Is atheism a religion?

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...And you were saying Christianity was "jibberish."

Hemingway once remarked, "Write about what you know." Smart guy that Hemingway. It would seem in this instance that some are not really that familiar with Christianity and yet, would be critical of it without knowledge of its many facets. There is the linear view of Christianity; it begins with the Genesis Book and moves in a linear progression (much like a storyline plot) to Revelation (The Second Coming). And that is supposed to be the End of Human History. That's really an evangelical view and it certainly has its advocates.

Yet, like many other religions, it also has a non-linear facet as well - the more intriguing view, IMO. Think of it as an unfolding, rather than a linear progression of human history. Or if you wish to think of it - rather than the End - as the ongoing Human Dialogue with God. I'm sure animals have this dialogue in some fashion as well, Nataraja, so don't despair.

Rather than saying that Christainity "begins" with Adam and Eve, and the Garden, try to think that it really begins with the coming of a deity, Jesus Christ. The core of my belief, as a Christian, (a follower of Jesus), is that Jesus Christ is everything He claimed He was/is. The Beginning is the Four Gospels of Jesus Christ, in the New Testament. That means that the Genesis story is furthest removed from the center. So it's really NOT the starting point. Christianity has a Jewish deity (Christ was a Jewish rabbi) but it has roots in other religions as well. That is not evidence against Jesus being a diety, but in fact, reinforces the notion that He is one. As I said, it is an unfolding, not a linear progression.

 

Hmm. I was a missionary for 2 years. I saw what I was doing as giving people information so that they could make informed decisions. Despite how some people may see missionaries of all stripes, neither I nor my colleagues sought to force or trick anyone.

As for your view on Christianity, I respect your right to it but it is somewhat flawed. Many of the religious texts from all religions make great use of poetry and figures of speech. The trick is to determine when the text is being literal and when it is being figurative. The idea of inspiration or holy guidance is pivotal to my belief.

To accuse Christians of "mental gymnastics" is a straw man -- there are many ways that two seemingly opposite elements can be reconciled. A firm understanding of the basics is necessary before critiques of this nature can be taken seriously -- though again, I have total respect for people who do not believe the same as I do.

 

Nataraja, do you honestly not see the contradiction in these two sentences? Everyone has the right to make up their own mind...that includes hearing missionaries out, or telling missionaries to go eat it. You don't like what they have to say, they'll leave you alone (generally). But if you do like what they have to say, converting is also a choice on your part. Some people consider it the best decision they ever make. It seems like you have a problem with people trying to convince others to change their point of view, which is all a missionary really does.

I'm not sure you know what "fundamentally wrong" means, unless you're talking about people forcing conversions, and since I don't see anyone here advocating that I'm not sure what your point is.

 

I've never met a Hindu fanatic before even if it isn't Hinduism you're fanatical about

A lot of religious writing - from all religions - is metaphorical, a lot use praetanatural concepts to explain natural phenomena. Many religions also codify morality and ethics to a standard where they ensure a functional society can arise from what is written.

To simply turn around and denounce all credibility from a religion you seem uncertain about is quite perturbing (I was rather surprised that as a man of science you shunned a woman based on her faith, which you seemed to imply in a previous post)

I had always presumed that science required an open mindedness and willingness to explore new ideas and prospects - something not limited by religion or lack thereof.

 

Dangerous presumption 8people. Scientists are fanatically obsessed about their specialty. You really have to be driven to do such intensive research. Chemistry department faculty lectures at the University of Texas at Austin used to almost become brawls. Two professors (and different professors each month), whose work overlapped, would get into arguments over which interpretation of the data was correct (each interpreted it to more closely match their own theories) -- it was a huge battle of egos. Quite entertaining to see 60 year old men being restrained by colleagues.

