Religion Debates and Discussions

I actually didn't see the word "if" either, my bad, but this is an excellent point.

In a parallel universe where the Bible says it is impossible to leave the Earth, most evangelical extremists like Gehenna would deny the moon landing ever happened. And that's not calling Gehenna dumb, it's a very logical conclusion based on Gehenna's attitudes to the Bible and evidence.

 

May be irrational to you, but it's probably the most rational reasoning ever found that makes perfect sense.

Faith doesn't mean it's real. Faith is the embodiment of your own reasoning when you believe something.

What's the difference if you keep using the bible for evidence? Please don't say because God is perfect because the bible says so. This is an irrational type of circle reasoning and i'm pretty sure we're all past 6th grade here.

 

replied to nothing else i said again continuing to ignore the questions asked

well, when the earth was hypothesized to be round, people thought the people who proved it were wrong. what if the moon landing was faked and you are one of the people that believe otherwise? "That picture could be fake."

this is why no one listens to you. if you dont back up your claims no one will bother listening to you except pre adolescent children. anyone with half a brain wants proof for something.

and again, changing the topic of literally the entire thread without answering past questions that were left unanswered (not as terrible since i'm subject of this too lol)

also:
https://www.livescience.com/41537-t-rex-soft-tissue.html
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2...osaur-bone-could-still-have-soft-tissue-in-it
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Soft_tissue_preservation

my favorite:

• http://biologos.org/blogs/jim-stump...osaur-bones-what-does-the-evidence-really-say
• https://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue/ (the above link mentions this paper)

i also find it quite ironic how, in our eyes, gehenna, the religious one here, is playing devils advocate... and vice versa. pretty funny actually lol

 

First of all, I'd like to protest the use of the word "theory" here.
A theory is not something someone "comes up with." You're probably thinking of a hypothesis, but that's still a pretty incorrect. A hypothesis is an idea that hasn't been tested, but has evidence for it being accurate. A theory is a tested idea that's been rigorously experimented on, and has lots of supportive research done on it. Things like gravity, evolution, and relativity are theories. Things like the multiverses are hypotheses, because they can explain things that appear in the real world, but haven't been tested (in the case of multiverses, because it can't really be tested (yet)).

Second of all, religious faith is completely different from scientific faith. I have "faith" in evolution and gravity, because I see the tests and observations done by humans that perfectly (or as close as you can get in a real world setting) support and "prove" the theories. When faith is used in a religious sense, it's used to mean that the person having faith supports their respective deity regardless of whether or not they see them. The poem someone sent to this thread talks about this:

It describes how, even when God is not with the speaker, the speaker must have faith in God because He is carrying the speaker through his life. This type of faith is different from scientific faith, which requires direct observation to be held.

Technically, the most common definition of faith according to Google is "complete trust or confidence in someone or something," to which I'd say that no great scientist has ever had complete faith, because reasonable doubt is a necessity in a scientific setting. If someone were to show an inconsistency in our theory of evolution, or gravity, or relativity, I would, of course, have reasonable doubt for both sides. I would doubt the study that showed the inconsistency's reliability, because such a large theory won't be easily debunked. I would also, however, doubt evolution a certain amount more, on the chance that the new study was right.

I made up the term "scientific faith," as far as I know. If it actually means something different from how I'm using it, then whoops. I'm using it just to mean faith in a scientific setting.

 

Never once did I say it did.

 

This is not a study. This is an article written about a study, which does not link said study. Ignoring all potential bias in the article, I still have a few things to say.
I think that without showing the actual data, the article cannot and should not be taken as great proof for anything.

Related:
Psychology, especially studies involving religion, is very unreliable at the first survey or study. A perfect example of this is a study that showed that humans could see into the future, and would change their actions based on it.
http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf
The experiments had three sets of images. Images were put into the sets "neutral," "negative," and "erotic." Participants in the experiment were shown two curtains. After selecting a curtain, a computer would randomly place an image behind one of them. The other one would reveal a blank wall. So, expected results would show that 50% of the time, the curtain with the image would be chosen. However, the original experiment showed that if the erotic image was randomly chosen, the curtain was chosen 53% of the time. This has a 1% chance of happening, making it under the threshold of statistical significance in psychology of 5%.
Predictably, nobody was able to repeat this result.


