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Espozo wrote:The reason I believe in any sort of religion is that there's really no explanation for why life even exists.

Non believers like myself think that there is no why, there is only how. And there are some really great explanations for how life could have begun.

Oh, I worded it wrong. There's plenty of scientific explanations for how life exist (almost all of which make more sense) but what I meant to say is how the universe exists, as in anything. We can say that the big bang kind of positioned everything, but we can't say what created the big bang in the first place. You can argue that about any sort of god, but I feel like being around since before the universe is kind of part of the definition, unlike some sort of giant explosion. Really, all evidence points away from Christianity, but that's the whole thing about it: defying logic. In a way, I'm not sure if I even believe in Christianity more than any other religion, but I believe that there must be some sort of supreme being. I do think the whole afterlife thing in any religion could be a hoax, because there's no evidence of your body being some sort of spirit or whatever. If you think about it, you're really just a machine, and in that regard, if you made a robot just as complicated, would it go to some sort of afterlife? Like I said, if I'm a Christian, I'm just barely there. I'm just not a fan of anyone slandering any sort of religion because there's really no way of knowing these sorts of things. You don't even know if anything around you exists.

Espozo wrote:there's really no way of knowing these sorts of things

That doesn't mean that you should start making up random explanations. Some things are unknowable by nature (the information is already gone, or not reachable), nothing wrong with that. What you're saying is essentially the "god of the gaps" argument.

thefox wrote:That doesn't mean that you should start making up random explanations.

Well, it's just for me.

thefox wrote:What you're saying is essentially the "god of the gaps" argument.

That's exactly what I'm saying.

But that's like... the worst argument for the existence of God there is! What good is explaining the existence of everything by attributing it to a magical being, if you can't explain the existence of the magical being itself? It just adds another layer to the puzzle, it doesn't explain anything.

Espozo wrote:What I don't appreciate, is you grouping everyone who believes in some sort of religion as a bunch of uneducated losers.

I didn't. I just made fun of the fact that whenever they encounter some issue that they cannot explain away, it's always: "Maybe it's a translation error."

You said yourself: You don't know. You have absolutely no idea. And yet, translation error is the first thing that comes to your mind.
Sure. Some desert people from 4000 years ago condemning homosexuality is less likely than every single Bible translation being wrong and every linguist who worked on a Bible translation not knowing how to do his job.

Now, that's condescending.

To apply it to an actual practical example: If you have problems getting a program to work, it's good form to assume first that you did something wrong. Suggesting that there might be a bug in the software is condescending unless you have actual proof. But some noob not knowing how the Windows console is used shouldn't be too quick to say that the console is buggy.

Same here: If there's some law in the Bible that you find strange, don't imply that it might be a translation error if you know nothing about it. Even putting it as a question doesn't make it any better. ("Is Wendy Testaburger a stupid bitch who let's everybody suck her tits? I'm just asking questions.")

If you imply a translation error without knowing anything about it, you're disrespectful to the people who actually know Hebrew and who can translate these texts.


Also, this:

As if they really believe that the Bible would suddenly become a book of higher science and that all the contradictions and errors and cruelties and other nonsense suddenly disappeared if the Bible was just translated correctly

was just a sarcastic remark of the way people try to defend the Bible.
I mean, even if they do find a translation error here or there, what do they promise themselves from it? Do they really believe that the text will be more correct then?

Job 37:18 says: "Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?"

This is clearly unscientific since the sky is not strong like a molten looking glass.
Now, if someone postulates a translation error, what does he expect to find? Does he really expect the text to say: "the sky which is a penetrable atmosphere made of gases"?
I don't think anybody is that naive, but then why bother with the possibility of a translation error at all?
The German Luther translation says mirror instead of looking glass. Some other translation says mirror of metal. But the thing is: None of these translations are a correct representation of what the sky is in reality. Because that book was written thousands of years ago by people who believed the Earth is a disc and the sky is a dome. So, what exactly do Christians try to gain by implying that this or that text passage is a translation error?

That was what I wanted to point out.


By the way:

Espozo wrote:

93143 wrote: I'd hate to see people making enemies of each other over something like this

Oh please, I've been enemies with him since day 1.

Is this how the Christian "Love thy neighbor" rule it put into practice?

Seriously? Enemies? You're a little bit of a drama queen, are you? (And don't take this as an insult: I put a question mark at the end. See? It was just a question.)

Espozo wrote:Really, all evidence points away from Christianity

Not at all true. Lots of evidence points away from biblical-literalist second-wave Protestantism...

If you think about it, you're really just a machine

Ever heard of the Hard Problem of Consciousness? Very smart people regularly tie themselves in knots over it, often relying on definitions of reality that exclude the subject under discussion in order to dismiss it. In a particularly egregious example, it has been suggested that it is impossible to tell whether one is oneself a philosophical zombie...

