Einstein Letter Critical of Religion To Be Auctioned On EBay 414
cheesecake23 writes "In an admirably concise piece in The Atlantic, Rebecca J. Rosen summarizes Einstein's subtle views on religion and profound respect for the inexplicable, along with the news that a letter handwritten by the legendary scientist that describes the Bible as a 'collection of honorable, but still primitive legends' and 'pretty childish' will be auctioned off on eBay over the next two weeks. Bidding will begin at $3 million."
3 million (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:3 million (Score:4, Funny)
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On the other hand, now he 'll be turning in his grave, which beats shaking your head by eh, a long way.
Re:3 million (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fairly certain that were Einstein still alive, he would be shaking his head at such ridiculousness.
I'm fairly certain that Einstein, no longer being alive, now knows more about the existence of God (or not) than all of the people posting comments on his religious views.
Re:3 million (Score:5, Funny)
I suspect he would be writing the squeal.
A horror movie about a giant man-eating pig running amok, frightening townspeople and causing havok?
Church and Einstein (Score:5, Interesting)
Also Einstein said:
"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. . . ."
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."
ORIGINAL SOURCE (you need a paid subscription): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,765103,00.html
ALTERNATIVE SOURCE: http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/12/time-christians-in-germany-during-world-war-ii/
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)
And still - just because you praise an organisation for its stand in a conflict, you don't need to subscribe to her ideology.
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. But if you praise an organization for its stand in a conflict, perhaps you should not be so quick to call for its complete obliteration. Einstein, to my knowledge, never called for the complete elimination of religion. But I'd wager that someone will do just that before this thread falls off the first page.
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you don't subscribe to the ideology of an organisation you don't call for its elimination.
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Uhh, yes, that's true. I never suggested otherwise. But the fact that some atheists don't call the elimination of religion does not mean that no atheists do. As with any belief set, you've got extremists who want to force their views on everyone.
Indeed, just five minutes after you posted, an AC posted to say that our species is better off without religion (going as far to include a Hitler analogy), thus proving me right.
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Funny)
You also don't burn down the stadium of the opponent you play in your next game, if you lose. But you will still have people in your fan crowd demanding exactly that.
My personal stance is quite similar to this one:
Religion is like a penis.
It's fine to have one.
It's fine to be proud of it.
But, please don't pull it out and wave it around in public.
And never ever force it down the throat of my children.
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I was raising what I saw as a major flaw in the reasoning that "religion is OK, just dont bother anyone else with it"-- which is that if you believe your religion to be true, its hard to justify NOT telling someone about it.
Regarding portion of population and religion, I would recommend you check out the various gallup polls on "what people say they believe" versus polls that ask specifics ("do you believe in a personal god"; "whens the last time you opened your holy book", "whens the last time you gathered
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Saying that we would be better off without a religion is not the same as calling for its elimination.
We would be better off without stupid people, but that doesn't mean we should round 'em up.
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Saying that we would be better off without a religion is not the same as calling for its elimination.
We would be better off without stupid people, but that doesn't mean we should round 'em up.
Actually, saying we are better off without religion IS calling for its elimination, just like we are better off without without totalitarianism. We have a long history of trying to get rid of things we are better off without -- polio, smallpox, Marxism, Communism, people who think different than we do, etc. etc.
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Just because you don't subscribe to the ideology of an organisation you don't call for its elimination.
Someone please tell that to The Jews/The Arabs.
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Someone please tell that to the <fundamentalist group de jour>.
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Absolutely. But if you praise an organization for its stand in a conflict, perhaps you should not be so quick to call for its complete obliteration. Einstein, to my knowledge, never called for the complete elimination of religion. But I'd wager that someone will do just that before this thread falls off the first page.
No, but here's a call for the complete elimination of religion from any role in law or government. Huge difference of course, but sadly, that difference will be lost on a great many "true believers".
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Interesting)
Certainely not "Heinlain" or whatever...
"Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre." [atheisme.free.fr]
It's from Jean Meslier (1664-1729), who was... a catholic priest !
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They don't really say that. They say Mussolini made the trains run on time. What they say about Hitler is that the Autobahn system was a great advance.
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll do that right now. As they say, Hitler made the trains run on time, but I still think we're better off without him around.
People have the capacity for decency, with or without superstitions of an all-seeing magician looking over their shoulder. Furthermore, I think it's fair to say the world has been a more perilous place because of organized religion.
There's just no good reason I can think of to keep harmful, vestigial garbage like that around. Our species is better off without it.
Actually, it was Mussolini who made the trains run on time, not Hitler. As for the rest of your post, all of today's morality is based on primitive superstitions (especially if you consider religion a superstition). It is fair to say that without organized religion, the world would be far different than today - for one, it was the monks that preserved all of the ancient texts we have today when most of the civilized world was overrun by the the many hoards. It was the church that developed the structures that we, today, call our judicial system. Same for universities, hospitals and a plethora of other social institutions that until recent times, were taken over by the government.
One cannot simply dismiss the role of religion, both good and bad, in the formation of our modern societies. Whether religion is based on a real deity or is just superstition, does not change the impact it has had. One has only to look at the so called godless societies of the past to envision a world today that would not have had religion. Things like survival of the fittest, subjugation of women, slavery, genocide, infanticide, etc. all would be prevalent. Moral codes that put an end to those all stemmed from societies that believed there was a greater purpose, outside of themselves.
Maybe we don't need those structures anymore today, but to deny that they shaped and influenced what we accept today is like denying the earth revolves around the sun.
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Things like survival of the fittest, subjugation of women, slavery, genocide, infanticide, etc. all would be prevalent. Moral codes that put an end to those all stemmed from societies that believed there was a greater purpose, outside of themselves.
Except for oh say all the societies that institutionalized those bad characteristics because $deity told them so? You should try reading some of those books sometime, there's very little there that sound anything like "all men are created free and equal", most of them are "all other gods are false" "convert the unbelievers" "do as I say and get rewarded, don't do as I say and get punished" - even the post-Jesus book when God wasn't genocidal on Sodoma and Gomorrah and incesticidal by killing all the first b
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As Sique was saying, just because a group does one good thing, you don't have to like or agree with them. (My paraphrasing of his statement.)
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Correct. For instance, the Nazis actually did great things for Germany's economy and national pride.
Except they didn't do great things for Germany's economy. Neither in workers wages nor in GDP.
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And still - just because you praise an organisation for its stand in a conflict, you don't need to subscribe to her ideology.
The ideology behind religions is generally not bad, most teach good behaviour, morals and tolerance as the basis of the religion. For some humans who cannot think for themselves need something to guide them. The problem is those that deliberately misinterpret the teachings to promote their own agenda
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I mostly agree with you, until the point of not thinking by themselves. I am religious, and I do learn science and have a very letftiah libertarian way of thinking, so I dont see how can someone say that I dont think by myself, still I might be blind.
There are some people working an agenda thru religion, but most are really not, they are learning just as any scientist, every day trying to discover a little new thing about what God left us. And you can be surprised by the good things you get to learn when yo
Definition of not thinking for ones self. (Score:3)
I mostly agree with you, until the point of not thinking by themselves. I am religious, and I do learn science and have a very letftiah libertarian way of thinking, so I dont see how can someone say that I dont think by myself, still I might be blind.
Religions can only exist if people accept someone else's story regarding the existence and nature of a mythical being based on no factual evidence whatsoever. People believe in religions because it brings them comfort. But if you accept anything purely on faith and especially if you cannot possibly verify the claims, that is pretty much the definition of not thinking for yourself. You have traded rational and independent thought for comfort. Seems a costly trade to me.
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:4, Insightful)
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The world has never had so little proportion of religious people... Do you think it is getting better aside from technollogy? Even more, do you think it will be better in let's say 100 years? a thousand?
