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Question for Athiests and church bashers
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nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »How can I misrepresent you by quoting and replying to exactly what you said?
Don't be mischievous. Because I posted this right afterwards, and this was ages ago, it didn't become a sticking point for you until after your virus argument collapsed:As a quick point I would like to say you're right here on the wording. What I wanted to say is that we could not, and would not, have evolved the way we did, without religion it would have been very different, for better or for worse is another question, which we'll never know.
i.e. it has been the most culturally pervasive force on earth. If you think I thought we wouldn't have grown eyebrows without religion or something, then, no, that's not my view, but that would be a more fun debate.For an entire species yes. However this claim is entirely false on the level of individuals
Here, you are in contradiction with yourself. The point of religion is to bind, and it conferred evolutionary advantages on those it binded together. They had more children. Evolution's only yardstick of success. Evolutionary biologists suggest that religious belief in supernatural truths and agents evolved in order to combine reproductive motivation with adaptive cooperation strategies.At the level of talking to another lay man on the subject you might get away with it, but here I can assure you that you are not talking to such a person
The problem here is that you repeat such pointless statements and present them as scientific fact. This internet warrior stuff, no offence - generalizing, usually doesn't bother me, except that you present yourself as an authority on subjects where you display actual ignorance. Your only tactic is to try to discredit the opposing voice in a "lads, he's like Philologos/Jakkass, don't worry" kind of way. I'm sure you're an evolutionary biologist on the internet, that's OK. The fear I have is that someone might think you've worked it all out, the evolution and origin of religion, and that you can brush aside the careers of anthropologists and evolutionary biologists - who still haven't figured it all out - by presenting your 'facts', and people, albeit looking for self-confirming evidence of their belief, will accept it, unaware that in fact you are wearing no clothes, so to speak. This issue is too important to be decided by propagandists of any persuasion.wrong, as is your attempts to suggest religion causes more reproduction.
Do you have any research or data that indicates otherwise? Because the research on this, is already conclusive and convincing. What bothers me is that you've already been made aware of it, but are still in denial.You think words exist right? Words are memes. So if you think one exists, you think the other exists and so your error will correct itself again.
The late, great Stephen Jay Gould said "memes are meaningless metaphors", and he was right. For me, it would be useful if it were true, but it requires too much faith because there is zero empirical evidence. I might as well believe in any religious faith as they can offer nice ways to view what we don't understand too.My only problem is with unsubstantiated claims.
This again! As I've already pointed out: all these findings are through proper studies and empirical research. In other words, they have substance, and they show how religion was useful. The correlation between religiosity and reproduction is extremely, extremely positive. Secular societies are basically falling below the replacement rate. All the evidence points to the fact that religion is adaptive, not viral. Since you like to use phrases like "unsubstantiated" and "much less from yourself", I'm led to another point. Your argument that religion is bad / a virus is, ironically, one of the most unsubstantiated claims you could possibly make.And studying it is intensely important to us as a species for many reasons, including possibly the future survival of our species given religions potential to end it.
I am deeply committed to studying religion. I can guarantee you though, there won't be a Son Of Man Coming On The Clouds Of Heaven style apocalypse. We are well able to do the job ourselves, thank you very much, and we've got some of our brightest minds working on it right now.You can invent any bias for me you want if it makes you feel better.
You can't say religion is inherently bad or evil and must be eradicated, and then say you have no bias. Religion is something that needs to be deciphered, not arrogantly repudiated.Are you suggesting all atheists are sterile or what? They are having children just as successfully as anyone else. So your comment is not just meaningless, its wrong too.
Are you brushing aside demographers and sociologists too? The worrying thing is, it can be summed up like this: the world is becoming both more religious and less religious at the same time. Conservatism is on the increase in all major religions, because they're having so many children, while liberal and secular values predict lower birthrates. This is all based on empirical evidence. The same evidence that led "memeticist" Sue Blackmore to retract the virus theory. It's refreshing that someone can stand up and say "I've been wrong all these years, thank you for teaching me."
And personally, I don't live in Ireland, or Germany. We can both say more for the trends we see on the ground. You don't wanna know what I'm seeing. Ireland, I'm sorry to say, is nothing. Catholicism is in freefall in Western Europe, according to research, but other forms of Christianity are set to boom. Have you done any research into trends in China? A nation of 1.3 billion which could potentially become the most Christian country on earth. The editors at The Economist, who famously said God Is Dead, wrote a book on this issue called God Is Back. Everyone knows atheism is rising, especially in Western Europe. No offence, but in Ireland, atheism is as cheap as the Catholicism it is replacing. That cheap, state-sponsored religion has no hope, same with the Church of England. Where there is a free market for religion is where they thrive, where they don't rest on the state laurels. Globally, Western Europe is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to religiosity. For further reading, I suggest Shall The Religious Inherit The Earth?: Demography and Politics in the 21st Century, by Eric Kaufmann. It reads like an atheist nightmare though. It's the committed religious populations that matter, as they will be the political heavyweights. Ironically, when one expresses disgust at a la carte Catholics, you have no idea what will replace them. It's a pity that moderation seems to no longer be an option.
