That’s not actually at all the case. In fact, if memory serves, even that guy with the funny hat who lives in the Vatican recently said that “non-believers don’t all go to hell” to paraphrase. What’s his name again, oh yeah, The Pope.
There are many religions that have nothing to do with Judaism, Christianity or Islam, and as crazy as it sounds, many of them are waaaaay chiller about the whole heaven and hell thing than you might imagine. In fact, many of them don’t even really believe in heaven or hell. Crazy, inorite? But it’s true.
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I assume you’re not actively roaming the streets killing, raping and stealing, and may actually do altruistic things like donating to charity and being honest in your business practices. If you’re not Jewish, most of the commandments like Sabbath and kashrut don’t apply.
Which does, admittedly suck. That said, the kid’s non-Jewish mother only means that the kid him or herself isn’t Jewish by Orthodox standards,* but it’s not a judgment on the kid aside from their religious status. That your friend’s parents choose to treat him poorly speaks more to their being horrid than anything else.
*Reform Judaism accepts patrilineal descent, Conservative Judaism may or may not. I’m a little hazy on that right now.
The real loser of the debate is whomever created the format.
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Give me an example. As I said:
Name a religion that you feel doesn’t prescribe disadvantages to non-believers, I challenge you.
Can anyone help me out here - In the post, it says “the most valuable thing Bill Nye did also came towards the end, when he explained that Ken Ham’s views don’t represent all religion or even all Christianity.” Where do I have to skip to within the video for this segment? The whole thing is almost three hours long; I sat through the last 26 minutes and I don’t think I can stomach more Ham right now.
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If you’re not Jewish, most of the commandments like Sabbath and kashrut don’t apply.
Good point. Though by the moralistic standards of most religions I’d fail. I love doing drugs, I love fucking, I support gay rights, I support abortion and I pirate anything with gay abandon.
[quote]That your friend’s parents choose to treat him poorly speaks more to their being horrid than anything else.
[/quote]
It’s the community that treats non-jews differently. My friend’s family treats all their grandchildren the same, irrespective of their official jewish status.
Taoism
faith = belief in something for which there is no proof (evidence), if there is even the slightest evidence then faith is no longer needed you can use reasoning instead.
science = belief based strictly on evidence and reasoning.
the problem with faith is there is really no reason to believe any specific thing, some people make up one god other people make up a different one or multiple ones, neither has a shred of more reason to be valid over the other. the same goes creation myths.
whereas science only promotes ideas that can be tested and validated repeatedly by multiple independent sources. it is quite literally the cataloging of what can empirically be observed and know and repeated, it is a systematic cataloging of our reality as it is and it does its best to cancel and correct for any biases.
religion is how we explained things before we had any rational way to reason out the actual answers we made up fantastical stories, and each group of people made up their own stories. as the understanding of science expands it fills in and replaces these previously unknowable areas with knowledge which is why religion in general tends to be threatened by science. It is constantly losing ground as the myths are replaced by facts.
science is focused on the actual answers and is the pinnacle of human reasoning and thought. Thank God for Science! 
Well, I don’t know what your criteria for “accepting evolution” is, but in order to reject Ham, all you need to do is reject the idea that a being with a personality, judgement and a design sense was responsible for the history of life in the universe.
And you can, you know, not only because of the evidence, but because the theological implications of a Creator that actually took the time to think of up this, this or any this (please don’t go into this one if you don’t want to be in the position of needing to scrub your brain) is that the said Creator is a bit of a monster, and I don’t exactly know if you’d want to worship someone like that.
FWIW, I’m a Muslim, and yeah, there are YEC Muslims out there, but I really attribute that to Western conceptions of the Divine affecting us, the colonized (after all, Muslims have been known to pick up crap like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, neoliberal capitalism and Randian libertarianism from Westerners — hell, there are a bunch of brown kids down the south of our country who picked up Neo-Naziism through punk music!). The religion I was raised in cared more about practice and conduct over the details of theology; again, partly out of survival in a system affected by colonialism.
For me, YEC is just a really shitty belief system that doesn’t think about its implications, and is tremendously narrow and provides absolutely no value in getting stuff done (What use is a biologist that rejects evolution? What use is a theory that provides no reliable predictions? No use, as our colonial masters used to say). Let the crazy Westerners hobble themselves with shit theories — the rest of us have other things to do.
