Thanks. It's a clever reworking of the song and lacks the breezy piety of the original. I prefer this, if we must have an anthem:

Thanks for your thoughts.

The process of religion as we know it perishing has been fairly gradual, but I couldn't help but notice last night watching the New Year come in on CNN, that the song chosen to announce this occasion was John Lennon's Imagine. Now, I try not to read too much into things like this because culture is so entangled and impossible to read, but CNN is a major player in American culture, and Lennon's song is an explicit repudiation of religion. I get the impression things are going to move fairly quickly away from religion as the older generation disappears.[/quote]

I have always hated Imagine - its been used as a secular hymn for decades here in Australia and its mawkish tone suits this era where sentimentality dominates. Religion hasn't had much of a role in public life here since the 1960's, but it had a small revival of sorts a few years ago with a stunted, evangelical, Trump-lite Prime Minister (2018-22). He turned out to be one of this country's most ethically compromised and unpopular leaders. I think many people today more correctly associate religion with coercion, poor moral choices and shifty politics.

We evaluate scientific progress by the leverage it gives humanity over the impartial forces of Nature, turning them to our own advantage. But putting such power in the hands of ethically-challenged humans can easily turn pro-gress into re-gress. For example, the Manhattan Project scientists, who gave us the tools to exploit nuclear power, later began to regret their role in unleashing such fraught forces upon a world lacking the necessary moral code to control god-like power*3. — Gnomon

So what? You don't think putting god/s into the hands of your 'ethically-challenged humans' hasn't also been a magnificent scourge - from holy wars to stacking the Supreme Court? The original power of mass destruction was religion.

The book referenced is a history book, not a religious treatise. Do you feel that the details of history "don't much matter"? — Gnomon

I know what it is. You don't think history is tendentious and subject to publishing fads? Interesting.

I thought I was clear - I am not much interested in people's pet theories about how this particular messiah myth was tweaked/distorted over time.

I’m not a theorist or system builder. You can find anything you want about the 'true' story of Islam or Christianity, etc, in a myriad of (often contradictory) books. These publishing phenomena are tendentious and mainly driven by commercial or ideological interests and for the most part don’t interest me. I have no need for the a god or messiah hypothesis however it is expressed. When it comes to the Jesus myth, it was clearly inflicted upon the world by the Roman Empire and enforced as an institutional truth by society for centuries. The specific details of the myth's development and its evolution don’t much matter.

You like Star Wars, I know you do.
— Agent Smith
Dude, stop ... :snicker:
In the summer '77 I was probably the only 13 y.o. in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, who wasn't WOW'd by Star Wars and grew to dislike it, even hate it, for being a flashy noisy live-action cartoon which insulted my already well-honed scifi nerdy intelligence ... — 180 Proof

I only just saw this. Perfectly articulated... and I thought I was the only one... :flower:

I spent quite a few years in the company of theosophists, Buddhists, Gnostics, and assorted New Age devotees. What struck me was the complete lack of transformational power their beliefs had for them. They were as anxious, ambitious, jealous, substance dependent and vulgarly materialistic as any group of hedge fund managers. It's a rare person who can escape the need for metanarratives as a bulwark against fears of anonymity and meaninglessness. Perhaps the belief in the progress of science is a secular variant, but at least it pays off now and again. :wink:

Can I ask if you find theism unpalatable? — Gregory

This would be an interesting discussion but should it be here and clog up the science/religion success thread? And I should say it is good when we can have these discussions without getting personal or needlessly rhetorical. I'm not a post-modernist - I lack the ability to understand the arguments - Heidegger may as well be in Latin (well, he did start out wanting to be a priest...)

The short answer is I have no sensus divinitatis and no subsequent argument I have heard has convinced me theism is useful or true. That said, I have a number of friends who are theists. I have two close friends who are a Catholic priest and a sister (nun) they think religion is by and large a terrible blight on the planet (including Catholicism) and many of my views about religion come through the work of religious writers - John Shelby Spong, Richard Rohr, David Bentley Hart.

Aren't you assuming it's rational to leave religion in the first place? — Gregory

Aren't you assuming it is rational to start from religion? And don't you need to separate crude religion from spirituality? Or theism from religion? Where do you being? But I'm not much interested in debating the merits of secularism versus religionism, there's enough of that on this site already, right?

