Do you believe in God ?

Thank you @Ted Varrick .

Does one need a Police Clearance to be Austraian of the Year? It could be a little embarassing for all concerned if I make the honour roll.

 

Not at all embarrassing, given some recently elected Members of Parliament.

 

No flanno permitted on the podium AFAIK

Linky; if Noah was Jewish, why did he have a son called Ham?

 

I'm a big fan of Odin

 

Lol, you're missing the "n" mate

 

Judaism had not been invented at the time of Noah so he didn't know?

Judaism was founded around 2,000 years BC. (1)

The flood is estimated to have been around 2350 BC, before Judaism was founded.

That reminds me of that One Nation candidate who said:

"2 per cent of Australians ''follow haram''.

She also advocates a ban on halal food but said similar dietary guidelines for followers of Judaism, known as kosher, were permissible because ''Jews follow Jesus Christ''.

''Jews aren't under haram, they have their own religion which follows Jesus Christ,'' she said. ''They don't have a tax on [kosher], they've just got a certain way of making it where haram has a tax on the food.'' (2)​

I saw that interview live. It nearly made my brain explode!

(1) Judaism Origins, Judaism History, Judaism Beliefs
(2) http://www.smh.com.au/federal-polit...ter-gaffe-in-tv-interview-20130808-2rive.html

 

I am surprised no one mentioned Terminus, the god of property / land boundaries Terminus (god) - Wikipedia Feb 23 marks a celebration day in his honour .

 

I used to but now agnostic.

 

Do you believe in god?
I would expect most investors to have similar answers

 

Methinks worshipping Terminus is a bit of a dead end.

 

The problem is when opinion starts to get the same weight as evidence. Not everyone's opinion is equal on all topics, and "discussing" something is often not worth it. But by all means, submit articles for peer review.

Cheers,
Inertia.

 

I don't think I realised how politicised (by religion, government, industry, and even by the scientific community themselves) science was until I read a couple of books by Dava Sobel - Longitude (one of my all time favourite reads) and Galileo's Daughter.

While it did tarnish my opinion of what I thought was a field full of facts, what it also showed was that scientific method wins in the end. It is also good to remember that scientific theories are usually phrased with a statistical confidence. There is always room for improvement and deeper understanding.

cheers,
inertia.

 

Yeah, not in my case. I will give you an example. I wanted to discuss radiocarbon dating. Not because I think it is wrong or because I have a better theory. I only wanted to discuss it to understand it better. My tutor would not permit the discussion. When a science student is not permitted to discuss science to understand science better, that is wrong. We were told to accept it without understanding it. That's not science, that is religion

 

Question 1: On topic scene from Pulp Fiction. Discuss.

 

OK, purely a personal view based on my own experience...

There is, I think, a fundamental difference between science and spiritual experience that has been the cause for a lot of misunderstanding: While science looks objectively at the external world, spirituality dwells subjectively within the inner being.

Not only is the field of experience different but also the purpose, the approach, methods and what’s taken as “real”. What works with one doesn’t necessarily work with the other.

Just a small example but full of consequences if you think about it: Language is essential for science to be expressed and develop, but in many spiritual traditions it is the absence of language – silence – that is the key to insight. Being unitive in nature, a spiritual experience tends to degrade as soon as you try to put it into words considering how dualistic our language can be.

Spirituality-speak can therefore appear awkward, ambiguous and deeply unsatisfactory to the scientific mind. Not only that, because it describes so badly the reality inside it carries a high risk of being misconstrued by people only attuned to the world outside. Even with the use by many religions of “soft” discourse such as parables, allegories or analogies the risk is still pretty high.

It’s very much like trying to describe the colour red to someone who has always lived in a world without colours. Whatever explanation you may come up with it’s going to be misleading to them. If you say red is a real hot colour they may well take it literally and quickly withdraw their hands from it. Then you say, don’t be scared, only fire will burn you and it is yellow, they’ll get even more confused! To take words literally is generally a sign of a disconnect that will only disappear when they can see with their own eyes.

This is not to say that the inner world hasn’t got its lot of fallacies or that a rigorous mind is not necessary when dealing with spirituality, it just means that to interpret a subjective experience such as intuition, creativity or mysticism with a reasoning, discursive mind is fraught with danger. Now, the reverse is also true, there is much harm in dealing subjectively with scientific facts!

That being said, I think it’s been unwise for religions to try to explain the material universe. It doesn’t add anything to your inner experience and you won’t find truly spiritual people willing to argue about it.

 

Either way, there are two options. Athiests are the biggest cowards of all and of course religeon followers are the biggest fools if there is no God. People like to talk about morality but in the absence of God, there is only survival of the fittest and we know that survival of the fittest is ultimatley kill or be killed. So any moral standard implicated by someone from an athiestic position can not be transposed onto any one else other than themselves because any moral standard they create is a LIE, not based on the reality of their belief. Do I believe in God. I certainly do. Philosophically speaking, of course my belief could be total crap based on a lie. Personally for me If I was sure no God existed then I would teach my children to lie, cheat, steal and do anything else that gave them an advantage over other people, why becasue that is what nature does and in the end without God we are only animals.

 

Absolute rubbish.