Discussing religion is literally a waste of time and energy

I really feel like talking about this, and this site seems the right place to do so.

I've been noticing that the threads in this religion subforum gets quite a lot of attention. Threads here have pages and pages of replies. Why?

I am not sure wether I'm too smart or too stupid to understand religion. I HATE the fact that a lot of physicists, scientists etc. are wasting their time discussing about it while they could be working, discovering and finding solutions to diseases. For example, the use of stem cells. The church is against the use of stem cells, which has a huge value to medicine. Several scientists are religious, I know. But that's out of topic.

This is what I've ALWAYS thought about religion. I feel like it is a huge weight in the world and in NO WAY it explains the world and why we are here. In sum, religion is for ignorant and outdated people. Sorry if this offends anyone. And a religious person with a PhD in whatever doesn't make this person intelligent, so don't even bother showing me an example

Thoughts?

 

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I suppose a lot of people react to the kind of aggressive stance taken by religious groups, anti-science, preaching literal adherence to the bible, anti-evolution etc, and fight back. If you say nothing the religionists might think they won the argument. If they just stayed quiet and prayed to their imaginary friends we wouldn't care one jot.

 

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The problem is that despite the best advances in science, diseases will still exist. .... along with old age and death ...... and of the course all this happens in the medium of attachment to things that will shortly cease to exist. Regarding your example of stem cells, its more a moral issue of establishing industries based on mining human life (illegal trade of human organs is another one) than an intrinsically religious issue to it.... which is why the subject doesn't enjoy a universal rejection from theists .... and even then its since been discovered how to extract stem cells from more general cell matter.

Iow discussing science as somehow being a magical panacea to the problems of material existence requires a dumbed down definition of existence at best or a willful state of ignorance or intellectual immaturity regarding the the nature of suffering in the material world at worst.

Iow what is a waste of time is to discuss science as being capable of solving the essential problems of material existence.

 

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Number 9

Many discussions are debating moral positions.

That is the value I see in religious discussions.

Where else is Joe average, other than in political discussions, going to see both sides of moral discussions?

I think that the bible was intentionally written in it's ambiguous way just to have people seek God. God as defined as the best moral position on whatever issue is under discussion.

I myself try to draw Christians, usually kicking and screaming, into moral discussions. They do not like to go there because most times they lose the arguments.

Regards
DL

 

I'm interested in philosophy and religion and enjoy discussing them. I suppose that other people feel the same way.

I don't think that it takes much intelligence or specialized knowledge to have a feeling for religion. The majority of the human race clearly does, in some way, sometime in their lives. That's probably a big reason why it generates lots active discussion threads. Religion is something that laypeople are all in a position to discuss, without needing to have large amounts of education beforehand.

But religion's like everything else. If you want to learn the details of of religion's scope and range of manifestations, if you want to know what's in all the various canonical religious writings, or if you want to know what philosophers, historians, psychologists and others have said about religion over the years, you need to study. There are lots of ways of doing that.

I doubt if scientists lose much work time discussing religion. They may or may not spend some of their time away from work practicing or thinking about religion. They also have hobbies, watch sports, travel, or whatever it is they do.

I suspect that you meant it to be insulting.

I think that it takes a great deal of intelligence to earn a doctorate. It takes even more to make scholarly contributions subseqently. My thesis advisor in graduate school was a former Catholic priest with a Doctor of Sacred Theology degree and was something of an authority on one of the lesser known Neoplatonist philosophers. I have tremendous respect for the guy. Very nice, thoughtful, supportive and scholarly.

 

Then why are you discussing it, instead of "working, discovering and finding solutions"? You really cannot criticize others for something you are doing, unless you are resigned to being a hypocrite.

 

We do not stray ourselves from doing nothing while discussing religion. I get your point but it is just simplistic to say that. We are just developing rhetoric, what's the problem with that? xD

 

If those things do exist, presumably they would exist no matter what I think about the matter. Maybe I do have a soul, despite my thinking I don't.

Buddhism is a religion, many people think that it's a very important one, and one of its core doctrines is the non-existence of what people in the West would call a 'soul'. Buddhism isn't based on worshipping God (or gods) either. One of the reasons why Buddhism is interesting in these kind of discussions is because it violates many of our longtime Western assumptions, derived from our Christian history, about what religion is and needs to be.

None of this means that belief in souls, God or Christianity is necessarily wrong. It just means that these kind of belief aren't necessarily essential to all religions or to discussing religion. The historical Western theological vocabulary doesn't exhaust all of the religious possibilities.

I don't personally share that belief, but I won't put you down for believing it.

 

I used to admire Buddhism. I thought that the idea of meditating upon God, upon the universe and universal principles was such a beautiful thing. But when I started hearing about Buddhists who don't believe in an afterlife, the intrigue faded.

I appreciate that.

 

So you're saying that efforts to live as a good and honorable person are a waste of time. You're saying that we should just live like animals and not care about who we hurt. We should drink, molest, rape, kill, steal and do anything that we can get away with because this is the only existence. You are saying that we should shun wisdom from angels who tell us to live better lives. That's what you're arguing.

 

How much time do you think they are wasting? Dawkins has had the time to publish a book on atheism as well as many other books on evolution. If you feel religion is a huge weight on the world, then what's the point of avoiding the subject?

 

The problem is that drugs do not feed the soul.

