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Egyptian husbands can have sex with DEAD wives...

BellaBaby75 said:
Minchia, I adore you, but I don't see how any of this is relevant to the OP? It definitely is fodder for another conversation however.

You're right, horrible acts are committed in the name of religion - the religion itself is irrelevant because it's humanity that commits the crimes, not religions.

Plenty of athiests commit heinous acts of violence too.

But I think we need to be careful not to condemn an entire relgion, based around the acts committed by extremists within that religion?

It's just like condemning an entire race of people, for what Ivan Milat did. Not all Australian's are like that, but we've certainly churned out some exceedingly violent people?

Not all who follow islam are full of hate or violence either. I have muslim friends, have always had muslim friends,who I love dearly, they're the most peaceful people I know. And when acts of atrocity are committed, they are on their knees praying for the victims of those crimes, and heartbroken that they are done in the name of their beloved koran.

A 'few' extremists, should not allow us the right to judge an entire relgion, country or culture. Because as we all well know, not everyone is the same. We are all different. Structures within a larger structure...

Much of our moral stance, beliefs and values, come from our upbringing, handed down by our parents - I think "religion" is often used as a poorly veiled excuse, and twisted interpretation of what is largely a peaceful text and series of stories that are meant to uplift and provide comfort for those who seek it.

When we're talking about female circumcision, or 'honour killings' or little girls being married off from the age of 8 & 9 to men old enough to be their grandfathers, well that becomes a cultural thing. Often veiled thinly behind religious beliefs too, to try and add some weight and baring to it all.

In the end, we cannot judge. But we can help, we can educate, we can provide refuge for those who flee, we can provide a platform to hear the people who want to talk, and create advocacy programs for those that want to use them. This is humanity.

My 4 months in the Middle East were the most enlightening and heartbreaking of my entire 12 years abroad. I learnt alot about myself and my own heart there. And I learnt alot about them as a people...

Sweeping statements are just that. I personally don't like them, because they capture and judge too many people who don't fit into them.

But I do understand what you're saying Minchia.
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Yep, not so much in relation to the OP and we know how lengthy religious debates can be. It was mainly a follow on (slight tangent) from a brief part of chocs previous post as well as something that was fresh in the back of my mind as I had someone bring it up to me last week. I had a similar question posed to me in the same vain. "Well prove that god doesn't exist". Disregarding that this is a logical fallacy, the burden of proof lies with the believer. :D

Again this is straying. Frankly I don't care what anyone believes. I can tell from reading that Fadi is a man of faith, and appears to be probably the most respected and held in the highest regard by many. I have absolutely no qualms with this, for each man and woman is entitled to their beliefs so long as they a) keep them to themselves and not preach to others how or what they should think or b) use those beliefs in a way to oppress or incite violence and hatred.

For me, life is about the truth. I will not believe everything I read and take it as "gospel". It is good to have your views challenged - many people live under the blanket and solace of confirmation bias, where they will seek out information that already confirms/aligns with their preconceived ideas or belief. That doesn't really help better or further your knowledge, but I myself like many others are guilty of this - and I try to avoid it where possible.

Sam Harris is an interesting mind on the topic of morality and religion. Ie; Do we need religion for "morals" (short answer; no)
 
Minchia said:
Yep, not so much in relation to the OP and we know how lengthy religious debates can be. It was mainly a follow on (slight tangent) from a brief part of chocs previous post as well as something that was fresh in the back of my mind as I had someone bring it up to me last week. I had a similar question posed to me in the same vain. "Well prove that god doesn't exist". Disregarding that this is a logical fallacy, the burden of proof lies with the believer. :D

Again this is straying. Frankly I don't care what anyone believes. I can tell from reading that Fadi is a man of faith, and appears to be probably the most respected and held in the highest regard by many. I have absolutely no qualms with this, for each man and woman is entitled to their beliefs so long as they a) keep them to themselves and not preach to others how or what they should think or b) use those beliefs in a way to oppress or incite violence and hatred.

For me, life is about the truth. I will not believe everything I read and take it as "gospel". It is good to have your views challenged - many people live under the blanket and solace of confirmation bias, where they will seek out information that already confirms/aligns with their preconceived ideas or belief. That doesn't really help better or further your knowledge, but I myself like many others are guilty of this - and I try to avoid it where possible.

Sam Harris is an interesting mind on the topic of morality and religion. Ie; Do we need religion for "morals" (short answer; no)
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I knew where you were coming from Minchia :)

I think we all try to avoid it where possible...sometimes we're successful, sometimes we're not.

I think the very fact that we're able to discuss it in an open and candid way, is often the very basis for great moments of learning and clarity and idea sharing, from, by and because of, all of us :)
 
To the OP; Just plain weird huh, kinda sickens me that humans even consider this shit. I just shake my head, so sad.
 
@Minchia, don't sweat it.