I didn't say fanaticism is on the rise, although that well may be the case as I suspect reasonable people tend to leave organised religions and the ones left tend to be fundamentalists. Maybe you can find us a citation? Consider the rise in fundamentalist Islam that has been well documented in the naughties and perhaps the key role of white Christian evangelicals in the crass and lamentable Trump phenomenon? Good book by a Christian professor on this subject - Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.

The topic of this thread seems to be based on a Category Error : assuming that materialistic Science and spiritualistic Religion are competing in the same game, on the same field. — Gnomon

interesting. I would say it's the other way around - materialistic religion (most instantiations of religion) and spiritualistic science (how science is generally understood) are in direct competition as explanations of life on earth, not to mention the compass by which we navigate values and meaning. The naturalistic fallacy isn't much of an impediment to most practical people, who look to science as an effective path to understand reality, while religion ( often a series of fallacies in search of purpose) diminishes in importance, except amongst the fanatics who view religion as a set of vulgar terrestrial commands.

That emergence must have some kind of collective/networked consciousness to it? Do you agree? — universeness

I'm really only interested in what we do to each other here and now. :wink:

So we have the moral person who acts through the traditions of their organized belief system and we have the person of Heraclitus, of Chuang Tzu, of Christ and of many old wisdom who acts spontaneously through their understanding.

I admit that such a person is the highest goal, not something easily achieved and for many, unrealistic.

So we got banished from paradise for gaining the knowledge of good and evil but maybe through our own evolution we can create the garden and be as gods. — TheMadMan

I have never considered that there is much to the idea of good or evil. There are behaviours which harm the flourishing of conscious creatures and we can judge those behaviours accordingly. Generally I think humans create morality to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of order.

In the jails I have visited I am often curious how many prisoners are sincere Christians. The idea that following a religion makes one behave morally is not just contradicted by jail populations but also by history and the egregious crimes committed by believers of all persuasions across time.

You are either having a bad day or don't have a higher philosophical mindset and aren't interested in truth, like Tom, but in arguing. — Gregory

Now, now, that's not a quality response. Arguing is tedious and I don't think there has been any arguing in this thread. I only undertake questioning like this to better understand what others believe and why, whether they are postmodernists or theists. Sometimes people make claims which require follow up questions for clarification and sometimes people struggle to answer them.

Ok, sounds reasonable, but it also tells us that personal experience of god is no pathway to reliable knowledge. We need to use reason and judgement to determine what views we will accept.

Well those people are obviously wrong. — Gregory

How do we determine that the sincere personal experience of one believer is right, while the experience of another is wrong. Is there a process?

Why would God pay attention to willful disbelief? If it's not willful than faith can come in its due time. To ask for proof from God is not to exercise prayer. You sound like a Catholic talking to a Protestant "how do you know how to read the Bible without the Pope as it's interpreter? Ya'll disagree with each other". A Protestant uses prayer to read the Bible and it doesn't matter if others disagree with him. You are trying to see things from a God's eye view — Gregory

You seem to be answering a different question to the one I asked. Incidentally, the Catholics I know have generally regarded the Pope as a reactionary pissant and someone to ignore. This current pope seems more popular.

My question was:

Why should we accept this experiential knowledge as opposed to similar claims from other theists who, let's say, know from experience that god wants 'fags to burn in hell' and that women are inferior to men?

What is the nature of this experience and how can we tell what is true from what is false? — Tom Storm

Why is atheism the default? I'm just claiming what I know from experience. — Gregory

Forget atheism, I'm trying to understand how you can claim you know god is male and that in your words - God answers prayers as he wants, not as faithless people want.

You know all this from experience?

Why should we accept this experiential knowledge as opposed to similar claims from other theists who, let's say, know from experience that god wants 'fags to burn in hell' and that women are inferior to men?

What is the nature of this experience and how can we tell what is true from what is false?

QAnon? How are you distinguished from Stalin I can ask? — Gregory

Include Stalin if you wish. My point, which you seem to ignore, is that people are certain about all kinds of fabricated ideas.

So my question asked earlier remains: -

How do you arrive at this? What relationship with god/s must one have to make a claim like this?

As I said, God answers prayers as he wants, not as faithless people want.
— Gregory — Tom Storm

If you don't want to find truth than you are truly devoid of both the philosophical and religious spirit. — Gregory

You're aware, I'd assume, that there are schools of philosophy which remain skeptical about capital T truth. Are the chances of humans uncovering Truth, even if it exists, likely?

