Well, science can’t always (usually) answer the questions of philosophy or metaphysics. Doesn’t mean those things are wrong necessarily – science is a process, not a proscribed belief system, and there are many religious scientists of faith, who are dutiful scientists.
I think many people consider the objectivist-materialist view of things as scientifically proven, when that is hardly the case.
Someday science may be able to prove things that today fall under philosophy and metaphysics, and it’s my belief that science has actually already demonstrated a lot of “metaphysical truths” that many folks are reluctant to accept. I mean truly accept, including the ramifications of. Quantum physics seems to demonstrate that reality is actually digital (quantized) and is made up of information more primarily than matter, and that the role of observation somehow affects our perception of the world, and causes the so-called waveform collapse. We’ve hardly come to actually “understand” what this means…
This should be an easy solution - just say you believe in god - what ever that god is to you. Money, booze, weed, sex, Boba Fett collectibles.
This is where @Melizmatic pointed out to me Jessie from Preacher went wrong. He ordered Odin to “Serve God”, which left a lot interpretation on WHICH god to serve.
But no, in all seriousness, theocratic authoritarianism is bad.
Once upon a time, back when journalists became photojounalists because their publishers fired all the photographers because the CEO was getting a big enough bonus because papers weren’t selling, nobody reckoned.with the fact that journalists were generally much better with words than pictures, and that they’d use filters to make up for it.
“It goes against the Constitution and human rights”
That’s not how either human rights or a constitution work…
I suspect they’ll actually be quiet about it, given, as has been pointed out, they’ll tend to agree with the sentiments on some level. It’s always interesting to see what the Islamaphobes are quiet about, as it tells you something about them. (Although sometimes they’re happy to loudly denounce something they themselves openly engage in, which is… weird.)
It’s not him, it’s the fact that he represents (yet another) piece of evidence indicating that it wouldn’t be safe to visit Malaysia as an atheist.
Satanism as an inverse of Christianity is largely fictional - but like many fictions, that doesn’t stop people (usually the mentally ill) from trying to make it real… But yeah, organized Satanism tends to not even believe in a literal Satan, so there’s also no belief in any literal god.
I don’t think modern Anton LaVey Satanism is the entire world of what we could call “Satanism” even if it is the most popular or well-known.
While I nominally agree with you, from the point of view of the Malaysian Deputy Minister this is moot. Science might prove Muhammad existed as a historical figure, but how would you prove he actually received information from a supreme being and not his own malfunctioning brain? I’m not sure I would want to try arguing that in a Malaysian court.
I guess this would depend on how you define “Satanism”-- does Luciferiansim count? I think a lot of Christians would call it “Satanism”, of course American evangelicals typically think yoga is a form of witchcraft, so then the question is “who gets to define the term ‘Satanism’?”
And when the little boy shouted 'But the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes!", the crowd looked around at each other and someone yelled “The kid is insane, he needs treatment” and soon the whole crowd was screaming it until the authorities took the kid someplace “special” and he learned how easy it was to see the Emperor’s clothing if you just tried hard enough and enough pain was used on you.
Later on, several major civil wars were fought over just what color the Emperor’s robes actually were or whether he put his left leg into his trousers first or his right leg, but no one ever doubted the existence of his clothes in public again.
More about how you define “inverse” - I’m thinking about the traditional, fictional Christian notion of
"Satanism," where notional Satanists believe exactly the same texts that they do, but behave in the opposite way than they’re commanded to by those texts. But yeah, there’s the other kind of “inverse” where Luciferians are not following the same texts but one which is, in many ways, inverted in terms of cosmological characters and their roles/actions. (And then there are the very modern strains of Satanism that either treat Satan as pure symbol or use Satan in a more tongue-in-cheek way to put themselves in opposition to fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy.)
I’m just guessing that he isn’t as rigorous about the application of “not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution”=“must obviously be hunted down and extirpated” logic to this things he approves of; some of which must have escaped constitutional inclusion; but, to the degree that this ‘argument’ is anything more than bullshit smeared into the approximate shape of supporting evidence, it’s not entirely surprising that a reactionary jerkass would be using a “if it’s not in the foundational text, it’s default deny.” theory.
Revelation-based religions(with the exception of the rarely-welcomed-by-their-peers variants that do personal revelation on an ongoing basis) do tend to have a strong flavor of “if it were important, it’d be in The Book”. Now, given that source texts tend to be overdetermined, underdetermined, vague, cryptic; and sometimes only applicable by strained analogy to new situations, the less dumb and/or more intellectually honest fundies tend to adopt a somewhat more nuanced perspective (the difference between thinking it’s revealed truth; but recognizing that the historical chain of custody is quite a trip and that the ‘plain meaning’ of the text turns out to be a trifle nontrivial; and bellicose assertions that it was revealed exactly as you think you understand it, no complicating factors); and the somewhat more open adherents are often more flexible still; but I don’t get the impression that this guy is either of those cases.
Yeah, it’s just a hell of a jump from “it’s not explicitly protected by the constitution” and “it must be eliminated.” It’s an even bigger jump to suggest that it “goes against” human rights to give people human rights…
I suspect that they’ll take the opportunity to pat themselves on the back about how tolerant they are, because they merely discriminate instead of kill.
This brings to mind a story I heard from a guy back in the oughts who had been in Egypt, and he said when asked what religion he was Muslim, Christian and Judaism were the choices and it was easier to just say one of those than try to explain being an atheist, which, at least in his anecdotal encounters, would make their head explode.
