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Well, matter and energy are pretty much everything we can perceive so argueing that there could be a higher cause or being would be a rather random accusation.

Mathmatical truth depends on logic. Logic depends on what we perceive.
Moral is a social thing. We can survive better that way.
Colours and everything we can perceive is determined by the physical laws of our universe. We do not know why or how they came into existance, yet.
There is nothing transcendental about that.

Assuming there is nothing beyond what we can perceive is no error, it is no belief, it is just nothing more than we can possibly know and therefore pragmatic and scientific.

There is nothing truely good,it's just a subjective term.Everyone percieves it in a way.So,I guess what most people find morally good should be the standard?I disagree with that system too.Another system,what serves best for the whole society,imo that's too idealistic to ever be true.

About relegion,No one can ever be 100 percent sure about anything,you're correct.What bothers me most about relegion is it's egotistic believers that think that they're better than you because of they're belief.They're just pathetic human beings who are trying to fix their shitty life.The bible makes a nice story actually,although I have always founded flaws in it,and I don't really agree with most of it.

Also,yes for everyone who applied!

No, there is a difference between experience, perception and proven facts.
Perception depends on subjective interpretation. Interpretations are subjective to a certain point. Once they are proven and can only be challenged by proving alternative intepretations they are not subjective anymore, they become what we like to call facts or scientific theories.

When you see something you see something, may it be true or false. You know there is something that has some sort of cause.
If you prove the existance of something through various experiments it is anything but subjective. It is a proven fact or scientific theory and can be used to invent new stuff such as spacshuttles, which certainly do exist.

Irrational beliefs, however, can considered subjective because they depend on interpretation and personal opinion. That applies to both science and religion.
To clarify this: Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a theory. They both are considered proven (not too sure about natural selection, but evolution definitely is proven).
1 dimensional strings and higher dimensions are no facts, they may exist but we do not know. Superstringtheory would require to prove the existance of both to be considered. Therefore believing in the existance of either of them, at this point, is irrational.

No, a brain can interpret experiences and is capable of comparing them with various information, which is why we educate ourselves. And there is a thing called logic which we use to analyse and interpret things so that they make sense.
Science is very much based on that logic and whenever we prove an alternative interpretation of something to be correct and therefore disprove a previous interpretation we learned something and benefit from it. That leads to scientific progress and new amazing things like TVs and cars etc.
The existance of technology like that proves that the brain is very much capable of perceiving the true nature of our environment.
I'd say every sane brain that has access to the respective organs required to perceive certain information from the environment can recognize the existance of many physical laws, they are not subjective but universal (as far as we know). If you mean something else, like people are borg etc. then I have to agree, we are individual beings that depend on verbal exchange of informataion.

Which is why no scientific theory ever goes without critic.
A good scientist will be perfectly willing to accept when his theory has been proven to be incorrect through various experiments.
For example, they have just proven that the theory of relativity might be incorrect because they have discovered electrons that travel faster than the speed of light (I am a layman so I can't say much about that, feel free to correct me on this one, but my point stands).
Making mistakes is essential to find the truth because through mistakes we learn. There is no such thing as a transcendental universal truth. There are only physical laws, time and matter which interact with each other and we need to determine them in order to comprehend them. Once we comprehend something it is considered a fact or proven theory and we move on to determine something else.

Can't ignore sociology because unlike science (talking about science and research only, not philosophies or anything) religion is a social thing.
But I am willing to leave it out of this discussion because it is hardly interesting at this point anyway.


You need to define your beliefs more precisely.
I think you are willing to acknowledge that the bible has loads of flaws.




Edit: I am argueing from an ignostic point of view, by the way.
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cn i jion pls

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We could technically perceive transcendental things, we could just not understand/prove them.
Considering the existance of a transcendence to be true can be rather contraproductive simply because it is very hard to get to one base everyone agrees on.
And that is because god cannot be defined properly. We can only define his actions as in “he made this and then he proceeded to make that” etc etc.
The problem with that is that it creates a fault for people who try to understand our existance but do not want to look any further. God does not need a cause, he just is there and always was. The universe, of course, needs a cause.



Do not judge non-believers.
Kill them instead.

You could probably interpret it differently or call it out of context (dunno if it is out of context) but one can in general say that if the bible is so poorly worded that it depends on proper interpretation rather than defining itself it is flawed and very prone to getting missunderstood.
If it has been translated incorrectly a million times you can't even use it as source for anything, not even your own beliefs so this whole discussion is redundant (huehuehuhe) unless we all learn whatever the bible has been written in first and then discuss everything in that language.

We cannot be morally perfect because everyone has his own morals and ethical code.
There is no such thing as universal morals, and if there are, prove it. Aztecs sacrificed people to their gods in order to please them while the bible condemns such actions (as far as I know). The point is that the aztecs thought they were RIGHT when they did that. God did not give them the feeling that they did something wrong.
Same with nazis killing all the jews, white people enslaving black people, etc etc.
There are many examples so if this one does not work I will find another one.

And there comes the next problem: The age of this religion.
If the christian faith is around 1700 years old that means that all the people who previously lived did not follow the right religion and were vastly missinformed if christianity is the right religion. They did not eat what they are supposed to eat, they did not live how they were supposed to live, they did not marry who they were supposed to marry (they just had sex).
I mean, we agreed that the theory of evolution is true. That means some species gave birth to some being that could be called the first human being (in theory) and until someone created the concept of morals etc they were rather clueless about what to do.