Such fanaticism carries over to other avenues of life. For example, no one was willing to argue religion with Henry Eyring (he's quite a famous physical chemist). He probably lost the Nobel Prize because he left a full professorship at Princeton to join the University of Utah faculty and live in Salt Lake City (he was a Mormon and wanted to raise his children in Salt Lake). He had a great quote on this subject:

"Is there any conflict between science and religion? There is no conflict in the mind of God, but often there is conflict in the minds of men."​

Edit: Eyring is one of my "science heroes." He won nearly every award in chemistry (except the Nobel prize), redefined many areas of chemical kinetics (a course I took from his son), and had remarkable strength of character.

 

Yeah, Im fanatical about evolutionary biology. I talk about it almost constantly every day. I love it, it is one of the most beautiful scientific theories.

Exactly. Any religious person who tries to convert anyone to any religion I find appalling. However, I do spend a lot of my time trying to subtly convince people that evolution is true. But I have good reasons for knowing evolution to be true, and I feel strongly that people need to accept the reality of the gene centric view of evolution. Maybe I should start worshiping Dawkins instead of Shiva eh?

Um, yeah I do know what it means, and I am not talking about forcing conversions. I am talking about people who spread their religious ideas like a virus. And I never implied that people here were doing it, I was implying that as a tenant of Christian faith is that you have to spread the gospel to all the world that it is wrong. Any sort of 'hey come and believe what I believe because it is the truth, my little man-made book says so' is trickery. Maybe not intentional trickery, but trickery nonetheless.

I denounce the credibility of the Bible as being the word of any god and any conclusions you can deduce from it. I also denounce the credibility of the Koran, the Tanakh, and the holy scriptures of Bahai and Zoroastrianism. Im not uncertain about Christianity, I am uncertain as to how a rational person in the 21st century can hold beliefs from the bronze age. I know more about Christianity than I let on most of the time, I was a philosophy of religion major for a while before I got sick of the bs.

Mormon?

You justified what you were doing as giving people information that was not based on any empirical evidence so that they could make uninformed decisions. This is Christian trickery.

Not really. I like to keep everything that I am aware of since the neolithic revolution until the present in context when I look at a religion or a belief system, and it doesnt even have to be a religious belief system. It could be any number of non-religious failed attempts at understanding the universe and our place in it. I am equally critical regarding flat-earthism, or geocentrism, or hollow-earthism.

The many ways that two seemingly opposite elements can be reconciled in Christianity vs rationality IS the mental gymnastics. Any rationalization of irrationality requires absurd reasoning techniques. For example...why wont the Christian god heal amputees? Why do limbs never regenerate? Why does prayer never work? Christians have to invent reasons why these things happen because they cling to their unsubstantiated beliefs. That is the mental gymnastics they do when they try to justify how their bronze age myths are applicable to the age of information saturation.

 

That is an historical fact, that the book is man-made and it required a fair amount of editing (even Jesus name was misspelled as "Judas" in early editions). Nevertheless, the Bible is an historical document (in large part). The men who wrote it down were inspired by God. But God did not write it. This really came home to me the first time I held an actual King James Bible in my hands in the special collections floor of my college library (as a library assistant stood guard over me). As I flipped through it, I became increasingly aware of its history and how the book is a man-made object, as wonderful and beautiful as it is.

 

Thanks again, you seem to have a knack for explaining things in terms I can understand and also ways that calm down my fanatical passion for evolutionary theory.

I feel pretty much the same way about my own scriptures. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, is a man-made book. We know when it was inserted in to the end of the Mahabharata, and we know that the historicity of the battle that takes place in it, as well as Krishna just happening to be the heroes charioteer is purely fictional. Yet it is incredibly beautiful and full of insight. I wouldnt go as far as saying it was inspired by Krishna himself, or even Vishnu himself, but it was definitely 'inspired' by some higher power that is in all of us.

A good online translation that you can read Chandos is here Bhagavad Gita, it has the good verses in red just like Ive seen in some bibles. The blurb on the main page for the Hindu texts on this site says "The Gita discusses selflessness, duty, devotion, and meditation, integrating many different threads of Hindu philosophy." and I couldnt have said it better.

