What, no mention of Discordianism?
HAIL HAIL HAIL HAIL HAIL ERIS ERIS ERIS ERIS ERIS ALL HAIL DISCORDIA
HAIL HAIL HAIL HAIL HAIL ERIS ERIS ERIS ERIS ERIS ALL HAIL DISCORDIA
The Big Picture: Nerd Gods
- Thread starter MovieBob
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IDK, maybe I've just been a magnet for obnoxious people with strong religious views. I don't mind discussing it, but every time I have the religious people just end up getting pissed when I refuse to take the bible as a source (self-validating and all that) and tell me I'm going to hell, and the Atheists generally end up quoting (often misquoting at that) Darwin or degrading the bible even after I agree with them on that point. They don't like my stance that you cannot (at least not yet) disprove the existence of God, so actively disbelieving it requires just as much faith as believing in it.mysterioso2006 said:
Generally my stance is "That's your opinion, good for you." I just don't like when people spout their opinions on the matter as fact. Most recent example: I was playing cards with a bunch of guys when someone (jokingly) said "go to hell" and the atheist at the table jumps in and says (not jokingly) "there is no Hell." An Awkward silence later, we just pretended he didn't say anything.
Pretty solid. I'm pretty much with him, though I probably lean a bit more atheist. I don't begrudge anybody their beliefs, just as long as they don't try to shove it down my throat. Hey, one story is as good as the next. Whatever keeps somebody from going out and being a complete jackass, have at it.
I thought about Jedi at one point, but never got the serenity thing. I used to tell people I was a Haruhist just because there had to be some tennant approving the molestation of big breased moe girls, but got too many concerned looks. I need something new. Hmmmm... I know, that VG cats cartoon:
I am now a Jenova's witness. Care to talk about the lifestream?
In all seriousness, I'm a similar agnostic: beleif in god, can't quite get how anyone can think they "know" the answers. Not beleive. Know. That and even among religious people it can be somewhat flighty. My mom says she's religious but hasn't been to church in 20 years. My cousin just converted to catholicism not due to some deep spiritual decision, but because her husband made her. It just makes things hard to take seriously.
I think religion develops over time, though religous ideals can permiate just about anything. PC vs Mac debates, or PS3 vs Xbox 360. Republicans are now holding Ronald Reagan to a level of a religious figure. Free market ecconomists hold of Ayn Rand's fictional books not as a theoretical argument against socialism, but a s a doctrined certainty about what would happen in a socialist world (like Ayn looked into an alternate universe.) Religion always seems to be about cornoring the market on truth, even to the point of ignoring other views, opinions or condricictary evidence. We almost need a strong moral geek icon to worship at thip point, and I would also hold up Spider-Man. The central tenant he lives by is that harmful acts due to indiference can come back to have bad consequences. Something we could use today in the "me first" culture we're in.
I am now a Jenova's witness. Care to talk about the lifestream?
In all seriousness, I'm a similar agnostic: beleif in god, can't quite get how anyone can think they "know" the answers. Not beleive. Know. That and even among religious people it can be somewhat flighty. My mom says she's religious but hasn't been to church in 20 years. My cousin just converted to catholicism not due to some deep spiritual decision, but because her husband made her. It just makes things hard to take seriously.
I think religion develops over time, though religous ideals can permiate just about anything. PC vs Mac debates, or PS3 vs Xbox 360. Republicans are now holding Ronald Reagan to a level of a religious figure. Free market ecconomists hold of Ayn Rand's fictional books not as a theoretical argument against socialism, but a s a doctrined certainty about what would happen in a socialist world (like Ayn looked into an alternate universe.) Religion always seems to be about cornoring the market on truth, even to the point of ignoring other views, opinions or condricictary evidence. We almost need a strong moral geek icon to worship at thip point, and I would also hold up Spider-Man. The central tenant he lives by is that harmful acts due to indiference can come back to have bad consequences. Something we could use today in the "me first" culture we're in.
I'm not going to a skiiing resort, I'm gonna survive in the frozen wasteland for a week (I'll be fine, I brought extra socks.)and I say BAH to your power converters and I raise you one arm of General Grevious! Someone had to loot his corpse while the Troopers were going crazy under order 66.Quaxar said:
Xmas is not a "secularified" version of Christmas. It is just shorthand for Christmas. X essentially means Christ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmas
I also do not understand why you called atheists boring. You kinda just said that without anything to support it. If it was a joke, it was a bad one. If it was a real point, it was a bad one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmas
I also do not understand why you called atheists boring. You kinda just said that without anything to support it. If it was a joke, it was a bad one. If it was a real point, it was a bad one.
