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In reply to this comment by bigbikeman:
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Christianity is a well-designed Chinese finger trap for the mind. As you get closer to proving your side of the argument and disproving something said in the Bible, they fall back on "the devil makes us question the Bible so I can never do that." Modern religions are built to resist competing ideologies, whereas old polytheistic beliefs were pretty simplistically presenting a theory of how the world works and how to survive in it. That's why it's futile trying to attack their core beliefs. It's like attacking a knight on his shield, it's the most defended target.

As ReverendTed said, the Bible doesn't directly contradict evolution. In my experience, it seems like a large percentage of Christians presently believe that god "set in motion" his creations via evolution, rather than making them directly from nothing, and that the Adam and Eve creation story is a parable. That's how I understood it, and I went to Catholic school for 12 years. The recent anti-evolution wave was more a cultural phenomenon than a religious one.

I think there's no point in proselytizing nonbelief. Defending your rights, ensuring your children get real education in school and not indoctrination--there's definitely a point to that, and that's when atheism is at its strongest. But going on the offensive against basic religious belief is counterproductive and creates more conflict.

>> ^chilaxe:
I'm all for statistics being respected even if they're considered undesirable - because otherwise what we're doing isn't science


I agree that it shouldn't be taboo just to tabulate those kinds of statistics that Cohen presents. The focus should be more on his bad science than his undesirable hypotheses.

Religion certainly isn't a "constant" underlying current. There are many wars with no religious aspect to them at all. I also disagree that it drives wars. Religious or moral justification comes after the real impetus for armed conflict. The wiki entry on war has some interesting theories on the motivations for war.

Any ideology is a way to unite or divide people, and any small difference in ideology can be made gigantic when the environment is staged for conflict.

>> ^gwiz665

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find evidence in history of a war caused by religion. I've looked (hint: not the Crusades). Athenians fought Spartans, Americans fought Americans, Hutus murdered Tutsis. War does just fine without religion.

Consciousness as an illusion is a bit of a fallacy. The primary function of consciousness is awareness, and awareness is fundamentally impossible to prove or disprove from an outside observation. Science will undoubtedly change how we think of our consciousness as we learn more about our brains, but the core phenomena of "something instead of nothing" from our internal perspective is inexplicable.

Consciousness as a "user" illusion seems to posit that there is a unique, independant user/observer for each of our brains, something like souls.

I wouldn't make the leap that because we are conscious, we have immortal souls. But if I came from nothing, then some essence of me survives when I return to nothing. As Chuang-tzu says:

"Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end. There is existence without limitation; there is continuity without a starting point. Existence without limitation is space. Continuity without a starting point is time."

"But if you reorient people without touching the environment, it'll slip back."

This is why a religionless Middle East would still be bloody. It's the environment that engenders extremism and violence--the poverty, desperation, and segregation. Incidentally, those things are all present in India but somehow their culture and religion keeps everything on an even keel (as far as I can tell).

I don't quite agree that information can eliminate superstition. Well maybe I agree with the principle, but it will never be eliminated because there are always events that seem random to our brains, and ways to misinterpret that data. There's a limit to one's knowledge, but information is limitless, so there is always a disparity.

>> ^rougy:
I'm sort of a Taoist/Buddhist/Christian. Catholic by birth

Whoa I'm one of those too.

I think the big loser in the atheism vs religion debate is philosophy. Atheists are usually deeper thinkers, but when they talk about religion, the water gets shallow quickly, and religion is nothing but a brain virus that wreaks evil.

If you look at it objectively, religion exists and persists because of some survival benefits it granted. People together are powerful, but like a herd of cattle, they never realize what they could do if they worked together. Religion is the dark age's solution to that problem; it removes much of the hassle of organizing groups. When hierarchy was ordained by a divine power, there's much less debate and less time and energy wasted on deciding who rules whom, and how. It not only guided people as a group, but individually, it could remove stresses and preoccupations we'd otherwise have--to remove even our fear of death. It often misfired or was used in a negative way, but that's true of any other tool we've invented. Scapegoating religion for humanity's dark side is pointless and false.

There's real work to be done on how to maintain some of those beneficial aspects of religion without religion, or even improve on them. Just removing religion doesn't solve anything. If the problems religion addresses were solved in another way, religion would disappear. Removing religion shouldn't even be atheism's goal; it should be to reduce conflict and improve quality of life, whether or not religion is involved. Of course you wouldn't call it "atheism" then, you'd just call it "the right thing to do."

intolerant:

1 : unable or unwilling to endure
2 a : unwilling to grant equal freedom of expression especially in religious matters
2 b : unwilling to grant or share social, political, or professional rights : bigoted

In other words, something an objective person should avoid. If we outgrow religion but still believe in "eye for an eye," we haven't really grown at all.

"The idea that the truth of God can be bound by any system, by any human creed, by any human book, is almost beyond imagination for me."

"The Way that can be named is not the true Way."

He's actually a Taoist (not that that means anything, as he points out).

There are lots of unique examples of altruism in nature, but not every animal or living thing displays altruism. The only ones that display altruism do so because it benefits the species in the long run. Just because altruism can exist without manmade laws doesn't mean it always does.

If you took a step farther back, you would see that religion and laws are a part of nature in the sense that they're a part of culture, and we require culture to survive. Of course that's very different than saying any of the religions are right.

It's more strange to suggest that religion was unnecessary for our survival. If it wasn't necessary, it would not have existed (and persisted). Whether it's necessary for our future survival is another topic. It's not yet as vestigial as our tailbones, and in any case, it needs to shrink naturally just as our tailbones did while we adapt to its absence.

One of the only fantasy RPG conventions not included in Dragon Age is the thing about freedom--an open world to explore, where the main quest can get eclipsed by the much more interesting side quests. This was present in Oblivion, Morrowind, and the Baldur's Gate series, so I'm surprised no one's really commented on it. Dragon Age is incredibly focused on the main plot, which makes the few side quests totally out of place, such as helping an elf win over a girl he likes (while the horde of baddies just wiped out a neighboring town).

The physical area of the game seems tiny. There are less than 10 major areas to visit, and two of the towns I've seen so far have something like 10 buildings in them and 20 or so NPCs. It feels like I'm walking through Disney World. Within these small areas, you're always hemmed in to a single path much like the Final Fantasy series. While exploring a forest, you're stuck on the trails. What's so hard about making an open zone? Baldur's Gate 1 did it just fine.

The only way I can start to understand this game's appeal is by thinking back to Mass Effect, because I really enjoyed that game and the formula seems identical. I think the difference is originality and the script. Mass Effect was an original story (at least to me and most gamers) and the cutscenes were almost TV-worthy, whereas Dragon Age's story is familiar to just about everyone and is executed poorly.

Yeah I had high hopes from the video title but this seemed like the least riot-worthy tasering I've ever seen.

Looks like he lined up over the Hudson as a precaution while they did troubleshooting. I've read a lot of airplane crash accounts and there were cases where they should've considered the worst possible outcome right away rather than try to fix their problem and resume normal flight.

The first part is absolutely my favorite MP scene, with the strangely hippie navy crew and the slowly-turning-pirate news anchor, it's like a sketch comedy symphony.