The Unfan

I might understand it if it made some reasonable sense as opposed to a chain of irrational beings doing irrational things in places that aren't realistic.

Trauma

But that's exactly what I'm saying might be, except god's medium is reality, and our's is just a distorted copy of that, warped by its imagination, a personalised reflection of something in some other place in which we can't begin to ever define the rules.

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A mi no me importa nada
Para mi la vida es un sueño

The Unfan

CAPTAIN AWESOME THE MIGHTIEST SUPER HERO EVER WILL SAVE THE DAY.

DontRunMeOver

Science is largely a type of religion. Sciences like geology, anatomy and whatever you call the study of crystals might be largely based on empirical data that we can observe (in other words, facts) but the more 'fundamental' sciences of physics and chemistry mostly revolve around concepts like atoms, electrons, wave-particle duality, energy levels and interpretation of spectra and analytical reactions which are actually very abstract and probably not very close to the truth at all. These sciences are based on models, not 'realities' or 'facts'. They are simplifications of what is actually going on concieved so that humans can try to understand it and can attempt to use the models to achieve what they want.

In order to practise science you have to have faith in the models, the 'assumptions' of which could just as easily be called 'beliefs'... this can involve believing that the models are actually realistic accounts of what is going on, or accepting that they aren't actually correct but that they can give guidelines which you can follow to do what you need to do.

So in my opinion science is itself a religion. It's not necessarily exclusive of the other religions but it certainly gets a lot more done.

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beat yr own KID

Science is not like religion. Religion = based on faith and hope. Science = based on logic and tests. A scientist isn't gonna say ANYTHING is fact until, using logic, has answered every rational question about it.

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I was dead. This was hell. There were no demons, no hellfire or brimstone, just a deep, complete feeling of darkness and hopelessness. This was the never-ending void. Not at all how I had imagined it, but worse than I thought that it could have been.

Voodoo Chile

Science is only right until it's proven wrong years later. It was once a "scientific fact" that the Earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it. Sounds pretty stupid now, doesn't it? And a hundred years from now, people are going to look back at our "scientific facts" and think that we were idiots for ever believing them. So really, science may as well be a religion. You're putting your faith in a mere human in a lab coat. A scientific test doesn't conclusively prove anything, it's just a theory that'll most likely be "disproven" later on by another theory, which'll be "disproven" later on by another theory, and so on. Science, religion, it's all just theories.

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Free your mind and your ass will follow.
The kingdom of heaven is within.

beat yr own KID

They're not the same. At all. There is a big difference between someone trying to figure out fact and someone beliving a being in the sky did it. Unlike in religion, science does have some facts. Are you going to deny gravity? Science has pretty much proven that as fact. Or that everything is comprised of atoms? So yeah, I do put more "faith" in a guy in a lab coat. Unlike a god, he's shown some actual results.

__________________
I was dead. This was hell. There were no demons, no hellfire or brimstone, just a deep, complete feeling of darkness and hopelessness. This was the never-ending void. Not at all how I had imagined it, but worse than I thought that it could have been.

Trauma

Not what I'm saying.

How about this: ignorant teenage boy with tons of bravado preaching about the non-existence of God on an internet forum to show credibility for his cynical "free-thinking, wanna be new age revolutionary" theories contradicting any study of theology ever conducted in the past two millenia.

__________________
A mi no me importa nada
Para mi la vida es un sueño

tdoc210

I never understood how people could beleive in a "god".
why would you want to think something is higher than you?
I don't, im not going to outright deride a whole group of people
but i think that to serve in a religion you are submitting to the fact that you are a slave to something you can't see, be the papists, or Buddhists there's always a doctrine to follow.
I like to think of religious documents, well specifically the Christian, texts a pretentious child's tale, ie to make them not scared of death. Fact of the matter is, you die, and your body is recycled into the ground.

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We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that.

cardboard adolescent

Okay, the idea that the sun revolved around the earth was never a scientific fact, that was an Aristotlean idea which became intertwined with the Catholic church and was therefore never challenged, until Galileo and Copernicus. I can't say what Aristotle based his idea on, certainly not any sort of scientific method, but it's pretty obvious why the church embraced it. Nowadays, scientific facts are based on experiment and observation, in all the sciences, from physics to geology. In my opinion, there's no difference between observing particles in a cloud chamber and looking at something under a microscope. Our understanding of the universe is no means absolute, but what we do know we know with a great deal of certainty, and isn't likely to be disproven. Most of the theories we hold true will probably be expanded upon, and shown to have a great deal more depth than we previously imagined, but they're unlikely to ever be thrown out the window.

Earth = center --> sun = center : result of aristotle and church, neither of whom used anything resembling scientific method
Newtonian mechanics ---> general relativity ---> quantum mechanics : expansion of knowledge. newtonian mechanics still apply and are true, there's just more depth.