Religion… What do you think?

Why did this thread even became so popular? If i would have made something called ''Batman, What do you think'' it would have stopped at two pages

@frozen: treat others like how you want them to treat you

Yes, but that wasn't his point. Most Christians didn't really follow that motto in the past, he was referencing the history of the bad treatment Christians have given to Atheists; discrimination.

@frozen: so we should discriminate against them.

@hylian: No, we shouldn't.

This TV series looks okay; considering it doesn't involve the supernatural nonsense from The Bible and uses a Middle-Eastern actor for Jesus. Still disappointed that they used long hair (historically inaccurate, but whatever....).

Thoughts on this?

@frozen: It looks lame tbh. They should make films about other mythologies.

Agreed if your going to make a movie about something that came to be through ancient scriptures/ Cultures i don't understand why this is the most popular one

the Greek or Norse myths are Far better

personally i prefer my fiction with a bit more excitement and less contradictions

i understand why these stories have lived on there amazing ideas

the bible ...i couldn't begin to understand how its still with us today

@frozen:

@frozen You asked a question about hair length a while back but I didn't get a notification. I did have a few thoughts.

First, there is some debate as to whether Jesus was a Nazarite. If he was (had taken the vow) then he would have worn his hair long (possibly only occasionally) and not consumed "the fruit of the vine"

But in general the Jewish culture frowned upon long hair for men. Men were expected to pray before God without being covered (open, unfettered) and long hair represented a covered head.

The passage you cited (1 Corinthians 11:14) (IMO) is emerging from two cultural sources. The first, as I noted above, it is old in Jewish custom and is essentially about the maintenance of gender roles and submission before the Lord and before the husband.

One example is Ezekiel 44:20 They shall not shave their heads or let their locks grow long; they shall surely trim the hair of their heads.

Actually the passage you cited is a part of a longer discussion (usually the case) which makes up most of chapter 11 ( 1 Corinthians 11:3-16) The point being that because man bears the image of God he must not wear his hair long because the long hair is symbolic of covering the head (like with a scarf or veil) and most of this discussion centers around this idea.

But there may be another issue "off screen". The new christians of Corinth (and in similar Greco-Roman cities) were coming out of pagan communities which practiced temple prostitution. There was apparently some gender issues involving priestesses who shaved their heads, male boy prostitutes who dressed as women, etc and probably this made inroads within the culture at large but was not acceptable to the nascent church communities both because of the association with pagan practice and the dictates of Jewish tradition. So this passage may also have been a call to maintain tradition and a way to draw a clear distinction with the surrounding culture.

@willpayton: Great video! How did you find that video?

It was just suggested to me to watch by YT. But, yeah, very good video indeed.

Animal gods, I like it

Great video. Sagan was the man!

Carl Sagan was awesome beyond words

@looby_loo: @kuonphobos: @zigzagman: @hylian: @leonkarlen123: @dshipp17: @xxmarvelousdcxx: @tomofukuoka: @ccraft: @frozen: @lordraiden: @mrdecepticonleader:@mr_clockwork91:

I thought everyone might enjoy watching this:

Fascinating stuff. Derren Brown is amazing.

Thank you, i'll check it out tomorrow.

@willpayton: I'll watch when I get the chance

@willpayton: Great video, I also smelled the thing from my laptop :o

Is Darren Brown a psychologist?

@willpayton: The other day when the preacher was talking about another preacher who suffered from depression I got very emotion, not that I cried, just that it gave me chills and the weight of my depression came back onto my shoulders all at once making me upset. And before we left the Preacher asked everyone if they were saved and if they loved Jesus, I kept my hand down, which made me feel worse, like I wasn't deserving of it or something. If the preacher came up to me, I probably would have broken down the same way the woman did at the end of the video.

@willpayton: Thanks for the heads up! Lots of interesting stuff posted recently. But I am still working through that other series you posted elsewhere.

________________________________________

I did watch the Sagan video and find that his premise of interpretation (hermeneutic) for the Fall narrative may not be entirely accurate or at least it is different from my own experience concerning my own study and the ideas of the majority of other Christians I have known. The issue isn't really so much as knowledge but trust and disobedience.

But his point concerning anthropocentrism is a very good one and one I have even used myself just this week. When scripture speaks of being created "in God's image" this is not generally understood to mean appearance but more internal matters like the ability to be creative or to need community, or to be moral etc. In fact in some iterations of Christianity images were banned for similar reasons.

As an aside, this issue of anthropocentrism also bugs me in relation to the various portrayals of alien beings in much of science fiction with the Star Trek and Dr Who milieu being most common offenders. I even wrote a bit of short fiction once upon a time about one possible outcome had Kal-El arrived on Earth appearing more like a Lovecraftian entity than a handsome All-American. So perhaps anthropocentrism is a need locked deep within the human psyche. Like trying to imagine a new color or a non-Euclidean shape. =)

@willpayton: Yeah the stuff he can do is great.