All I know of God is what I've experienced throughout my life and God is infinite so I must know little about him — Gregory

How do you arrive at this? What relationship with god/s must one have to make a claim like this?

As I said, God answers prayers as he wants, not as faithless people want. — Gregory

How is your embodied or experienced certainty distinguished from the similar certainties of a QAnon believer or a Scientologist or a Hindu?

And it could be what the truth sounds like. You're going to take this as 50/50 chance? Everything has many interpretations abstractly. — Gregory

I'm not really in the truth business - except in a pragmatic sense.

How do you know what you said below?

As I said, God answers prayers as he wants, not as faithless people want. — Gregory

You seem to know an awful lot about a god - his gender and his personality. How so?

sounds like exactly what someone would say if they had no way to relate to god/s but felt they needed to double down on certainty.

How do you know this?

No offence but your examples sound exactly like what someone would say if there were no gods and no way to demonstrate them. Pray for a cure for cancer and instead get a new dog. Such a desultory, random, chaotic outcome of prayer makes a mockery of prayer, right? And to argue something like, 'you don't understand it because you're not a believer' is one of those wonky justifications that resembles, 'you can't see my imaginary friend because you don't believe in her' type of justifications.

My issue with religion is that it unfortunately offers an opportunity to separate people by drawing firm lines in the sand as to what is demanded of one another in terms of belief and custom. As religiosity increases, who can sit with you at the table often shrinks. The same holds true in other contexts, political divisions being the polarization du jour.

It seems to me that if your religion requires exclusion, you heard the sermon, but maybe missed the message. — Hanover

Nicely put.

I was only trying to show what an atheist might choose to do as observances of his atheism. I acknowledge your examples of atheist behavior demonstrate with equal truth how some atheists behave. — ucarr

Thanks for clarifying.

Thanks for clarifying.

I was talking about using quantum theory to explain how the brain works. That's what Penrose was doing. — frank

Oh ok - never heard of this before.

P.S. - I just watched several interviews with him about the matter. Not sure what it gives us but it's interesting.

Surely the quote by Bohr implies idealism, ie everything is consciousness. That’s certainly what Mr Wayfarer seemed to think.

Penrose is a Mathematical Platonist, isn’t he? Does this make him an idealist more generally?

But you know that people have been thinking about a possible link between consciousness and quantum mechanics at least since Penrose. — frank

Far as I know it goes back to the very foundations of QM - Niels Bohr was a kind of idealist and often seen as a mystic (certainly by Einstein) and often quoted here by @wayfarer. A Bohr quote that launched a thousand Deepak Chopras.

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.”

I was asking you what exactly "practicing atheism as a kind of secular Protestantism" involves or consists of. What does this look like, in practice? — busycuttingcrap

There are a number of Christian apologists who make a similar point - they argue that the atheist's value system is essentially one of Christianity (Protestantism generally gets left out of this argument). Basically they are unable to imagine any notion of secular morality and values and insist that any moral system in atheism must be derived from a Christian morality. Why would you value other humans if there is no transcendent meaning? That old thing. A 'true' atheist to them would be a nihilist who would commit mass murder, rape and theft before breakfast each morning.

A secular protestant... — ucarr

It's not always a vacuous culture war out there.

Many atheists I know have had church weddings, don't care what their funeral ends up being and find Christmas engaging, have religious friends and enjoy visiting churches. Some atheists are not engaged in any debate about gods and do not consider themselves in opposition to religion, they are just not concerned with religion and find any idea of god/s irrelevant to their experience of life.

I asked "why" do you feel that this personal preference of yours constitutes a higher quality? — Metaphysician Undercover

I was being sarcastic in an unhelpful way. Sorry.

When I enjoy content I tend to value it more, regardless of its actual merit. I am not a philosopher, so I'm not sure how I would ascertain 'higher quality' in a substantive way. Best I can do is tell if something is riffing off fallacies and banalities. And I am more likely to value a contribution if I can understand the position being articulated on account of clear English and coherent conceptual framing.

Anyone who actually believes that higher quality is possible ought to have clear criteria as to how to recognise its occurrence. — Metaphysician Undercover

Fair. Do you have such a criteria or can you imagine one?

Having a robust familiarity with the philosophical literature being referred to and using citations and quotations appropriately strikes me as an obvious but banal example.

