Soldato
- Joined
- 12 Dec 2002
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- 2,951
Why is the UK not religious anymore?
- Thread starter kwerk
- Start date
I'm a bit late but that was a brilliant post.
Soldato
- Joined
- 1 Apr 2009
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- 9,952
The laws of attraction.
Can you buy crates of steroids to bread a race of mutant super-cats in the UK? No.
Can you buy as many guns as you can fit in a bomb shelter in the UK? No.
Is complete lunacy a sign of serious mental illness in the US? No.
Will they laugh at your quaint, irrational, jarring view of the world? No.
Praise the Lord? Darn yes, brother!
If you're not already in the US, Kwerk, you really should be. You'll fit right in.
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Quite evidently not, I said "The average moron" that is not a sweeping statement unless you are making a sweeping statement by saying that the majority of the UK's population is an "average moron".
Even if what I said was interpreted as a sweeping statement, I corrected myself in my second post.
Neither fairness nor morality have anything to do with religion. Your claim that they are impossible without religion is truly bizarre. You can have fairness and/or morality without religion. You can have religion without fairness or morality. The two are unrelated because religion is about obedience, not fairness or morality (unless you consider unchallengable obedience to authority to be morality, which some people do).
Religion imo is just an ancient form of government... The idea that all seeing deity has you under constant surveillance, and that only those of the cloth are able to interpret his / her / its will. Well it seems to me like a form of control. Just as the elevently billion cameras dotted around the country, and the frankly ridiculous number of laws and rules that govern us are, today.
Christianity is a messy subject for me. The bible is littered with contradictions and bizarre moral lecturing, much of which doesn't translate very well to the modern day. And all sorts of both good and bad things have been carried out in the name of Christianity. I don't personally have much time for organised religion, but I don't see anything wrong with belief.
Some people need the emotional crutch of belief in order to cope with how crappy the world can be, so in that sense it's a force for the positive. And there's much as a race that we don't understand about the universe, so who is to prove them wrong? Certainly no one here.
But its when religion gets hold of that belief and twists it into extremism that I take issue with. Durka durka.
Christianity is a messy subject for me. The bible is littered with contradictions and bizarre moral lecturing, much of which doesn't translate very well to the modern day. And all sorts of both good and bad things have been carried out in the name of Christianity. I don't personally have much time for organised religion, but I don't see anything wrong with belief.
Some people need the emotional crutch of belief in order to cope with how crappy the world can be, so in that sense it's a force for the positive. And there's much as a race that we don't understand about the universe, so who is to prove them wrong? Certainly no one here.
But its when religion gets hold of that belief and twists it into extremism that I take issue with. Durka durka.
There's much that we don't know about the universe, but it doesn't give religion a licence to fill in the gaps. And it's not the job of atheists to prove religion wrong, it's up to religion to provide evidence to substantiate its claims.
There's a small teapot in orbit around Mars.
You can't prove me wrong, so it must be there.
Soldato
- Joined
- 8 Mar 2007
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- 10,938
Ancient form of societal carrot and stick in lack of an organised police force.
Carrot = Heaven
Stick = Hell
Religion in a nutshell.
Carrot = Heaven
Stick = Hell
Religion in a nutshell.
Neither can you prove yourself right, so it becomes a matter of belief.
Given enough time and money, I could prove you wrong. I don't think the same can be said about Gods existence.
Well if you believe in multiverse theory, somewhere there is a teapot in orbit around mars.
Given enough time and money, I could have a crack at proving that wrong too
Nope, it's an invisible, intangible teapot.
You've got me there I guess
That's a good point about CCTV I never thought of that. It's like "god" watching you.
I don't care either way about religion as long as nobody is trying to use it to force me to do anything. If I want to only let one race of people in to my shop, or rent my flat, that's my business. If I wanted to be a homo that's my business (homos used to be illegal in the UK, look what happened to Alan Turing). What's funny is I read a story the other day about homos wanting to only rent flats to other homos and getting in trouble from the diversity police. It makes me laugh when the smug liberal idiots trip themselves up with contradiction.
The thing that bothers me is the smugness of people today operating under Political Correctness religion like it's scientific. It's superior to all over religions because it's some how backed by pseudoscience, and nobody should question it. That other religions are quaint little things that we can patronizingly humor the dumb ignorant idiots who are in to that sort of thing, as long as they keep inside their own harmless bubble. But everyone knows intelligent people are really atheists (can't have any competition for the PC moral framework).
If you were to be honest about this scientific idealism, government policies should be made by politically independent scientific studies and statistics, not just what "feels right" or is the the most "fair". How do you even measure "fairness" anyway? The problem is it would result in some policies that don't make people feel warm and fuzzy inside, like only allowing immigrants from certain countries, or perhaps eugenics to thin the surplus population (which I reckon can be done 100% voluntarily and thus ethically). Or spending more time researching MRSA (stupid old people probly deserve it) and less time researching AIDS (we must protect our precious gays!).
The other parallel I noticed is the cult of "victim-hood". There is a whole industry of professional victims nowadays.
Victim-hood = Sainthood.
Once you achieve victim-hood status you become a saint, like St. Steven Lawrence. But only "protected classes" (minorities, gays and women) can become saints.
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No... I don't think there is. If there were infinite parallel universes, then you'd be correct. Possibly. But time is quantised - there have only been a finite number of time quanta since the Big Bang, and therefore only a finite number of branching points for parallel universes to form. It's a huge number, to be sure, but it's far short of the number you'd need to have an even chance of there existing a universe like that. For that to happen, the exact type and number of particles would have to randomly emerge from the quantum foam at the same time and in the correct formation to create a teapot, and for all this to have the correct position and velocity to form a stable orbit around Mars. And this would have to be in that vanishingly small subset of universes where there is a Mars.
On the other hand, there could be a relatively nearby parallel universe where some humans actually deliberately sent a spaceship out to put a teapot in orbit around Mars, just to poke fun at their version of Bertrand Russell. That's actually far more likely than one emerging spontaneously from the quantum foam. If there are parallel universes, I think it's actually quite likely there exists one where that happened.
For an example of a government policy people would utterly hate, despite producing good results:
13% of the population in America do 54% of the murders. 1 in 2 of them end up in prison at some oout in their life. They are the reason why America has the biggest prison population in the world (70% non-white).
The government could work out exactly how much this group pays in and how much they receive back in welfare/prison/policing costs. Then the government could workout an amount needed to pay them to voluntarily leave, give them $100,000 or whatever to renounce their citizenship, plus a one-way ticket to say Liberia. Then send Liberia a billion dollars in aid money for good measure.
Murder rate would be cut in half, prison population cut in half, policing costs cut, welfare costs cut, etc, etc. The investment would pay off very quickly.
Of course it's an utterly horrid idea though that only Hitler would even think about.
BTW Abraham Lincoln actually had that very idea, but they never bothered doing it.
13% of the population in America do 54% of the murders. 1 in 2 of them end up in prison at some oout in their life. They are the reason why America has the biggest prison population in the world (70% non-white).
The government could work out exactly how much this group pays in and how much they receive back in welfare/prison/policing costs. Then the government could workout an amount needed to pay them to voluntarily leave, give them $100,000 or whatever to renounce their citizenship, plus a one-way ticket to say Liberia. Then send Liberia a billion dollars in aid money for good measure.
Murder rate would be cut in half, prison population cut in half, policing costs cut, welfare costs cut, etc, etc. The investment would pay off very quickly.
Of course it's an utterly horrid idea though that only Hitler would even think about.
BTW Abraham Lincoln actually had that very idea, but they never bothered doing it.