I’m partial to “The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine”
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
– Gilbert and Sullivan, The MikadoThere’s absolutely a handful of figures – all well known, all active in politics or business, all gladly engaging in behaviors that cause mass harm and sometimes death – that I might be inclined to try to
murderassassinate. (Once you’re that famous, its assumed you have enemies who want to kill you, even if you’re just famous for being a Beatle and writing pop songs.)I’m not sure I could pull the trigger, having ever killed anyone, but I and many many others have motive good enough for the courts, regardless of who actually kills them.
But yeah, even if I had a really, really good rifle and training to use it (or a hit-man glad to do it for me) it would be an act of desperation. I would not fault a starving man for stealing food, and would applaud a mother swiping medicine for her kids.
My mores drive me, instead, to remove these people from their positions of power without causing them harm, or even better, to reform them ( by way of Inception maybe) so that they conduct themselves with empathy and awareness of all the harm they might cause by their actions. But when we don’t have the capacity to do that, and they continue to cause harm, the knife in the night whispers.
Do the people asking that question just conveniently ignore the fact that religious leaders rape children like it’s going out of style?
Immunity to cognitive dissonance is a requirement to believe in religion.
While the quote presents a correct conclusion, it’s also problematic in that it makes a slip of logic and paints a target for fallacious rebuttal.
- The slip of logic: one cannot conclude that no gods exist because all religions are clearly wrong – all that tells us is that none of the specific gods depicted by these religions exist. The path to disprove the existence of ALL gods must go through philosophy instead;
- Painted target: by juxtaposing science and religion, he invites the religious nuts to perceive and treat both things as belonging to the same class of intellectual activity, i.e. the “you have your opinion and I have mine” crowd.
Scientifically, we’d have to carry out the scenario of erasing the religions to see if the hypothesis is true. But how would we compare if they were erased?
The trick is that you don’t actually need to do it, as we already have the functional equivalent analogue – the development of countless different religions in the past, in different regions of the globe – as evidence. If at least one of these religions were right, you would’ve expected it to show up in at least more than one region in the past, but we can clearly trace all similar religions to patterns of human migration, which strongly suggests humans created all of them out of their cultural beliefs at the time
Is this the same dude that did a whole episode of a tv show about how second hand smoke isn’t bad for you?
Almost, they did half an episode of Bullshit about second hand smoke.
On the topic, Bullshit was weird show, using Penn and Teller to make a show about disproving pseudo science and outright bullshit, and then also trying to disprove perfectly resonable stuff.
It did make me trust public restrooms more though, but I wasn’t a fan of their endangered species episode. Turns out they were right about recycling but that’s just kind of sad.
To be fair, they wanted to do a Bullshit Bullshit show to correct the record, but were told no.
It’s a pretty smooth brain take because the core ideas of religion are just about universal. Those core ideas would be re-derived. It’s the details and names that vary. You could describe religion as a connectedness to, and humbleness before the mystery of, the universe
What I’m saying is that nobody knows how any of this works. Maybe we are in a simulation and there is a literal being overseeing us. Logical positivism & reductionist materialism have long been disproven by Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem & quantum uncertainty. We do not know what’s going on. Athiest people who claim they definitely know how the universe works are just as bad as fundamentalists. It’s the same mistake of overconfidence
“a connectedness to, and humbleness before the mystery of, the universe”
This is the same rationale Stephen Colbert used when debating Ricky Gervais making the same point above. Yes, similar ideas may come back and people may invent new deities to direct this emotional response towards as humans have done in the past, but it is not observable and/or measurable fact. There is no evidence that any of these created deities are real, but the science of human behaviours in such a experiment may show that humans will always create religions to deal with the overwhelming response of appreciating the improbable notion that your conscious self exists.
Athiest people who claim they definitely know how the universe works
The thing is that atheists don’t do that. They are aware how science works and that what we consider to be true is only the current best approximation.
disproven by Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem
I don’t know much about most of the fancy words you’re throwing around. But I do know that the Incompleteness Theorem only states that statements can exist that you can neither prove nor deny. We could assume that a deity exists that chooses to hide its existence. This assumption would be such an independent axiom. If we take it to be true, however, then it is subject to reasoning, and we can quickly derive that this deity does not have the properties we usually associate with it. So while a deity may exist, it certainly isn’t the one we’re picturing, from which “God doesn‘t exist” follows necessarily.
It’s also worth noting that Gödel was talking about an axiomatization of mathematics, not the ‘real world.’
What core ideas are there in the big religions?
Besides the oppression of subserviente women and the hatred of homosexuals?