I answered that already in the next part. For heaven’s sake man , read carefully- how are you going to break open Heidegger with such scant regard for meaning? :razz:

So you might ask questions like the following. Do you recognize quality as such? Do you recoil in shock at its occurrence? Do you attack it aggressively in fear of the power that superlativeness has over you? Are you humbled by quality? — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting. I find myself asking how do we even recognise high quality given the divergent levels of understanding and education between members? Not to mention some people's dogged prosecution of certain beliefs. I generally associate high quality with pellucid English sentences that state things elegantly and simply. But that's my bias. This could also indicate my unwillingness or inability to engage with more complex ideas. :wink:

What Tom Storm seems to be alluding to is that we have beetles in boxes, pace Wittgenstein... — Shawn

I don't think I'm making a private language argument. Some people will comprehend the nuances, especially if those people inhabit the same time and culture. Or have a historical understanding of it. But the chances of them understanding references, conventions, values and even some meanings are diminished by time and cultural differences. I think this process is built into all human communication. There's a reason for the expression, 'Some jokes don't travel.'

Most of the folk here haven't yet even gotten to Christmas eve, and by the time they do Santa will have already visited us. — Banno

I think it's clear that Santa is the guarantor of all human meaning and morality.

I seem to have answered your question before you asked it. What does that mean? :wink:

So, there is something mysterious about meaning after all? — Shawn

At some level I think there is. As a second job I have worked as a journalist. I tired hard to write pellucid prose. My meaning seemed clear. But no... that is naive. People interpret 'the meaning' in different ways. What might be intended as a progressive idea might be interpreted as a conservative one depending on how the reader relates to or understands your concepts. I hold a view that people have visceral, emotional reactions to words and concepts that transcend the usage of a word.

Religion was used to justify slavery and absolve slaveholders. Read the Bible. "Thou Shalt Not Enslave Others" is not one of "God's commandments". No prophet has ever preached "Free all slaves!" or "Slave masters are damned to Hell!" — 180 Proof

Amen, Brother! Isn't it staggering that the Bible wants to micromanage human behaviour to the point where you can't eat shellfish or wear mixed fabrics, but owning another human being? No problem.

One more thing- where does deciding what the Bible means, stop? Do Baptists believe in demons and angels and how much is Satan a part of the religion? How about slavery? Does the Bible justify slavery or make slavery taboo? What are the boundaries of deciding truth for oneself? — Athena

As I understand it, Baptists leave interpretations and matters of faith to each individual church, so they vary wildly. In America they tend to be blunted literalists in many places.

I was taught that the Bible is a man-made compilation of allegories containing both good and bad ideas. We were taught there's no satan, slavery is wrong, women are equal and that Christianity could be abused like any idea. It looked towards progressive politics rather than an ossified text for guidelines about culture and society.

Let me give you some flavour of the kids of things we were taught from my favourite (now dead) American Episcopalian bishop, John Shelby Spong.

“God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.”
― John Shelby Spong

“To read the gospels properly, I now believe, requires a knowledge of Jewish culture, Jewish symbols, Jewish icons and the tradition of Jewish storytelling. It requires an understanding of what the Jews called “midrash.” Only those people who were completely unaware of these things could ever have come to think that the gospels were meant to be read literally.”
― John Shelby Spong, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy: A Journey into a New Christianity Through the Doorway of Matthew's Gospel

Personally I was never able to believe in god/s, even as a child. I've never had a sensus divinitatis and the idea of theism was never coherent to me. I only got interested in the arguments used to prove or disprove god because the apologists thought reason could be aggressively mustered in their defence.

A notable quote.

I think I'm out of my depth here, so I digress. But, I would like to mention that history or what you put down as 'time' is of more importance rather than culture, no? — Shawn

We're all out of our depth. :wink: I'm arguing that time amounts to culture and history. Think how US political culture was understood in 1935 and how it is understood today. That kind of thing. Think of the difference in tone and understanding between the movie Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and the US TV version of House of Cards (2013). It's like different countries. Both films about faults with Washington, but the world of the first looks like a utopia compared to the latter.

So to ask whether meaning persists over time is to ask whether particular usages persist over time: do people use the term the same way. — busycuttingcrap

A useful nuance.

I think the 'disingenuous caricatures of atheism' is as useful to the polemical mystifiers as the tediously proffered notion that atheism inevitably leads to Hitler and or Godless Communism