Vic
Elite Member
- Jun 12, 2001
- 50,415
- 14,303
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I agree with the OP re: the topic title. The whole Left/Right Liberal/Conservative dichotomies are nonsense to give intellectually-vacant idiots something to feel important about. Typical us vs. them mentality.
The topic of god, religion, and faith is a bit more complicated though. I agree that religion has been abused as a means of power and manipulation over people for thousands of years, and I do not have faith nor do I adhere to any religion, however to say that modern science has made it obsolete is simply to air out one's own ignorance on the subject. For one thing, religion itself is merely ancient science in institutionalized dogmatism. For another, modern science only disproves the lower (so-called "literal" or "fundamentalist") beliefs of religion, while the higher more abstract views remain unknowable, untouched, or in some cases even reinforced.
So while I will argue for days the importance of maintaining a secular liberal government, separate from any religion, I will also argue the necessity for individual freedom of belief. And if you want, I'd be happy to discuss the age-old science and religion debate as well, particularly in areas of theoretical physics and the cosmological standard model, contrasted against ancient religious beliefs, and so forth. What I often find surprising is not how wrong the ancients were (which they of course were more often than not), but how right they were in so many areas. It is fascinating. Especially if you take into account that much of the really wrong religious dogma, that much of the modern religious world clings to (like young earth creationism for example), is actually a product of relatively recent times (middle ages into the 1800s), and not what the ancients actually believed.
The topic of god, religion, and faith is a bit more complicated though. I agree that religion has been abused as a means of power and manipulation over people for thousands of years, and I do not have faith nor do I adhere to any religion, however to say that modern science has made it obsolete is simply to air out one's own ignorance on the subject. For one thing, religion itself is merely ancient science in institutionalized dogmatism. For another, modern science only disproves the lower (so-called "literal" or "fundamentalist") beliefs of religion, while the higher more abstract views remain unknowable, untouched, or in some cases even reinforced.
So while I will argue for days the importance of maintaining a secular liberal government, separate from any religion, I will also argue the necessity for individual freedom of belief. And if you want, I'd be happy to discuss the age-old science and religion debate as well, particularly in areas of theoretical physics and the cosmological standard model, contrasted against ancient religious beliefs, and so forth. What I often find surprising is not how wrong the ancients were (which they of course were more often than not), but how right they were in so many areas. It is fascinating. Especially if you take into account that much of the really wrong religious dogma, that much of the modern religious world clings to (like young earth creationism for example), is actually a product of relatively recent times (middle ages into the 1800s), and not what the ancients actually believed.