Kinda funny to see not many theists in this topic (though his last reviews about religion took quite heated debates). Maybe many theists in the forum have given up on contributing to this topic or got disgusted by those without religion coming out and share their logical viewpoints.
About nerd-gods, I think not many people would recognize them as actual Gods, because people know that they are completely fictional (or at least, in this universe) and follow their basic guidelines or moral views, NOT actually believe nerd-gods are whatever they claim or do not claim to be. If there were fanatics geared toward such practice (because they actually BELIEVE the existence of nerd-gods, regardless of their reasoning as to why), then it will take more than many hundreds of years or even millennia before that could happen. Until then, it will remain as a cult or collective intellectual society that discusses and practices of.. whatever their nerd-gods stand for. I admit that most religions started with the latter way, but it seems that, one way or another, once the religion took the roots of humanity, it cannot be removed that easily.
To those who are non-militant atheists, do you have Doctor's point of view when it comes to existence of God? (as expressed in episode "Satan's Pit") Because, it looked like you (plural) were to me.
About nerd-gods, I think not many people would recognize them as actual Gods, because people know that they are completely fictional (or at least, in this universe) and follow their basic guidelines or moral views, NOT actually believe nerd-gods are whatever they claim or do not claim to be. If there were fanatics geared toward such practice (because they actually BELIEVE the existence of nerd-gods, regardless of their reasoning as to why), then it will take more than many hundreds of years or even millennia before that could happen. Until then, it will remain as a cult or collective intellectual society that discusses and practices of.. whatever their nerd-gods stand for. I admit that most religions started with the latter way, but it seems that, one way or another, once the religion took the roots of humanity, it cannot be removed that easily.
To those who are non-militant atheists, do you have Doctor's point of view when it comes to existence of God? (as expressed in episode "Satan's Pit") Because, it looked like you (plural) were to me.
Hmm, I might be tempted to worship one of those "nerd gods"
Hell Commander Shepard took a huge dive into Jesus Allegory territory... wait a second, HOLY CRAP I KNOW HOW MASS EFFECT 3 WILL END!
Hide the eggs!!!
Hell Commander Shepard took a huge dive into Jesus Allegory territory... wait a second, HOLY CRAP I KNOW HOW MASS EFFECT 3 WILL END!
Hide the eggs!!!
As a fellow survivor of Catholic school myself, I have often wondered why people in the west were unable to accept new (UFO religions) or even revival of old (neo-paganism) religions. We made all the old stuff up, so why can't we just make some new stuff up?
I realize that there have been some people in this thread proclaiming the virtues of faith and how these new faiths would lack the legitimacy for people to put their faith in. These people seem to lack a knowledge of history, where it becomes clear that religions are abandoned and supplanted all the time. Faith is not the reason that any of the world's major religions - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism became the dominant world religions. It is also extremely naive to assume that self-proclaimed religious people in the world today actually believe the things which come out of their mouths. Religions tend to cluster around communities and a failure to espouse the tenets of the religion of the community can often result in being ostracised. As a result, I put very little stock in the argument that a religion must be legitimate enough to warrant a person placing their faith in it.
I personally fail to see how faith in one set of myths is any less valid than faith in another, newer set. Are either Buddha or Muhammed a more realistic or righteous character than Superman or Spiderman? Are angels really more believable than Greys? As a species we need to start taking our religions less seriously and enjoying them for what they are, an expression of our culture and our on going attempt to explain the incomprehensible world around us. None of them are right or wrong. And anyone who proclaims that there view and only their view is right and that society must be governed according to their incontrovertible beliefs must be confronted. To steal a line from Bill Hicks, "That's what fundamentalism breeds - no irony"
I realize that there have been some people in this thread proclaiming the virtues of faith and how these new faiths would lack the legitimacy for people to put their faith in. These people seem to lack a knowledge of history, where it becomes clear that religions are abandoned and supplanted all the time. Faith is not the reason that any of the world's major religions - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism became the dominant world religions. It is also extremely naive to assume that self-proclaimed religious people in the world today actually believe the things which come out of their mouths. Religions tend to cluster around communities and a failure to espouse the tenets of the religion of the community can often result in being ostracised. As a result, I put very little stock in the argument that a religion must be legitimate enough to warrant a person placing their faith in it.