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Interesting)
It is certainly getting safer. The world in 2012 is a less violent, less belligerent place than at any time in recorded history :
http://hnn.us/articles/10-3-11/the-world-is-actually-safer.html [hnn.us]
While there is no concrete reason to think that this won't continue, we have major time of upheaval on the horizon with shrinking food supplied due to global warming, and the impending robotisation of manufacturing which will displace millions of manual workers worldwide.
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The only reason the Church would stand up against nazism was because it was a threat to their control over the populace anyway, so it wasn't for some altruistic stand against nazism, but entirely about self-interest protectionism.
In other words, no matter WHAT the church does, you will never find anything satisfactory about it because you can always come up with some (spurious) ulterior motive for it.
Got it.
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:4, Informative)
"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth."
Einstein was wrong about this one, if it is in fact an authentic Einstein quote. Can someone please verify for me?
The Catholic and Protestant Churches supported both Nazism and Fascism.
On the Protestant side:
European Protestantism bore the fierce impress of Martin Luther, whose 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies was a principal inspiration for Mein Kampf. In addition to his anti-Semitism, Luther was also a fervent authoritarian. Against the Robbing and Murdering Peasants, his vituperative commentary on a contemporary rebellion, contributed to the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Christians and helped to lay the groundwork for an increasingly severe Germo-Christian autocracy.
On the Catholic:
The Lateran Treaty of 1929 was when the Catholic Church threw its full formal support behind Mussolini. Of course, there had been longstanding informal support long before this, but this is the formal document that the Church cannot deny! It is a impossibility to win power in heavily Christian countries like Italy and Germany were in the 1920's without the active support of the church.
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Interestingly, I recently read that when Japan joined the Axis they passed a law forbidding persecuting the Jews in Japan.
Why kill the 1 Jew when you can 1 million chinese? (Score:5, Informative)
The Japanese indeed never went after the Jews, specifically. They did however put civilians from conquered territories into labor camps and had their troops rape women and children for relaxation. Not specifically Jews, just anyone really who they had captured.
They did kill millions of Chinese in their holocaust but their generals were not sickened by a little blood so they never bothered with gas chambers.
Still, I don't think that exactly makes them the nice guys of the axis powers.
Re:Why kill the 1 Jew when you can 1 million chine (Score:5, Informative)
Partly true (Score:5, Interesting)
Urk is a fishing village in Holland known to be part of the bible belt. They were also FIERCE resisters, their fishing vessels carrying many a Jew and downed allied airmen to safety. There reasoning wasn't so much a love of Jews and others they helped to safety but a pigheaded resistance to being told what to do. They knew wrong and right and nazism was wrong, end of story. They were good men, who did do something.
But I wouldn't call them lovers of freedom, just people who when pushed, push back, by instinct. They would also have had nothing to do with mass religion, claiming "protestants" are one group is damn silly. Most consider the people in the next village to be weirdos.
Meanwhile the pope at the time was thought of to be a good man too. He just didn't do anything.
Mussoline and the holocaust were strange bed fellows, it has to be remembered that nazism and facism are not the same thing. And Mussolini was a fascist, not a nazi. He regonized Jews were part of Italy and should be left undisturbed, Jews were members of his party in quite high positions. It is only with the increasing power of Germany that this changed, resulting in Jews being stripped of citizenship rights in 1939.
This was not at all popular with the Italian fascists and the pope even send a strong letter of critism on this. To increasingly appease Hitler, Jews were started to be round up in Italian controlled areas and send to labor camps but Mussonlini until the Italy surrender refused to send them to German controlled extermination camps. The Germans complained that Italy and its territories were becoming a save haven in Europe for Jews.
After Italy surrendered, Mussonlini was freed by the Germans and they took over control over the remaining Italian land and started to put their holocaust plan into action. Italian soldiers who were not captured by Allied forced found themselves improsoned by the Germans, Italy very much became subjegated to full German control and all that entailed.
The role of religion in WW2 is far from clean, but it is not as simple as some Discovery Channel programs would like you to believe.
