RE: Who does religion care?
September 29, 2010 at 5:01 am
(This post was last modified: September 29, 2010 at 11:24 am by Anomalocaris.)
(September 28, 2010 at 4:03 pm)Rayaan Wrote: The world itself is an evidence of God.
Maybe these are too obvious to notice and.....
Don't overreach here. The world is evidence of cosmology. Your god, coequal with all other deities of other religions despite your inevitable protestations, is but an artifact of the first shabby attempts at cosmology. To embody a concept of "wrong" worthwhile to a pursuit of the truth implies a certain standard of intellectual honesty that none of these first attempts has aspired to meet. These infantile first attempts are so self important and so lacking in intellectual integrity that they on purpose demand faith so as to make it difficult for their believers learn from their mistake. As a result, for real insight into cosmology, religion is not even wrong, it is simply worthless. In this age infinitely more robust cosmologies exists to let men frame his own existence in solid understanding of the world. These as they stand now may be mostly on the right track, may be only partly right, and may yet be mostly wrong. But they are honest enough to offer collateral with their claims, so as to let you find out if they are right, and learn something even if they be wrong. When such real effort at cosmology is available, dredging up god and religion again to interfere with men's understanding of the world is contemptible.
(September 28, 2010 at 4:03 pm)Rayaan Wrote: Allah doesn't need our prayers to survive. It is only we who need His guidance and mercy and that's why we have to pray to Him. He gave us a beautiful planet to live in. He gave us food, money, intelligence, technology, and everything we need to survive. There's a small tax for all this stuff that we're getting for free. So, it's like a debt we owe to God if we don't pray to Him or thank Him for all this free stuff we're getting.
That Allah, or Jehovah, or the rather embarrassing specimens of homo sapien called Jesus, doesn't need your prayers to survive is only technically true beccause Jesus is dead and those other ineffable beings are ineffable only because they don't exist, except as an often conflated, but totally nonequivalent, survival of a particularfigment of the prayerful's imagination. Your food, money etc came from many things, none ultimately more traceable to your supernatural despot in the sky more than another's. 4.5 billion years of physical evolution of the earth, and 6 million years of hominid physiological, behavioral, cognitive and societal evolution bequeathed you these things. Those 6 million years of human behavioral and societal evolution also saddled you with Jehovah, Allah, or Buddha. But be clear about what came from what. That small "tax" you mention is your personal intellectual integrity, assuming it had ever been yours to so eagerly give up.
(September 28, 2010 at 4:03 pm)Rayaan Wrote: It's also a matter of building a relationship with Him.
Humans are somewhat embarrassingly capable of building relationships with and perceiving benefits from concepts that are patently unable to reciprocate in any way. No doubt solid relationships with the pet rock saved a few from even greater depths of intellectual poverty. If you are intellectually so poor that the concept an all powerful being so narcissistic that his pleasure profits from your praise constitutes an enrichment to you, and you are unable to come up with guidance better than what could be imagined to come from one such as that, then by all means enrich yourself in this way. But do not assume all of the rest of humanity is so poor as you.