The Flaws I See In Religion (Long Read), page 1

Originally posted by awake_and_aware

Originally posted by AmrikazNightmar3
I see your signature. What's the stats on mushrooms?

Anyway, I believe in God. I don't believe in organized religion...they've missed the message.

What message? How can you define God but religion cannot?

I'd propose that no man can define God, or prove whether a deity exists. You can't extract objective morals from simply observing reality. It's a conjuring trick from abstraction.

ALSO

I'm very much enjoying the Theist (NOTUrTypical) arguing against yourself (The Deist)

I find it amusing that someone can move from the Deist position to the Theist, to claim to know what God's thoughts, wishes and desires of any given lifeform are. I find that amusing.

A belief in God is one belief, a belief in the being's thoughts, desires, emotions and commands takes quite an extraordinary ammount of faith.

Deism and Theism

In Richard Dawkin's "God Delusion" he does admit that the universe does indeed "appear" to have been designed and he attempts to explain why it "appears" this way from a Darwinian perspective. Certainly when one considers, for example, the human body, the eye and even consciousness itself, it does seem to "appear" to be the product of a very elaborate and intricate "design."

The three main arguments for the existence of the gods (or a singular god) would appear to be the argument from design, the argument from "religious experience" and the argument from religious hypnosis and indoctrination; the latter being more of a sceptical argument.

The argument from Religious Experience

The argument from religious experience can essentially be dismissed due to the electro-chemical nature of the brain and the fact that mystical experiences can be produced by scientists administering '___', '___' or other psychoactives; further such experiences can be shown to be entirely subjective; a white American conservative Christian nationalist for example may have dreams and visions of a white American nationalistic Jesus and feel that their faith is confirmed, just as the Sadhu may have dreams and visions of Shiva, just as the African Christian may have dreams and visions of a black African Jesus. This is really one of the "dangers" of religious fanaticism, since the religious fanatic may well be absolutely and totally convinced of the correctness of their diablolical religion. Similarly religious schizophrenics may well genuinely have audio and visual hallucinations of devils or gods appearing to them and communicating with them, but this does not establish the objective existence of such beings.

The argument from "Religious Hypnosis and Indoctrination."

This is probably the most easy to dismiss, since a child who has been hypnotised and indoctrinated since birth to believe in, for example, that the Aztec Sun God "Huitzilopochtli" requires constant human sacrifice offerings to receive his blessings, may well come to "truly" believe in such a god and may well even have dreams and visions of the God, just as a person who watches a horrific movie may well have dreams which involve the plot of the movie; such is the nature of consciousness. Most of the bizzarre and utterly irrational religious beliefs which religious fanatics genuinely believe in can be explained by a process of religous indoctrination and hypnosis and the "normalisation" of the irrational, where in many societies it is perfectly "normal" to find that "most" people have bizarre and irrational beliefs and that those who reject such beliefs are considered "abnormal" or even heretical and blasphemous.

The argument from Design

Of all the arguments for the existence of the gods, is generally the argument from design that Richard Dawkins and other philosophical humanists devote most of their time to attacking, although the barbaric immorality and bigotry of the gods of the world's major religions is also a major issue. The "argument from design" is essentially the central argument of the Deists; it is simply that the human life and the universe "appear" to be a product of rather intricate design.

I was listening to an interview with Richard Dawkins where he stated that he had to admit to the possibility that human beings "may" well be the product of genetic engineering and that they "may" well have been designed, but he was not referring to the design of the "gods" or a "god" as religious fanatics understand the terms; he was merely referring to intelligent beings who may have genetically engineered human beings and that they "may" have been from other planets, however this is purely a "speculative" argument regarding possibility, not a statement of his "belief," and of course he also raised the question of how such intelligences could have evolved and made the point that this does not imply a Grand Designer, since this belief leads to the question of who created the designer's designer, ad infinitum. I also suspect that life on earth is a product of genetic engineering by intelligent designers, but again this is just speculative. Further since it is entirely probable that we live in a "multiverse (a cosmos of many universes or "parallel worlds")" it may well be the case that our designers are "metaphyiscal" to our universe, however by metaphysical I only mean that they are not part of our physical universe, not that they are "not physical."

From Deism to Theism

Attempts by Deists to create a "natural theology" have generally been little more than observations of science and nature. "Theology" of course literally means the "study of God or the gods" and of course since the gods do not lend themselves to empirical observation, this is not at all a "study" of the gods but rather theology is simply the study of the anthropomorphic ramblings of ancient and modern religious fanatics. It is at the point where the Deist begins to "define" the gods and to describe their laws and their morality where the Deism ends and the religious fanaticism of Theism begins. To the modern American Christian, their deity could be generally described as an American Nationalist, an evangelical anti-Communist, a consumerist, an imperialist and an ideological Capitalist, etc. This tendency to attempt to claim to have knowledge of the unknowable is simply epistemologically fraudulent; thus "Theology" could be generally defined as the study of human stupidity.

Religious Beliefs, Attitude and Behaviour

Unfortunately there is a relationship between religious beliefs, and human attitudes and behaviour; if we believe for example that the priimitive, savage, bigoted, human-nature hating and genocidal Bronze Age war god of the Bible is a definition of absolute goodness, then this will affect our attitudes and behaviour, and thus the history of Christianity has been a history of war, bigotry, tyranny, slavery and human misery which has not created "religious utopia" but hell on earth; all of which seems to be the will of the Biblcial deity, or rather of the authors of the diabolical texts of the Bible. Thus what is "good" to a humanist becomes "evil" to a religious fanatic and vice versa and thus the religious "hell on earth" that we find is a natural consequence of such inverted thinking.

I think that even if there are "gods" or "designers," they clearly designed human consciousness with intelligence and reason, however religion in general seems to be an insult to human intelligence and reason, and thus it could be argued that religion is a heresy agains the gods of nature (i.e., human beings).

Lux

edit on 7-5-2011 by Lucifer777 because: (no reason given)