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Actually I think you're the one that is wrong on that one. And so was I until not so long ago. The main thing that can be said against the Catholic church is that it didn't openly oppose nazism under the war - but they surely opposed them. Read up on Pius XI and XII . Wikipedia is a start.
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http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/paul_23_4.html [secularhumanism.org]
http://www.catholicarrogance.org/Catholic/RC_scandal-3.html [catholicarrogance.org]
http://www.economist.com/blogs/certainideaso [economist.com]
Re:Church and Einstein (Score:5, Informative)
Einstein was wrong about this one, if it is in fact an authentic Einstein quote. Can someone please verify for me?
Here [skeptic.com] is an apparently honest attempt at verification by a math professor who put a lot of effort into sourcing the quote in 2006. He concludes that it is probably not authentic.
HOWEVER, in 2008, a woman brought a series of letters to an episode of Antiques Roadshow [youtube.com]. Apparently her father had also attempted to source the quote. Her father finally received a letter from Einstein himself:
"It's true that I made a statement which corresponds approximately with the text you quoted. I made this statement during the first years of the Nazi regime-- much earlier than 1940-- and my expressions were a little more moderate."
Ever heard the one about the Polish Pope? (Score:3)
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He was a teenager in WWII, and the hitler stuff was mandatory.
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They kept supporting Nazis until the end of the war (at least in Yugoslavia). The church supported 'Home guard' units, which swore loyalty to Hitler.
My Credo. (Score:4, Informative)
My Credo
It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large.
Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own.
I am often troubled by the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings, and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them.
I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.
I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary.
I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism.
Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state.
Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated.
The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.
Einstein - 1932
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Einstein never said that (Score:2)
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Churches form a of counter-government in Western society. Thus in a time of revolution they are one of the few organizations that have the ability to resist. That is not so much an argument for churches as an argument for spreading out the concentration of power in a society. The news media and Universities have both grown stronger since Hitler, but neither really has the ability to act as an independent and alternate government to the same degree.
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The entire hierarchy of the Catholic church, top to bottom, colluded to hide the rape and torture of small children by priests in Ireland only a few years ago. I guarantee said rape and sexual abuse is still going on TODAY in less enlightened places where the church still holds power, and when it is unearthed, it will be covered up as much as possible as well.
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Sources are very important when you talk about controversial history. If you don't cite it please stop spreeding lies and black legends...
Catholic Church saved more than 700000 jews from Nazis:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40300640/ns/world_news-europe/t/popes-praise-pius-dismays-holocaust-survivors
http://www.amazon.com/Pius-XII-Holocaust-Understanding-Controversy/dp/081321081X
Good memories (Score:2)
This reminds me of catholic high school when I quoted Einstein for an assignment in my religion (indoctrination) class as a way of proving that god DID exist. To make my (nonunderstanding) teacher look foolish in front of the rest of the class. Good times.
I dig his definition of "God" (Score:2)
His definition is basically that "God" is the mystery, AKA creating force, of the universe itself. Whether that "force" turns out to be a bearded dude or natural laws is a lower level than the definition.
It's a great wiggle-room definition. Thus, you can be a geek who admires the "glory of God" without having to subscribe to a particular religion or "shape" or sentient-level of creator.
It's the kind of non-committal fuzz that would make Mitt Romney proud ;-)
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It's a great wiggle-room definition. Thus, you can be a geek who admires the "glory of God" without having to subscribe to a particular religion or "shape" or sentient-level of creator.
All definitions of god have a huge amount of wiggle room, AKA incoherence. I always thought of Einstein as a pantheist due to his claim of following the god of Spinoza, perhaps though he would be better characterised as an igtheist [onlinephilosophyclub.com].
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It's the kind of non-committal fuzz that would make Mitt Romney proud ;-)
Careful application of Occams Razor shows that under all that non-committal fuzz is a face-full of self-interest.