About the article itself:

1. Assuming that the group of people surveyed was 50% religious and 50% atheist, this result is only mildly surprising. If basically all of the religious people said the killer was atheist, only 33% of the atheists would need to say the killer was atheist for the result to be shown. That's really not very many people, out of such a small group surveyed. However, nowhere in the article does it mention the percentages of atheists to religious people in the study. If the percentage of people in the study was representative of people in the world, the data would have no significant results.
2. The way the data was analyzed seems to differ from how it was collected. In the article, it says that data was collected by percentages (people said how likely they thought it was that the killer was atheist or religious) and the data was analyzed in absolutes (People said whether or not they thought the killer was religious). This shows that the study is inconsistent with itself, and shouldn't be taken as very serious evidence.
3. Another thing I noticed (which doesn't really detract from the reputability of the source) is that some things the article said were just redundant. For example, it said 50% of people were asked how likely they thought it was that the killer was atheist, and 50% were asked how likely it was that he was religious. These two mean basically the same thing, since those are kind of the only two options. It's sort of weird to me that they decided to do the study that way, since agnostics exist, but whatever.
4. This result also assumes causation. It assumes that because a person is atheist, an observer is more likely to suspect them of misdeed. The other way of looking at it is because a person does misdeeds, they are less likely to be seen as having good morals, a characteristic associated with religions.

Conclusions you cannot draw from this article:

• Atheists are less moral.

It's not that atheists are less moral, it's that less moral people may tend to be atheists. If someone is a serial killer, it's more likely that they're an atheist, but someone being an atheist doesn't increase their chances of being a serial killer. Like how a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle isn't always a square - If something is a square, you can assume it's a rectangle, but the information that it's a rectangle isn't enough to say it's a square.

Conclusions that you can draw from this article:

• People may see atheists as being less moral.

That's not to say that the article claims that atheists are immoral, of course. All I meant to say was that this result can't be used to say that.

This does open discussion about this topic. It's maybe not entirely surprising to me that people are biased against atheists, just because atheism is a minority, but it did surprise me that the results were so heavy (assuming the 50/50 religious/atheist split of the survey group). It's interesting, and it's something I may look into more.

 

Well of course people see atheists as more immoral than religious people. It's a large part of the religious mindset. "You can't have morals if you don't believe in God".

I just think it's BS. The study's right, but the idea that atheists can't be or aren't good people is silly.

1. I love how they poke fun at ridiculous creationist ideas. Gehenna, you have to understand that to a rational scientifically minded person, the idea that we lived alongside dinosaurs is absolutely laughable. It's so fcking retarded that the best thing one can do is laugh. So, no, I won't discount them for being snarky. I think it's warranted.

2. Evidence of Jesus being the son of God, people living to be 900, the flood happening, two humans being able to create a genetically variant population, all of Jesus's miracles, evidence that the earth is 6,000 years old, evidence for any of these things. I gave you a list before and you didn't give me one shred of evidence, you just gave me conclusions and other things that are not evidence.

3. Well, that's one of the dumbest arguments I've heard from you in a while. "I can't have faith in evolution because the bible says not to". But you have faith in the Bible!

What this says to me is that you are SO ****ING GULLIBLE that you will believe anything anyone teaches you, provided they teach you it first and teach you that it precludes any other belief. If you had Mormon parents you would be Mormon, if you had Muslim parents you would be Muslim and you don't see WHAT A PROBLEM THIS IS? You don't care what the truth is, you don't care about evidence or logic or reason, you're a ****ing sheep Gehenna. Honestly I try to be civil when I can, but it appears that you just have absolutely no ability to think for yourself. Moving on...

4. Yeah. Sure am glad I'm not a religious Jew. I'm just in it for the songs and the food

5. What kind of theories? We've provided you with many pieces of evidence for evolution that you have not been able to discredit. And sure, individual scientists throughout history may be inclined to certain conclusions without evidence, but ultimately if those conclusions are to be established as proper scientific theory then they need actual evidence, it needs to be examined by other scientists, etc. There's a process.

