Zonie63
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Joined: 4/25/2011
From: The Old Pueblo
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Just0Us0Two
quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
It would be nice to to hear the perspectives of believers on these issues. From where I sit, as a non-believer, I doubt it will make a great deal of difference to many believers. In the final analysis, it is the reactions of believers, not those of non-believers that will count. It's their belief system not mine!
I'm not a believer, but my wife was very much so. I can tell you that no amount of evidence would ever have shaken her faith. She and I used to debate theology, and while she agreed that I had some very good points and arguments, in the end she really didn't care. I'd say that shaking a true believer is unlikely. They believe on faith, not logic or evidence.
I've never had a huge problem with "faith," in and of itself. I come from a religious family myself, with my father's side of the family almost fanatical about it.
To me, if someone were to sit and meditate, contemplating nature, the stars, the universe and believing in their heart of hearts that there must be some intelligent, sentient force behind it all - I can deal with that and relate to it as a logical possibility.
Where I start to get irritated and wary is when someone spends times poring through ancient texts, scriptures, reviewing old artifacts - looking for secret codes, ancient runes, etc. - and using that to create some kind of "faith" based largely on the imaginations of intolerant people of questionable intelligence and sanity. And then they invent a whole bunch of rules and rituals to go along with it.
So, one has to wonder where the "faith" of believers is actually directed, exactly what they have faith in, and why. More often than not, it seems that their faith is primarily in their own religion and the various trappings, scriptures, protocols, and rituals associated with it, whereas concepts of "God" are more abstract and an incidental component in the whole thing.
I'm an agnostic myself. I neither believe nor disbelieve, although I differentiate between things I reasonably know to be true versus those things I don't know or can't prove.
A while back, I was reading an excellent article in National Geographic about the latest theories regarding the origins of our Solar System.
quote:
When most of us were growing up, the solar system seemed reliable and well behaved. “There were nine planets orbiting in well-determined orbits like clockwork, forever,” says Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona. “Forever in the past, and forever in the future.” Planetarium displays and the lovely mechanical devices called orreries embodied this idea, which went back to Isaac Newton. In the late 17th century Newton showed that a planet’s orbit could be calculated from its gravitational interaction with the sun. Soon clockmakers were building increasingly elaborate orreries, with brass planets that circled the sun on unchanging pathways.
Newton himself knew that reality was messier. The planets, he recognized, must also interact with one another. Their gravitational tuggings are far weaker than those of the sun, but over time they affect the paths of neighbors. As a result, as Brownlee puts it, “there’s no such thing as a circular orbit.” In principle the relentless pull of gravity can amplify these small deviations until orbits migrate, cross, or otherwise go haywire. Newton concluded that God must step in from time to time to fix the clockwork. But he couldn’t say when. Even he who invented calculus was defeated by the “n-body problem”: He had no formula for calculating into the distant future the orbits of multiple bodies that were all pulling on one another.
It got me to thinking about the possibility of "God" and "Creation," as well as how early religious myths involved anthropomorphizing celestial objects and observations of nature. But I was also thinking how modern religions tend to ridicule more "primitive" beliefs which might involve worshiping the Sun itself as some sort of "God." But it's also a scientific reality that, without the Sun, we humans would never have existed in the first place.
But religionists make it all seem so easy, as if God just snapped His fingers one day and <poof!> human beings just happened. But contemplating that article and all the billions of years it took to prepare the Earth for our illustrious arrival into the Universe, it seems that being God must have been tremendously hard work.
It surely was not quite so easy as the religious seem to make it, and if you look at the past 4.5 billion years in a certain way, one could surmise that human beings were the result of a very tired God just trying to crank something out at the end of an extremely long work day. He thought He had a good thing going with the dinosaurs, but that turned out to be a bust. By the time He got around to creating humans, He was likely getting kind of cranky and loopy. 
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RE: The Covert Messiah - 
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