"Childish" not in text, Incorrect translation... (Score:3, Informative)
He did not say Childish (Score:5, Informative)
DO NOT LET THIS FALL INTO THE THE WRONG HANDS (Score:5, Insightful)
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DO NOT LET THIS FALL INTO THE HANDS OF RELIGIONSISTS who constantly use out of context quotes by Einstein to "prove" he variously a... fundie, believed
Just remind them of this
http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism [monthlyreview.org]
Re:DO NOT LET THIS FALL INTO THE THE WRONG HANDS (Score:4, Informative)
Who cares what Einstein thought? That he was brilliant in one field doesnt make him an expert in all others; for all that he did he had some well known failings.
Good grief, can we cease with the appeals to authority?
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
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Was it about, Jesus being cross with the Jews?
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
Um, something about Jesus, Jews and a cross, keeps coming to mind.
You must mean the famous joke:
What happens when you drive nails through the hands of the son of a jewish carpenter? He gets very cross...
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:2012 (Score:5, Interesting)
I am no programmer, but i am guessing its very bad code. No good comments, no explanation of what and why. Just like in the real religion!
There two most central lines of the code to understand are these:
The first computes a SHA512 hash of a 111 byte buffer. The second checks if the last 64 bytes of that buffer was actually the hash of the buffer itself. Producing a 111 byte string with that property would require you to either find a security problem in SHA512 or perform a brute force computation which is out of reach even for the best know quantum algorithms. So the theory would be, that only God could produce such an input. I say the existence of a weakness in SHA512 is more likely than the existence of God. Hence even if the program did produce any nontrivial output, it doesn't prove the existence of God.
/dev/random, and repeatedly XORs 111 bytes blocks from there until the result contains a NUL character. Looks like some lame approach to ensure that the contents of the buffer is NUL terminated if it is finally printed out (which is never going to happen anyway).
/dev/random are given by God. I don't feel qualified to attempt an answer to that question, since I am already convinced about the non-existence of God, and hence that question makes little sense to me.
Where does the contents of that buffer come from in the first place? It reads data from
One can ask whether the bytes read from
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The premise is flawed in any case. If there is a God and he is powerful, he could just as well shout in a loud voice from the sky. The program appears designed to detect the presence of a weak god, who is able to influence only small things. If a powerful God refuses to shout from the sky every time some arb asks, why should he then influence the /dev/random pseudo random process? Or the path of one program?
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If there was a god and it was powerful, then humans wouldn't have needed to invent it. And the evidence that humans did invent it is all over every religion.
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Since theists can paint god under whatever light it suits them, nothing can be concluded about it, regardless of philosophies or probabilities. Therefore, the question is irrelevant and dismissed as such, until an actual concrete definition of god is brought forth.
Which is why the Ignostic [wikipedia.org] position is the only sensible one.
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In that case, he wants them to not just believe, but blindly believe like a fool. When I want someone to believe in something, I make sure I have some evidence to show them to make my case.
The whole belief thing doesn't make any sense anyway. What does god get out of people believing in him? Why would this even matter to all powerful being? Punishment for being rational and logical is his 'love'. "You don't believe I exist even though there is really no good reason to believe I exist...here's a world of end
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Re:2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
"Don't worry if you don't believe in God. Just know that God believes in you.
AFAICT, you don't have enough evidence to warrant a knowledge claim. I consider it likely you don't even have enough evidence to make a belief based claim. That only leaves you with a faith based claim. Faith and delusion share the same definition -- eg they are synonyms. What does this tell you?
Re:2012 (Score:4, Insightful)
God has revealed himself to me as well. Then I realized it was just this hashish joint I got a bit earlier.
Ok, I'll bite anyway. How can you tell it's God reveling himself and not some random hallucination?
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Without evidence one way or another, the only logical conclusion is agnosticism.
Wrong. Contrary to popular opinion, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
God has revealed himself to me. He'd reveal himself to you if you weren't so afraid he might actually exist.
You won't find what you're not looking for, and you certainly won't find something you're sure doesn't exist.
