(June 18, 2024 at 5:40 am)Belacqua Wrote: It looks as though people want us to wrap this up, so I'll do a little summary here. I appreciate your willingness to talk with me about this is a civil tone.
I have a high tolerance for idiots and all sorts of people. You are far from that.
You have your own POV and the probability of me changing that is 0%. But it is an opportunity to have a conversation.
I just go where the conversation goes to.
(June 18, 2024 at 5:40 am)Belacqua Wrote: In the above, you have asserted that the priests' motives are malicious, that they intentionally tell false stories which they want their followers to take as true. While I'm sure many people have taken the stories more literally than they should have, I don't agree that the priests were trying to be tricky. As I've said, metaphorical and mythic explanations were common then, and I don't think that people were any more gullible than they are today. (Look at all the people who believe political propaganda and conspiracy theories.) Educated people have always known to be skeptical, but they have also known that different kinds of expressions work in different ways. Some lessons are told through quantified math, and some through evocative fictional example.
I don’t think I said that priests are malicious but I’m sure that some were. I have a very high degree of certainty on that.
What is guaranteed is that they could not answer certain Big Questions such as
Why does stuff exist?
How does nature work?
Who made this?
Why do I exist?
What happens when I die?
Where did my dead son and parents go?
I am very certain that none of these guys said to the people “I don’t know.”
If they said I don’t know to the Big Question of
“How did things start? What was at the beginning? What steps did the gods take to create stuff?”
there wouldn’t be any Genesis type myths in all the religions of the world.
I don’t know what exactly was going through their minds. Maybe they felt creative. Maybe they knew they were bullshitting. Maybe they thought the gods were putting the info into their brain.
They have been dead for a long time. I don’t have a Delorian so I can’t visit them, I can’t ask them questions. I don’t have a machine to connect to their brains and extract info.
We can use basic logic to fill some of these gaps in human knowledge just like we can take a guess that some markings on bones represent lunar cycles.
I agree that the gullibility of people is about the same. Wearing modern cloths, machine made jewerly, having a PC, a lamborghini, 2 iphones, smelling good doesn’t help people to develop their thinking skills.
This is why you have new mega gigantic religions that get created recently (mormonism, scientology, and possibly other UFO religions).
(June 18, 2024 at 5:40 am)Belacqua Wrote: Right, because accepting scientific knowledge does no damage to their Christian belief. Lemaître knew more about physics than you or I, and knew more about Christianity than you or I, and had no trouble reconciling them. Only sola scriptura literalists are bothered by science. And neither you nor I is sure how many Christians in history have fit that description.
That is correct.
What I was saying is that modern science has modified christianity.
By christianity, I don’t mean just the Bible. I mean what the population believes, what priests say, what televangelist sell.... the entire set.
Modern science doesn’t damage christian faith bc it is difficult to let go of christianity.
I think it is difficult for a lot of people to let go. They would have to put into question their existence. They might have to accept that death is really the end.
If they throw away the Bible, they are left with nothing. Either they will have to search for another religion and that is not easy to do. Joining some other foreign religion probably feels weird.
Possibly, their priests and family members ridicule other religions once in a while and they were in that band wagon as well.
I think that christianity has a lot of appeal with the Jesus came to town because he loves you a lot. He has said that be careful of wolves in sheeps clothing, which probably gives some comfort that christianity is the true religion. (That line gets mentioned a lot by christians. They view it as a guarantee that Jesus really cares for you, he is looking out for you).
Islam has its appear as well. Mohamed said that his religion is perfect, don’t join anything else, all other prophets after him are crap.
Sometimes, I buy a refrigerator with a 10 y warranty. I feel safe and reassured that I made the guaranteed perfect decision. 10 y warranty is printed on the box just like lifetime warranty it is true is printed in the Bible.
I’m only giving a few possible examples.
You seem to be under the impression that christianity has always been a christianity where Genesis is considered metaphorical and that everyone accepts the Big bang theory and Evolution theory and that it was ready for the science of the 18 th, 19 th, 20 th century.
No dude. They were not ready. Millions of them had trouble accepting that they were just apes.
I’m sure none of them cried when they heard that the Sun has been running for 4.7 billion old but when they heard that we are just a bunch of cells, cells that are very similar to any other animal cell, that were are cousins with animals, with apes....I bet that hurt their ego quite a bit.
(June 18, 2024 at 5:40 am)Belacqua Wrote: Anyway, that's my take on the conversation. Thank you again for being civil about it. I'll end it here so the others are not bothered by it any more.
This is the internet.
I was told the internet was for the exchange of ideas, to learn things. People should not be bothered.
(June 18, 2024 at 5:40 am)Belacqua Wrote: I agree that "converted" is the key word here.
It has to be converted to a How type of question because the why type is invalid.
Just to be clear, the question was:
Why does stuff exist?
The question is structured by the theist that way so that he can insert the god into it.
In science, it is part of the philosophy of science to get rid of the god, to focus on how nature as a machinery works.
This position is taken by science since for an extended period of time, there is no evidence for gods and alien things.
If a god or alien thing is discovered, if we discover that he had a role in this, science will reconvert the How to a Why and would ask the god Why did you do X.
That will also get injected into the Big bang theory and all theists will be satisfied.
In short, any human that doesn’t ask these Big questions, such as how did life start on Earth, how did the Earth form, why did the earth form, are there gods and what steps did they take to create stuff.... si dead inside. I am very certain that ancient humans were curious, they asked these questions, the priests satisfied their curiosity.