Will we digress?

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In the US, it seems like there are so many irrationals and people who are utterly afraid or expecting to see Jesus knocking on their door in the night, they don't care about science and technology that will make things better for all, just like they thought in the dark ages and it held everyone back. Does anyone else get the feeling US wants to take a giant step backward and enter a second medieval period in history?

i would not mind seeing jousting become commonplace.

I think that you mean "regress". Not "digress". But I digress.

Looks that way sometimes.

Its not enough to stop teaching evolution.

Some folks (even on wrongplanet) think that NASA is surpressing evidence that the bodies in the so called "Solar System" all orbit around the earth instead of around the Sun. So even Galileo, and Copernicus, are too modern for them! Forget about Darwin! Its a Geocentric universe after all!

So..ONWARD to the Tenth Centurey!

What you're saying sounds pretty funny when you consider that religious people have contributed a lot more to science than the non-religious. Galileo was religious. Copernicus was religious. Darwin had a degree in theology and didn't feel that his theory was mutually exclusive with Christianity, so it's bizarre that people consider him an atheist, as he was merely critical of orthodox christian ideas. Newton was religious. Einstein was religious. Aristotle practically invented empirical science (he wasn't exactly an empiricist but he laid the groundwork for it) and he was religious. Graham Bell was religious.

There are also incredibly irrational people who aren't religious. A good portion of humanity is irrational and this has always been the case. A select few come along and invent things or effect other big developments in society with their ideas. The people you're talking about are stereotypical Christians in the US. If they knew more Hebrew they probably wouldn't be so scientifically backwards, it's funny to me how little some Christians know in the way of verifiable facts about their own religion.

Actually,

Religion holds people back and can keep them from learning as much as they can and to accept God's will rather than change the outcome with scientific advances. Abrahamic religions tend to view intelligence as evil and an embodiment of the reptilian (Satan and all his minions.)

There's nothing continuous about social improvement. It's a cycle from one direction to another
depending on things like a country's financial situation and their neighbor's financial situation.

In some countries it seems they spend great periods of their history on the "lower" part of the cycle.

And some more "progressive" countries seem always on the upswing.

But the U.S.????? It wasn't really that long since the genocide of Native Americans, was it?

Like the old saying: Nothing is more constant than change.

And the dark side of relgion says it is okay to slaughter the "heathen." Why do people always cling to such violent superstitions or is it just a way to mask and rationalize their dark thoughts?

Abrahamic religions are tribal religions that do still serve an economic and political purpose in countries where territory and subsistence are not secure.

The US on the other hand is rich with fertile resources, but the thing is, there is still a large underclass that the much smaller and POWERFUL over class does not want to help further with social welfare state ways.

Until that happens, Abrahamic religions will still be majority rule among the masses, where territory and subsistence are not secure, as these religions serve the purpose, of securing territory and subsistence.

It's a matter of survival and it works for those who depend on it, at least that's what they think, and we will not be changing their minds anytime soon, overall, as long as they cannot find secure territory and subsistence in life, as that is a basic human instinct for survival, AND PER OVERALL HUMAN TRIBAL INSTINCT, of securing territory, substance, and reproductive control over one's own genes.

Affordable health care is a step in that direction but the 'Abrahamic religious overloads' are doing everything they can do to prevent it to keep their rule, as many of them ARE psychopathic leaning individuals moreover of the reptile brain way of thinking for domination, through subjugation and fear TO CONTROL in repressing and oppressing GOD given human nature; particularly reproductive freedoms.

So in metaphor the 'reptiles' continue singing to their choir to keep them in jail.

By the way, good to see you back, Ana. :)

And believe it or not, the following video performed by Arianna Grande, illustrates this, as the true devil and or Anti-Christ being the Abrahamic religious reptile minions cast down to hell, while freedom chained above is released to ascension, IN AWAKENING AND ENLIGHTENMENT per the Kabbalah Tree of Life, in yes, a starship 'metaphored' as such.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8eRzOYhLuw[/youtube]

The way to change is always through art and human emotion, FIRST. AND the folks in pop-culture per art are always the ones who reflect and change cultural norms, FIRST, where allowed.

And thank goodness FREELY ALLOWED HERE IN THE US, SO there IS hope of CHANGE TOWARD greater Human freedoms as Humans ARE evolved per Mother Nature True aka GOD. :)

Facts do little to change anything in real life, as humans are evolved as emotional creatures moreover than rational creatures, STILL TO DATE, and THIS IS plain to see even on this site, where folks 'think' they are not ruled by emotion, but IT IS evidenced that they are time and time again, through their words, that STILL do NOT lie AGAINST EMOTION, as first response in life. :)

I conceptually analogize the scientific / religious divide to the difference between Plato and Socrates (whom I believe was likely [along with Diogenes of Sinope] an autist himself - or more specifically, he was the sort of person who, during that phase in the development of the human species, was related to the society in which he lived in a manner structurally isomorphic to the position autists find themselves in with respect to the societies in which we live, during the current phase of the development of the human species).