 

Just because a personal experience is not empirical does not make the sharing of that experience "trickery." That's a rather stunning position to take. I'm a lot of things, many of them quite horrid, but a trickster ain't one of them.

I don't expect to convince you or joaqin or others like you that my beliefs are correct. What I do take exception to is the patronizing statements made that what I and millions of others belief is "stupid" or "totally indefensible" or "nonsensical". I would feel the same way about a Christian talking about Hindu beliefs or Native American shamanism and saying "wow, people who believe that are idiots!" To say that about the spiritual (not scientific) positions of a group is not cool, to say the least.

 

Thank you, Nataraja. I will save the link, so that I can look at it closely. This looks very interesting.

 

Ok, and this revers to Aldeth here, I was talking about you're beliefs (in this case in the invalidity of any claim to imparted knowledge), ot necessarily your one religion. Sorry if there was a confusion. I believe my point still holds.

I put these two together because I want to address them together. The Bible (as far as I have ever studied it) makes no such claims whatsoever, except in an artistic manner (the same way we can describe the sky as stretching on forever today, or of colors leaping out at us). The Bible is not meant to be a science text book. The parts that deal with things like creation are only meant to be very basic premises presented to a very basic people, not the final word on the topic. As to the 'problems' given out in your link, I only looked briefly at these, but I have yet to see one I didn't already know the resolution to. Did these people bother to actually research the points they were criticising? Did they know that 'the Heavens and the Earth' was an artistic way of saying 'Everything that is', and doesn't litterally mean that the Earth, as it is today, was formed on that day? Did they notice the bit where it says that the Earth was 'formless and empty' (i.e. not actually created yet)? I think a first year apologetics student could resolve 90% of the stuff they brought up. I'm sorry, but 'proof' includes an exploration of the subject. Simply saying 'this doesn't make sense' without any effort to resolve it doesn't make 'this' nonsense.

Umm, it's verse 7 you were talking about, not 11. The reason I point this out is that I looked it up and started reading a prayer. Confused me for a bit. Anyway, the resolution to the Daric unit of measurement is even simpler than te above. 1 Chronicles was comosed either by Ezra, Nehemiah, and/or unnamed contemporaries. That puts it at around 500 B.C. The Daric was a common unit of measurement at the time. If you wrote a text on medival armor today, you would give the weight in pounds, or kilograms, not in stones, right? As to the mass of iron, you're off by a factor of 10. My sources say 3.4 million kilos (3,450 metric tons), or 7.5 million pounds (3,750 tons). A lot of iron, yes, but historically inaccurate for a whole nation to give, especially a prosperous one like this? Not really. Concerning your claim that King David 'probably didn't exist', I'm afraid the evidence doesn't bear that out. There is a record made by an opposing king about a century after King David lived that he defeated the 'House of David' in a battle. That's one tick toward his existence, and no ticks against. Even if it were none on either side, it still wouldn't be a 'high probability', just a historical uncertainty.

... Ok, umm. A little later here you say you're pretty sure even your own Shiva doesn't actually exist, so I'm not sure that counts. When I say a singular god who created the universe, I'm not talking about an anthropomorphised feature, but an actual creator god. Beyond that, though, the existence of a singular creator god would mean that it could have made man as special and above the animals and could have done all the things presented in the Bible, thus these things would not be 'nonsense', but rather just one more of the many possibilities.

Here we are. The two big differences between us are: 1.) I believe in a real supernatural, you only believe in a 'supernatural' as an explanation or manifestation of the natural; and 2.) I admit my beliefs are grounded in faith and personal experience, you seem to view your beliefs as absolutely obvious to everyone and something you would have to be an idiot to deny.

Ok, I can see your point there. I don't agree with it, but I see the reasoning behind it.