Sounds startling similar to wish-thinking. What criteria do you use to separate the two?
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That doesn't help anyone, because it just raises the question: How can I know God believes in me? Telling me "just know" isn't enough; if I had the capacity to accept that kind of dogmatic command, I'd probably already believe in gods.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:2012 (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually it's not a "book" as such. It is distinctly a collection of stories and letters that were at one stage compiled and bound together. The original authors never intended for them to be in a book. Many of the letters were probably never even meant for more than one person. Go figure.
What "ample evidence" is there that any individual part was rewritten?
Textual analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
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Evidence of alterations come from textual analysis. For example, some of the alterations use phrases that were in use much later than the stories were supposedly written down.
I am not a theist, but that is an invalid argument. The early Jews had an oral tradition and the stories were written down long afterwards. As each Hebrew community had it's own priests and texts there were variations. These were at some point in antiquity combined into a single text, but that does not mean they were altered in the sense you use the word. Finally, it is well established among historians that the texts in question were not meant to be a scientific account or even an historical one in the s
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There were many conflicting writings to choose from at the time the Bible was formed. They could have made the Bible say many different things. That is says what it does is by choice.
That could be said about any field. There are mathematical models in existence that show how the everything revolves around the earth. But the scientific community has rejected those models. There are various models of evolution around (no, not intelligent design, but actual evolution) and yet the scientific community has rejected most of those. When I was growing up, there were 9 planets, now, because the scientific community has decided otherwise, there are only 8. Why is it okay for the scientific c
Re:2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
30 seconds on Google turned up this article [dangerousi...ection.org] and a speech on the subject [youtube.com].
The bible has been in human hands for centuries and copied by hand before printing presses came in. A spelling mistake here, bad handwriting there, the next guy comes along and misreads a word and then 'fixes' the sentence so that it makes sense. I'd be shocked if there was a single page in there that hadn't changed. And that's only accidental changes.
Looking at the things politicians do today, when it's easier to fact-check and catch them out than ever before, I find it completely believable that people just... mis-copied parts of the bible to justify whatever they felt like doing. It's not like people in the year 900 were going to get on Facebook and compare notes with people in other countries. They'd probably never touched a copy of the Bible. Probably couldn't read. A man with a bible could tell people it said anything. Make some changes in his copy, noone would ever know.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
The bible has been in human hands for centuries and copied by hand before printing presses came in. A spelling mistake here, bad handwriting there, the next guy comes along and misreads a word and then 'fixes' the sentence so that it makes sense. I'd be shocked if there was a single page in there that hadn't changed. And that's only accidental changes.
Of course, The Faithful claim that $DEITY in his glorious omnipotence has kept The Holy Word pure and absolutely identical to The Original.
In common-speek that's a circular proof and can thusly be completely ignored.
That's hardly the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't be concerned with minor typographical errors, it's unlikely they could actually result in changed meaning. For the sake of argument, look at the dead sea scrolls, which are thousands of years old, and compare with the modern hebrew bible. What you'll find is that they are largely identical. So even over long spans of time, it seems that minor typographical errors won't add up to significant changes.
The problem areas with the text itself are the time between when the events occurred and when they were written down, and stories that were added to the text after the fact. We know that peoples memories change over time, and the more time passes the more details they fill in. So, it seems that the different authors filled in the details a little differently. But the details are hardly the point of the stories they wrote. The link you provided points out stories we know weren't included in the earliest manuscripts of the text, but since we don't have the originals, there may be (and probably are) others.
However, the real problem one which applies to all forms of human communication. The foundation of communication is shared experience. We experience concepts and then learn to associate words with them. But we all have different experiences, and have associated them to words differently. That means that when one person talks, what he's saying and what the other person's hearing are going to be different conceptually. I have an identical twin brother and even with him, I run into these kind of misunderstandings.
So when it comes to reading the Bible, some of which is probably 3500 years old, there are going to be some language barriers even if it's "perfectly" translated. The person writing it would have had many experiences that most of us will never have.
