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True but what about the commonly accepted moral values and virtues, have they not stemmed out of religion? If there is no religion is this world, what will you base your moral values on? If the society is full of too many “personal things” and they all collectively decide in favour of something which is not socially accepted or against morality, what will happen? Well this are just simple questions that come in my mind really.

@p0lygon-Window 323118 wrote:

treat others how you would like to be treated?

i dont want you to kill my mum, so i wont kill urs etc
read richard dawkins the god delusion to know all about moral evolution

I would reccomend ‘Lila: an inquiry into morals’ by Robert M. Pirsig

It’s basically eastern philosophies re-written for modern/western thought. One of the points is that even if there is no ‘God’ as defined by most religions, there is definately a drive for complex life, sentient consciousness, and goodness/quality/morals woven into the fabric of reality. very interesting read for athiests and theists alike.

@FixOrRepairDaily 323579 wrote:

I’m not religious as I believe believe in freedom of thought.

theres a biiiig difference between religion and organised religion. only organised religions restrict freedom of thought.

ye like the only thing holding us back from raping/kill/stealing is the ten commandments :crazy_diz yeah right, maybe for the christians of the world not me tho

hahaa i got her on msn, she comes on sometimes! i dont talk to her no more though. she gave up trying to convert people i believe

What you’re describing here isn’t religion, it’s spirituality (to which my comments don’t apply – being spiritual won’t make you close minded, quite the opposite in fact.)

It only becomes religion when there is some form of organisation involved, and a collective belief system with a codified set of practices (at which point it becomes rigid and a barrier to freedom of thought.) To say it’s only organised religion that does this is a bit of a nonsense tbh, as all religion is by definition organised.

If your ideas are constantly changing, and you are developing your own personal philosophy then using all the tools at your disposal makes sense. I never suggested that all religious philosophy/theology was horseshit – far from it, but taking what you see as the good bits from a philosophy and ignoring the bad or dumb bits isn’t following a religion. You can’t for instance claim to follow the teachings of the Koran but decide that you think the business about which direction you face at morning prayer is silly and ignore it (wouldn’t go down too well with fellow worshippers for a start, and you can’t claim to follow the teachings of the religion while at the same time be ignoring them when you disagree…)

Evolving a personal philosophy and using the words and thoughts of others to help you find your own path is spirituality, not religion, although why you would decide science cannot answer any of those questions is a bit beyond me – if you are still searching for the answers then you don’t know where you are going to find them (because if you did know where you could find them they would have been answered). Why ignore any source of enlightened thoughts until you have the answers you seek?

And why would the conclusion that religions are largely very silly (with varying degrees from “thats a bit of an odd thing to think”:wtf:, to “woohaa, back away slowly and don’t make eye contact.”:razz: :sign0082:) lead to you stopping thinking about philosophy and theology altogether? Just because someone else has gotten the whole business scrambled doesn’t mean your spiritual evolution has to stop, and doesn’t mean the philosophy that ended up with them getting scrambled must have all been nonsense…

Yes – there are various definitions which generally rely on context to help define them (for instance it can be used to denote exact adherence to something – ie “to make a religion of tidyness”). From the thread title and the topics of discussion I was assuming the context was that of the usual meaning of religion – ie the pledging of oneself to a cause or belief system based around a codified set of practices. In that sense they are all organised (and the terms personal, or organised religion are a bit misleading – a personal religion can be one that follows these codified practices but doesn’t get involved in the organised and group worship practices of the religion.) That was why I made the distinction by choosing another term for people who are seeking the answers as opposed to the ones that believe they know them….

Where did you get the idea Pagans are all atheists? Generally it’s only Christians who use that particular idea of Pagans… The original meaning of Pagan comes from Latin – Paganus, which means “civilian” (as opposed to Miles or soldier). It’s used extensively in Christian literature to refer to the Heathen unbelievers in the one true god (ie Christians and Jews)… I suspect a Muslim would strongly object to being referred to as an atheist (as would Hindu’s, Sikh’s and a host of other religions that were described this way).

Spiritual means believing in at the very least a soul-force/life-force that has some existence after death wether that includes some divine intelligence or not, but I meant it as a blanket term to cover anyone still seeking the answers to those questions and not entrenched in a belief system that purports to have those answers. I don’t really care which term is used – philosopher, seeker or whatever – the point was someone who is still looking for answers to the difficult questions.

