Her non belief is exactly 100% as rational as your belief. Neither of you has any actual knowledge about god on which to base an opinion. And she is not advocating bringing her beliefs in to the classroom as science, so leave that red herring at the door.

You're already assuming the existence of an unprovable, supernatural being, which all gatherable evidence strongly suggests does not exist. If you were to make it fuzzy logic, the non-existence would be .99, and the existence .01 (being generous). You're saying that the acceptance of the .01 is as equally rational and valid as the acceptance of the .99.

I just gotta disagree with that.

The arguement that humans are too stupid to figure it out is ridiculous, and a poor cop-out. The sun used to orbit the Earth. The world used to be flat. The world used to only be a few thousand years old. Now we regularly send people into space, use telescopes to look back into time, and are in route to building computers with more processing power than the human brain. Not bad for some hairless apes.

The arguement that humans are too stupid to figure it out is ridiculous, and a poor cop-out. The sun used to orbit the Earth. The world used to be flat. The world used to only be a few thousand years old. Now we regularly send people into space, use telescopes to look back into time, and are in route to building computers with more processing power than the human brain. Not bad for some hairless apes.

Sure - billions of people on this planet are dying of poverty, disease, war, and climate change while a few percent live in luxury. Yeah, we've got it all figured out. I'll take God over hairless apes any day, if the current state of the world is what we are basing this on.

“I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.” Stephen Hawking

Oh, just for the record, I will put down my opinion on the original topic of the thread. I do think that there is a causal relationship between low intelligence and religion, not because I think that religious people are necessarily unintelligent (I hope I have made it both clear and persuasive that I do not), but because people with low intelligence are less likely to spot the problems and fallacies in whatever superstitions they are exposed to even if they do attempt to use their critical faculties.

It is certainly not the case that atheism is necessarily a hallmark of any intelligence whatsoever: You can (in principle at least) adhere to atheism as a dogmatic position (though I do not know of anyone who does), and you can arrive at any position, true or false, through a process of faulty reasoning or by starting from erroneous premises. In highly religious societies it is probably the case that atheism is more strongly correlated with intelligence because it requires breaking away from the intellectual status quo and arriving at a new position.

"More strongly" does not necessarily mean "very strongly at all".

Anyway, it wasn't that long ago that science was all about bleeding people to remove the ill humors from the body and prescribing cocaine and heroine to help mentally ill people. So please don't try and sell me on the fact that t3h sci3nce has all the answers.

Sure - billions of people on this planet are dying of poverty, disease, war, and climate change while a few percent live in luxury. Yeah, we've got it all figured out. I'll take God over hairless apes any day, if the current state of the world is what we are basing this on.
He was speaking of the current level of knowledge, not the current level of goodness or fairness. To think that because something seems nicer it should therefore be preferred as truth is wishful thinking. I think it'd be really neat if the moon were made of cheese...

When you speak of evolving religious capacity, are you speaking in a darwinian sense?
I would disagree with that point. And raise you one "what is a trait?" Things like language, writing and art are all passed down from generation to generation, but not by genetic inheritance. Trading ideas, skills, etc are all passed down at a faster rate and are more Lamarkian in nature. If I take you to church, we don't have to wait until your kids to find out if the ideas were passed on.

I also take issue with some points of dawkins etal. arguments. As most of their arguments are strictly adaptationist. A lot of has become the search for a plausible anecdote to describe what is happening. Good stories aren't always the best part of the truth.

Well, the specifics of each different language are passed on from generation to generation, but we have evolved the mental capacity for language. This is evident from the fact that we are the only known species that is able to communicate abstract concepts to other individuals verbally. We have tried to teach chimpanzees to speak (with sign language), but they were never able to learn grammar.

I will have to think about Petter's comments some more before responding. He makes some good points, but I think that my post was not very well worded, so I don't think we are talking about the same issue.

You're already assuming the existence of an unprovable, supernatural being, which all gatherable evidence strongly suggests does not exist. If you were to make it fuzzy logic, the non-existence would be .99, and the existence .01 (being generous). You're saying that the acceptance of the .01 is as equally rational and valid as the acceptance of the .99.

I just gotta disagree with that.

The arguement that humans are too stupid to figure it out is ridiculous, and a poor cop-out. The sun used to orbit the Earth. The world used to be flat. The world used to only be a few thousand years old. Now we regularly send people into space, use telescopes to look back into time, and are in route to building computers with more processing power than the human brain. Not bad for some hairless apes.