And here we are back to the absolutes. Our DNA is 98% in common with Chimps, but we are not 98% Chimps. You still seem to believe that DNA is the definition of all existence of life. Guess what, I'd bet that modern computers have 98% of the materials in common with modern power screwdrivers, but does that mean I'm typing on something that's basically just a better screwdriver? No. There are differences far deeper than DNA that even modern science recognizes.

Funny, I don't.

I don't think you know nearly as much about what you're talking about as you think you do. There are many Christian scientists in these fields throughout Europe, South America, and probably elsewhere. I think what you meant is that America seems to be the only place where the Church tries to influence science from within. That may be a legitimate criticism, but speaks more to the culture of America than anything else. So I'll ask a little more clearly. What about the many scientists, widely respected throughout the scientific community, who are also devout followers of the Christian faith? You know, the ones who present evidence as evidence and not absolute proof of anything, one way or another.

No, actually, they aren't, and I'm pretty sure we've had whole threads dedicated to this discussion. I'm pretty sure you were in them, too.

Nataraja, all in all, you are by far the most hypocritical and backwards-minded person I've seen on these forums. In one breath you condemn others for spreading what they believe and at the same time do yourself the very thing you condemn. It's a double standard plain to everyone here but you, it seems.

 

NOG, I call things as I see it and to my eyes Christian belief is on the same level as scientological belief, wicca, islamic, jewish, mormon, zoroastrian, norse, greek, animism, ufo faith and the old classic, Santa Claus. You only believe in one of those, why? I am sure you find many of the other beliefs quite silly if not outright stupid. Me looking from outside into Christianity see it as you would looking into scientology. Same thing, different names.

 

Hilarious; you must.

Evolution theory is in direct contradiction with almost everything that is said in the bible. Do you accept that God is not an intelligent being, or a being of any kind? That He is chaotic, goalless, and doesn't have a plan? Not to mention the factual inconsistencies in the way the world around us funtions. It's either religious truth, or the theorem of evolution, you can't mix-and-match them.

I said before that I'm OK with people making up their own version, as long as they don't reject evolution. But pointing out the denial here is just too tempting

 

Of course we are not 98% chimpanzee. We only share common ancestry with them, we dont come from them.

I dont believe that DNA is the definition of all existence of life, I KNOW it is. DNA makes us who we are. Three nucleotides form a codon which codes for an amino acid which chained together form polypeptide chains and those polypeptide chains form proteins. This is all life is. Proteins coded by nucleotides. When you look at the DNA of any organism you can see where it fits into the phylogenetic tree, and when you look at its morphology you can see where it fits into the phylogenetic tree. This is the double nested hierarchy, which is that it is true from the bottom up and the top down. When we look at our morphology we see we are apes, when we look at our genome we see that we are apes, when we look at the proteins our DNA codes we see that we are apes. It is not open for discussion, it is the fact of the matter and nothing can dispute it. We are animals. Period.

Classic creationist argument and one which is logically faulty from the start. The materials computers and in power screwdrivers are not self-replicating. Computers and power screwdrivers are non-replicating things. Neither do they have a metabolism, nor do they have homeostasis. This is a classic argument from design. You take life which is a stellar phenomenon and you compare it with artifacts fabricated by the stellar phenomenon and try to draw comparison between them.

Oh, really? There are differences between chimpanzee and humans that are 'deeper' that the deepest part of what makes life life? Interesting. You do realise though that DNA just codes for proteins and the proteins make us who we are, right?

Shiva is not Brahman, only one of the many aspects of Brahman. I have no doubts about the existence of Brahman. It is ultimately Brahman who would be the origin of the universe, and the ensouler of the universe. Shiva is just one of the many many many 'faces' of Brahman that humans can relate to because they are under the spell of the illusion of Maya, not realising that everything in the universe is made up of the same energy that was released at the start of the universe, and thus not knowing their true nature. I dont want to go too much into theology here, because it is obvious that Christian theology and Advaita Vedanta theology are diametrically opposed schools of thought.

