Tom Capuder#Theists:
Some of you think the evidence for #evolution is insufficient.
Where’s sufficient evidence for a #god
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an #atheist vs #faith
myrmepropagandistI'm confused why anyone would want "evidence" for God. Isn't faith supposed to be an evidence-free activity?
Exactly, which is a good reason to oppose it.
For instance, in the case of evolution vs. creationism, evidence favors one side, and nothing but imagination is responsible for the other.
Faith is pretending to know things you don't know. And that's never a good basis for decision-making.
Evidence free activities have value. They can help us to understand how our ancestors may have seen the world. They can allow one to experiences a sense of mystery and feel a real connection to the religious traditions of the past.
It's just important to remember that they are "evidence free" and won't be able to really tell you anything useful in the empirical sense.
Why is it necessary to use evidence-free methods to understand how ancestors saw the world? We have enough evidence in writings and archeology to make informed judgements about ancestors' behavior.
I often experience "a sense of mystery" when I contemplate the world and universe. There's nothing wrong with not yet having answers to mysteries. It isn't advisable, however, to provide pat, soothing, imaginary "answers."
We've learned so much as a species that it's no longer necessary to revere religious traditions of the past, none of which have any place in the real world of today, IMO. They should be assigned to the dustheap of discarded mythologies.
Religions provide social cohesion. People like them. They are important to human history. They shouldn't be forgotten or treated as obsolete, but rather, like folk stories practiced and celebrated with awareness of their limitations.
Of course many people won't want anything to do with this, and that's fine too.
Nate Gaylinn@futurebird @tomcapuder I've struggled with this. As a rational materialist, I reject religious ideas that are incompatible with science. For a long time, I thought that meant rejecting all of religion, and that believing in a higher power required proof of a higher power. But I now see that's misguided.
For me, it's because I had a superficial understanding of religion. A naive, literal view of the Bible is deeply problematic, but great spiritual thinkers have struggled with that since at least the middle ages. They found much better ways of engaging with these ideas that don't require false beliefs. And, like you say, it's largely about embracing ambiguity and non-literal views of reality.
Any attempt to erase religious practice becomes a form of cultural genocide, especially pernicious for those who have already targeted by cultural genocide.
I would hate to live in a world without the rhetorical traditions of the Black Baptist church, without Jewish cultures, without First People & their traditions.
It's not enough to write it down, it must be practiced.
I just don't think practice requires one to decide "this is the one and only way and truth"
Matt McIrvin@futurebird @ngaylinn @tomcapuder Where we get into trouble is that people constantly try to use "religious practice" as a way to make end runs around other civil-rights law, or impose their values forcibly on others. "My business has to be allowed to discriminate in this way because it's my religious practice." "We have to be allowed to take all the pharmacist jobs in town and deny people birth control; that's our religious practice." And the courts seem increasingly sympathetic.
I'm not even sure it's *always* bad-faith: people identify their religion with their entire social-political worldview, and they probably do believe their right to free exercise is being denied if they can't hurt other people in these ways.
It's a hard boundary to define. It'd be unfortunate if this kind of abuse of free exercise of religion leads to the whole concept getting a bad smell.