What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Aye. People always mention Mother Theresa as an example of unquestionable goodness. Uh, no. Yeah, she did a bang-up job of feeding the hungry and comforting the sick, but by forbidding family planning, birth control, or (especially) abortions, she worked to ensure that there would be poor, poverty-stricken starving people forever. In other words, one hand was taking care of the symptom but the other was making the disease worse.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Breading cocker spaniels could get me in trouble with all those SPCA people. On the other hand, corn dogs must come from somewhere...


Tom

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

I was thinking more along the lines of an adapted breaded chicken recipe.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Or more likely, just don't want to be lumped in with the atheists and theists that are convinced they know that which they don't know.

A true agnostic believes that it is not knowable whether a god exists or not. I'm an empirical agnostic. If there is a god and she want's me to know of her existence, she has the ability to let me know she exists. I'm not holding my breath.

I'm also not the least concerned that man made constructs designed to control behavior such as hell exist.

 

What about the possibility that god is a man-made construct? Why is the burden of proof on the atheist, not the theist? There's a difference between "I'll believe it if and when I see it" and "That's so bizarre and contrived it can't possibly be true".

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Because the atheist is the only one for whom proof matters. Believers base their belief on faith and dismiss attempts at proof as a failure of faith. That isn't merely ignornant, it's burying your head in the sand of ignorance and buying more sand.

Agnosticism at least keeps out of the sand market. But it does have a problem: it declares uncertainty only with a very narrow and specific definition when compared to the infinite range of what's possible. As Burritos alludes a few posts back, there are no easter bunny agnostics (older than 12). The agnostic says he's not sure there's a god or not, but he's sure whatever that god is it isn't a galactic consortium of hyper-intelligent aliens, or anything else that can be discerned by science.

The agnostic is therefore actually mostly atheist, certain that 99.9999999999% of an infinity of possibilities can't be and reserving judgement on only an infinitesimal jot of somebody else's fancy.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

We humans are just DOS command boxes who think we're in total control of the whole computer, but in fact we're just little applets running within the confines of Windows. Why do you think we're important enough that Windows have to let us know of her existance when she can trick us to think we know and control everything? I'm sure a DOS box would go nuts spewing out error messages if Windows tells him that he's not really himself!

Man made constructs designed to control behaviour do exist. Ever heard of jails? How about discrimination, or ideologies that systematically create and maintain social classes? Aren't these man made constructs that rivals hell?

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Hedging, my patootie. I can say for certain there is no such thing as Hell. However, I have no idea what happens when one dies. Anyone who says they definitely do what happens is an fool. Admittedly, probably nothing happens, that's it, game over, you're worm food. However, if you say you definitely know that's what happens and...well, see the third sentence.

 

faith is faith, and proof is proof. faith is not proof, and proof is not faith. you simply cannot apply the characteristics of proof to faith. saying you have no faith because you can't prove it is ridiculous. by definition, faith is un-provable. it's called faith because we can't prove it.

it's really interesting how some of the athiests feel they know better and can tell people of faith that they are wrong, when in reality, athiests cannot prove that God is a myth. They have a belief (or faith) that God is fictional even though they can't really prove that. It wreaks of hypocrisy. I don't tell athiests that they are wrong for not having faith. Athiests should not tell me I'm wrong for having it because when the cards are on the table, they don't know any better than I. It's simply a matter of faith.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

That's another difference between Atheists and Agnostics. I'm not saying Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc. are wrong. I'm saying they're probably wrong. Atheists are probably wrong, too. Which is why I use the word "fool" instead of, say, "idiot". Theists and atheists are not idiots just because they believe in their particular god or gods (or lack thereof). Yes, their are Christian idiots (that almost-Koran-burning guy), Muslim idiots (anyone who straps explosives to themselves), Jewish idiots (anyone setting up a home in the West Bank), even Atheist idiots (I can't think of an example off the top of my head (Madalyn Murray O'Hair comes dangerously close, but the good she did mitigates her extremism)) - but they'd be idiots no matter what faith (or lack thereof) they were. However, they are fooling themselves in that they think they know the answer when they don't even know the question (ala Douglas Adams).

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

It isn't hypocrisy, it is scientific method and logic. Most things are impossible to prove in the negative. For example, I can't prove that the sun will come up tomorrow. It has every previous day. We understand the fusion cycle powering the sun, and all the evidence suggests that it has many years of life remaining, but still I can't say with certainty that it will be here tomorrow.

I can prove with good certainty that the sun came up today. We have demonstrable evidence in the sky. Things that are easy to demonstrate in the positive are often impossible to prove in the negative.

No logical atheist would ever claim to have proof that god doesn't exist. That would require a proof in the negative. A logical atheist might make the claim that he has never witnessed any evidence suggesting the existence of a god. Lacking that evidence he would be suspicious of any claim suggesting the existence of a god. Presented with real evidence, I suspect most atheists would happily admit that they had been horribly wrong and were now believers. Presented with anything less, most atheists will show skepticism or outright disdain.

Tom

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

Thank god when he was 9 years old my son told me "Don't be silly, DAD!" when I asked him if Santa is real.

He was in a catholic junior school and still he figured it out all by himself. He was then recommended by the school to go into the gifted classes because of his "god gifted" intelligence.

He never went to confirmation and we never visit the church ever since.

Maybe god sent him a mesage to not believe in god any more? If a child could see through all these silly rituals and ceremonies and commercialised icons I don't know why we adults can't.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

I am confident that the Biblical definition of Hell, being under the earth and being all fire and brimstone doesn't exist because that violates several laws of physics. Every theology pretty much falls apart there, too, including Atheism ("The Universe couldn't have been created because that would imply something created it! Since I don't believe anything created the Universe, it doesn't exist. QED.").

When I say someone is probably wrong, it's because there is no way to scientifically measure their statement, but it sounds more faith-based than science-based ("I have faith god {exists|doesn't exist}). In other words, people say "I know that..." when the correct answer is "Nobody can no for sure that...".

Of course, if I personally see the avenging arm of Allah coming down from the sky wielding a scimitar, I'll change my mind.

 

I'd question my sobriety first.

 

see, you guys have proved my point.....you're trying to use proof to prove something that can't be proved, and because you can't prove the un-provable, you're saying it's not real.

it's real simple: if you don't believe in god, fine. but you really have no right to tell the people that do that they are wrong.

 

Re: What's the bigger social opiate, organized sports or organized religion?

They do, however, have the right to ask for demonstrable evidence. Likewise you have the right to ignore their request, but don't expect that to impress them very much.

Tom