Also, how'd you define heaven? We know now that there is no heaven above the sky but space and random spaceobjects.
And why do you think there is such a thing in the first place. The bible is no proper source and something you can rely on would be nice.

The thing about universal morals is that we see the world as it is, and the world as it should be.
The truth is, we do not even need morals to explain things, morals are just a basic concept of altruism which we need to survive. For example:
Animal A is together with its family, sees some sort of threat and warns the others so they all flee together.
The animal possibly does it without any conscious reason. It may be instinct, but that instinct helps it survive, mainly because probably most of his kind have similar genes as his and will therefore act the same. The human being is not a super intelligent species that can fight his instincts either. We all act according to them because instincts are way stronger than our conscious mind.
The thing now is, that the instincts we follow often are not morally correct. There is a thing called egoism. Most people are egoistic. Life is a competition, we live in a capitalistic world. Many people are aware of the poverty in Africa but don't give a flying fuck and continue with whatever they do.
Sure, there is a thing called remorse. But, we do not only have a bad feeling about moral decisions, sometimes you get that feeling when you buy something you thought will be awesome but when you purchased it it wasn't really worth it, so you have a bad feeling about it and regret your action.


For some reason I do not buy that statement, simply because it seems like a rather blunt “goddidit” interpretation.
We have a remorse because god made it so we bla…
That is a rather poor attempt to explain the true nature of things because it does not really help us understand anything. We have many great scientists working on problems we do not understand yet. That truly helps us understand the human nature.


Now let us take a look at the so called proofs for the existence of god by Thomas Aquinas.



That statement is based on an assumption that has yet to be proven.
We do not know if there needs to be an infinite series of movers.
And we cannot randomly go ahead and assume that god is immune to that kind of regression.
Even if we go ahead and use god as explanation and start point for that regression, I do not think it could be used as proof for the characteristics the Christian god is ought to have. Omnipotence, benevolence, omniscience etc are all not necessary to be some sort of mover

Omniscience and omnipotence are paradox in the first place. When you are omniscient you know what is going to happen, when you know what is going to happen you have no free will and do not have the power to change the future. Therefore you are not omnipotent.



I find it very hard to believe that people call that a proof for the existence of god.
I can make the same argument with all sorts of thing.
Soda tastes good, there are greater sodas and lesser sodas, therefore there must be one truly magnificent soda and that soda is god.
okay…


We already have proven that evolution is a fact, natural selection is pretty much a proven theory based on that fact etc.
We do not know what the cause for existence itself is…yet. Being satisfied but that kind of statement is very lame and does not help us in any form.
We need to be curious to discover new things. That argument tells us to be happy with what we know. A typical “goddidit” statement.


From what I see religion is the search for and worshiping of chasms in knowledge that have not been scientifically explained so far. Which is very funny to me, because rather than trying to explain things we do not know with something supernatural we cannot possibly comprehend we should rather try and learn to understand the world we live in.




About the nazi ideology: I doubt you believe what you just said yourself.
The nazis did not want to kill the jews and other races solely to form a superior race. They hated them with all their might, ideologically.
There are many ideologies that contradict our morals.
For example, slavery used to be perfectly normal and fine and hardly anyone challenged that idea until they learned that black people, who have been thought to be lesser creatures, are no lesser creatures but people too.

I mean, we eat animals and for most people it is perfectly fine, even though there are millions of animals being kept in rather cruel ways. And even when they are kept nicely, in the end they get killed for us to consume. If god made animals for us to consume, why did he give them the ability to feel pain? Sounds very lame to me.


If we have to rely on the bible to comprehend anything we are doomed, as I explained in my previous post.
It is also not very satisfying to believe in a supernatural soul that cannot be percieved in any way, shape or form.
We just have to assume it is… there…somewhere
/me pokes own head
blah

Fickarika is an awesome troll and I suggest inviting him to #h

I consider us flawed because we are not morally perfect. We cannot all be perfectly honest, we all cannot be perfectly charitable, and so on. Also, I haven't studied much biology, but I do accept evolution as the most logical theory (basically making it a fact). This doesn't contradict my beliefs because the Church teaches about Genesis is that it is of religious truth, not necessarily historical or scientific. I swear I said that somewhere in here already

Ok,then I guess it depends on the perspective you're seeing it from.If,you're following a certain moral system,then of-course any human would come short to it,specially one which is detailed such as the christian moral system.
So,if you are christianity,you have a following set of morals.I can argue about them because they are hypothetically set by "god",or whatever.But,I just wanna ask?Do you think sex before a marriage is an immoral thing to do?If,you believe in a universal moral law,than we're talking about something entirely different now.




I believe that hell isn't a place you are sent to. I think it is a state of being in which you are separated from who your soul is destined to be united with. That is a pain that is unrivaled.

I don't really believe in the existence of souls;I believe that we are animals just like all of other organisms,but smarter(lucky us! :P)



I believe that laws made by government should simply be moral, because the government and society is secular. I live in the US. Our court system is just (for the most part), and our democracy is working the way it was made to, even if I don't agree with the side in power.

Agreed


The bible was originally translated from the fustercluck of languages it was originally assembled in by St. Jerome in the 4th century into latin. From then on, it was translated into other languages, and for different denominations when the Protestant Reformation occurred. The translation was not modified by the Church. Popes, such as Rodrigo Borgia, have been corrupted. He specifically had numerous illegitimate children, and neglected his position. But, he did not use his power as Pope to perform any evil acts, or blaspheme.

http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worl...?articleid=909
This quite illustrates my point of view.