While Socrates was held by his student Plato to be a philosopher, and while Socrates indeed performed the process of philosophizing, I believe that Socrates was not himself a philosopher (a lover-of-wisdom, one who seeks the truth) but a sophos (i.e. a sage, one who is wise - perhaps inherently - and seeks self-actualization, not to gain access to truth but to gain access to others such that the truth he already has access to may be shared).

The difference I grok can be expressed thus: The philosopher attempts to construct a model of the world in terms of the language he groks, whereas the sophos groks the world, and attempts to construct a language-expressible model thereof. Thus the philosopher attempts to compile wisdom from knowledge, while the sophos attempts to translate knowledge from wisdom.

Socrates is known for his disdain for writing, which is why we only know of him from the writings of his students. I suspect this is because Socrates knew/felt/believed that the creation of writing, a further abstraction (i.e. a stateful model of an internally-stateless process) of language, which is itself an abstraction of thought, would only exacerbate (via instantiation of an (n+1)-dimensional domain of discourse [where the spoken word is either zero- or one-dimensional language (depending upon how you treat the time variable), the composition of written words into a narrative is first- or second-order language, and hyperlinked texts would constitute second- or third-order language]) the divide between the philosopher (he who seeks wisdom through the lens of knowledge) and the sophos (he who seeks knowledge through the lens of wisdom).

Of course, by opposing the development of writing, Socrates was acting in a manner analogous to the religious conservative today; seeking to preserve a (to him) present State of Affairs. In his wisdom, Socrates predicted that the advent of Writing would obfuscate language, and thus interfere with the ability of the Sophos to spread wisdom; yet the same wisdom blinded him to knowing that - just as the sophos must instantiate (via speech) the processes by which he groks wisdom, that it might be shared - so too must the philosopher process (via writing) the state of his knowledge, that it too may be shared.

My opinion is that any and all States (which would certainly include a stateful understanding of a religion, held static by hierarchically-organized churches and doctrines of infallibility) should be discarded once they no longer adequately perform the function to which end they were instantiated. Yet the function itself, or rather the process which it encapsulates, must be understood before the its instantiation is discarded, or else wisdom (itself an instantiation of the process by which information becomes knowledge, just as knowledge is an instantiation of the process by which data becomes information) is lost.

Mathematicians have a long-standing association with mysticism, from Plato's Forms, to Pythagoras' (Monad + Dyad + Triad + Tetrad = Dekad [recursed Monad]), to Descartes' dualism, to Spinoza's God, to Erdos' "The Book." And it is mathematicians who provide scientists with the tools they require to tease the details - the states - of existence out from the domain of experience. These tools are instantiations of the processes by which the universe "speaks its existence" or "speaks itself into and through existence" - i.e. the domain of the mystics.

As I grasp it, humanity's current scientific understanding of quantum mechanics requires dispensing with either locality, reality, or counterfactual definiteness. All three of these assumptions were, until fairly recently, simultaneous fundaments of the Empiricist worldview; a scientific paradigm shift (a Process by which the State of science is reconfigured) was required in order to instantiate knowledge to the contrary, and the details emerging from that reconfiguration are as yet ill-understood. Yet every mystic understood this to be the case, long before the advent of quantum physics; and further understood how 'non-reality', 'non-locality', and 'non-counterfactual definiteness' are simply different labels applied to the same phenomenon. Yet lacking the details - provided first by philosophers, later by scientists - they were unable to linguify (encode in language) this understanding.

Capitalism - economic statefulness - probably deserves a significant share of the blame for the present statefulness of religious belief (though by no means all of it - religion is instantiated spirituality, which itself is instantiated mysticism, which is itself probably instantiated mathematics - so if religious belief already exists at a given time-index, a sequence of capitalization-events have already occurred prior to that time-index). Capitalism instantiates the wealth-inequality which exists at the time-index during which the capitalistic system began (market capitalism encapsulates a dynamic function, such that the members of the set of participants in the capitalistic economy can reconfigure their relationships with other members of the set, without altering the structure which defines the manner in which this reconfiguration takes place - with this understanding, it makes more sense to describe the various avowedly "communist" states as statefully-capitalistic economies); thus, if there were poor people when capitalism ascended (as there were), there will be poor people until capitalism is discarded.

The non-wealthy potential mystic, denied the means by which to become a mathematician, finds a welcoming home for his mystic potential in organized religion. Meanwhile the wealthy non-mystic sees that this outcome protects his power over the non-wealthy; the potential mystic might learn to promulgate his wisdom in the language of religion, but that language has been long since rendered harmless (to the wealthy), as the wealthy have maintained the State of Religion long past the point at which religion ceased to perform the function it was instantiated to encapsulate.

I personally am as leery of the ardent empiricist as I am of the ardent theist; both have capacity for great tyranny. It was most certainly not a religious institution, but a department of an avowedly non-religious State government, which incarcerated, tortured, and forcibly drugged me over a period of years without cause or due process. It was not faith, or belief, but Results-Driven Proven Science(?) which obviated my "care-takers" from their responsibility to consider whether my unusual way of speaking might be due to a mere difference in my methods of processing language, before plunging head-first into draconian "therapies" for a "mental illness" I never had (Oppositional Defiant Disorder, more accurately known as anti-fascism).