With regard to truth, remember that both truth and reality are relative, generally defined by individual perception. There is no absolute for either. This I know as a scientist, who seeks truth.

In part, this is a wonderful thing. But it also means truth can be shaped by the beliefs one holds and this can have a dark side.

You are right though - one does not require religion to have a moral code. Morality is independent of religion. However, religion can, and is, a strong influencer and driver of moral codes (and immoral ones). This is a fact we have to accept and deal with.

It is difficult to argue with people who strongly believe that there is a moral and/or religious stance in laws and actions that cause harm and/or discrimination etc to others. That is the dilemma that confronts us as human beings in these situations.
 
chocchillimango said:
...both truth and reality are relative, generally defined by individual perception. There is no absolute for either.
Click to expand...

Choc's...can you elaborate on this point...please!!! There are some truths that aren't an issue of realativity, such as the circumference of a circle = 2PiR...neither is a^2+b^2=c^2. I get that our experience off the world is an illusion cloaked with our own understanding, reasoning and logic...something's are true regardless of perception.


Ps You can be good without god. I've not killed anyone :-)
 
PowerBuilder said:
Choc's...can you elaborate on this point...please!!! There are some truths that aren't an issue of realativity, such as the circumference of a circle = 2PiR...neither is a^2+b^2=c^2. I get that our experience off the world is an illusion cloaked with our own understanding, reasoning and logic...something's are true regardless of perception.


Ps You can be good without god. I've not killed anyone :-)
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LOl that was my point. I don't recall eliminating anyone either :D

Well, you know, maths is a theory so in the context of how we define it, the circumference of a circle is a truth.
I guess I'm thinking about it in terms of quantum physics and general relativity. The one thing we can be certain of is that our own "reference frames" and what we observe shape our truths and our reality.
That extends, as you rightly point out, to our perceptions of what we experience and that colours (not necessarily "cloaks") what we hold to be true or real.
 
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chocchillimango said:
@Minchia, don't sweat it.

With regard to truth, remember that both truth and reality are relative, generally defined by individual perception. There is no absolute for either. This I know as a scientist, who seeks truth.

In part, this is a wonderful thing. But it also means truth can be shaped by the beliefs one holds and this can have a dark side.

You are right though - one does not require religion to have a moral code. Morality is independent of religion. However, religion can, and is, a strong influencer and driver of moral codes (and immoral ones). This is a fact we have to accept and deal with.

It is difficult to argue with people who strongly believe that there is a moral and/or religious stance in laws and actions that cause harm and/or discrimination etc to others. That is the dilemma that confronts us as human beings in these situations.
Click to expand...

Yes totally agree Choccers, I was more speaking of truths that can be placed under scientific scrutiny and explained with science and rationality, as opposed to being mystical or supernatural. Over the last 100 years, we have moved in leaps and bounds in understanding our surroundings, and the "truth" (scientific truth) to me is much more amazing than anything we had conjured up in our heads to explain for example, lightening, which I have heard referred to as "God climaxing".

I am probably in this frame of thought as I have been reading R Dawkins latest book "The Magic Of Reality - How do we know what's really true".

Of course, there is still much around us that we do not understand, and quite possibly in our life times or ever - we might not. I just think holding a belief where there's not a shred of evidence to do so is a waste. I know how hard it is to even open the religious mind to the thought of there not being a divine being - as if that is what you were taught and brought up with it's quite hard to pull away - you become defensive when someone challenges those ingrained beliefs. Shit, I thought the Bible was the be all and end all - that our planet was no more than 10,000 years old in my younger years. RE was teaching us one thing, then we'd be bombarded with The Big Bang Theory in science class.

But then in my teens, Carl Sagan came to the rescue with Cosmos and opened my mind a little more with The Demon Haunted World.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
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Darkoz said:
I believe that in science we look for facts but do you think that facts are the same as truth?
Click to expand...

Good point - I have perhaps blurred the line between the two.

Truth has a variety of meanings, such as the state of being in accord with fact or reality
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Edit:

Truth in logic

Logic is concerned with the patterns in reason that can help tell us if a proposition is true or not. However, logic does not deal with truth in the absolute sense, as for instance a metaphysician does. Logicians use formal languages to express the truths which they are concerned with, and as such there is only truth under some interpretation or truth within some logical system.

A logical truth (also called an analytic truth or a necessary truth) is a statement which is true in all possible worlds[42] or under all possible interpretations, as contrasted to a fact (also called a synthetic claim or a contingency) which is only true in this world as it has historically unfolded. A proposition such as “If p and q, then p.” is considered to be logical truth because it is true because of the meaning of the symbols and words in it and not because of any facts of any particular world. They are such that they could not be untrue.
Truth in mathematics
Main articles: Model theory and Proof theory

There are two main approaches to truth in mathematics. They are the model theory of truth and the proof theory of truth[citation needed].