So a degree means you know all there is scientific thought has to offer on those questions? You don’t think science is as much a mode of thinking as it is a collection of data on what we can reasonably prove is true of our existence/universe? Not sure what is being taught in degree level sciences at the moment, or whenever you did yours, but if the course wasn’t geared to the process of scientific enquiry and method then I would consider doing another one. And if it did teach you this process then how can those tools definetly be useless in your search?

The fact that the more we learn, the more we realise how much we don’t know doesn’t mean the tools are useless and can’t provide an answer – what it means is we have more knowledge, and as a result we have found more questions that we wouldn’t have thought of before, but which turn out to be relevant.

As for questions like why are we here? or what is here? – they aren’t the difficult questions, they are actually the most simple, basic ones. Answers though – those are difficult in inverse proportion to the simplicity of the question (a difficult question like “what are the mating habits of the lesser spotted Woodpecker?” has a relatively easy answer which is “go and observe them, and then you’ll know.” When you start asking things like “what is blue?”, or “why is there a universe?” or “why are we here?” the answers become so complex that we can’t answer them with the single way of thinking, and we have to be able to think in several ways to have any hope of answering them fully.)

So the goldilox enigma (although I suspect you meant to use the term paradox, because the only goldilox enigma I can think of is do bears really make porridge?) isn’t that the more we learn the further we get from the answers. We aren’t further from the answers, we are closer and in becoming closer we are discovering the complexity that will be required of a satisfactory answer to such basic questions.

Are we talking some new form of religious belief (or lack thereof) that I am unaware of here, or by “pagan” do you mean Wiccan? As in the somewhat confused attempts to revive the “old religion”. I say confused because for the most part the practice of Wicca is based on a fairly unfocussed hippy idea of what they think the old religion was…

Ye – I was under the impression you had given up any hope of science ever having those answers (which I thought a little odd given your education). As for science being able to explain our universe I agree totally that it isn’t all encompassing (although there are scientists who seem to believe it is – people being people, there is as much dogma in science as you’ll find in any religion :wink:. Fortunately, unlike most religions, the scientific view is changing constantly so the dogma and entrenched belief’s only last as long as it takes the next paradigm shift to hove into view :love: )
Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not saying science and logic are only tools to use (because logic will only get you so far. Then you have to get out and push :alien_abd.)

We have many more tools that are just as useful – things like intuition, imagination, or the ability to try and understand things by relating them to abstracts are just as important as being able to think logically, although I do think we still lack the tools that will be needed to find an answer to the important questions. I think that we have an awful lot more evolving to do before we can hope to get answers.

I don’t consider myself an atheist btw (although most religious people would probably say that I’m not only an atheist, but a heathen and a heretic to boot :laugh_at:). When the question about believing in god crops up people seem to get all carried away with the theist (definetly believe :angel_fly), atheist (definetly don’t believe:rant:) or agnostic (am not sure, but if there is I don’t want to burn with all those atheists, so am sitting firmly on the fence here:scared:)… The arguments assume you have to be in one of the categories, but they miss out the one I would put myself in – dunno if there is a word, but I’ll use apatheist (basically couldn’t care less if there is or not :bored:. As far as I’m concerned the universe is here, and we live in it. It’s a spectacularly interesting place to live, and there are far more important questions to be answered – finding out if there is someone to worship/blame for it all seems to me to be a total waste of time…)

OK – not come across this one before (the term Goldilocks enigma I mean, not the various anthropic principles). The debate over the different arguments of the anthropic principle has always seemed rather a strange one to me (although this could well be a failure in my ability to understand the arguments properly).

When asked the question of how the universe came to be the way it is, and wether intelligent life was accidental or inevitable, I always feel that the different answers rely on the premise that the scientific ideal of the detached observer is true. None of them really seem to address the point that the act of observation changes the thing being observed (and also changes the observer). We’re not separate from the universe, we’re part of it, and it’s an emergent system. Our existence and behaviour affect the way the universe behaves (we are in a very real sense making it up as we go along), so the answer to wether intelligence is accidental or inevitable the answer would seem to be both. It’s accidental because there were many happy coincidences that led up to this point, but it’s also inevitable because the parameters necessary for the emergence of intelligence were part of the make up of the whole (they must be or it couldn’t have happened. The question that really sends the logical approach off to sob quietly in a corner though, is wether the parameters had always been there (from day 0 as it were), or did the emergence of intelligence result in a rewriting so it had always ben like that?

Edit: Just went and read the Wiki article on the anthropic principle, and it has a bit about that book – sounds like an interesting read – think I might add it to my list :crazy_fre