As would I. But remember there’s a difference between believing that it happened with Jesus and is possible (as in, a physically real event and that there are possessed people in the world)…and that every medical issue is the result of some demon.
In short, I don’t think it is irrational to believe in God or the reality of evil spirits (“the greatest trick the devil ever played was making us believe he doesn’t exist”, etc). You or someone else mentioned that there are obviously religiously observant science people, and I don’t see an inherent opposition in holding those stances together.
However, I DO think it is irrational to practice that in lieu of your training for everything, just as it is completely irrational to INTENTIONALLY avoid modern science in favor of praying things away. Like, take the chemotherapy man.
This is all great. I know of a local doctor who’s a very devout man. He will pray with people if they ask him to do so. He may even say he would like to say a prayer for him. I’ve only been to him once when I was younger but I know many religious people in this area go to him a lot because of that. But I’ve never once heard anyone say he doesn’t use science to make his decisions. I wouldn’t pray with him probably as I’m not a believer and what I went in for back then was pretty minor. Been a while I think I remember being concerned that my dick was way too huge or something. Not important.
I’m even fine with people who want to do the whole pray it away. Pisses me off if it’s with kids but that’s a different issue. I’m agnostic-atheist so it doesn’t make sense to me at all like many faith things. I think the vast vast majority of us who go see a doctor want him to make decisions based on science and the training they have had. The very website we post on is science based as much as it can be. I don’t want to read articles by people who don’t believe in research and science on here. I’m not looking for an article by someone that says don’t lift and pray your way to huge gains or something. And I highly doubt that T-Nation would have became big if it ignored science when giving advice about nutrition, health, strength.
Faith and science don’t have to be at war. You can believe in a higher power and still want to see a doctor for heart surgery.
Exactly this. Some religious folks believe it has to be an all or nothing dichotomy. That is a big falsehood. If you believe that God created all human beings than you also must inherently believe that he created scientists and gave them the talents that unlock cures to many diseases (among other things). I personally don’t believe in only praying something away, but adding in prayer to a treatment regimen can help calm the afflicted person, thereby putting them in a better mental state to fight a life-threatening disease which can help.
Totally agree. I’ve never understood why the lines seem to be drawn there in this age - many of the most genius men and women in history were religious (as opposed to “nominally-politically-dont-blacklist-me-please-Vatican” type of faith). And many are today.
As to historical famous scientists all being religious, I don’t think we have enough evidence to tell one way or the other in many cases. I think the negatives of being an apostate were enough, that almost nobody would admit it.
Darwin who was somewhat recent kept his theory secret for 7 years (even from his wife as he thought it would upset her). He knew that many would see right away that his theory was in conflict with the Biblical account of creation. He published it when he realized that another scientist was very close to making the same discovery. Darwin was correct in his thinking that his work would not be well received.
As to the lines being drawn, it seems to me to come from what brand of Christianity you come from. I went to a Christian school that took the Bible literally. They believed in a young earth, rejected evolution, believed in a global flood… Not very many of these people were in the scientific or medical field. Out of my graduating class I was the only one who went to a public university. The rest went to private Christian colleges (extreme ones IMO) or joined the military. A few that joined the military did go to public university after/during the military on the GI bill.
Well they were not interested in anything that went against their beliefs. Would not even consider it. I bought into it at the time, but still found it embarrassing. We did a field trip to the science museum, and the teacher was talking over the tour guide whenever he mentioned anything against a literal Biblical interpretation.
Other silly things too. For some reason they thought only the King James Bible was to be trusted. I guess the earlier Hebrew, Latin and Roman translations had errors in them, but when the King James was made, God got it right that time.
They still cherry picked the Bible for what seemed right to them. Gay is most definitely wrong, but eating shrimp, pork, and wearing poly blend clothing is okay.
I think there is a bit of sorting with the different brands of churches. Some are extreme and take a literal take on the Bible. Others (see UU church), are much more moderate, accept the Bible can’t possibly be literally true, are kind and accepting to people of all lifestyles. Then there is everything in between. IMO, not to many people with scientific careers attend the former, many attend the latter and in-between churches. I would even consider a UU church for the social benefits (especially if I had children).
takes powerful drugs that he doesn’t see made. Goes to doctors to check levels and makes sure he’s ok. Doesn’t want to trust doctors during pandemic when they ask him to do simple preventative measures.
Wow, I could write pages about this, but I know it would never be read. So I will keep it as brief as possible.
