What Religion are You?

Post Reply New Topic

Good grief that's mouthful....

Well, I consider myself religious and to me death is the absence of life?

I don't believe in some different kind of life during death: Either you are alive or you don't exist (=death). Life without a body is impossible. And as far as I know we don't have immortal souls.
We are the software (soul) which shapes our hardware (body). We replace the atoms of our body every year, so we're not our atoms but rather the structures and processes. So basically we are a copy of a previous version of ourselves.

When the ancient Hebrews talked about souls they where referring to the concept of individuals with a unique identity and free will.

When the body has died, the person is gone forever unless god chooses to recreate this person.

The great thing about Pastafarians is their rituals. Nothing like the weak sip of a drop of wine and a fragile little round cracker, no sir! The Pastafarians praise their God by eating of his "flesh" from large individual bowls of wonderful al dente spaghetti in generous servings with tomato sauce made with oregano, parmigiana, fried onions, olive oil, and the full rigor of scads of crushed garlic. Their breath alone would send the evil Mac Caroni screaming back to his red hot pizza oven. A sacred sprinkling of marijuana always helps the sauce to donate pleasant visions.

Well, the issue here is what he, not you believe in. The Aesir religion proposes the existance of Loki, even though you as a religious person don't believe in Loki.

BTW, the Moon is completely absent of life. Would you say it has death, even though nothing lived in the first place?

Agnostic

Me too.

I don't know if I put mine in this thread already or not.

All facts are uncertain and tentative. An open mind leaves one prepared to explore and discover more potent ways of approaching the universe without throwing away very useful partial truths.
Ruveyn is completely convinced that there are hard facts in mathematics but, as Einstein noted, math is not reality. To accept it as such is to fall into Plato's error where he assumed the abstractions made through the coordinated results of our very limited sense systems represent a reality truer than what is simply perceived. But math is an exercise in abstract consistencies and these exercises can closely approximate what our senses tell us or wander off into intricate and fascinating fantasies having little or no relationship to our universe.

The generality of agnosticism is not a definite thing, it is a spectrum of probabilities. The bulk of religions with its outstanding panoply of unprovables and immense unlikely inconsistencies that tear the hair out of theologists trying to justify the fantastic nonsense arising from naive misunderstandings of realities is very low on the scale of probability. Atheists who totally deny the possibility of an intelligent creator are much higher in probability but there are still many mysteries to be solved and it is good to be careful about absolutes. The high probability agnostics are so close to atheists as to be practically indistinguishable from them and that seems a good stance for someone to be ready for surprises.

I doubt the math thing posted being that much of relevance to the issue of the existence of anything that haven't been empirically proved, strictly speaking regarding empirical evidence, the mere lack of evidence of the existence of X doesn't strictly deny its existence. In any case I don't see how deductive reasoning to be perfectly accurate to reality as some would likely claim regarding the issue, given that empiricism seems to reject anything without physical experience. I would tend to doubt a claim of mathematical proof especially when a proposition seems biased and the issue of the correlation to an issue seems questionable.

I don't know much about math, before I get a response such as "You don't know math" or similar, the issue is that it seems, correct me if I'm wrong, that there is already a mathematical proof for the string theory, and if there really is, still wouldn't be able to be regarded as factual or truth given the lack of empirical evidence for it.

Perhaps my argument may be flawed, but still I would put such claims into a fair amount of doubt.

I've always thought of buddhism as much more a philosophy than a religion, as it's possible to be an atheist, agnostic, polytheist, or monotheist as one, I believe.

Well, it's still a religion nonetheless, even though it's believers may disagree on things.

There are no facts in mathematics. The objects of mathematics are abstractions and have no literal existence in the physical world. They are just patters on neurons popping in the brains of intelligent beings. Look the whole world over and the number two is not to be found, even though there are many pairs of shoes, socks and hands.

Of course this leaves some questions. If mathematics is Unreal, why is it so helpful and necessary to do physics? Good question and there is yet to be an equally good answer.

See:
http://www.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/file ... wigner.pdf

This is a very insightful essay on the question. Wigner does not give a solid answer to the question (no one has, so far) but he gives some very good insights.

ruveyn

Fine. No problem.

You said, flat out, in an unqualified manner that a negative cannot be proven. You are wrong. I have given several counterexamples which show how wrong you are.

In physics, Newton's law of gravitation has been disproved empirically. How? Newton's Law incorrectly predicts the motion of planets. This was first shown in connection with Mercury.

The Michelson-Morley experiment and its negative output clearly shows that a visco-elastic mechanical aether that carries light through space does not exist. All later version of the MMX further verify the negative result of the original. No aether. Period. If aether exists then the earth does not move in space. This is clearly counterfactual. Space is not filled with some super-stiff gelatinous goo that miraculously does not impede the motion of the planets about the sun.

Prove of negatives and disproof of positives is routine in mathematics and physics.

ruveyn

^
^Ok...time to kiss and make up you two...

Last edited by MissConstrue on 21 Aug 2009, 8:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

Okay. What's your proof that God does not exist.

Which god?

If you mean a god who is able to do anything, then a contradiction follows. Such a god could make a stone so big he could not move it. And if he could not make such a stone, then he is not omnipotent. So we have eliminated omnipotence as a characteristic of god.

The sure fire way of proving a negative is either through logical contradiction, or contradiction by a known particular. If the assumption X exists leads to a contradiction, then X does not exist. If the assumption X exists leads to the denial of a known fact, then X does not exist.

ruveyn