The Faith & Religion mega Thread

Originally Posted by sundialsvcs "Big Bang" is easy to understand: it is a "scientific" version of a creation mythos. Nothing more or less. It's perfectly understandable that "scientific" humans – being human, after all – would invent one, as their searchings (in their own way) focused in on the same Great Kahuna Question.™ The "scientific™" basis for this mythos is that some people think that the Universe(!) is expanding from a single point. In what, to me, is certainly nothing more than "a grand leap of faith," if not a wild-haired guess, someone decided that "life, the Universe, and everything" must have exploded, in a single "big bang," from that point. And they're teaching that in schools now, even as they vehemently oppose the teaching of another well-known "creation mythos." <snip>

It puzzles me a bit that you seem so well read in so many areas and posses a considerable knowledge and facility with language, yet seem to equate "Turtles all the way down", and "God did it" with hard evidence. Much of what formed the Big Bang Theory was discovered quite by accident, which tends to rule out agenda. Red Shift was a shocker to Science and scientists and massive work was done to falsify it to no avail. Then a biggy occurred again completely by accident as I'd think you'd be quite aware in the form of the Bell Labs discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation, coincidentally shifted in the precise amount it would were Red Shift correctly figured.

For anyone unfamiliar with this huge breakthrough see Discovery of CMBR by the Horn Antenna

After the Horn Antenna WMAP was created and put into a heliocentric orbit gathering data for 9 years. While it raised some minor questions needing further investigation. the data was consistent with and expanded upon Hubble's Red Shift and the Bell Labs data. WMAP was retired and the job was expanded by the Planck Spacecraft which was orders of magnitude more powerful and operated at a vastly wider range of frequencies. Compare WMAP and Planck Data

Anyone who has seen a distant workman swinging a hammer and noticed the sound is out of sync with vision has an intuitive understanding of the time it takes sound versus light to travel distances which provides the basis for understanding that when we look at much MUCH larger distances we are looking back in time. This is borne out in every test and is consistent with Red Shift and CMBR. Furthermore, the high energy conditions seen and measured with telescopes have been recreated in colliders on Earth and have been so consistent that every major prediction has borne out including the important Higgs Boson whose confidence level is 5 Sigma. It's tempting to quote the 99.999999999 % certainty figure, and while that has some meaning, it is not the way that hard Science expresses statistical probability. The bottom line is that it is far more certain than most people require for confidence, requiring 3,500,000 tests with only one deviation.

In short The Big Bang (and remember it was not an explosion in any sense we can relate to) has stood up for `100 years and countless man/hours (not to mentions tons of money) spent in effort to falsify it, and yet it stands with every new discovery just adding to it's confidence level.

Please demonstrate any "mythos" that has anything to compare with such consistency of objective evidence, or are you just being generous and conciliatory?

Originally Posted by enorbet In short The Big Bang (and remember it was not an explosion in any sense we can relate to) has stood up for `100 years and countless man/hours (not to mentions tons of money) spent in effort to falsify it, and yet it stands with every new discovery just adding to it's confidence level.

We can also say:

In short the Bible has stood up for more than 2000 years and countless man/hours (not to mentions tons of money) spent in effort to falsify it, and yet it stands with every new discovery just adding to it's confidence level.

In other words, your argument has no value in demonstrating anything but confidence, which is equally present on both sides. Confidence is another word for faith.

Originally Posted by OregonJim We can also say: In short the Bible has stood up for more than 2000 years and countless man/hours (not to mentions tons of money) spent in effort to falsify it, and yet it stands with every new discovery just adding to it's confidence level. In other words, your argument has no value in demonstrating anything but confidence, which is equally present on both sides. Confidence is another word for faith.

I suppose that would seem true if there were actually any objective evidence to support it or your claims and you redefine terms and ignore any actual evidence of contradictions, rewrites, translations, exclusions/edits and falsehoods, not to mention the base premise that "God wrote it" to prove the conclusion that "God exists". You Sir, are in Total Denial of the process of Logic. Why can't you accept it that you have bought into a closed system and just admit Blind Faith? That nobody can argue with. Oh right, that whole redefinition of evidence and logic, evangelical thing.

FYI NO! Confidence != Faith by anyone's standards but hardline fundamentalist religious zealots, and most certainly not actual Science. Just because you call Oranges "Apples" doesn't make them the same.

So let's finally "put this to bed". People can decide you are completely correct if they can manage to denigrate "confidence" and elevate "faith" to be equals. For anyone who comprehends the difference, their conclusions are likely quite different.

Originally Posted by enorbet FYI NO! Confidence != Faith by anyone's standards but hardline fundamentalist religious zealots, and most certainly not actual Science. Just because you call Oranges "Apples" doesn't make them the same.

Really? Let's try Merriam-Webster:

CONFIDENCE: : the feeling of being certain that something will happen or that something is true FAITH: : strong belief or trust in someone or something

I suppose you're now going to say that the dictionary was written by hardline fundamentalist religious zealots. That the dictionary is anti-science.

Once again, your standards come from a different planet than the rest of us, as do your perceptions of the definitions of even the simplest words.

You are also the only one who continually asserts that "strong belief or trust", as faith is DEFINED above, is the same thing as "blind faith". There is certainly blindness present here, but it's not in the definition of the words.