For examples of government censorship and 1st amendment violations, the problem really became evident when a double standard was applied. This is in reference to state and local municipalities violating the 1st amendment, where local laws cannot supersede federal law and especially cannot supersede the Constitution.
So still in two many states, gatherings of 10 or more people are banned, church attendance is banned, small businesses are banned from opening even if they provide similar services as the big corporate stores, BUT BLM protests are wide open and in some cases even encouraged.
It’s a sticky thing, in the first place to curb civil liberties for any reason. Technically, save for a Federally declared state of emergency, states cannot enforce civil liberties restrictions. But, each state was left to do what it thought necessary in the case of covid.
The BLM protests turned this narrative on it’s head. However, instead of states modifying their emergency declarations to accommodate the protests (I am deliberately excluding the riots, looting, murder and mayhem for the sake of the discussion), which would lift the restrictions for everybody, they decided to say that you can protest for BLM, but everybody else cannot assemble, go to church, open their business, etc. So there is a contradiction in the law that is glaringly evident. There are special rules for people supporting a particular politics and ideology, but everybody else has to obey. Needless to say that’s unequal application of the law. And further, pretty much eviscerates the point of lock down, if you can go out and gather in the thousands and then those people go back into their communities dragging with them what ever they caught at the protests.
I decided to deal with social media giants in a different post.
Changing the status and anti-trusting these mega-media oligarchs is what I am advocating for.
Sure these are ‘private’ companies, but they are operating and controlling a public space and domain. The argument for anti-trust is that these companies are monopolies. Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Amazon, twitter have almost no competition in the spaces that they run. One can argue twitter does have ‘some’ competition for the case of like Instagram (owned by Facebook), but they don’t exactly do the same things. However, in large part, no other company can compete at any reasonable level with these monsters of the domains they are in. The argument for anti-trust also would deal with at least some of the free-speech issues on these platforms.
As far as free-speech itself, all of these platforms have terms of service and they are allowed to have those. But they cannot editorialize and they cannot apply the rules selectively. The rules have to be for everybody or nobody. Amazon bans books they don’t like. Google manipulates their search engines to discriminate based on political ideology and so does twitter and Facebook.
So you cannot editorialize a tweet from the President regarding use of force as ‘violence’ and let a blue check guy like Reza Aslan threaten to ‘beat the shit’ out of another journalist, or the Covington kids as he did. That’s an unequal application of the terms of service.
And there are millions of examples where twitter and Facebook in particular, have taken down and punished people for saying shit like “Learn to code” or “All lives matter” and allow open threats of violence, doxxing, and other vile shit because those banning, shadow banning, demonetizing, share an ideological bent with the with one side and not the other.
That is illegal under their 230 protection. Once they start editorializing one side in favor of another, they stop being a ‘platform’ and become and ‘publisher’. 230 protects these companies from law suits, removing that protection when they become publishers will change the game and they will be open to all kinds of litigation.
I wrote in more detail about 230 protection ^^ up there. So in fear of going on and on I will stop here.
Edit: Changed ’ Glenn Greenwald’ to ‘Reza Aslan’ because Reza Aslan was the guy who said that shit. Not sure why I confused the two, but my apologies to Greenwald… Not that anybody read it, but if they did, my bad…
I would never even think of claiming they were all religious. Two of my most favorite philosophers of all time were atheists–Hume and Russell. And others outside philosophy also. I did say many were religious, which I don’t think is controversial.
Thus is what I was referring to by “nominally, politically”.
Kinda silly considering the KJV was translated from the Latin and Greek (not Roman), as are all English language versions lol
Greek was the original language of the New Testament. Aramaic and Hebrew were the languages of the Old Testament. I am not sure what language is ‘Roman’, is that like talking ‘Mexican’?
However, the KJV is notoriously errant.
Sorry if I wrote that as if it were your claim. I have heard many say this though. Or say almost all were.
I don’t think we can tell because of the issues around not being religious in the past. I think having a homogeneous religious population results in almost all actually believing (look at a few of the Arab countries for example). I think questioning things becomes more common when not everyone believes.
This is correct. I was wrongfully assuming Paul was writing in Roman. Turns out it was Greek. The original languages of the Bible appear to be Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. KJV was a translation of a translation…
I know. I didn’t even really think about it when I wrote it (Roman). I guess I was thinking the Bible had some original texts in Latin because of the Vulgate which was an early popular translation.