Re:That's hardly the problem. (Score:4, Informative)
I've heard theories that this period was a key one which transformed the ancient Hebrews into Jews (even to the point where it might have been the period when they finally embraced true monotheism). A lot of books supposed got written (and perhaps rewritten) during this time with an eye to supporting the religious positions of the exiles and preserving their culture.
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30 seconds on Google turned up this article [dangerousi...ection.org]
Good grief, that's hilarious. Not the article, the comments. I love the whole thread about "lol so your book is wrong and so are everyone else's but it's a fact that the quran is flawless so you must believe its every word".
I love the faithful. They are the source of endless amusement. I'm convinced if they'd just stop and listen to themselves for _one moment_ they'd realise how ridiculous they are.
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The universe, and nature are majestic in their own right. Stop cheapening them by implying that they couldn't exist on their own. They do, and that's really freaking aw
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No offense, but I would give those sources more credit if their entire existence wouldn't be completely undermined by saying anything to the contrary.
And if it wasn't completely unrealistic and contradicted by the incredibly well documented existence of Apocrypha, multiple councils to determine the true gospels, and the fact that the Church has always been far more political than religious even if its followers are not.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Insightful)
The reliability of the New Testament is also beyond reproach.
Now there's a scientific attitude.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Informative)
You are way wrong on this.
Transmission [bible.org]
B. The Masoretes
The Masoretic scribes (A.D. 500-1000) in charge of the Old Testament manuscript copying used a very meticulous system of transcription and had a deep reverence for the text. God used their almost obsessive respect for the text to preserve the text’s accuracy. They had specific rules on the type of ink and the quality and size of parchment sheets. No individual letter could be written down without having looked back at the copy in front of them. The scribe could not write God’s name with a newly dipped pen (lest it blotch) and even if the king should address him, while writing God’s name, he should take no notice of him. They were so meticulous that they counted all the paragraphs, words and even letters, so they could know by counting, if they had done it perfectly. They knew the middle letter of each book so they could count back and see if they had missed anything. . .
D. The Dead Sea Scrolls
Since the oldest complete copy of a Hebrew Old Testament in existence is dated about A.D. 1000, that’s a long time after the originals were written (1450-400 B.C.). But there are portions that date back farther. Most significant are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in caves in 1947 by an Arabian shepherd boy. These well-preserved Hebrew text fragments date back to 100 B.C. They include many Bible portions, including some complete books. Their value to the credibility of our Bible is that amazingly, there is virtual agreement between these Hebrew texts and the ones dated 1,100 years later! This proves how accurately the scribes copies for all those years.
The evidence shows that our Old Testaments today are extremely accurate reflections of the original manuscripts.
So how reliable are the manuscripts that all these Bibles are translated from? The evidence is overwhelming and seldom disputed. Manuscripts prepared from different individuals spread over various parts of the Middle East and Mediterranean region agree remarkably with each other. Also, the manuscripts agree with the Septuagint, which was translated to Greek from Hebrew possibly as far back as the 3rd century BC. The Dead Sea scrolls discovered in 1947 also provided a profound testimony to the reliability of the centuries of transmission of the Bible text, as every Old Testament book found was virtually word for word with today's Bible! (the few differences were "obvious slips of the pen or variations in spelling"1).
I see your possibly biased sources and raise you a wikipedia!
According to The Oxford Companion to Archaeology:
The biblical manuscripts from Qumran, which include at least fragments from every book of the Old Testament, except perhaps for the Book of Esther, provide a far older cross section of scriptural tradition than that available to scholars before. While some of the Qumran biblical manuscripts are nearly identical to the Masoretic, or traditional, Hebrew text of the Old Testament, some manuscripts of the books of Exodus and Samuel found in Cave Four exhibit dramatic differences in both language and content. In their astonishing range of textual variants, the Qumran biblical discoveries have prompted scholars to reconsider the once-accepted theories of the development of the modern biblical text from only three manuscript families: of the Masoretic text, of the Hebrew original of the Septuagint, and of the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Old Testament scripture was extremely fluid until its canonization around A.D. 100.