Your argument, and the same can be said for the popular new atheist arguments, would hold more weight, more moral integrity, and intellectual honesty, if you could intersperse some of the diatribes against religion with a passing allusion to its attempts to alleviate human suffering, efforts for peace, social justice etc, but maybe you're scared it might be a wound in the ideology. As someone else pointed out, it's sad to think that scarcely was the ink dry on the Dawkins / Hitchens book, when 10,000 Buddhist monks in Burma took a stand due to their religious principles and were beaten, imprisoned and murdered. The same can be said for Tibet, Saigon, Cambodia and other places over the past few decades.
And please, anyone, don't equate religion with the catholic church in Ireland. In attempts to equate all religion with child molestors, countless millions who devoted their lives to the service of others are wiped from history, by people claiming to be crusading against bigotry.
I don't expect to win any friends for these views here on AH. But why should my carefully studied opinion be declared heresy because it does not fit with someone else's worldview? By the way no, I did not mean to suggest you, personally, are sterile!
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Don't be mischievous.
How can I be mischievous by quoting and replying to exactly what you said?
You can keep going around in this circle if you like but the facts are the facts. You came on here saying that we "could not" have evolved without religion, I corrected that, you have distanced yourself from the comment now if not actually retracted it. As far as I am concerned we are done.until after your virus argument collapsed
I am aware of no such argument, let alone a collapse. My point is not an argument per se but an analogy which allows us to view religion in a different light and throws up some interesting ideas within that light.
The point of the analogy was to correct your error in thinking that something surviving must have some evolutionary advantage to us or it would not have survived. That has been your position and it is a wrong one. Evolution does not demand that an attribute that survives in a species must have some advantage to that species. It can just have an advantage to itself.
And thats what the virus analogy shows. The common cold for instance has survived for as long as we know. What is the advantage of it to us therefore? Nothing. The advantage is to ITSELF. Religion is much like that too.
So again I am aware of nothing "collapsing" except your idea that something that survives well in us must therefore have some advantage to us. There is no such requirement. As soon as you correct that error many of your other errors will self correct too. I therefore recommend once again that you correct it.Here, you are in contradiction with yourself.
No. I am not. What I said is entirely correct... that your claim on the level of an entire species is correct, but on the level of individuals or groups of them within a species your comment was... as is much of your knowledge of evolution.... too general, incomplete and not useful.The point of religion is to bind
Actually no, religion is as divisive as any other force on the planet. Also I see no reason to think binding is the "point" of religion. There are many other "points" of it such as control over people, attempts to pander to a non existent entity and more.it conferred evolutionary advantages on those it binded together. They had more children. Evolution's only yardstick of success.
Again: Simply having "more children" is not de facto an "advantage". You have been corrected on this already, so not sure why you insist on making the same error again. You are clearly not here to listen.
You are simply wrong if you think "more children" is the "yardstick" of success in evolution. It is not. The yard stick of success is having your genes survive into later generations. That can be achieved with one child or 1000 children and there are some species which reproduce once in their life while others do it many many times. Each is just as successful as the other given they all are still here.
If you think mere numbers of off spring is the only measurement of evolutionary success then your knowledge of the subject is as bad as I first thought. Comical then that you come out with a line like this...except that you present yourself as an authority on subjects where you display actual ignorance.
..... given how little you know about the subject and how many errors I have found in the claims you have made on it.Because the research on this, is already conclusive and convincing.
Cool. Link to some of it then. Actual science papers I mean, not blog posts, news paper articles, or opinion pieces.
The main problem however is not with the correlation between religion and reproduction... it is with your entirely false idea that higher reproduction automatically means "better". Also correlation does not imply causation. It is causation not correlation I would like to see in your links when you present them. If you present them.This again!
OF course this again. Given it is the main issue I have in ALL my posts I am not sure why you would be surprised I mention it at times. My issues are with unsubstantiated claims. The idea there is a god is such a claim. Therefore I have an issue with it. Whats wrong with that exactly?religion is adaptive, not viral.
Huh? Viruses ARE adaptive too. That IS one of the points of my analogy so you are now making my points for me, thanks
One of the advantages of looking at Religion as analogous to viruses is to realise that they too (religions) evolve. They are there, they get reproduced by us just like viruses do, they undergo mutation and modification, and those that are better at getting us to reproduce them survive into later generations while others die.
Thats the whole point! Thanks for making it for me. Religions, like viruses, use us to reproduce themselves. Religions, like viruses, mutate and evolve to get better at making us reproduce them and surviving!! Now you are getting it!Your argument that religion is bad / a virus is, ironically, one of the most unsubstantiated claims you could possibly make.
