[quote]TheBodyGuard wrote:
Good grief Pat really? A yahoo “answers” reference? I have news for you sir; that radioactive decay is “uncaused” is currently a scientific fact. Do your homework.
And causality my dear friend may likely be a mere principality of human thought. You always avoid that.
Good hunting. [/quote]
Sufficient reason and or dependence are not. You seem to have 2 dimensional grasp of causation.
Nothing exists without a cause!
God is uncaused!
The universe can’t be uncaused!
I don’t see the logical misstep here!
Loud noises!
[quote]pat wrote:
Sufficient reason and or dependence are not. You seem to have 2 dimensional grasp of causation.[/quote]
That’s rich coming from someone who thinks that because nothing can exist without a cause, something that exists without a cause must exist.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Nothing exists without a cause!
God is uncaused!
The universe can’t be uncaused!
I don’t see the logical misstep here!
Loud noises![/quote]
I ate a big red candle.
[quote]ironcross wrote:
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Nothing exists without a cause!
God is uncaused!
The universe can’t be uncaused!
I don’t see the logical misstep here!
Loud noises![/quote]
I ate a big red candle.[/quote]
Yeah there were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
Sufficient reason and or dependence are not. You seem to have 2 dimensional grasp of causation.[/quote]
That’s rich coming from someone who thinks that because nothing can exist without a cause, something that exists without a cause must exist.[/quote]
Dear Jesus (pun intended) thank you for putting that in simple terms. If that doesn’t make you question this fairy tale, nothing will.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
[quote]ironcross wrote:
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Nothing exists without a cause!
God is uncaused!
The universe can’t be uncaused!
I don’t see the logical misstep here!
Loud noises![/quote]
I ate a big red candle.[/quote]
Yeah there were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.[/quote]
I saw that!
In light of making this thread more interesting, I’ve decided to punch you in the ovaries. That’s right. A straight shot. Right to the baby-maker.
[quote]ironcross wrote:
Kami- so you think that the god which those responsible for 9-11 serve is real?[/quote]
i think i already said i’m an atheist.
[quote]
Which do you personally find more firghtening: knowing what happens when you die or not knowing? Which one do you think scares people more?[/quote]
We all know what happens when you die.
you rot.
that’s all we know, and we all know that.
You may think there is nothing else. Nothing else happens, there is no afterlife, etc. That’s a belief. Not a knowledge.
And there is the same amount of belief in this belief than in the “i will go to heaven” belief.
btw, i never heard about a religion that successfully managed to supress the fear of death and the uncertainty about death in the mind of its followers. Neither doctrinally nor factually.
Even Tiribulus won’t pretend he know what will happen to him when he die.
[quote]
Your third reply is a logical error. You are saying that if interpretation of one proposed set of ideas changes with time, then all interpretations of proposed ideas change with time. You then jumped into this meaning that the truth changes. Then you said that if the truth changes, there is no truth. First of all, the interpretation of certain things which are considered true have not changed in far longer than any religion has existed. For example, it’s considered true that women produce children. This has been considered true without a chqnge in interpretation for quite a while. What has changed is the role women should play in society. But the interpretation that women give birth has never changed. Also, I am proposing that the truth hasn’t changed, merely the reasoning given about an action which was never true. For example, hindu’s believed that cows are too sacred to eat. This was told to the masses as a spiritual issue, but in reality they were more valuable to the people as milk and cheese than they were as meat. The fact is, the cows had value. That truth was valid and they have less value now that there are too many of them. What was never “true” was that the value was spiritual. You can find this phenomenon in every religion and to deny its presence in your own is lying to yourself.[/quote]
you don’t need to sacralize cow to teach the masses their economical value. The masses knew that way better than the erudite brahmin. Another reductionnist explanation of a religious practice. see above.
[quote]
How is “reducing” religion to a mechanism for a culture’s survival not a valid explanation for its existance? We don’t say that cultural survival isn’t a valid explanation for capitalism. Why is religion different?[/quote]
cultural survival isn’t a valid explanation for capitalism.
it may be a valid explanation of any economic system. It may even be a “valid explanation” for virtually anything. Therefore it actually explains nothing.
to explain capitalism you need to explain its specificity.
It’s the same thing with religion. You need to explain what’s specifically religious in religion. Reducing it to something broader and more vague won’t do the trick.
you could start with the lowest common denominator of all religions : the presence of rituals.
bottom line :
you may very well be right when you say that religion is “man-made”.
But it has certainly not been made for the simplistic reasons you propose.
[quote]kamui wrote:
you may very well be right when you say that religion is “man-made”.
But it has certainly not been made for the simplistic reasons you propose.
[/quote]
For what reasons do you believe religion was made?
[quote]kamui wrote:
cultural survival isn’t a valid explanation for capitalism.
it may be a valid explanation of any economic system. It may even be a “valid explanation” for virtually anything. Therefore it actually explains nothing.
