Matthew 6:5

ThatOwlWoman said:
Hmm, probably not. Different cultures have different values. Example: Most of us find the thought of incest to be abhorrent. Yet in some cultures (like ancient Egypt for one), sex between siblings was not only okay, but expected in the royal families. Most Catholics believe that "mercy killing" is a mortal sin, along with abortion. Many other people do not. Euthanasia is even legal in some places, like Oregon.

We're also, unfortunately, very good at justifying harmful actions.
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Agreed about differences. Yes, odditties pop up in cultures just like nutjobs pop up in modern society. That's not what is important IMO; what is important is the norm. The main section of the Bell Curve.

Most societies have a problem with inbreeding (incest is just the act to get there).
Example: Inbreeding is bad for a tribe and means a lot of babies have to be left on a hilltop for the coyotes or otherwise disposed. Having babies takes energy, valuable resources for tribes barely able to feed themselves. Malformed babies use up all that energy being made then cannot benefit the tribe. Worse, if allowed to live, they'll consume without ever able to sustain the tribe. Ergo; incest bad!

That kind of scenario would have existed in human tribes around the world for over 200,000 years. Now note not the differences between religions but their commonalities. What is the norm for established religious beliefs? They all have things like "Don't harm one another", "Don't steal from one another", "Respect your elders" and "Don't fuck who you aren't supposed to". At the base of each of those rules is a fundamental truth necessary to the long-term survival of the tribe such as the "No incest" rule.
 
evince said:
Not all Christians violate these ideas



It’s organized religion who causes these things

Same ole crap of creating a scaffolding for evil to climb to the top of its power struture


Believe what is in your heart


Be such a good example that other humans ASK you what you believe


Stop all the bullshit advertising coming from the organized power structure funding designed to create a power structure for the few at the top to USE
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My first post in this thread
 
evince said:
Science can explain more than physical facts


The science of human behavior for example


Old myths cant explain anything

They merely suggest at ideas


And those old myths even contradict each other depending on the religions you look at



Facts are the best path to truth

Not old myths
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I spent a professional career ensconced in the inductive reasoning of the scientific method, and consider it a powerful tool for provisional knowlege of how natural systems work.

The inductive reasoning of scientific method is our best method of providing rational explanations of how nature behaves. But it is not equipped to answer why reality is the way it is. Isaac Newton even said as much when he published his universal laws of gravitational motion.

Much of the scientific knowlege we take for granted now, is going to look laughably incorrect in the year 2100.

Very intelligent people maintain there is a higher truth that we do not have access to through sensory perception or through human cognition, because there are limitations on human reason. We really are just smart chimpanzees and our brains have cognitive limits.

I am not going to begrudge anyone who thinks all of reality is limited to a collection of subatomic elementary particles and energy fields. But I not think it is utterly irrational to maintain a belief that there is a higher reality which we cannot access through perception, reason, or particle accelerators.
 
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Yes there are things we yet don’t know


Mankind has always lived in that mental space


We always will


Otherwise we will die as a species


Seeking to understand existence is in our DNA

That is why some display the god gene (a propensity to believe in a higher being)


A mind soother to compel us to live long enough to create the next generation


Think of how many times in mans existence religions had to be altered to comport with newly known facts


Religion comes from the brains of mankind


Not from facts


Just because a human believes something doesn’t make it real huh
 
Cypress said:
I believe most Christian traditions consider the ethics of suicide to be completely situational.

There are Christian females who were revered as Martyrs of the faith because they committed suicide to avoid rape, or because they refused to be forced to submit to the Roman pagan gods. It seems pretty clear there can be justified or virtuous suicides in the Christian tradition
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Most American Protestants consider it a sin, hence laws against assisted suicide. Catholics consider it a mortal sin and the suicider can't be blessed or buried on consecrated ground.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Now say Jesus deserved to be crucified and the same should be done to all Christians. Do it upside down like Nero did just for fun.

Peter_crucified_upside_down.png
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Your post 53 on this thread in response to a post of mine
 
evince said:
You are shaming your claimed religion by lying about me
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That $100 is still waiting to be collected, evince. Search my posts for clues.

Let me know when you can name my "claimed religion" because the waiting is killing me! LOL
 
Dutch Uncle said:
That $100 is still waiting to be collected, evince. Search my posts for clues.