Not at all. As I said my definition of "bad" varies with context however the context which fits religion is anything that does not do any good... or at least not any good that could not be done just as well without it.... and meanwhile it does at least one harmful thing.
Religion does not do any good that I know of in present day life..... it certainly does not do any that are not just as attainable without it... and I can list many bad things about it. Therefore it fits by definition of "bad" perfectly does it not?
You have not shown one good thing about religion. You have instead listed all the good things that religion has successfully managed to assimilate or associate itself with and have made the error in thinking religion gives us those things, rather than the fact we take those things to religion and give it the credit all too easily.You can't say religion is inherently bad or evil and must be eradicated, and then say you have no bias.
Coming to a conclusion based on arguments and evidence and coming to a conclusion based on being biased emotionally against something are too different things. My issue with religion is the former so deal with that. If you want to pretend it is the latter then you are engaged in 1) Making things up about me to avoid the things I actually say and 2) Talking at me rather than with me. Deal with what I have said, not what you have imagined me saying or feeling.It's refreshing that someone can stand up and say "I've been wrong all these years, thank you for teaching me."
It is indeed. However the reasons she gave for being wrong are bad ones and I explained why already. I am happy to do so again.And please, anyone, don't equate religion with the catholic church in Ireland.
Nor have I done any such thing.But why should my carefully studied opinion be declared heresy because it does not fit with someone else's worldview?
I did not declare anything heresy. Your "carefully studied" opinion... especially with regards evolutionary science... is "wrong" not "heresy". That is all I have said so stop dressing it up in words like "heresy". Wrong is bad enough, I do not need other words to describe it.
I repeat, and will gladly keep repeating, that you have made here two massive errors in evolutionary thinking and you have no substantiation for either of them and would do very well to correct them. To summarise them again they are:
1) The idea that a higher number of off spring automatically equates with "better" or "more successful" is just plain wrong.
2) The idea that all attributes or characteristics of a species that have survived a long time must therefore have some benefit to the species is also just plain wrong.
Many of the other errors and tosh you speak in your posts would be corrected in a domino effect if those two errors were corrected in your knowledge of the subject of evolution. However you seem more interested in calling me "ignorant" on the subject than actually correcting those errors.0 -
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philologos wrote: »I'm not sure whether or not whipping up a sense of notoriety about other posters really works
I am not so sure. Given, for example, your choice to evangelise all over the forum, from the atheism one to this one to the Lesbian/Gay one, I find it very useful to mention exactly how you have not presented evidence for the claims you make, how you run away and ignore (and even pretend to have the users on ignore when you actually do not) the people who show why your position is false, and even engage in telling lies about the people who disagree with you and pretending they said things they never did.
So no, I find it very useful to show people exactly what they are dealing with in a person like yourself and the posts you make such as replying to me and PMing me shortly after saying I was on ignore.... help me in doing that more than if I had access to your account and was let write your posts myself.
I mean, come on, seriously. Telling all and sundry that you have me on "ignore" but then replying to one of my posts and PMing me expecting replies. How do you expect to retain a modicum of credibility when you wantonly display that your own words are false?I don't particularly see anything wrong with anyone having other views
Nor do most atheists so I would be very careful on going down that road of reasoning as that way straw men lie and you would not like to be accused of erecting those.
The problem most of us have..... whether we identify with the word atheist or not (FYI I am actually with you on this and I rarely, if ever, use that word to identify or describe myself)..... is not with people having other views or ideas.
No what most of us have issue with is people coming into our halls of power, education and science with entirely unsubstantiated views and ideas. I have yet to have anyone inform me why having an issue with that is a bad thing however.
You may have an issue with some of the spokespeople of atheism at the moment, but that neither makes atheism a bad thing, nor makes it a "cult" or a "religion" as you tried to say. At least someone is out there speaking against bad ideas. Someone has to do it. If you have an issue with the people that are doing it, then go do it better yourself would be the wisest course of action.0 -
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Also I hesitate to call it an atheist based doctrine in a way Nazism was, but it was definitely scientific based ideology a bogus science of race and genetics and in the three examples I gave you got the worse horrors in history.
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gargleblaster wrote: »
Not in the official sense with comparison to the way that communism banned religion.
But Communist Russia never use religion in their symbolism but Nazism did as in the example you pointed out. But the NAZI party became a way of life and Hitler was regarded as semi divine or even wholly divine deity. Also they never used religion in their ceremony the ceremony was all about the state.
Also German Nazism never oppressed the Christian European religions, they did oppress the jewish religion but that was more about race then religion.
So again I hesitatingly call Nazism a wholly atheist ideology but it did have similarities. I just give it as an example of what a scientific doctrine can lead to. And admittingly a very bogus false science.0 -
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