6. Could you address the claim that if the Bible said the moon landing was impossible, you would deny it? I absolutely think you would.

SOURCE.
PLEASE.
THIS IS A PRETTY BIG CLAIM.

 

It's not safe to say that at all.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/234653/religious-affiliation-of-us-prisoners/

 

I mean, anyone who kills people is probably deranged.
But again, they're not killers because they're atheist. They just aren't stable enough to hold firm belief in anything. Like I said, it's not that the being atheist is what makes the killer, just like how being a rectangle doesn't make the square.
That metaphor isn't perfect, though, because anyone could be a killer, but not any shape can be a square.

And no, actually, most prisoners are religious.
Here's literally every link from the front page of Google when I googled "what percentage of criminals are religious"
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-prisoners-less-likely-to-be-atheists/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/234653/religious-affiliation-of-us-prisoners/
http://www.pewforum.org/2012/03/22/prison-chaplains-exec/ "America’s state penitentiaries are a bustle of religious activity"
https://thehumanist.com/commentary/...-us-prison-system-privilege-religious-inmates
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friend...ists-its-a-lot-smaller-than-we-ever-imagined/
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=141 (this one doesn't actually mention the data on the linked page)
http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-a...americas-scientists-and-07-percent-its-prison
https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-U-S-prison-inmates-believe-in-God (probably not a super-reliable source, to be fair)
https://www.quora.com/Are-atheists-more-or-less-likely-to-be-criminals-than-theists
http://www.adherents.com/misc/adh_prison.html
Every single one says that atheists make up a smaller percentage of federal prisons than Christians.

So that's not actually very safe to say, because it's statistically the polar opposite of reality.
This data does not show that all Christians are immoral, or that Christianity has a bad influence on people. It does show that it's not true that atheists make up a smaller percentage of jail population than they do outside of jail. If you were to derive any sort of over-generalization from this data, it would have to be that, in reality, atheists are less likely to be criminals than Christians although that claim is just as unfounded and bull**** as saying that atheists are more likely to be criminals.

People are people, and people do dumb things. Nobody is perfectly moral. Anyone could become a criminal. It is not a direct or indirect result of religious beliefs.

 

i can not take your ignorance much more

re-read what you just said. and then study on it. christians hold more positions in prisons than atheists.
that is a huge ****ing claim and youre giving absolutely no evidence for it; and it's something that you actually could go out and try to find evidence for.

this is completely moronic; how the hell is it "safe to say" most criminals are nonreligious?

the only deranged person here is you. absolutely no proof for something youve said whatsoever. you live your life assuming **** like that, you're not going to have a good one.

if you were a born into an islamic family you would be saying "Thank Allah I wasn't born into a Christian family. I can't imagine myself being one."

 

How is analyzing criminals behind bars any different from analyzing criminals on the streets?
Can you explain why analyzing prison populations with that severe a difference would not be evidence to the contrary of your point? I know that people go to prisons to try to convert inmates, but I can't imagine that the number of successful conversions would be that severe. Remember, these federal prisons are generally for more severe crimes than county or local jails. The people in these would tend to be less likely to change their mind about their actions.
It's literally impossible to record data on serious (worthy of being imprisoned) criminals that are on the streets, because if we knew about them, they would be in jail. That's the whole idea of jail.
And if you're making a claim as large as "more atheists are criminals than Christians," you need some serious evidence.
You provided literally none, and when we provided counterexamples, you fail to respond with evidence that supports your claim. As I've stated maybe 5 times, the burden of proof lies with the claimant.
If you can't support your claim with evidence, it can't be considered. That's true in basically every area of life where debates take place.

This link that I sent last post mentions (not cites, to be fair) a study done that compared many different countries and assessed them based on % of population that believes in evolution, and % that believes in God. Here are the results.

If we're talking about factors that can cause crime, here's two links to sources that say that religious upbringing leads to less altruism:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01167-7?_returnURL=http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0960982215011677?showall=true
https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2...bringing-associated-less-altruism-study-finds
The research is out there for anyone willing to spend the time to try to get it.