Let me know when you can name my "claimed religion" because the waiting is killing me! LOL
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This is meaningless to the conversation we were having

A completely false diversion
 
Dutch Uncle said:
That's one view point. In the days before books, radio, television and the internet, people spent a lot more time sitting around the campfire talking.....about 200,000 years worth of talking.

Like you and I, they pondered the meaning of existence. Depending upon the region of the world they lived, a consensus developed. All tribes/cultures have "origin" stories. For some reason, at least in the US, only the Christian origin story is ridiculed. Atheists don't ridicule other religions and cultures for some reason, which I find curious.

That said, as human tech advanced, those stories were eventually written down. For Jews, Christians, Muslims and Mormons, Moses (either a person or a small group of people) wrote down the first five books of what evolved into the Bible. Regardless of the writings used, the written beliefs became the cultural norm for human societies for over a thousand years before radio.

Before the printing press was invented in the 15th century, a tribe or village might only have one book. If they did, in Western Society that book was a Bible, usually held the the local priest. Very few villagers had the time to become literate because they were too busy trying to stay alive. After Guttenberg, lots of books were printed, but the best seller remained the Bible.

Less than a hundred years after the mass printing of the Bible, Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses and a slow explosion of various ideas followed, including literacy of the population. Yes, the rich learned to read first and the poor last, but literacy spread.

Back to your point: I disagree. Yes, powerful assholes seek to dominate other people. They'll use whatever tools are available including, as Marx wrote, the opium of the people. No tool is evil, wrong, bad or even good, right. It's just a tool. It's how it's used that matters. Yes, evil people have misused religion just like evil people have misused other tools and forms of power. Your claim that religion is only like Marx claimed is wrong since it's much more than a tool of evil as evidenced by the good people have done with it.
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Here you say I claim religion is evil


That is a lie


I said organized religion creates a scaffolding that evil people can easily climb

That is NOT what Marx said


You lied about what I said
 
evince said:
Cypress said:
I confirm that you have an established record of showing the utmost esteem for the moral philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth.

On the flipside, I maintain that science does not give us access to ultimate truth or objective knowlege. As powerful as science is, scientific knowlege is always provisional. And the knowedge it provides is entirely mechanistic. Which is fine for anyone who wants to believe all of reality and all truth can be explained by material matter and energy associated with leptons, fermions, and bosons.
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Science can explain more than physical facts

The science of human behavior for example

Old myths cant explain anything

They merely suggest at ideas

And those old myths even contradict each other depending on the religions you look at

Facts are the best path to truth

Not old myths
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In some ways you two are talking past each other.

From your posts, I think we can all agree Science is a methodical approach to studying the physical universe. Behaviorism is a science. There are physical reasons why people have certain diseases, either mentally or physically.

Within the confines of the natural universe, enough research will eventually yield all facts for those searching for. What it can't answer, IMO, are spiritual questions although it might come close with the ideas of multiverses and existence being a hologram.

Troy used to be a myth, but the myth itself yielded clues to the proof Troy existed. The myth of Sodom and Gomorrah is fuzzier, but 1) both cities did exist and both cities were destroyed by flood. Around the same time period, two cities located near a volcano in Syria were destroyed by....wait for it....fire from heaven and death. It's very likely the two events were conflated into the one we know now. If so, it'd be another example of old myths explaining a fact.

True, old myths can't explain everything but they can certainly point the way to the truth.
 
Also

I never named a religion that I thought you were member of


So you are lying again about me doing so


Why are you doing this?
 
katzgar said:
Christians suck... "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen."
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Agreed. But just like you can’t lump every nigrow in one pile so true with every so called Christian. Quit stereotyp’n son


Blessings
 
Dutch Uncle said:
In some ways you two are talking past each other.

From your posts, I think we can all agree Science is a methodical approach to studying the physical universe. Behaviorism is a science. There are physical reasons why people have certain diseases, either mentally or physically.

Within the confines of the natural universe, enough research will eventually yield all facts for those searching for. What it can't answer, IMO, are spiritual questions although it might come close with the ideas of multiverses and existence being a hologram.

Troy used to be a myth, but the myth itself yielded clues to the proof Troy existed. The myth of Sodom and Gomorrah is fuzzier, but 1) both cities did exist and both cities were destroyed by flood. Around the same time period, two cities located near a volcano in Syria were destroyed by....wait for it....fire from heaven and death. It's very likely the two events were conflated into the one we know now. If so, it'd be another example of old myths explaining a fact.

True, old myths can't explain everything but they can certainly point the way to the truth.
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Gobbledygook


Blessings
 
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