That's the situation as I grok it, anyhow.

Excellent detailed analysis of the 'situation' at hand and beauty of the mind that looks to all disciplines for synergy of answers. :)

This is merely bias speaking if you can't really back that up. Simply because there is a stereotype and you have observed some people doesn't mean that religion hasn't also demonstrated a lot of other things. Religious people built the modern world, far more so than non-religious people.

Hell it's hard to even find a good number of non-religious scientists before the 20th century, before then for thousands of years it was us "stupid and backwards" religious people that kept progressing and progressing towards modern society. So some fundamentalists, Catholics, and other Christians with their heads in the sand don't want to accept things like evolution. It was a religious person that came up with evolution in the first place! A good deal of Christians support modern science. Hindus don't seem to take umbrage with it either. What you are essentially doing is cherry picking your neatly packaged little example, and it seems you're not even aware of the extensive diversity in this Abrahamic crowd.

What's more: given a proper translation of Genesis it's not mutually exclusive to modern science at all. It isn't at all explicit that the whole world was flooded, in fact it's irresponsible to translate that passage as anything other than a regional flood. Also the idea of the earth being six thousand years old is an arbitrary idea that some people hatched up in the 19th century, they just looked at the genealogy and multiplied the number of generations by forty, demonstrating clear ignorance of how Hebrew toledoth/genealogy worked (only significant figures are mentioned, it isn't a valid chronological tool).

^^^ But that's more of a demographics issue. Of course there were more religious scientists, simply because atheism wasn't really invented. And even when it was more or less invented, it was an extremely small group. When David Hume lived his views were just considered eccentric (and dangerous to have). We don't see any Nobel Prize winners that follow Apollo, simply because those people don't really exist anymore.
I don't think religion has to be detrimental to science at all, unless in the case of people with extremely literal beliefs (young earth, creationism etc), and then only if it has to do with their area of expertise. I've heard someone say that normal water and salt water don't mix because it says so in the Koran.

Sure (btw atheism wasn't new, it just wasn't at all popular; see Plato's Apology and the accusation that Socrates was an atheist; or Aenesidemus, Sextus Empiricus, and other proponents of Pyrrhonian skepticism), but I've heard secular people say things that are just as ignorant. Hell I've even personally heard an atheist say that the holocaust didn't happen and it's only propaganda for Zionists. There are many different ideas that can be dangerous, and we can't just put on an idea straight jacket and cow down to the thought police because of rampant stereotypes. I get sick of hearing the thought police here who want to play comparison games and carp about how stupid religious people are, it sounds like a broken record.

Why don't we religious folk start making threads every day about how dumb atheists are? How is that entertaining? "Will we regress because of all the non-religious people" ad nauseum, does that sound fun? There aren't even very many arguments being constructed, just emotional diatribes and semi arguments like Otaku's; I can't even commit to engaging in one of these because I just can't stomach it, it's so silly and more than half of it would have been laughed out of logic 101: fallacies. The only one that looked even remotely interested was about the problem of evil (why does god allow suffering), but I'm sure that would evolve into a bunch of diatribes and semi arguments too. Not to sound like a prick but when you've seen something happen a million times in a row on the internet you start to figure there's a pattern.

Are you guys interested in say... discussing the teleological arguments? The cosmological arguments? Arguments from history? Like a real serious argument where we point out fallacies and people don't cop out on them? One where people don't just say "well read my link" and you realize it's a really dumb link ("godisimaginary" you've got to be kidding me that guy must have flunked philosophy 101)?

^^^ Atheism wasn't new, but it was extremely uncommon. Almost everyone believed in some sort of God/Gods for most of recorded history, and even more people believed in some sort of supernatural stuff. That website with 50 "proofs" has very little proof at all. Still, the fact that there have been so many religions makes it very unlikely that a specific person has picked the One True Religion. Not proof at all, but I find there aren't really any arguments why any of the religions are true. People may be able to argue for a Creator/First Cause, but that is a long shot from a personal God with very specific qualities. Yet most people don't believe in a vague First Mover, they have very specific beliefs that are only found in their specific books.

There have been quite a few posters in PPR who try to convince people by quoting Bible verses, but that doesn't convince anyone unless they already believe in the Bible. Same with the Koran or any other holy book.
I am an atheist and agonistic, and I think most people get their religion and their values because of the culture they live in, not because those religions are necessarily true. I think it shows pretty well in the Eurobarometer polls, where what you believe is pretty much determinded by the country you live in. Almost everyone is religious in Romania, Turkey, Portugal, while there are very few believers in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Sweden. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Europe)

One thing why non-religious people critise religion is because often religious political parties try to force their religion on other people. For example, in the Netherlands only 28% believe in God/Gods, but it's only been in recent years that stores are allowed to open on sundays. Last municipal election the Christian political parties were campaigning to force stores to close again on sundays. Now why should atheists be barred from shopping on sundays, or from opening their own store on sundays? Same with euthenasia, if Christians don't want to do that fine, but apparantly there is demand for euthenasia among the non-religious, since nearly 5000 people opted for it last year.