Lack of evidence proves nothing. Ever. Basic logic. You find it more credible to assume non existence. That's fine. So do I. The amusing thing for people who study sociology or psychology of religion is the ways in which your non belief operates in exactly the same ways that religious belief does. Your unrational faith in rationality (and progress) replaces the religious persons faith in the divine, and your hostility towards religion binds you tighter to your self identification and group identifications the same way that emnity always makes us hairless apes wanna hug our tribemates.

Anyway, it wasn't that long ago that science was all about bleeding people to remove the ill humors from the body and prescribing cocaine and heroine to help mentally ill people. So please don't try and sell me on the fact that t3h sci3nce has all the answers.
That's (bad) medicine, not science; it may also have been thought of as scientific at the time, but that does not mean that they actually had solid bodies of evidence and proper hypotheses, theories, etc. to back up those treatments. Today we call such things 'pseudo-science' and afford them no respect at all. The modern scientific method is designed, as best as we are able to formulate it, to be resilient to personal agendas and errors. It is often wrong, but it is self-correcting, and it is in the general nature of scientific inquiry not to take wild stabs that may or may not be totally and utterly wrong, but to gradually correct and refine theories and achieve better and better results -- as measured by objective observations, verified predictions, etc.

He was speaking of the current level of knowledge, not the current level of goodness or fairness. To think that because something seems nicer it should therefore be preferred as truth is wishful thinking. I think it'd be really neat if the moon were made of cheese...

What good is knowledge if it's not used to benefit the 'tribe'? That is something religion has always demanded (Christianity, anyways) - the concept of using your skills and resources to the benefit of others.

Anyways, that's a bit of an unintended de-rail.

What good is knowledge if it's not used to benefit the 'tribe'? That is something religion has always demanded (Christianity, anyways) - the concept of using your skills and resources to the benefit of others.

Anyways, that's a bit of an unintended de-rail.
I'll derail with you! These threads always acqiure something of a train wreck aspect, anyway.

I think in debates such as this, the theist side tends to confuse truth with values -- if you go by religion, after all, they tend to come in a package. To an atheist, this is not so. This is what gives rise to idiotic misconceptions such as "You believe in evolution; you must therefore believe in Social Darwinism, you evil, ruthless bastard!" Rational people (whether religious or not) know that "You can't get an 'ought' from an 'is'", and acknowledging that evolution happened doesn't mean that we therefore think that ruthless natural selection is good. (I'm not putting creationist words in your mouth, merely illustrating the is/ought problem.)

(On a further de-rail, I think this ties in with a deeper confusion that 'natural' somehow means 'good'. Bullshit. For example, I don't know or care whether homosexuality is genetic; even if it were entirely by choice, gays don't hurt anyone and so it's not bad simply because it's 'unnatural' -- the lunacy of the latter notion in the face of non-human homosexuality observed in nature aside.)

The only way in which science should really affect policy is in helping to define a platform -- a view of reality -- on which to base moral and policy decisions. For instance, knowing whether Huitzilopochtli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huitzilopochtli) is likely to be real or not tells us whether it makes sense to sacrifice people to him; evaluating whether there is likely to be any deity out there may give us a basis on which to stand when we decide whether our morality should be focused on the well-being of humans or on how much it pleases a supreme being. In other words, accurate knowledge can help us avoid making the wrong decisions due to erroneous premises.

On the other hand, science doesn't come with an ideology; just a process for evaluating whether objective claims are true or not, and how accurate these evaluations are. Is it fair to judge the modern skeptic/atheist/humanist based on where we stand today, given the progress of science and society? Frankly, I am dubious: We do not, after all, live in a secular world society. There are and have been some secular societies (the communist regimes, yes, I know -- dead horse again -- which did not particularly promote free thought, freedom, and inquiry, but also places like Scandinavia, not generally a model of depravity or oppression).

A truly good society, if you ask me, needs most of all a good ideology, but a truly good ideology should be based on reality, not fantasy. If we postulate a supreme being it is all too tempting to infer that said being's wishes should trump our own, and it's not that far from here to Nicaragua (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2185811,00.html).

