A Blind Guy
Bluelighter
I'll tell you what you did with atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the Universities, or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanized them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disemboweled them, hung them and burnt them alive. And now you have the nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you
-Dr. Madalyn Myrray O'Hair.
As for free will, contemporary physical theory says that we cannot calculate exactly where any subatomic particle actually is, but only where it probably will be. So it's loose, all things moving in random swerves. When an action occurs that you observe, it has an effect on you, and that effect is probabilistic, not deterministic, which gives rise to the almost infinite number of variables that you, as your own entity, will react to something differently than other people do. Every thought or idea or action is your reaction to stimulus in your own personal way because of the way subatomic particles interact with each other in random behaviors. This is why we have the illusion of free will, there are many reactions we could have to a certain stimulus and the randomness allows us all to have a different one.
That's not very refined but it's just an idea. So I wouldn't say that life is pre determined because we all make choice, although the world we live in now is exactly like this because everything in history happened exactly the way it did.
Also someone said that science helps us make weapons that hurt other people so we should get rid of the scientific theory... right. That is true, humans have created some pretty fucked up shit. However, science has also done miraculous good. A lot of good and some bad.
What has religion actually done that has shown an improvement in people's lives that could not have been caused or propogated by other completely different social structures like community groups?
What I'm getting at is this; you can't have science without science(medicine, computers, technology in general are good and we get those with science), but you can raise good people without religion. I'd even say that you could raise better people without any religion ever, because once you invent a religion you invent something that someone doesn't agree with and now you and your whole family hate him and his whole family because he doesn't subscribe to the same local group superstition that you do.
Religion is poison. Enough said.
-Dr. Madalyn Myrray O'Hair.
As for free will, contemporary physical theory says that we cannot calculate exactly where any subatomic particle actually is, but only where it probably will be. So it's loose, all things moving in random swerves. When an action occurs that you observe, it has an effect on you, and that effect is probabilistic, not deterministic, which gives rise to the almost infinite number of variables that you, as your own entity, will react to something differently than other people do. Every thought or idea or action is your reaction to stimulus in your own personal way because of the way subatomic particles interact with each other in random behaviors. This is why we have the illusion of free will, there are many reactions we could have to a certain stimulus and the randomness allows us all to have a different one.
That's not very refined but it's just an idea. So I wouldn't say that life is pre determined because we all make choice, although the world we live in now is exactly like this because everything in history happened exactly the way it did.
Also someone said that science helps us make weapons that hurt other people so we should get rid of the scientific theory... right. That is true, humans have created some pretty fucked up shit. However, science has also done miraculous good. A lot of good and some bad.
What has religion actually done that has shown an improvement in people's lives that could not have been caused or propogated by other completely different social structures like community groups?
What I'm getting at is this; you can't have science without science(medicine, computers, technology in general are good and we get those with science), but you can raise good people without religion. I'd even say that you could raise better people without any religion ever, because once you invent a religion you invent something that someone doesn't agree with and now you and your whole family hate him and his whole family because he doesn't subscribe to the same local group superstition that you do.
Religion is poison. Enough said.
