organised religion

I agree whole heartedly! Religion has always been used as a method of control and to gain power, religion provides a convenient excuse/camouflage.

Hence why I disagree with those who try and blame religion for this idea, it is simply an excuse, and if religion didn't exist, another excuse would be found instead.

Quick edit.

It's not about land and power for a suicide bomber is it. lol. He's dead. - It's about going to heaven and getting his virgins!

Not everything is exclusively about the individual. Sacrificing yourself for 'the greater good' is hardly a new concept nor one unique to Islam.
 
I assume then you do not believe in love? It hasn't been scientifically proven after all.

Love is a human feeling and I can feel that and therefore I have evidence of it being there - So yes I know it exists. Just like I know this laptop I'm typing on exists, I can feel it and see it, I don't need to do a scientific experiment to prove it's here.

God on the other hand - You can't feel it, see it or see its effects. So I don't see it as real. I'm not and would never say for certain that god doesn't exist, but on the evidence we have I would say he doesn't.
 
Excellent, if you could present me with a link that gives the scientific explanation for love in all it's varying forms that would be great.

Neurobiological theories

Based on discoveries made through neural mapping of the limbic system, the neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain. If distinguished from reactive responses of reptiles, emotions would then be mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (e.g., dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures. In mammals, primates, and human beings, feelings are displayed as emotion cues.

For example, the human emotion of love is proposed to have evolved from paleocircuits of the mammalian brain (specifically, modules of the cingulate gyrus) which facilitate the care, feeding, and grooming of offspring. Paleocircuits are neural platforms for bodily expression configured millions of years before the advent of cortical circuits for speech. They consist of pre-configured pathways or networks of nerve cells in the forebrain, brain stem and spinal cord. They evolved prior to the earliest mammalian ancestors, as far back as the jawless fish, to control motor function.

Presumably, before the mammalian brain, life in the non-verbal world was automatic, preconscious, and predictable. The motor centers of reptiles react to sensory cues of vision, sound, touch, chemical, mavity, and motion with pre-set body movements and programmed postures. With the arrival of night-active mammals, circa 180 million years ago, smell replaced vision as the dominant sense, and a different way of responding arose from the olfactory sense, which is proposed to have developed into mammalian emotion and emotional memory. In the Jurassic Period, the mammalian brain invested heavily in olfaction to succeed at night as reptiles slept—one explanation for why olfactory lobes in mammalian brains are proportionally larger than in the reptiles. These odor pathways gradually formed the neural blueprint for what was later to become our limbic brain.

Emotions are thought to be related to activity in brain areas that direct our attention, motivate our behavior, and determine the significance of what is going on around us. Pioneering work by Broca (1878), Papez (1937), and MacLean (1952) suggested that emotion is related to a group of structures in the center of the brain called the limbic system, which includes the hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, hippocampi, and other structures. More recent research has shown that some of these limbic structures are not as directly related to emotion as others are, while some non-limbic structures have been found to be of greater emotional relevance.
 
Love is a human feeling and I can feel that and therefore I have evidence of it being there - So yes I know it exists.

You are aware that many people believe that they have experienced God? This is generally enough evidence for them too. Much like you having experienced love is evidence of it being there. How would you prove to someone that has never experienced love that it exists?
 
You are aware that many people believe that they have experienced God? This is generally enough evidence for them too. Much like you having experienced love is evidence of it being there. How would you prove to someone that has never experienced love that it exists?

Seriously....its a stupid argument, you can say this for anything basically.

:o
 
Neurobiological theories

A cut and paste job from wikipedia doesn't really count as scientific proof of love. Not to mention the section you linked gives some possibilities for some emotions and how they may have come about, it doesn't really give an explanation for how the many varying types of love have come in to existence, how they work and what their purpose is.
 
You are aware that many people believe that they have experienced God? This is generally enough evidence for them too. Much like you having experienced love is evidence of it being there. How would you prove to someone that has never experienced love that it exists?

Yes I understand that people say they have experienced god but there's generally always another, better more rational explanation. People say they've been to Lordes and have been cured, and then you look at the statistics and there's actually zero evidence that a trip to lordes is making people better from the miracle of gods cure. The rational explanation is that these people would have got better anyway!

I don't think love can be explained by, for example, pin pointing a part of the brain that produces love - It doesn't work like that. Love is a lot of different human emotions brought about by many neurological and chemical processes.
 
damn, i hoped it wouldn't be derailed into a standard god debate quite this fast.

How was it not going to happen? You would have to be completely deluded to think that the subject matter in the original post would not end up in a discussion about the existence of god. Especially considering his existence or non existence could answer the original query.
 
How was it not going to happen? You would have to be completely deluded to think that the subject matter in the original post would not end up in a discussion about the existence of god. Especially considering his existence or non existence could answer the original query.

i hoped for some intelligent discussion to carry on and ignore the trolls and this had nothing to do with the existence or non existence of god, just opinions on organised religion vs belief in a deity.
 
Stalin persecuted people based on their belief. He drew the lines based on religion. That is no different whatsoever to the rest of the wars/conflicts where religion was the dividing line.

Stalin persecuted anyone he was a threat to his powerbase, atheist or religious.
It didn't even matter if their beliefs were in line with his own, even his closest advisers such as nikolai yezov were eliminated as a matter of course.
 
Death is one of the few things in life that are uncontrolable, organised religion is in someways a way of confronting and controlling death so people use it as such. There are of course other reasons to being part of organised religion but I believe this plays a large part.

I must agree with the OP though the whole idea of the organised side of it seems alien to me, if there is a higher power then surely individuals would just be rewarded for being good people in general rather than being part of a church, giving money to said church, etc.
 
...if there is a higher power then surely individuals would just be rewarded for being good people in general rather than being part of a church, giving money to said church, etc.

Surely that would depend on the nature of the higher power. He may in fact be a bit of a control freak and a bit of a git, in which case following the rules might matter more than being a good person.
 
Surely that would depend on the nature of the higher power. He may in fact be a bit of a control freak and a bit of a git, in which case following the rules might matter more than being a good person.

What rules?
 
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