To answer your question directly: "What good is knowledge if it's not used to benefit the 'tribe'?" Clearly, by definition, none. But in order to use knowledge to benefit the tribe, we first need to acquire knowledge, and I see no reason to suppose that false knowledge should be better suited for tribal use than real knowledge; only the problem that false premises may be used to reach arbitrary conclusions.

Sure - billions of people on this planet are dying of poverty, disease, war, and climate change while a few percent live in luxury. Yeah, we've got it all figured out. I'll take God over hairless apes any day, if the current state of the world is what we are basing this on.

“I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.” Stephen Hawking




And I think you just picked yourself the worst possible example of why to believe in God.

The Spanish Inqusition
Croatia
English Civil War
Huguenot Wars
The Holocaust
St. Bartholemew Massacre
Tudor England
400 years of witch hunts
Al Qaeda
Many, many Crusades

I can go on for a very long time.

Free and inter-depedent trade is the only thing that can and does raise us up from warfare. I can provide you with examples why if you want. They have nothing to do with God or religion. Religion has in fact tried to stifle and regress scientific knowledge and understanding throughout its history.

Couple that with the idea of globalization, and you'll find the standards of living rising in all corners of the globe. This has nothing to do with God, but simple economics, advances in transportation, and global communications.




now here's the funny as hell part. your first post on this thread was about you glorifying how rational you were... now all of a sudden, BILLIONS are dying? There's only roughly 7 billion people on the entire planet. We peaked at a 2.2 percent growth rate, and are sitting at about 1% now. If BILLIONS were dying, well... where the hell are all the bodies? Climate change melt them all? :) Sounds pretty irrational to me.

What good is knowledge if it's not used to benefit the 'tribe'? That is something religion has always demanded (Christianity, anyways) - the concept of using your skills and resources to the benefit of others.

Anyways, that's a bit of an unintended de-rail.

That's a morality question. Fortunately, religion is not required for morality.

Religion is an attempt to codify morality. That's why we have the amazingly insightful and brilliant seperation of church and state.

It's a simple question, "Can I be good without God,"?

I can; therefore, I do. I make the choice, not because I fear torture on a time scale unimaginable (the punishment for not believing in abrahamic religions)... but because I recognize it as a truth that transcends anybody's religious viewpoint.

The Spanish Inqusition
Croatia
English Civil War
Huguenot Wars
The Holocaust
St. Bartholemew Massacre
Tudor England
400 years of witch hunts
Al Qaeda
Many, many Crusades

I'll see that and raise you:

The Reign of Terror
The Great Leap Forward
The Ukraine Famine
Pol Pot's cleansing
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Tianamen Square
Many, many people tortured/executed by Communist dicatators

My point is that religion and atheism/science both have their fair share of retards/oopsies, not that one is better than the other.

The Spanish Inqusition
Croatia
English Civil War
Huguenot Wars
The Holocaust
St. Bartholemew Massacre
Tudor England
400 years of witch hunts
Al Qaeda
Many, many Crusades

I'll see that and raise you:

The Reign of Terror
The Great Leap Forward
The Ukraine Famine
Pol Pot's cleansing
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Tianamen Square
Many, many people tortured/executed by Communist dicatators

My point is that religion and atheism/science both have their fair share of retards/oopsies, not that one is better than the other.

Not really. All of those (minus the nuclear weapon droppings, red herring, the B-29 fire bombings killed far, far more) are communist ideologies horrendous failings.

Communism has a freakin' tremendous body count. Some just happen to claim atheism. The ones I listed are purely for religious reasons. If you want to call atheism a religion, okay, but it's still not the reason behind the tradgedies you listed. The reason was communism itself.

Actually, quite a few of the examples on your list are not "pure" religous stuff per se. (Al Quaeda = angry at US foreign policy, not just our religion, Holocaust had a great deal of pseudoscientifc stuff working behind it, not to mention that more of the Crusaders were motivated by loot and land than by purely religous causes). Then again, most large scale conflicts are motivated by a MIX of factors ranging from religous tensions, to a desire for more natrual resources, etc, etc. So it's hard to point at any given war and say: This was a religous war, or this was a secular war.
And how was the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror a communist ideology horribly failing? It happened quite a while before Marx was born. "Cult of Reason" ring any bells?

And how was the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror a communist ideology horribly failing? It happened quite a while before Marx was born. "Cult of Reason" ring any bells?

that's what I get for being in a hurry and skimming through the list.