I personally fail to see how faith in one set of myths is any less valid than faith in another, newer set. Are either Buddha or Muhammed a more realistic or righteous character than Superman or Spiderman? Are angels really more believable than Greys? As a species we need to start taking our religions less seriously and enjoying them for what they are, an expression of our culture and our on going attempt to explain the incomprehensible world around us. None of them are right or wrong. And anyone who proclaims that there view and only their view is right and that society must be governed according to their incontrovertible beliefs must be confronted. To steal a line from Bill Hicks, "That's what fundamentalism breeds - no irony"
I don't understand how people would start believing in a known fictional character. Yes, all religions were started by somebody, at least all but one were fiction, but people didn't know it!
And as Bob himself insinuated, the result of those new gods may be something like or worse than Scientology!
And as Bob himself insinuated, the result of those new gods may be something like or worse than Scientology!
Damn you Bob, I respected you, now you gotta go make the masses think agnosticism is a third choice! If you lack a belief in a deity of some kind then you are not a theist. If you are not a theist, you are an atheist. And that's that. You don't even have to have a belief. Plants are atheists, they lack a belief in a deity. If you want, you can take it further, and believe in a lack of a deity (instead of lacking a belief in a deity) and that would be explicit atheism (though really there needs to be another word for it. Agnosticism is about knowledge, yes, agnostics believe knowledge of the existence of a deity is impossible to know. Hell, most Christians preach that. Gnostics (not the Christian sect you were discussing, a different thing entirely) believe that knowledge of the existence of a deity is possible to know. Not that they believe in a deity, just that they think, at one point, it'll be possible to prove it.
Well, I've been pursuing some of the text in here so far, and I've noticed no one has called Bob out on this one, so I guess I will.
Bob, you are off on your belief on the "evolution" of God/s and what gnosticism means. Please, allow me to explain.
First, the evolution theory of God/s. You talked about how cavemen viewed Gods as the natural forces (Druidism approach essentially), then they attached human characteristics to them, and then BAM we got us a Greek pantheon! That isn't the case though for religions across the globe. Judaism has existed for thousands of years. Best guesses place it as far back as 1500 B.C. (Scholars best guess as to when Moses would have lived.) So, for well over 3500 years we have one religion that has existed. I'm not an anthropologists, but I've got a feeling that this may be the oldest surviving religion, and the views have not changed that much for it. The arguement could be made that since Abraham believed in other Gods and then changed to one he might have been the one to initiate the transition, but that doesn't make it evolutionary. Cults don't grow large when they compete directly with mainstream view. The only one to do that in the last 1500 years was Scientology, and that was through some pretty nasty tricks.
So, what of the other viewpoint? Gnosticism? Well, here's the problem with gnosticism, it mixes and matches but never keeps things in context. For instance, what if I told you the parable of the Good Samaritan that Jesus told? (To paraphrase that story: A man is mugged on the road and left for dead. A holy man and a priest both ignore him because he is unclean. A Samaritan comes and takes him to an inn and gets him all healed up.) Some would look at that story and just go, "Oh, do nice things. Got it!" But that misses the bigger point that Jesus was making with that parable. He was trying to show Jews that everyone is good, because he showed how someone that Jews disliked would help total strangers yet the holy men would not.
This is the problem with Gnostics and agnostics, they take small parts that sound nice but don't have the same meaning when taken out of context. If you really want to understand this though, you need to go back to how the early Christian church had to fight off the tide of Gnostic Christianity, which was attempting to blend multiple myths into Christianity (this is partly the reason why we have so many pagan festivals with a new Christian flair. The other part was just keeping up the tradition). Entirely new books were written 200 years after Christ attempting to say that they were made by the apostles, yet they claimed things that directly conflicted with the books we had from them directly or from their letters.
I would love to go more into this, but I would first need someone to critique me here. Any takers willing to start a healthy debate?
Bob, you are off on your belief on the "evolution" of God/s and what gnosticism means. Please, allow me to explain.