You don't even know if anything around you exists.

True, and there appears to be no way to disprove metaphysical solipsism. You simply have to reject it, for the sake of sanity.

Espozo wrote:

thefox wrote:What you're saying is essentially the "god of the gaps" argument.

That's exactly what I'm saying.

God of the gaps is a bad argument, and good philosophers haven't tended to use it. The argument for a self-existent First Cause is much stronger - even if everything in the universe (or multiverse; you can push this problem away as much as you like and it will only get bigger) can be explained with logical, causal relations, you're still left with the question of why anything exists at all. As with the HPoC, just because the question is apparently outside the competence of scientific investigation doesn't mean it's a nonsensical question.

tokumaru wrote:What good is explaining the existence of everything by attributing it to a magical being, if you can't explain the existence of the magical being itself? It just adds another layer to the puzzle, it doesn't explain anything.

The problem is that the universe as we perceive it seems not to explain itself, and indeed adding more stuff that doesn't explain itself is unhelpful. That's why the philosophical definition of God is specifically that which does explain itself (which may have interesting implications re: logical describability); that which must by its nature exist.

Perhaps the most succinct summation of this idea is the Hebrew word יהוה...

DRW wrote:Is this how the Christian "Love thy neighbor" rule it put into practice?

Again, because I'm such a big Christian. How does anything of yours fall under "Love thy neighbor"?

DRW wrote:You said yourself: You don't know. You have absolutely no idea. And yet, translation error is the first thing that comes to your mind.

You're looking way too deep into this. Can you show some sort of example where "translation error" was the first thing to come to someone's mind, because it's such a common problem? You act like I think it's impossible for the Bible to be wrong, again, because I'm such a big Christian.

DRW wrote:Some desert people

I'm sure nobody would take offense to that.

DRW wrote:every single Bible translation being wrong and every linguist who worked on a Bible translation not knowing how to do his job.

Who said anything about every single? I haven't read the Bible in every different language.

You're a shithead?

How would it be if people maybe waited a bit before posting, so as to avoid saying unnecessary things in the heat of the moment? I've found it works for me...

I had waited a moment, and I don't regret a word. It's basic communication, not chess.

DRW wrote:

Espozo wrote:What I don't appreciate, is you grouping everyone who believes in some sort of religion as a bunch of uneducated losers.

I didn't. I just made fun of the fact that whenever they encounter some issue that they cannot explain away, it's always: "Maybe it's a translation error."

Jehovah's Witnesses understand this, which is why they made their own New World Translation from the original Hebrew and Greek.

To apply it to an actual practical example: If you have problems getting a program to work, it's good form to assume first that you did something wrong.

True in the majority of cases. But in the minority of cases, you may have run into a newly discovered hardware quirk. In late 2008, when I first bought a PowerPak, I tested a falling block game I had been working on, and something was causing the sprites to flicker only on hardware. It turned out to be OAM DRAM refresh. Some people would work around this by inferring a commandment "Thou shalt not disable rendering early."

It's basic communication where a bunch of insults are being thrown around. Also, "Love thy neighbor" doesn't mean you have to agree with your neighbor, but you do still have to be respectful either way, even if it means swallowing your pride and just accepting that there's nothing you can do to get the other person to think the same thing you do.

The fact of the matter is, science can only go back as far as the big bang theory. From there, there's no way to know how everything got there, just that current evidence suggests that everything was there. For some people, that's enough, but for others, the element of not knowing what happened before the beginning (and indeed, not knowing what happens after the end) is uncomfortable and needs an explanation.

Drag wrote:The fact of the matter is, science can only go back as far as the big bang theory. From there, there's no way to know how everything got there, just that current evidence suggests that everything was there. For some people, that's enough, but for others, the element of not knowing what happened before the beginning (and indeed, not knowing what happens after the end) is uncomfortable and needs an explanation.

That's me.

I don't even know what we're doing here anymore. DRW can have one last at it, and then it's probably time for a lock.



...Yeah, I suppose my last "joke" was unnecessary.

Here goes my theory: the universe is more than matter and physics, which are just a subset of everything there is. What exactly is there I can't possibly know, but things some call "energies", " spirits" or "gods" might belong in this extended realm. Time, being a physical concept, is not absolute, and doesn't really have any influence at the highest levels of existence. This makes it possible for things to have always existed, because at some point in the universe, the concepts of "before" and "after" simply don't exist, as hard as that may be for our human brains, living in the physical world, to comprehend.

This means that yeah, I believe in some kind of "force" beyond the physical world, but I don't think it's magical by any means, I simply think that everything in existence respects the same rules, we just don't know enough about these rules to understand everything. Some rules of the universe are easier to observe from our point of view, but others we might never be able to understand.

That's actually pretty deep sounding. It sounds like it would make a good story!