 

@Number 9 Bus Shelter

Number 9 Bus Shelter, welcome to Sciforums!

Seems that you choose to think prior to typing and Posting. Key word being "prior"!

You seem to be comfortable in your own skin - and this Forum need that quality in its Posters!

I am not at all sure you fully realize, yet, the can of worms you have opened with your OP - but you soon will.

Again, Number 9 Bus Shelter, welcome to SciForums!

 

Mazulu, You, Yes, You, Mazulu, Posted every single word of the ^^above^^ !!!

Seattle, said nothing, in any way, shape or form, even remotely close to that in his Post #18, that you Quoted!

Mazulu, you are not being very respectful to Number 9 Bus Shelter by exhibiting such behavior in this Thread.

True Believers and True Followers of any belief or religion would not, could not, and more importantly, DO NOT put words into other people mouths and accuse them them saying things that they did not!

Mazulu, what you did in Post #20 could honestly be a violation of 1 of the 10 Commandments: maybe #9 I believe...which goes something like :

“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor".

Please forgive me for paraphrasing or possibly getting the number wrong - I only read the different Bibles every 8 or 10 years - not daily.

Mazulu, does your particular faith/religion/belief have nothing like the 10 Commandments?
If it does, are you not expected or required, to adhere to or follow them?

 

Mazulu, what evidence do you offer as Proof of the statement above?

Mazulu, what evidence do you offer as Proof of the existence of this "soul" of which you speak?

Mazulu, what evidence do you offer as Proof that any "drugs do not feed the soul" of this possibly non-existent "soul" of which you speak?

Mazulu, is Dimethyltryptamine a drug?

Mazulu, I truly do not expect any real answers from you, but this might be your chance to at least try to show a semblance of substance!

 

Sure, that is true. I was just comparing the effects. In brief, that is a trick of the human mind.

 

The Universe is an awesome, weird and wonderful place.
Some then see this as requiring some sort of magical deity to explain. There was times when we idolised the Sun, Moon, Mountains, Rivers etc as semblances of these Gods.
Then along came science. It showed the natural workings of the Universe and the why's and how's, and showed that weather, tides, even the Sun and Moon, all could be explained without the need to invoke any deity. In fact at this time, the need for that deity has been pushed back at least to the BB. This along with evolution has been accepted by the Catholic Church.
Science cannot prove that this omnipotent magical being does or does not exist, but it can show its not needed.

But while science continues to push back the realms of darkness and searches for evidence of the how, why and when of the BB, others blindly and without thinking automatically put the BB down to the work of this mysterious God.
Until science can answer the remaining questions, the need for a deity to some, will always be necessary.

With the bar room brawls on this forum about the existence or otherwise of this deity, I prefer to remain as an observer, and concentrate my efforts in refuting the nonsense that some espouse here, like the conspiracy ratbag pushers, the pseudoscience brigade and those with that anti mainstream attitude for the sake of being anti mainstream and no other reason.

 

The main reason religion discussion might appear to be waste of time, is the discussion always degenerates to denial, name calling and insults instead of staying focused on the subject of religion. It would be like starting a topic in physics, but never getting past the presentation of an equation before everyone is insulting you just for presenting an equation. Nothing is learned which is the intent of atheism. If anything positive was to appear, it would contradict the unscientific bias against religion that pitch 0% tolerance.

I look at religion, like it or not, playing a role in shaping humanity from the beginning of civilization. At the very least a history discussion would be scientific if it was objective and not focused on negative data stacking.

From the POV of psychology, how was it possible for Christianity to have survived, with so much bias, torture and death in the first hundred years, at the hands of the early atheists and pagans?

 

@wellwisher

So...were these "atheists" just standing around with nothing to do while waiting for the first "theists" to show up so they could bring on "so much bias, torture and death in the first hundred years"?

So...did these "atheists" also produce "so much bias, torture and death in the first hundred years" of the pagan "theists" early history?

So...wellwisher , being that the title of this Thread is : "Discussing religion is literally a waste of time and energy", is the Posting of unsubstantiated "facts" and conjecture your attempt to PROVE the statement : "Discussing religion is literally a waste of time and energy" ?!

wellwisher, I am only asking questions, being that I am neither a "theist" nor an "atheist" - one could probably say that I "don't have a dog in this fight"!
My point is : judging by the lack of any true evidenced offered so far in this thread, there isn't much fight in these dogs!

 

So to you, good people should not fight what they see as evil. Tsk, tsk. Your senmse of social conscience seems underdeveloped.

It is my view that all right wing literalists and fundamentals hurt all of us who are moral religionists, --- as well as those who do not believe. Literalists hurt their parent religions --- and everyone else, be he a believer or not. Literalists and the right wing of religions make us all into laughing stocks. Their God of talking animals, genocidal floods and retribution has got to go. So must beliefs in fantasy, miracles and magic. These are all evil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HKHaClUCw4&feature=PlayList&p=5123864A5243470E&index=0&playnext=1

They also do much harm to their own.

African witches and Jesus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlRG9gXriVI&feature=related

Jesus Camp 1of 9
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=48b_1185215493

Death to Gays.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMw2Zg_BVzw&feature=related

For evil to grow my friends, all good people need do is nothing.
Fight them when you can. It is your duty to our fellow man.

Regards
DL