First, the evolution theory of God/s. You talked about how cavemen viewed Gods as the natural forces (Druidism approach essentially), then they attached human characteristics to them, and then BAM we got us a Greek pantheon! That isn't the case though for religions across the globe. Judaism has existed for thousands of years. Best guesses place it as far back as 1500 B.C. (Scholars best guess as to when Moses would have lived.) So, for well over 3500 years we have one religion that has existed. I'm not an anthropologists, but I've got a feeling that this may be the oldest surviving religion, and the views have not changed that much for it. The arguement could be made that since Abraham believed in other Gods and then changed to one he might have been the one to initiate the transition, but that doesn't make it evolutionary. Cults don't grow large when they compete directly with mainstream view. The only one to do that in the last 1500 years was Scientology, and that was through some pretty nasty tricks.
So, what of the other viewpoint? Gnosticism? Well, here's the problem with gnosticism, it mixes and matches but never keeps things in context. For instance, what if I told you the parable of the Good Samaritan that Jesus told? (To paraphrase that story: A man is mugged on the road and left for dead. A holy man and a priest both ignore him because he is unclean. A Samaritan comes and takes him to an inn and gets him all healed up.) Some would look at that story and just go, "Oh, do nice things. Got it!" But that misses the bigger point that Jesus was making with that parable. He was trying to show Jews that everyone is good, because he showed how someone that Jews disliked would help total strangers yet the holy men would not.
This is the problem with Gnostics and agnostics, they take small parts that sound nice but don't have the same meaning when taken out of context. If you really want to understand this though, you need to go back to how the early Christian church had to fight off the tide of Gnostic Christianity, which was attempting to blend multiple myths into Christianity (this is partly the reason why we have so many pagan festivals with a new Christian flair. The other part was just keeping up the tradition). Entirely new books were written 200 years after Christ attempting to say that they were made by the apostles, yet they claimed things that directly conflicted with the books we had from them directly or from their letters.
I would love to go more into this, but I would first need someone to critique me here. Any takers willing to start a healthy debate?
I liked it.
But i am for a merge of the Godzillaism and the Church of Spiderman and the X-saints. Monotheism is just soooo unimaginative and boring.
But i am for a merge of the Godzillaism and the Church of Spiderman and the X-saints. Monotheism is just soooo unimaginative and boring.
Agnosticism is not a belief you can have and therefore the people claiming that you are just a 'careful atheist' are partly right. Actually there is no third choice, you either believe, or you lack the believe.
I can understand claiming this third choice when someone asks you, to prevent any awkward discussions, but when bringing up the subject yourself, it is silly. Most people in the modern world are agnostic in the sense that they understand that a certain belief cannot be proven or disproven. This says nothing about your belief.
Furthermore, atheism is not "not believing", it is lack of belief in Gods. The difference may appear subtle or semantic, but that is far from the truth. Claiming a God does not force anyone to choose between them existing or not. Not forming an opinion is not agnostic, it is atheistic.
This youtube video explains it rather eloquently I believe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNDZb0KtJDk
Your statement in the beginning hints that you were already vaguely aware of this, but simply have not yet understood.
Why is this important? Because atheism needs to be an acceptable position worldwide, especially in countries like America. 'Inventing' the smart atheist called an agnostic, just disqualifies people who are clear about their atheism. Especially if you are directly linking them to militant atheists, such as is being done in this video, disqualifying them by association.
I can understand claiming this third choice when someone asks you, to prevent any awkward discussions, but when bringing up the subject yourself, it is silly. Most people in the modern world are agnostic in the sense that they understand that a certain belief cannot be proven or disproven. This says nothing about your belief.
Furthermore, atheism is not "not believing", it is lack of belief in Gods. The difference may appear subtle or semantic, but that is far from the truth. Claiming a God does not force anyone to choose between them existing or not. Not forming an opinion is not agnostic, it is atheistic.
This youtube video explains it rather eloquently I believe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNDZb0KtJDk
Your statement in the beginning hints that you were already vaguely aware of this, but simply have not yet understood.
Why is this important? Because atheism needs to be an acceptable position worldwide, especially in countries like America. 'Inventing' the smart atheist called an agnostic, just disqualifies people who are clear about their atheism. Especially if you are directly linking them to militant atheists, such as is being done in this video, disqualifying them by association.