He's a mentalist and illusionist, but he definitely uses quite a lot of psychological knowledge/tricks in his shows.

@willpayton: He had the presence of a magician/illusionist.

Yeah. I've seen a number of his shows and the stuff he does is pretty cool.

People like William Lane Craig like to use the Kalam Cosmological Argument when arguing for the existence of God. This is one of the best responses I've seen to this argument:

and this is even more informative on the philosophy and science behind this stuff:

Similar material touched on in the Derren Brown video was touched on in the HBO documentary "A Question of Miracles" (particularly at 43:20) which is also a tragic expose on some very disturbing and heretical elements within Christianity.

I am also reminded of the thesis within M. Scott Peck's book "The People of the Lie" as it concerns group psychology.

Religion is like a d**k, it's perfectly fine to have one, but no one will like you if you flaunt it to everyone, and if you try to force it down my throat, you're gonna have a bad day.

@just_banter: That's probably the fifth or sixth time someone has posted that little amusement here on this thread.

Thanks. It was a cool story. =)

Noah's Ark story always confused me... I still don't understand what the heck the land animals did to deserve such fate as to die with the rest of the humans God considered sinful and worthy of death at that point in time. I mean even if you save two of every animal and put them on the ship... that means that 99.9 percent of all land animals still died... and for no other reason than humans messing up in God's eyes. I mean seriously what did the Hippopotamus do to deserve to die ?

Because according to the Bible animals are nothing more than property. It certainly doesnt consider that any animal might have feelings, thoughts, morality, or any of that stuff. So, basically... kill 'em all, let God sort them out.

I'm sorry, but I cannot help but find this post ironic when you claimed in previous threads that philosophy is 1) Useless 2) Doesn't tell us anything about reality 3) Philosophers are incompetent when is comes to logic and critical thinking; but then you post videos about philosophy in order to counter religious claims, so philosophy cannot be that useless and irrelevant since you feel the need to make use of it when evaluating religious claims. And, philosophers cannot be too incompetent when it comes to logic and critical thinking since you decided to post these videos despite all of the scientist who have given their unsophisticated analysis of the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

One Of My Favorite Film Scenes...

@nick_hero22: @willpayton

I witnessed your previous discussion (the recent one) concerning this issue you are hashing out but I honestly don't understand this dichotomy between science and philosophy you seem to have created.

Aren't science, philosophy and theology simply different methods for looking at the world and various phenomena? Each posits a different set of a priori assumptions about the nature of reality, but each is also a part of the overall quest of humankind to attempt to comprehend it's reality.

Seems like nitpicking to me.

Denzel Washington is one of my favorite actors.

This scene has no teeth (in my experience at least) and for me becomes a straw man argument. I have never met or read a serious evangelical scholar or serious evangelical student or evangelical parishioner who held to the belief that Jesus Christ was white (Caucasian, WASP).

Sure some have held that position. But the tradition I grew up within lampoons such thinking. I have personally only encountered it once. It was is a class in seminary and the student insisted upon the perspective that Jesus was white. After the professor and several students (including myself) took turns dismantling his position, he sat quietly for the remainder of the semester.

So my point is that every evangelical I have known (and I have known many) would have taken Malcolm X's position in this scenario.

It would indeed be nitpicking if the assumptions we're talking about were trivial or insignificant to the understanding of the nature of reality that each philosophy seeks to achieve.

One could characterize each like this:

(pure) philosophy: makes a minimal set of assumptions, does not concern itself with observations

science: makes a minimal set of assumptions, requires observations

religion: assumes what it likes, observations are irrelevant

As you can see I wrote "(pure) philosophy" because science also a type of philosophy.

The argument between philosophy and science came when the claim was made the philosophy does not make any assumptions. I demonstrated that it does.

The argument between religion and science usually comes when religion tries to pass assumptions as evidence, and claims that it's assumptions are equally valid as those of science. They're not. Science makes only the minimal set of assumptions required to proceed. Without those you cant get anywhere. But, if you make unfounded assumptions then you can easily end up deluding yourself into believing things that are not true.

First, I would like to point out that I disagree with your characterization of religion. It is a terrible generalization. While I agree that your point is true far to often it is not patently true and any claim that it is is not defensible. Religion (theology for my purposes) is based upon a non scientific observations, namely history. History is not nearly as "hard" as other observable science but it is also not the same as "assumes what it likes" and observations are certainly not irrelevant. It is the assumptions about the revelation in history which lead to the various religious iterations as well as the various denominations within specific religious systems.

But I'm sure we won't agree on any of that.