Historically, with the nineteenth century development of Boolean algebra mathematical models of logic began to treat "truth", also represented as "T" or "1", as an arbitrary constant. "Falsity" is also an arbitrary constant, which can be represented as "F" or "0". In propositional logic, these symbols can be manipulated according to a set of axioms and rules of inference, often given in the form of truth tables.

In addition, from at least the time of Hilbert's program at the turn of the twentieth century to the proof of Gödel's theorem and the development of the Church-Turing thesis in the early part of that century, true statements in mathematics were generally assumed to be those statements which are provable in a formal axiomatic system.

The works of Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and others shook this assumption, with the development of statements that are true but cannot be proven within the system.[43] Two examples of the latter can be found in Hilbert's problems. Work on Hilbert's 10th problem led in the late twentieth century to the construction of specific Diophantine equations for which it is undecidable whether they have a solution,[44] or even if they do, whether they have a finite or infinite number of solutions. More fundamentally, Hilbert's first problem was on the continuum hypothesis.[45] Gödel and Paul Cohen showed that this hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved using the standard axioms of set theory.[46] In the view of some, then, it is equally reasonable to take either the continuum hypothesis or its negation as a new axiom.
Semantic theory of truth

The semantic theory of truth has as its general case for a given language:
'P' is true if and only if P

where 'P' is a reference to the sentence (the sentence's name), and P is just the sentence itself.

Logician and philosopher Alfred Tarski developed the theory for formal languages (such as formal logic). Here he restricted it in this way: no language could contain its own truth predicate, that is, the expression is true could only apply to sentences in some other language. The latter he called an object language, the language being talked about. (It may, in turn, have a truth predicate that can be applied to sentences in still another language.) The reason for his restriction was that languages that contain their own truth predicate will contain paradoxical sentences like the Liar: This sentence is not true. See The Liar paradox. As a result Tarski held that the semantic theory could not be applied to any natural language, such as English, because they contain their own truth predicates. Donald Davidson used it as the foundation of his truth-conditional semantics and linked it to radical interpretation in a form of coherentism.

Bertrand Russell is credited with noticing the existence of such paradoxes even in the best symbolic formalizations of mathematics in his day, in particular the paradox that came to be named after him, Russell's paradox. Russell and Whitehead attempted to solve these problems in Principia Mathematica by putting statements into a hierarchy of types, wherein a statement cannot refer to itself, but only to statements lower in the hierarchy. This in turn led to new orders of difficulty regarding the precise natures of types and the structures of conceptually possible type systems that have yet to be resolved to this day.
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I didn't hope to delve this far in, but an interesting read none the less!
 
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Now you've really made my head hurt Minchia!
I was thinking in more simple terms, consider a murder scene.
You walk into a room and there you see a dead body on the floor, beside the body you see a person kneeling, on one hand covered with the victim's blood and the other hand holding a knife.
The facts tell us this when you entered the room,
There was no-one else in the room besides the victim and the other person
The person was kneeling over the body with a knife in one hand covered in the victim's blood.
The knife had only the other man's finger prints on it.
Now, all things being equal, the facts tell us that this person had stabbed and killed the victim however, the truth may show us otherwise.
 
@Minchia and @Darkoz,

as a scientist, I don't consider that we subject truths or facts to scrutiny, but theories. The history of humankind's scientific endeavour, and indeed in my own humble experience, has demonstrated many times over that our understanding of what constitutes scientific facts or truths, do change and evolve over time as our ability to test those theories become more advanced and our understanding develops.

There is indeed much that we do not understand and indeed may never understand (who knows?).

In the end, my understanding of the beautiful universe in which we live and her exquisite laws and asymmetries only strengthen my moral code to respect all things within her realm. The sheer wonder of being here for however long we have is such a privilege.

But this is all off topic on a tangent. Plus I get misty-eyed thinking about my beloved astrophysics...

This thread is not primarily about religion or science, boys. :)
 
Darkoz said:
Now you've really made my head hurt Minchia!
I was thinking in more simple terms, consider a murder scene.
You walk into a room and there you see a dead body on the floor, beside the body you see a person kneeling, on one hand covered with the victim's blood and the other hand holding a knife.
The facts tell us this when you entered the room,
There was no-one else in the room besides the victim and the other person
The person was kneeling over the body with a knife in one hand covered in the victim's blood.
The knife had only the other man's finger prints on it.
Now, all things being equal, the facts tell us that this person had stabbed and killed the victim however, the truth may show us otherwise.
Click to expand...

Indeed! And if you watch CSI or Bones or any of those shows, you KNOW (cuz it's tv and they're all reality shows anyway!) lol that the facts often don't represent the truth...........at all.

But lets be honest, if you're ever found kneeling over a dead body, with a knife in one hand and the victims blood all over you..........you're going to have some serious explaining to do!
lolol
 
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