I reassert that confidence = faith = belief, by today's standards.

Again: educated guesses, theories, facts and fiction! lalala

Words better suited for kindergartners than Sunday schools I guess?

For Sunday "school" it's blind confidence in their fairy tail!

Just a matter of clarification. Not for argumentation.

OregonJim, I have found your faith and reasoning power to have stood the test until this point of time (403rd page). I found this statement interesting:

In short the Bible has stood up for more than 2000 years and countless man/hours (not to mentions tons of money) spent in effort to falsify it, and yet it stands with every new discovery just adding to it's confidence level.

Can you please present us two or three instances of post-biblical time *discovery* that can improve its confidence level?

Thanks ahead in advance.

Respectfully,

m.m.

I want to add, if it's "safer to believe when we die" makes good suckers...

Originally Posted by jamison20000e I want to add, if it's "safer to believe when we die" makes good suckers...

That's Pascal's wager. I used to have an atheist uncle who was obsessed with it and with trying to disprove it. He regarded it as the only argument for Christianity that worried him.

In a nutshell, Pascal's wager goes like this:
Either God exists or He does not. If he exists and we don't believe in Him, we go to hell. If we believe in Him and He turns out not to exist, there will be no life after death so we will never know we've been had. Nor, in that case, will those who don't believe ever have the satisfaction of knowing they were right. Therefore we lose little by believing and have everything to gain by it. Of course the full wager is more complicated because it involves calculations of probability (something that Pascal was an expert on) and allows for the cost of being religious and having to live a more moral life than might otherwise be the case.

Morals and religions are two different things, like right and wrong. If kids are raise wrong we get wrong... and "eternal begins" may forgive anything they do; cult$ and on and on!?

Why must we inflict "our" fears of death on the children?

OregonJim do you think the "terrible twos" would be so bad if the kid is raised by award-winning, citing-edge, child-psychologists with outside calibrations form more genii?

Learning A Second Language A second language is one case where earlier really is better. Learning from birth is a great way to become fully bilingual. Babies at 25 to 30 weeks’ gestation can hear their mother’s speech, and even know if she speaks in a different language. Shortly after six months, babies’ brains discourage their ear from distinguishing sounds outside their first language, and by 12 months, the brain tunes off totally from sounds in a second language unless babies hear them regularly. However, don’t despair if your six year old only speaks English. Monolingual kids can be just as fluent if they start to learn their second language before the age of about seven, says Barbara Zurer Pearson, a linguistics researcher and author of Raising a Bilingual Child. Brain imaging shows children under seven are using a more diffuse area of the brain to assign meaning to words, so they can override the meaning tied to a sound in their first language more easily. In fact, kids who start to learn before seven but after their toddler years can be at an advantage over kids who start as babies. They have a more dexterous tongue, can repeat longer stretches, have better memory, and have more reference points for interpreting words and sentences. Even kids who start learning pre-teens almost never have an accent. Start learning in the teenage years, however, and it’s much harder (though not impossible) to get to a near-native level, and you will always have at least a slight accent. To speak like a native, it’s not just when you start that counts, but how much exposure you get. Barbara says studies show a rough guide is a minimum 20 per cent of your waking hours spent in the second language every day, week or month, while 30 per cent seems to be ideal.

http://www.childmags.com.au/child/de...ids-learn-best

Growth and Development, Ages 2 to 5 Years - Topic Overview How does a child grow and develop between the ages of 2 and 5? The ages between 2 and 5 are often called the preschool years. During these years, children change from clumsy toddlers into lively explorers of their world. A child develops in these main areas:

http://www.webmd.com/children/tc/gro...topic-overview

I know it's ahead of our times but "won't somebody think of the children?"

Originally Posted by malekmustaq Can you please present us two or three instances of post-biblical time *discovery* that can improve its confidence level?

Sure. The Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls which eliminated any doubts that our text had become corrupted over the centuries. Archeological discovery of the cities of Sodom & Gomorrah (which many thought was allegorical). The archaeological discovery of Jericho, which was another city many thought to be 'fable'. Also, the fullfillment of prophecy in recent years, such as the return of the Jews to the promised land and the re-emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 after nearly 2000 years. Simply the fact that the Israelites survived as a people, just as God promised, without being lost (remember, people have been trying to wipe them out since the very beginning - most recently by Hitler, Islam, and ISIS). When was the last time you met a Hittite? Jebusite? Caananite? Any other 'ite' but an Israelite?

Those are just a few. Hopefully you understand the terms 'confidence' and 'faith' better than our friend does.

So text from a more devolved i.e: primitive (in your head not biologically if you "wish") time??? You may get that one if we put you on a cross to die!

Originally Posted by jamison20000e OregonJim do you think the "terrible twos" would be so bad if the kid is raised by award-winning, citing-edge, child-psychologists with outside calibrations form more genii?

You can apply exceptional circumstances to almost any general statement, but that doesn't change the general case. Sure, some children are more outwardly rebellious than others but, in general, their concentrated, intellectual development is best started AFTER they learn about authority and obedience. That's why schooling generally begins around age 5 or so. Again, I'm speaking generally. We all know of 'prodigies' who can learn despite their inner disobedience.