But back to my point. I agree with the delineations you have made but I ask again (basically same question but in a different form) why the need to make any dichotomy? The way I deal with it is to recognize the value in each and create a mental system which recognizes the strengths and weakness of each set of assumptions and attempts to synthesize the perspectives of each where it is possible and hold the divergent perspectives in tension when synthesis is not possible.

It goes back to that old metaphor/heuristic regarding the blind men and the elephant. Science is indeed brilliant for the minimal set of assumptions and the scientific method, etc. But it is potentially limited in it's ability to see all possibilities by it's assumptions of materialism. Theology emerges from historical observation, which is certainly much less dependable than scientific observation, but it at least opens the door to the possibilities which science might be too blinded by it's assumptions to see, simply because it rules out those possibilities a priori thus potentially skewing it's observations.

And your statement about (pure) philosophy is understandable but personally I don't value such mental exercises that can be found in (pure) philosophy. They smack as "Ivory Tower" and "out of touch", so for me when I consider philosophy it is always earth bound and requires observation so basically I really make no major differentiation between science and philosophy. If anything it is a father (philosophy) to son (science) relationship with science having a slightly different set of assumptions and goals.

I wonder how old you are now... because this scene would have had to taken place in the 1950's during Malcolm X's prison stint... are you saying that there would not be a larger portion of Evangelicals in the 1950's who would have taken the position that Jesus was white back then ?

@dimitridkatsis said:

What if God is the one masturbaiting?

@willpayton: I wonder if that video deconverted any theists?

You never demonstrated that philosophy made assumptions since assumptions are unique to systems of knowledge, and philosophy isn't a system of knowledge. I already addressed that claim in another thread, and the point I made about this particular issue either went over your head or you were being incredulous.

It's amazing how God is aint it ? I mean the Lord God gives strength and power to ISIS to behead Christians and set Muslims on Fire and destroy 3000 Year Old Artwork but he can't give the resources to help the millions of starving humans around the world ? Aint God something else...

@nick_hero22: "assumptions are unique to systems of knowledge, and philosophy isn't a system of knowledge."

Wouldn't you agree that even philosophy assumes that:

1) man is capable of perceiving phenomena

2) and is also capable of creating/perceiving symbols

3) and is capable of creating symbolic categories such as mathematics, logic and language?

Or are you speaking/thinking of something else when you use the term "philosophy"?

Logical analysis and perception are self-testing facts we can know by simply engaging in those activities. When you make claims about the external world that is when things become tricky because we aren't questioning whether or not we are perceiving something, but the question becomes what are we perceiving and is our perception of it accurate.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-muslim-cleric-claims-the-earth-is-stationary-and-the-sun-rotates-around-it-10053516.html

Religion! Making the world stupider since... well, since forever.

Saudi Muslim cleric claims the Earth is 'stationary' and the sun rotates around it

A Saudi Arabian cleric has claimed that the Earth does not orbit the sun and is in fact stationary, making the opposite true.

Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari stunned students at a university in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday by telling them the Earth is “stationary and does not move”, Al Arabiya reported.

A video of the Muslim cleric’s lecture showed him using a cup of water in an attempt to debunk the theory that the world rotates as it orbits the sun.

“Focus with me, this is Earth;” he said, holding the cup.

“If you say that it rotates, if we leave Sharjah airport (in the UAE) on an international flight to China, the earth is rotating, right?

“So if the plane stops still on air, wouldn't China be coming towards it? True or not?”

Waving the cup and his hand round in a circle, he went on to claim: “If the earth rotates in the other direction, the plane will not be able to get to China because China is also rotating.”

Anyone who has been on a flight from the UAE to China will know this is not a problem - but that does not mean the world is standing still.

Experts say the Earth’s rotation in itself makes no difference to flight duration, whatever the direction of travel.

As the Naked Scientists at Cambridge University put it: “The atmosphere is moving with the surface of the Earth below it because there's friction…you continue to move with the surface of the Earth, so there's no difference flying with the rotation of the Earth or against it.”

The Earth's rotation does not affect flight times because the atmosphere moves with it, scientists saySheikh al-Khaibari has previously claimed astronauts never went to the moon, dismissing Nasa’s moon landing footage as a Hollywood fake, Al Arabiya reported.

The video of him discussing the Earth’s rotation emerged on the birthday of 16th Century Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, famed for his support for the long-proven Copernican theory that the planets orbit the sun.

He also employed other clerics’ statements and religious texts to support his latest theory but it was not enough to convince critics on Twitter.

The real apocalypse to look out for

Since my other thread got locked: whats your favorite bible story?

The ones that involve a lot of incest, infanticide, mass murder, genocide, mass circumcisions, stoning's etc a great sign of the times, the bronze age was! I find it quite remarkable that people still want to live like that, like the bronze age people?? Alright, I'm ready to be stoned now.......