Help me out here, Ex Buddhists.

[Brian37]

Now you want the scientific reality of why religion pops up, "The God Delusion" by Dawkins explains it and "The New Atheism" by Victor Stenger explains where it is coming from. Explaining reality isn't a denial of rights anymore than saying the moon isn't made of cheese is a denial of rights. What others do with accepting or rejecting those facts isn't forcing them to accept them by gunpoint. Science works regardless of what our personal biases are. And the fact is that all religions are a result of our species gap filling.

[Mudhammam]

Now you want the scientific reality of why religion pops up, "The God Delusion" by Dawkins explains it and "The New Atheism" by Victor Stenger explains where it is coming from. Explaining reality isn't a denial of rights anymore than saying the moon isn't made of cheese is a denial of rights. What others do with accepting or rejecting those facts isn't forcing them to accept them by gunpoint. Science works regardless of what our personal biases are. And the fact is that all religions are a result of our species gap filling.

Of course science works... within the framework that it is meant to work. I highly doubt that framework is applicable to the sorts of things that inspire a person to seek out Buddhism.

[Brian37]

Now you want the scientific reality of why religion pops up, "The God Delusion" by Dawkins explains it and "The New Atheism" by Victor Stenger explains where it is coming from. Explaining reality isn't a denial of rights anymore than saying the moon isn't made of cheese is a denial of rights. What others do with accepting or rejecting those facts isn't forcing them to accept them by gunpoint. Science works regardless of what our personal biases are. And the fact is that all religions are a result of our species gap filling.

Of course science works... within the framework that it is meant to work. I highly doubt that framework is applicable to the sorts of things that inspire a person to seek out Buddhism.

ARGGGGGGGG, you can also find inspiration in Harry Potter too, but no one starts a religion over it. Now again, this has nothing to do with human rights. 

It most certainly is applicable to religion, it is an explanation as to why those things are created by humans. Just like we can understand why people buy into other claims like Ouija boards working. Claims people like certainly make them feel good, but that alone doesn't mean they are anything more than a placebo.

Again, there is not one religion that exists now or has existed in our evolution that was around 200,000 years ago, or 2 million years ago or 4 billion years ago. Other life has evolved, like grass and bacteria fine without religion, and other life has also been destroyed by 5 mass extinctions in our planet's history. 10 billion years from now humans will not exist, our planet will die and none of those placebos we invent to make groups will exist either. The universe was around prior to us and it will continue on with no record of us or the groups we create and call religion. 

SCIENCE is most certainly capable of explaining why humans come up with these ideas. None of that fact stating is calling for a utopia where religion is forced out of existence. It is simply an explanation as to why it occurs. Just like we now know what DNA is. Religions exist as a gap filling placebo.

---

Not saying you can get rid of religion, and no, that harsh reality isn't sexy, but it is reality. I think it is better to consider that reality than pin your hopes on placebo. Our species also has the good side of curiosity and the ability to scrap old claims. I see nothing wrong with humans considering maybe they are the ones being good and the labels are not doing that, and that good in us has always been in us.

[Angrboda]

At least the Buddha taught us:  Believe nothing, no matter who says it, not even if I say it, unless it stands to reason and fits with your common sense.

Well that much is good advice.  

I find that to be horrible advice. We're biased thinkers, all of us, and this just lets loose the monsters of the id: confirmation bias, dunning-kruger, bias blindspot, etc.. It's just the opposite of what the Kalam sutra which he quotes advises: it's following a teacher instead of realizing that ordinary common sense just plain doesn't work. Common sense is what people practice now, and see where it leads them?

[Brian37]

I would highly suggest those reading this first understand that if you do accept evolution, then you need to understand that religion isn't a necessity but an outcome of our species gap filling. Accepting that that outcome isn't going to stop, does not mean we refrain from challenging our perceptions of reality. If we didn't do that our species would not be where we are today.

Our species pattern seeking is literally coming from natural selection, group survival and fight or flight. But in that natural reality, more often than not we gap fill rather than test. That is stemming from the same quick answer a antelope might make in deciding if that swaying grass is mere wind, or a predator stalking it, it doesn't always have time to assess that reality.

Dawkins and aptly so in "The God Delusion" describes this flawed perception as being the same as a moth mistaking the light bulb for moonlight. That is literally where religion is coming from. It only has a real benefit in creating numbers, but it is not real in the sense that it was ever required. Bad perceptions of reality can create success in a group, just like the Egyptians were successful in the false perceptions in all the polytheistic gods we know never existed.

No calls to end religion by force merely for suggesting one consider that it is merely an outcome due to our flawed evolution.

[tantric]

okay, laymen, let's learn some evo-bio. start with [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory"]dual inheritance theory[/URL]. evolution and DNA are not conjoined at the hip (is that funny? i was trying). multiple studies have confirmed that whale cultures evolve, particularly in response to whaling (migration patterns are transmitted culturally). neat, huh? now you see the agricultural revolution for what it is: humans and a variety of plants and animals became a species complex, like a lichen (algae+fungi). we need each other to survive. *that's* evolution. so is this:

malaria and world government

i had the honor of working near a brilliant dutch epidemiologist named jaap. one day we were discussing the evolutionary pressures on diseases, and he told me about a study he did with malaria in mice. see, in the long run, it benefits a parasite to evolve to non-virulence, as killing your host isn't a good plan. yet we still have killer diseases. jaap's experiment involved infecting mice with different strains of malaria, with known virulences, at the same time. it turns out that if a mouse has a mild strain and a virulent strain at the same time, the virulent strain wins outs, even if it kills the host. virulent diseases are more capable of coverting host to new germs. he told me this, just in normal conversation, then asked why i was looking at him with an expression of horror. i said disease:host::nation:earth. he said, oh, well, uh, yikes.

