. Personal Faith is often equal to personal pain and a in many cases a welcome antidote. A sort of philosophical Oxycontin if you will.
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Again that is all true. And it makes many of the people who follow some kind of faith especially vulnerable. Christianity has made an art form of exploiting people with faith for centuries.
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So maybe John Lennon was right, God is a concept or if not certainly is a measuring stick for and of human pain.
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I don't think the concept of god is that simple.