Auroya wrote:Glamour wrote:What exactly is this even supposed to mean? Religion has no special social license? There is no license for anything, only respect. You can debate it all you want, but people tend to get kicks out of baiting the religious into losing their shit so that they can continue to paint the religious as insane and irrational. This is not debate. It is psychological subversion by people who know what they're doing. It is showmanship. I am really perplexed by how someone can attack a creationist with only a very basic knowledge of science for commenting on science with reference to religion, yet when that same person attempts to comment on religion, they do it with a thinly veiled, barbed, loaded comment on religion with reference to science: e.g. "religion is unscientific". Yes, it is. So fucking what? Science is not reverent. Religion and science are two completely and utterly different things. If you comment on one by saying it is not the other, you are adding nothing to the debate, whatever "side" you are on.
They are not different. They attempt to explain the same thing, except that religion gets all the answers wrong. Science, logic and reason are our correct way of explaining the world now: if a belief system directly goes against them, it deserves ridicule, not respect.
Of course they are different. "Why" and "how" are totally different questions. Religion gets all the answers wrong? You know there is a lot more to religion than "a man in the sky made it all"? I can't believe how few people realise this, but materialism is as much a belief system as any religion is. And the scientific method is not a way of explaining the world, it is a self-propogating and objective means of uncovering hidden aspects of reality at an exponentially growing rate, as those discoveries facilitate the easier detection of newer/more detailed observations and theories or models in lieu of observations made. It explains how things happen, if you were reaching you could say it explains "why" in the same way an IKEA manual explains why you need to make sure you have all the components to build the furniture. The scientific method has no stance on spirituality or morality. If God were to be "discovered" with "evidence" tomorrow, whatever that actually means - please think about that - science would not care or be effected. All of physics and cosmology and biology and chemistry and mathematics would still stand. And in the same way, religion simply does not care about facts and evidence because it is focused on BELIEF. In science, if something is a fact, and is true, your belief about it does not matter one iota. In religion, if something is your faith and you strongly believe it/experience internal mystical experiences or construct a morality around it or believe in the perception of reality as a phantasmagoria of the consciousness, rather than that matter is all that exists and consciousness arises only by virtue of complex matter, facts about the physical world simply don't matter one iota.
The only thing that a lack of "physical evidence" for God - like, I don't know what, a brilliant white face pube the length and thickness of the Channel tunnel floating around in space somewhere - actually does, is strengthen the ecstasy of faith. The whole point is that you don't know, and by the way not a single person living or dead knows for a fact whether there is a God, but that is because it isn't a thing to be known, it is a feeling of interconnectedness that one experiences and a way of seeing the world, history and the future. Science is just a method of harnessing reality, it does not have an opinion on what the purpose or personal implications/reflections on the nature of reality mean. Calling religion unscientific as a means to try and diminish its importance is like saying of science that it can't categorise or define consciousness properly or has no use when talking symbolically, so overall it is useless and religion is winning over it in some supposed nebulous intuitive, emotional conflict. True, but irrelevant, because the questions raised in light of these things are not questions that the disciplines themselves are concerned with.
Posted: Wed Feb 18, 2015 4:50 am