Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: CuriousLord
To me, these questions are tired in and of themselves; rather, it's the psycological aspect of those pursuing them.
That part is interesting to me, too, as someone who has studied the workings of the human mind quite a bit over these last few years. And I would suggest that you are neglecting some important elements of how this interacts with the psyche, both on an individual level and on a societal level. If you'd care to discuss it, drop me a line, but I think you can figure this one out if you ask yourself the question "what good is religion, and to who?" and assume the answer is something other than "not at all." Ponder it like any other hard question. There are elements to the answer that took me years to figure out, but if you're as smart as you've indicated elsewhere, it shouldn't take you as long.
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As you've said, this is an unscientific approach.
Indeed. And I never did say it was my approach, either.
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Humoring the notion of a non-casual entity (which I would like to point out, can be, in part, scientifically deniable as non-casuality has not be observed through any experimentation throughout history, where as a scientifically nuetral subject would be one that hasn't been tested at all), I would point out that there's no reason nor logic in the distateful claims of personal but unverifiable, ineffectual "relationship"s with it.
Reason and logic only go so far. Humans are not machines, and both reason and logic are incapable of producing (or inhibiting) action without axioms to start out with. Not that I am positing religion as the only answer to that, as one can of course pick any set of axioms, and memetic evolution will play out over whatever was chosen. But there is, conversely, no sound reason to eliminate any set of axioms either, since they're all quite arbitrary.
And, yes, seemingly causally disconnected phenomena have not been studied, unless you count events that are written off as sampling errors or the like. And singleton events are not an object of study by their very nature. Both of which are less than relevant, as such. Science deals with prediction (in fact, you could say it's the modern equivalent of divination), and philosophy and epistemology define the limits of our predictions and the process of observation and feedback involved in refining them. The extreme example would be the solipsist position.
Granted, the position of Spinoza and Einstein is simpler to defend, by far.
But it's not the only position that is defensible, although I'd have to say this thread is not the place for that debate.
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Or, to get to the point, people are believing in something that there's absolutely no logical reason to believe in nor much sense to. Does this not speak more for the fraility of the human ego above and beyond anything else?
There is a lot of logical reason for some to do so, if you consider the whole system, i.e. including the psyche. We also tend to believe the sun will rise tomorrow, yet a vacuum metastability event cannot be excluded by modern science, and could certainly prevent it from doing so. Perhaps you should consider that the need for a perfectly predictable, logical and causally connected universe may be an equally great shortcoming of some minds?
Don't get me wrong, I'm on your side in the battle against religions that deprive the individual of responsibility, accountability, free thinking, and so forth, although for different reasons than yours. But I fail to see that this argument readily generalizes to all religion, and this coming from someone who did, for a rather long time, espouse an atheist position. Anyway, you might want to consider harm reduction instead.
In any case, this is getting to be a hijack; care to move it to CMail?
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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