They're Marching Against God - Your .02
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From: Santa Clara
Actually
The number of Americans who have identified themselves as "having no religion" is a whopping 18%. Source, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), Feb 2001.
A recent Gallup poll in January 2002 showed the following results:
- About 50% consider themselves religious (down from 54% in 1999-DEC)
- About 33% consider themselves "spiritual but not religious" (up from 30%)
- About 10% regard themselves as neither spiritual or religious.
Like it or not, there are more of us non-religious folks than there are people in all but the largest religious denominations. Like it or not, "godlessness" is not some passing fad, or some tiny group of repressed Americans trying to portray itself as being large -- it's a huge group of Americans. The lack of organization, see, is the reason it's not noticed so much.
- Warren
The number of Americans who have identified themselves as "having no religion" is a whopping 18%. Source, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), Feb 2001.
A recent Gallup poll in January 2002 showed the following results:
- About 50% consider themselves religious (down from 54% in 1999-DEC)
- About 33% consider themselves "spiritual but not religious" (up from 30%)
- About 10% regard themselves as neither spiritual or religious.
Like it or not, there are more of us non-religious folks than there are people in all but the largest religious denominations. Like it or not, "godlessness" is not some passing fad, or some tiny group of repressed Americans trying to portray itself as being large -- it's a huge group of Americans. The lack of organization, see, is the reason it's not noticed so much.
- Warren
It's is still possible that those occurences could be explained by science in the future or maybe science will prove religion is right.
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From: Yorba Linda, CA
I suspect that most atheists--and agnostics--would argue in favor of free will: that they have the ability to decide what they will think and what they will not.
Thinking, at the biological level, is a deterministic process: when the electrical charge in a neuron exceeds a threshhold the neuron fires, and when the charge doesn't, it doesn't. This is all caused neurotransmittors and neuroreceptors, but it is fundamentally deterministic: the state of all of the atoms in the universe at a given instant determines what happens in the next instant, and the next, and so on ad infinitum. This is inconsistent with the idea of free will.
I'm not arguing either way, nor am I trying to spur an argument either way. This is just something interesting to think about.
(Of course, the biochemists would argue that I was destined to write this . . . .
)
Thinking, at the biological level, is a deterministic process: when the electrical charge in a neuron exceeds a threshhold the neuron fires, and when the charge doesn't, it doesn't. This is all caused neurotransmittors and neuroreceptors, but it is fundamentally deterministic: the state of all of the atoms in the universe at a given instant determines what happens in the next instant, and the next, and so on ad infinitum. This is inconsistent with the idea of free will.
I'm not arguing either way, nor am I trying to spur an argument either way. This is just something interesting to think about.
(Of course, the biochemists would argue that I was destined to write this . . . .
)
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Originally posted by StrangeDaze
So can I tell my religious friends who stick to non-intercourse "sex" to avoid doing something wrong, that sticking to oral sex and excluding that which is mutually satisfying or reproductive is actually wrong and that they *should* be having regular intercourse???
So can I tell my religious friends who stick to non-intercourse "sex" to avoid doing something wrong, that sticking to oral sex and excluding that which is mutually satisfying or reproductive is actually wrong and that they *should* be having regular intercourse???
I'm assuming you're being funny, but I'll answer fully just in case you're not.
The Bible says that it is good for a man not to touch a woman, period. However, it says that if a man must touch a woman (or vice versa), they are to marry to keep from burning (going to hell). In other words, sexually touching without actual intercourse is practically the same as intercourse since it generally leads to intercourse before marriage. God doesn't only look at actions, He looks at motives and objectives. If you touch a girl (or vice versa) in a sexual way, even if it's running your fingers along her hand or something "small' like that, it's the same as sex because that's what you're either a) hoping for or b) thinking of.
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From: Santa Clara
magician,
No. Thinking is not deterministic because real particles are not deterministic. At small scales, "particles" like electrons are not deterministic at all. Quantum mechanics, in fact, forces them into indeterminism. The concept that the entire future of the universe could be solved by simply knowing the position and velocity of all the particles in the universe at the current time was coined by Descartes, and is now known to be extraordinarily wrong. If you'd like to know more, just ask.
I have to agree with your sentiment, though, that people are simply finite-state automata (if you ignore the "window dressing" of the indeterminism of quantum mechanics). I have previously held the belief that free will (and consciousness, its cousin) is just an illusion -- but it is entirely possible that quantum uncertainties have given us the gift of non-deterministic thought. We don't currently know the extent of the dependence of our thoughts on the quantum behavior of particles.
- Warren
No. Thinking is not deterministic because real particles are not deterministic. At small scales, "particles" like electrons are not deterministic at all. Quantum mechanics, in fact, forces them into indeterminism. The concept that the entire future of the universe could be solved by simply knowing the position and velocity of all the particles in the universe at the current time was coined by Descartes, and is now known to be extraordinarily wrong. If you'd like to know more, just ask.
I have to agree with your sentiment, though, that people are simply finite-state automata (if you ignore the "window dressing" of the indeterminism of quantum mechanics). I have previously held the belief that free will (and consciousness, its cousin) is just an illusion -- but it is entirely possible that quantum uncertainties have given us the gift of non-deterministic thought. We don't currently know the extent of the dependence of our thoughts on the quantum behavior of particles.
- Warren
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From: Yorba Linda, CA
Originally posted by chroot
We don't currently know the extent of the dependence of our thoughts on the quantum behavior of particles.
We don't currently know the extent of the dependence of our thoughts on the quantum behavior of particles.
(Quantum mechanics--the Heisenburg (sp?) Uncertainty Principle--is a difficult subject under the best of circumstances, and this forum hardly qualifies as the place to try to teach it. That's why I chose to omit if from my post. I'm glad that you saw through to the gist.)