yikes is right. human societies function like parasites in the body of the earth. even though it is suicide to kill the world, so long as there are mutlple nations competing for resources, the one that best converts those resources to copies of itself will win, even if it kills the host. that's what america does - we turn petroleum into americanness at a catastrophic rate. and we're racing towards a brick wall. look how the usgov crushed the ussr. this isn't going to end well.

religion is a product of cultural evolution - it exists because he had a survival advantage at one point (transethnic identities, mostly). that will never go away. people *like* rituals and ceremonies, and if you don't let them have theirs, they'll make shit up. most of it is self training - there was an experiment where pigeons where trained to peck colored buttons. later, a mechanism was added to randomly drop food in the cage. the pigeons developed 'rituals' of pecking certain colors, trying to get the food, even though it was dispensed randomly. do you understand the implications?

dude, i never called you a stalinist. i was using the way by which the ussr and prc turned their ideologies into something like state religions (people leave offerings at mao's tomb). i called you a fanatic, because it seems to me that you hate religion for some personal reason and are using 'logic' to justify your hate. that doesn't fly. your premise seems to be that religions are invalid because they are bundled groups of ideas/memes that originated with actual humans instead of falling out of the sky. so?

consider - nuclear apocalypse, afterwards. there's no way you can teach your kids all of science - whatever you tell them, they will have to accept it as divine revelation. it may be true, but they can't prove it and don't want to. plus, you have to make up shit to keep them away from radioactive stuff and other poisons, and you do what you can. when they grow up, thinking 'isotopes' are evil spirits, but still knowing a fair bit of our knowledge (heliocentric, physics, etc) - are they religious or scientific? now, what are you?

[Brian37]

okay, laymen, let's learn some evo-bio. start with dual inheritance theory. evolution and DNA are not conjoined at the hip (is that funny? i was trying). multiple studies have confirmed that whale cultures evolve, particularly in response to whaling (migration patterns are transmitted culturally).  neat, huh? now you see the agricultural revolution for what it is:  humans and a variety of plants and animals became a species complex, like a lichen (algae+fungi). we need each other to survive. *that's* evolution. so is this:

malaria and world government

i had the honor of working near a brilliant dutch epidemiologist named jaap. one day we were discussing the evolutionary pressures on diseases, and he told me about a study he did with malaria in mice. see, in the long run, it benefits a parasite to evolve to non-virulence, as killing your host isn't a good plan. yet we still have killer diseases. jaap's experiment involved infecting mice with different strains of malaria, with known virulences, at the same time. it turns out that if a mouse has a mild strain and a virulent strain at the same time, the virulent strain wins outs, even if it kills the host. virulent diseases are more capable of coverting host to new germs. he told me this, just in normal conversation, then asked why i was looking at him with an expression of horror. i said disease:host::nation:earth. he said, oh, well, uh, yikes.

yikes is right. human societies function like parasites in the body of the earth. even though it is suicide to kill the world, so long as there are mutlple nations competing for resources, the one that best converts those resources to copies of itself will win, even if it kills the host. that's what america does - we turn petroleum into americanness at a catastrophic rate. and we're racing towards a brick wall. look how the usgov crushed the ussr. this isn't going to end well.

religion is a product of cultural evolution - it exists because he had a survival advantage at one point (transethnic identities, mostly). that will never go away. people *like* rituals and ceremonies, and if you don't let them have theirs, they'll make shit up. most of it is self training - there was an experiment where pigeons where trained to peck colored buttons. later, a mechanism was added to randomly drop food in the cage. the pigeons developed 'rituals' of pecking certain colors, trying to get the food, even though it was dispensed randomly. do you understand the implications?

dude, i never called you a stalinist. i was using the way by which the ussr and prc turned their ideologies into something like state religions (people leave offerings at mao's tomb). i called you a fanatic, because it seems to me that you hate religion for some personal reason and are using 'logic' to justify your hate. that doesn't fly. your premise seems to be that religions are invalid because they are bundled groups of ideas/memes that originated with actual humans instead of falling out of the sky. so?

consider - nuclear apocalypse, afterwards. there's no way you can teach your kids all of science - whatever you tell them, they will have to accept it as divine revelation. it may be true, but they can't prove it and don't want to. plus, you have to make up shit to keep them away from radioactive stuff and other poisons, and you do what you can. when they grow up, thinking 'isotopes' are evil spirits, but still knowing a fair bit of our knowledge (heliocentric, physics, etc) - are they religious or scientific? now, what are you?

No one in the world should be suggesting force to end any group. But just like religion is a product of evolution, we've also learned to overcome old claims and move beyond them. Accepting that volcanos exist, and that you cant remove them, does not mean you ignore them because they produce pretty landscapes while dormant. We also no longer think slavery is justified but was justified with holy books, on top of those words even today still being in those books.

Even on the left I see far too many confusing human rights with credibility of an idea. Humans have rights, but ideas should never get taboos. And I cannot repeat this enough, not even atheists should fool themselves that they are above the same range of behaviors both cruel or compassionate. Ultimately we are the same species.