Quote:
Originally posted by Halx
I am approaching everything from the simple viewpoint that God, religion, and otherworldly matters do not exist. All that exists is physics. With this viewpoint, it is easy for me to be skeptical of religion because it is based off of unproven knowledge.
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Okay, I've scanned through the thread, and no one else seems to have touched upon this. I'm not arguing the nature or existence of God, but it sounds as though you are dismissing an entire thought model by using Occam's Razor, where one solves a mostly infinitely debateable problem by eliminating the more complex solution of the two provided. While this is efficient, it often comes at the cost of getting tripped up by bits and pieces of missed argument on your way out the door. Religion is so complex that, in my opinion, it can't quite ever be discarded as a point of view. You could spend the whole rest of your life studying the primary tracts and still get tripped up by a difficult question.
Quote:
Originally posted by Halx
[B]Religion uses faith to explain all the gaps in human understanding and in many cases (please understand that this is a clinical term) denial. Science uses measurable, detectable and repeatable data to explain everything instead.
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Respectfully, a gap in understanding is still a gap in understanding no matter who is trying to figuring it out. Ever heard of phlostigon? It and other scientific creations of days gone by sound fantastic by today's standards. And it was Aristotle and Ptolemy who decreed that the Earth was the center of the universe, not the Christian church. Science has served to explain most of the things we previously attributed to the divine, but remember, kids, it's called the
Theory of Relativity for a reason.
Although it may not sound like it, I don't align myself with any religion and could just as easily imagine and accept oblivion over an afterlife. I've read too many "true account" ghost stories to be an atheist, however, thanks to Michael Norman and Beth Scott.