Furthermore, 60% of released prisoners re-enter prison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Recidivism_rates). This shows that the rates of religion in prisons is not only because of proselytizing, because even if literally every atheist in prison went back into prison, the percentage of Christians that reenter prison would still be higher than that of atheism.

The unfounded claim that more criminals are atheist than religious is, in all honesty, probably the most offensive and bigoted thing that's been posted in this thread thus far, because it generalizes to a large population of people, goes directly against actual data, and cannot be supported, even when challenged directly. It's a bogus claim that has no place in this discussion. Most of the attacks made here have been at least personal, and haven't generalized to the whole belief system. It's comparable to saying "blacks are more likely to be criminals because they inherently have worse or fewer morals," but at least that idiotic idea is supported by the fact that a disproportionately large percentage of prison population is black. Your claim doesn't even have that going for it. It ignores, much like my false claim, the reasons, counter-examples, and evidences of the other side.
I'm not going to pretend like all the atheists in this thread have been flawless paragons of virtue and purity. Admittedly, there's a lot wrong with the discussion on that side (keep it calm @globalist). But, as far as I've seen, none have called Christians immoral criminals.

Spoiler: ''Bigoted'' definition

The claim fits the definition because it states that people of religious following are less likely to be less moral than those without religious belief; that religious people are inanely better morally than atheists.

I'm all for discussion, but I'm not for attacks on entire belief systems. We can continue, and put this behind us, or we can get stuck rehashing old points and getting everyone upset for no purpose.

 

we all want to know how accurate the things you give us are too.

i was beat as a child and i turned out "fine" too. your ignorance is still present. you are trying to argue the fact that most criminals are atheists and they are criminals because they are atheists.
you have not backed up your claim and you are only cherry picking your rebuttals again.


also:
this is from the same site that you linked about the atheists thinking even other atheists are immoral, so no bias excuse.
but i doubt someone like you would agree with most of what they are saying.
https://www.afp.com/en/news/2265/new-gene-study-rewrites-neanderthal-history

 

I'd be surprised if enough parents spanked their children to cause something that would sway the results that heavily. I found that something like 35% of children have been spanked, and about 2/3 of the families surveyed were religious. I don't know what I'd make of those numbers, but there they are.

Debating the findings of an article is not enough to state the opposite is true. Besides, unless we're debating the Pew Research Center's reliability, I think the information was collected soundly enough to be significant.

Everyone convicted of serious crimes is just a shell to some extent. Plus, just because someone isn't technically Christian in the sense that they uphold all of its values doesn't mean they're atheist. It means they hold the beliefs of Christianity, but fail to be what the religion would want them to be and wouldn't be considered a "true Christian" by their peers. This same argument can be made for atheists, though, just as easily. It's just as viable to say that atheists who commit crimes aren't real atheists s it is to say that Christians who commit crimes aren't real Christians.

The article you linked doesn't only say that children from religious households favored stronger punishments. Here's another quote: "But children from households identifying as Christian and Muslim were significantly less likely than children from non-religious households to share their stickers." While the punishments may be one side effect of a religious upbringing you agree with, the sharing would be a shame if you thought the same way.

Personally, I agree to some extent that some parents are favoring less harsh punishments than are desirable, but I've never been a parent and haven't been told how to be a parent so what do I know), and it has an effect on their children. The extent of the effect is debatable, as well as if there even is one, or what the effect is. I'm not a parenting expert, so I'll abstain from judgement on how to raise a child.

Because evolution is really firmly based in essentially random chance and luck (mutations are mostly random), it can't progress to match something easily. Humanity has a history of being a very dominant species, making it harder for species that interact closely with humanity to evolve alongside it. Intelligence isn't a trait that really benefits an animal in the short term, thus it's pretty rare to see animals that exhibit it. That's not to say that no animals can be smart (for animal standards). Crows can be pretty smart, in some senses. Dogs are extremely well adapted to sense human emotion and feeling, since they've been bred alongside us for centuries.