Not quite. I dont believe in any supernatural at all. There is nothing 'above nature' in this universe, not even consciousness is super natural. Consciousness, or the mind, is the activity of the brain. The rule of thumb in biology is emergent properties. When all the pieces are together something greater than the sum of the parts emerges. It might give the impression that there is some sort of soul or spirit animating our bodies but it is just one of the many beauties of biology.

Perhaps you just havent looked in the mirror lately, hmm?

I condemned proselytizing, and it was never aimed at anyone specifically here. Aside from when I talk about my religious beliefs, which are really not all that strong, see Im more of a weekend hindu than anything, I seem to just spread the merry cheer of evolutionary theory. Sure, I do have problems with Christian theology and I find it nonsensical and I cannot understand why anyone would still believe it in the modern age, but some Christians have actually bothered explaining things to me and havent just gone and attacked me for answering a question honestly. Chandos asked me a question, I answered it, and I warned I would be putting it bluntly so that he could understand why I brush off Christian spiritual whatevers. You made it into a big argument, and since then I have had to defend my stance that Christianity makes no sense to me. Christianity still seems to be this big fuzzy ambiguous religion. On a nearly daily basis I have to deal with fundamentalist Christians and they dont put me in a better mood over it all. My position still stands that Christianity is nonsensical and anti-science based solely on the reasoning methods used in Christianity compared to the reasoning methods used in the scientific method.

The double standard is what? You claim that you accept evolutionary theory, yet you say that humans are not just a species of animals. You dont even understand evolution. On other threads you have talked about how it is controlled by god and other things that arent actually part of evolutionary theory, one being that evolution is not goal orientated. No god controls evolution. Evolution is an entirely natural process. You miss out on a lot of the understanding of evolutionary theory because you keep wearing your Christianity goggles which distort the facts. Look at evolutionary theory without superimposing Christian beliefs on to it, then you will see it clearly and come to the realisation and acceptance that you are just an animal, just like me, just like any other animal. You 'should' prefer the truth that hurts than the lie that feels good.

You might want to watch this, it is pretty informative on why we are animals and just that.

 

The fact that it makes no sense to you is not a problem to me at all. I would hazard that you must deal with some really, really stupid, disrespectful, and all around ignorant fundamentalists. I'm sorry to hear that. But we're not ALL like that!

 

As Hemingway commented: "Write about what you know." It appears you know nothing about the Bible but a few things about evolution. Thusly, you cannot compare the two until you know something about both the objects you are comparing. My advice, begin with the Four Gospels. They deal with where man is going, not where he's been. That's the important part.

 

I know you are not all like the people I have to deal with. Ive come to realise that there are varying degrees of Christian belief, which is also another reason why I just find it so nonsensical. The people I deal with frequently have what I would consider a flat-earth mindset...they are the kind that believe the bible to be 100% literal and historical and scientific. Yet at the same time they live what I would consider normal lives, they use all modern tech and some of them are even scientists (albeit the laughingstocks of their departments). It is these people that drive me the most crazy. I especially get frustrated when they claim that I worship demons and that I am possessed by the devil because I listen to 'wobbly' music that circumnavigates the conscious mind or something like that. They dont understand that I dont 'worship' my gods, I dont even pray to them, I dont even pray to Shiva. I have even heard them say that evolution is a religion. This year I have made a pact with myself to never associate with them again because debating them distracts me from my studies...

 

Nataraja - You did not make the comment I was referring to, but Coin did. Your studies take you into areas that don't concern themselves directly with the subject and content of the Bible.

The people you dealing with have a social and political agenda at the center of their "beliefs." Be warned.

 

They tried to convince me that the world is going to end in September-October...last year. I kid you not.

 

Nataraja, the people you describe are a blight on the Christian community. But every group, religious and non, has such weirdos.