Sure, wikipedia may not be the best academic source on the planet, but at least the source article above is well cited. Oh, and that doesn't sound like "slips of the pen" to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_sea_scrolls [wikipedia.org]
Re:2012 (Score:4, Insightful)
And you can't see the problem with believing information published on sites with a vested interest in the bible being reliable?
Various religious people I have spoken to talk about the divine hand of God guiding the translators. A deity who is only "virtually free from any corruption" doesn't sound that good to me.
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It's really sad, that grown men organize their lives around some rules that an iron age tribe wrote on the skin of dead animals to keep the peace in their tents.
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Actually it's not a "book" as such. It is distinctly a collection of stories and letters that were at one stage compiled and bound together. The original authors never intended for them to be in a book. Many of the letters were probably never even meant for more than one person. Go figure.
What "ample evidence" is there that any individual part was rewritten?
There were religious councils held in europe through the middle-ages that specificaly focused on rewriting parts of the bible so they suited the changing views of church.
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Actually maybe you should read "Misquoting Jesus" by B. Ehrman - it is written by a blblical scholar, actually the farther back in time you go the _less_ consistent the texts of the new testament are - the exact opposite of what you would expect if they all derived from a common source - this coupled with the fact that stories similar to story of Jesus (except with Egyptian or other mediteranean gods as heros) had been floating around for years before the supposed birth of Christ and finally the lack of any historical Roman records of Christ's existence make even the statment that "Christ was a historical figure" that I hear from even many atheists and agnostic completely untenable - there is no evidence for a historical Christ
I'm not sure you understand Ehrman very well. Have you read Did Jesus Exist? [amazon.com] If you are going to cite Bart Ehrman, a former Christian, a current professor of the New Testament, and the holder of a Masters in Divinity, why not quote the part where he's 100% certain the evidence points to there being a historical Christ. Ehrman has many doubts about Christianity, but one of them isn't whether Jesus was a historical figure.
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The primary references for Jesus are the items in the Bible which are, themselves, 2 or 3 times removed.
Jesus is taken as a given because of Christianity.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus promised the end of all wicked people.
Thor promised the end of all ice giants.
I don't see many ice giants around.
Re:2012 (Score:5, Informative)
All praise Thor!!
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Hey mod: This is not Flamebait -1. This should be Funny +1. It's funny. Laugh. Why so serious?
He was critical of anyone who... (Score:3)
Re:I am sick and tired of this (Score:5, Insightful)
All religion is insanity. Classification of the specific type of insanity is really beyond the scope of any single person.
Its easier to lump all religion into the one box marked CRAZY. Leave classification to those studying the insane.
Muslim, christian, jew, whatever. you've ALL killed people in the past for not believing in your specific brand of invisible sky wizard insanity. you're all just as bad AND just as crazy as each other. None of you have any high ground to denounce any other religion anymore. ALL OF YOU need to stfu. keep your religious beliefs between you and god and shut the fuck up. Stop making the world a worse place already! you're not helping!
And stop trying to drag atheists every fucking argument about religion. Thats just a strawman and you know it.
Really i don't expect much logic and common sense from you crazies tho.
But still. Stop making the world a worse place.
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He simply used the religion he was most exposed to as an example, to look beyond that is simply vain attempts to promote other religions. More concisely the view is whether or not life has value, real value ie considered a dimension an expression of a different form of energy. Once down that path all life has value, not just select believers over non-believers and the remainder of the living biosphere. Obviously Einstein perceived a value of value of life, a distinct worth, something that has a true impact
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I'm not affiliated with any religion, I just noticed a large flame war waging, and wish you guys would get over yourselves. There are more important things for which we should utilize our mental resources, centuries old religious debates should be at the bottom of the list.
Just because I disagree with your bashing doesn't mean I'm 'religious people'.