[/quote]
I may have been misleading by using the term “cultural”. What I mean is “population survival”. If you don’t consider that a valid reason for anything’s survival, I don’t think we can continue this conversation.
Also, it explains a great deal. I’m actually concerned you apparently can’t see that.
I could give you some elements of answer here. But i won’t.
whichever answer i would give you, you will say “see, it helped our ancestors to survive. It’s nothing more than a survival tool”. Implying that we got better tools now, and don’t need this primitive one anymore.
the problem is not the “survival tool” part. It’s the “nothing more” part.
And as long as you don’t understand why i refuse reductionnism, this discussion is pointless.
i already give you some hints.
the “real question” is : what’s a ritual ? What do we really do when we sacralize something ?
[quote]kamui wrote:
the problem is not the “survival tool” part. It’s the “nothing more” part.
And as long as you don’t understand why i refuse reductionnism, this discussion is pointless.
[/quote]
It really is.
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Nothing exists without a cause!
God is uncaused!
The universe can’t be uncaused!
I don’t see the logical misstep here!
Loud noises![/quote]
I never said that…You just missed it. Pay attention, lest your selective attention make you look a fool. Ooops, to late.
And technically, ‘nothing’ doesn’t exist, and therefore has no cause.
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]Makavali wrote:
Everything that exists is caused, except God!
God is uncaused!
The universe can’t be uncaused!
What caused God?
I don’t see the logical misstep here!
Loud noises![/quote]
I never said that…You just missed it. Pay attention, lest your selective attention make you look a fool. Ooops, to late.
And technically, ‘nothing’ doesn’t exist, and therefore has no cause. [/quote]
I fixed it for him.
Kamui- I have no interest in a conversation with someone who says things like “I’ll give you a hint” over the internet while completely disregarding another person’s view point. I asked you a straight question because I was interested and you decided to not answer it. Obviously you’re not truly interested in spreading your ideas around, you just enjoy sounding superior.
On another note, the entire idea, which others in the thread are debating, that something has to come from something else, would only be true if time was constant from all viewpoints.
It’s not that i don’t want to answer. I just can’t.
You came here trying to dismiss religion, saying that it’s not an end in itself but a mere tool used for some external reasons. That’s functionnal reductionnism.
I tried, repeatedly, to show you why this approach is epistemologically incorrect. And, as a matter of fact, no serious researcher (believer or not) in the fields of anthropology, ethnology or history of religion will adopt it anymore. Marxist fossils excepted.
if you really want to understand religion and explain the existence of religious behaviors, you can’t deny its spiritual dimension.
the spiritual dimension of religion is religion’s core specificity. Each and every theory that will explain religion from the outside, and try to reduce it to external factors will miss the dimension. and will ultimately explain nothing.
the “hints” i gave you were not chosen arbitrarily.
A ritual is, by nature, an economically irrationnal act. An “useless” act. You can not explains it by “survival necessity”. And when a ritual become a mere cultural habit, it’s not a religious ritual anymore. So this explanation won’t do it either.
To understand why strange people do these strange things we call a ritual, you would have to actually try to understand them, without ridiculizing them.
Do it, and then we could talk.
[quote]kamui wrote:
It’s not that i don’t want to answer. I just can’t.
You came here trying to dismiss religion, saying that it’s not an end in itself but a mere tool used for some external reasons. That’s functionnal reductionnism.
I tried, repeatedly, to show you why this approach is epistemologically incorrect. And, as a matter of fact, no serious researcher (believer or not) in the fields of anthropology, ethnology or history of religion will adopt it anymore. Marxist fossils excepted.
if you really want to understand religion and explain the existence of religious behaviors, you can’t deny its spiritual dimension.
the spiritual dimension of religion is religion’s core specificity. Each and every theory that will explain religion from the outside, and try to reduce it to external factors will miss the dimension. and will ultimately explain nothing.
the “hints” i gave you were not chosen arbitrarily.
A ritual is, by nature, an economically irrationnal act. An “useless” act. You can not explains it by “survival necessity”. And when a ritual become a mere cultural habit, it’s not a religious ritual anymore. So this explanation won’t do it either.
To understand why strange people do these strange things we call a ritual, you would have to actually try to understand them, without ridiculizing them.
Do it, and then we could talk.
[/quote]
I <3 kamui.
Very short threadjack related to my post above.
I just now finally looked up what your name means, kamui, and the irony of my not knowing this entire time just hit me like a shuriken 
Actually, it’s not a reference to the ninja character. It’s the word for the spirits of Nature in the Ainu language. (The Ainu people of Japan were one of my pet subjects when i studied ethnology).
[quote]groo wrote:
If there is a cause for everything then what caused the first cause (god).[/quote]
It’s called an uncaused cause because on that which is brought into existence needs a cause. God being eternal was never brought into existence so he does not need a cause.
This isn’t possible, 1) 2nd law of thermodynamics, 2) the universe shows that a personal and not a blind force created it.