It's also possible that intelligence in species may be the exception to the rule, rather than a trend. Humans are the only intelligent species we know of, and that may well be because it's very uncommon. I went to a public astronomy lecture a while back, and the speaker talked about that. The presentation was about how we might find intelligent life on other planets (a fascinating subject, which is why I went), and he mentioned that there's no way we could know exactly what to look for, or where to look. We have some ideas, but life could be extremely diverse, and humanity may just be an exception to the rule. Because evolution strongly favors anything that helps an animal survive, things like brute force and power and sharp claws or teeth are favored in predators, and camouflage and speed are favored in prey. Humanity, from an objective point of view, doesn't have a lot of power in an individual. I mean, not on the scale of a lion or tiger or something like that. We evolved to work in groups, and to think to catch our food, which is something that wouldn't be likely to happen unless the species that was evolving the trait were in a situation similar to humanity's.

 

2. I'll be waiting

3. Edin lined this out perfectly above. What you need to understand is you've been brainwashed into this sht. if you were born Mormon or Muslim you'd say "I'm so glad I'm not an Evangelical. I can't imagine myself as one". This is a really easy conclusion to make for us because you've shown that the only basis of your belief is you being taught the Bible as a child or teenager. If you'd been taught the Koran, you'd believe in its teachings as firmly as you currently believe in the Bible's teachings. This is the product of not caring about evidence and only using "faith". All these arguments that you're using for why the Bible is true, they work just as well for the Koran and other religious teachings.

5. Well, depends what you define "faith" as, I think ObamaTheReptile alluded to a kind of "scientific faith" earlier, not exactly sure how would one would define it... But here's the thing. Christianity not only claims to have the absolute truth despite a complete lack of evidence, it actually makes this claim DESPITE evidence to the contrary. It's different with Darwin. He didn't wake up one day and go "oh i'm gonna believe in evolution now." My understanding of the history is that the idea that animals can transform or "evolve" into other animals was around before Darwin, but people didn't know how it happened, and it wasn't really a mainstream idea. Some silly people thought animals just spontaneously turned into other animals. What Darwin did was theorize the process by which this happens (natural selection) based on, I believe, his findings in the Galapagos Islands. Feel free to correct me on this guys, I'm just going by memory. He didn't then go "OK SO EVOLUTION MUST BE TRUE!" He had ideas about how evolution would work and he and other subsequent scientists went looking for evidence of this and they found a plethora of it. If the entire study of evolution was just Darwin's "faith" then it'd be much flimsier. But there are and have been literally millions of scientists who've examined the evidence to test the theory of evolution. The sheer amount of testing and evidence-gathering that has taken place means that for many scientists, the theory of evolution is as much a fact as is the idea that the earth is round. Technically it's a "theory" because it can't be proven 100%, but there are billions of things that aren't proven 100% but we still take it as fact because there's no use worrying about the 0.000000001% chance it's not a fact. Capiche?

Also for Einstein, I think his findings were more based on maths, which are absolute truths unlike science, so I don't think that really contributes anything to this discussion.

6. Ah, so you admit it! Do you see how crazy this is? Please tell me you see how crazy this is. A page ago you said the moon landing was obviously true. But you say that if the Bible said it was impossible, then suddenly it would be less obvious. You are living in a f*cking fairy tale, Gehenna. Your entire view of reality is twisted by and completely dependent upon this one book that was written two f*cking thousand years ago. If the Bible said that 5+5=11 you would probably f*cking believe it. If the Bible said that all the planets and stars were fake, you would definitely f*cking believe it. Why do you not care what is real? You have a complete disregard for reality and I believe there is something seriously wrong with you that causes it. It's not your fault, but you actually need help.

Gehenna if you're gonna make accusatory claims, like the idea that atheists are much more likely to be criminals, you need some serious evidence. Right now you're giving us nothing and I wish I could say I was surprised..

Can you acknowledge how quickly this thread or really any discussion would devolve if people just made crazy claims without any evidence?

gehenna my lad, can you please read a book on evolution? I've read your book, I've read it many times. It'd be nice if you could learn a bit more about the truth.