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Thank you. Yes, some of us are very willing in our desire to call out and try to stop the science-denying, but every time we try we end up seeing a bunch of loud skeptics who insist that science only belongs to the atheists, and if you’re religious, you’re brain-damaged.
Let us help, please; we don’t want to see a decline of scientific education, or a resurgence of diseases eradicated by vaccination. Science is a commons — when it’s affected, it affects us all.
Name a religion that you feel doesn’t prescribe disadvantages to non-believers, I challenge you.
Chinese folk religion. Which should, really, naturally stretch your mind about what, exactly, defines a religion, and who, exactly, is exactly an adherent, and who or what, exactly, is a religious authority.
Because the border between it, Buddhism and Taoism are really interesting places to examine.
This link will take you to it.
(Embed doesn’t work with specific timestamps)
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I disagree with that assessment only because I haven’t met any Muslims that believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old. They’re missing the “young earth” part of it. Conservative Islamic interpretation of the Quran is mercifully pretty clear that stretches of time in the Quran are largely non-literal.
That said, there are plenty of creationists, but there’s another group to distinguish them from: Scientific theologists. It’s currently in vogue in Islam to draw parallels between the Quran and science as “proof” of the Quran’s veracity. I never bought this even when I was religious because I understood Islam, and I understood science. These attempts always seemed clumsy and poorly thought-out.
They can sound a lot like creationists, and many are, but there are actually theistic evolutionists among them. Actually, what I’ve found in popular Islamic anti-evolutionism tends to be borrowed heavily from other sources. I really tend to see it as an import. It never used to be much of an issue, but the Islamic laity is increasingly obsessed with proof.
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Okay, what does your “god” (using your own scare quotes, mind you) do? Does it interact with the world? How? What’s the mechanism? If it is “well, it’s mysterious and can never be tested or measured”, then that is not compatible with science.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with accepting the full scientific explaination for how we came to be, while also accepting a religious explaination for why.
These are two completely different animals: Demonstrable physical proofs regarding matter and energy, and philosophical assumptions about intangible and unquantifiable ideas of consciousness and morals.
The only time they become incompatable is when you start trying to pass one off as the other.
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Pretty much anything polytheistic- Wicca, Druidry, Hellenism, Asatru, most aboriginal/tribal beliefs…
Believing that your rivals’ gods are more or less equivilent to yours creates a pretty different dynamic than believing your god is the only real one.
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•animal sacrifices
•human sacrifice (self torture)
•ancestor worship (cause dead people really care if we burn stuff for them)
•Heaven, the pantheon (of which the Chinese taoist culture has over 30) mirrored the political system of China at that time with all of its civil servants, bureaucrats, having an army, a royal family, parasitical courtiers, higher or lower ranking deities, who could be promoted or demoted according to their actions.
•The highest Taoist deity, Yù Huáng -ti (see: Jade Emperor), is associated with the ancient Chinese god Shang Di, ruler over all Heaven, Earth and the Underworld/ Hell.
•Hsien (humans who became immortal and achieved divinity through Taoist practices and teachings)
•“All things originate from Tao, conform to Tao, and to Tao they at last return.”
from Tao Te Ching
(Sounds heaps inclusive, amirite?)
Sorry bud… the internet’s go-to example of a “nice religion” fits exactly my criticism. Got another one?
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Why does it have to be? What’s wrong with leaving everything which can be tested or measured to science, while leaving what, by nature, can’t be to faith?
Cooking doesn’t need to be compatible with archetecture in order for both to be a valid art form. Political theory doesn’t need to follow the rules of ballet. Religion doesn’t need to follow the rules of science any more than flyfishing needs to follow the rules of NASCAR.
The problem isn’t faith being incompatable with science, the problem is pretending that they are the same thing.
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Did you even read that Wikipedia page you linked? None of this is interesting, it’s just misguided people from times past making up bullshit.
Through rituals of worship, people acquire and maintain a sense of stable world order, peace and balance.
Violating rules may insult a god and hence, undermine the balance and open the doors to chaos.
The attitude of the people towards their deities is of awe and apprehension. Through devotional practices a person strives to secure balance and protect himself and the world he is located into from the power of unfavorable forces.
In this sense, the Chinese traditional view of human life is not fatalistic, but one is a master of his own life through his relationship with the divine energies.
