h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's there in the backlog if you look for it, Dr J. We had quite a session on the mathematics of infinity a while ago. Jordan was very informative.

toxx

Hi shifty

I'll give your questions a go, from a druidic perspective....

"1. You have a young daughter (2 to 12yrs) who is raped and from there on her life is full of nightmares and she never ever recovers from the experience. You ask yourself these questions,"

OK not a pleasant example as I have a daughter in that age group, but go on...

"a)Where was God when this was happening"

Not everyone's gods are the meddlesome busybodies you find in some world religions. This is a good question for Christians though who believe that there god knows everything and is everywhere. One must a ssume that the old scrote is watching and doing nothing. Merciful my ass.

"b)The wages of sin (according to xtianity is death and suffering) What was the young girls sins."

Many christians believe that she carries the original sin of Adam and Eve when they defied God in the Garden of Eden, and that that sin can only be washed away by accepting Christ as their Saviour. Personally I think that is one of the most perverse philosophies of christianity.

"c)Will she be held responsible if she never ever believes in mankind leave alone God whom she has never seen."

According to the Bible she will be judged with the rest of us. If she didn't accept Christ then she will be cast into the lake of fire.

"2. Why is there no direct co-relation between doing good and prospering. (There are rich murderers who hold high places in governments all over the place, thieves embezzlers etc yet there are poor people (actually the majority who have never taken anything that is not theirs?)"

To prosper does not necessarily mean to become rich. Acting in a good way, being honourable, dutiful and loving in your relations with your fellow beings can be a reward in itself.

"3. Xtianity argues that God intended us to have a good life here on earth and later on in heaven. Why is it that some people have never known peace and happiness ever since they came to this world(examples may be given on request)"

Christianity argues no such thing. It says that we are here upon the whim of the creator, were infected with sin at his will and can only be saved if we show repentance and obedience to his will.

"4. To expound on point three, does God really love us all equally or some of us are pawns in his chess game that is the world"

The Old Testament shows that the Abrahamic God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims is a capricious, genocidal maniac. Love doesn't really come into it I am afraid.

"5. What is really our purpose here on earth. (I mean why did God create us knowing very well that down the line man will sin and the wages of sin is eternal suffering)."

We not only will sin, but are infected with sin from our conception. Our only escape is to be born again through Jesus. Our purpose, from a biblical perspective, is to adore God. In other words we are his ego-strokers, not a very mature attitude for an all-powerful deity.

"6. When all is said and done, I think religion is even more of a farce than God. Its intended to keep humans in chech just like state laws are meant to. But I'll give one point to religion for those who believe, and practice their religion, they do experience some inner peace and sometimes joy. I've come to think the reason why this is so is because of hope. Life without hope is as useless or tasteless as eating a carton."

Religion, like most human constructs, can be farcical and Churches have been used by the rich and powerful down the generations to maintain social control. On the other hand religion has brough comfort to billions who have little elese to light up their lives.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\

Dr J.

I am the theological math, so blame me

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\

Bass brew? Ewwww! I rate that right up there with Schlitz and Bud and Coors. If it's not a Guinness give me tea [REAL tea, not that almost exactly unlike tea junk]

Hmmm infinity eh? At about which post number can I find this?

I guess there's some stuff at about #18741, Dr J. I'm sure there's more mathematical stuff earlier. The relation between infinity and eternity tends to crop up now and again.

toxx

Hey, you won't have sampled the 'real' Bass, Dr J. I used to work just up the road from the brewery. That was back when they made 'real' ale. The pub right next to the brewery was the 'Blue Posts'. The lunchtime beer was wonderful - the afternoon's work, a heap of garbage!

toxx

I think toxxin, that the idea is all to do with the nature of Satan... Apparently, according to those who have had near death experiences, hell is more cold and dark than hot and red... and the scariest part is the hate, people are there because they feel hatred and negativity, and so they tale that out on newcomers. That makes sense to me!

I am reading an awesomely good fantasy novel by David Gemmell, 'The Last Sword of Power', and his portrayal of hell is very interesting. (It's not a Christian book, or a book about Christian or religious themes, it seems quite pantheist, really, and is about gods/immortals who come from an other dimension via Atlantis, I haven't read book 1 in the series, this is book 2. Brilliant!

<>

I suppose it could be, alji, depending on the circumstances... But I was talking about my experience, yours may well be different.

<<1. You have a young daughter (2 to 12yrs) who is raped and from there on her life is full of nightmares and she never ever recovers from the experience. You ask yourself these questions,
a)Where was God when this was happening
b)The wages of sin (according to xtianity is death and suffering) What was the young girls sins.
c)Will she be held responsible if she never ever believes in mankind leave alone God whom she has never seen.

2. Why is there no direct co-relation between doing good and prospering. (There are rich murderers who hold high places in governments all over the place, thieves embezzlers etc yet there are poor people (actually the majority who have never taken anything that is not theirs?)

3. Xtianity argues that God intended us to have a good life here on earth and later on in heaven. Why is it that some people have never known peace and happiness ever since they came to this world(examples may be given on request)

4. To expound on point three, does God really love us all equally or some of us are pawns in his chess game that is the world

5. What is really our purpose here on earth. (I mean why did God create us knowing very well that down the line man will sin and the wages of sin is eternal suffering).



Hard questions, shifty! I just have to say about number 4, that there's no question God loves us all equally. A lot of what we suffer, perhaps most of it, is a result of what we do to ourselves, and to each other. The question then becomes, why does God allow that? Because we have free will, freedom of action, freedom of choice.
God knows everything we have experienced, and I believe, takes far more into account than we do in judging ourselves and each other.
Leslie Weatherhead, the Christian writer, said once that most of us will have a very pleasant surprise when we come before God for judgement! God isn't as harsh as we are ourselves.

I've been wondering where to put this, which I discovered on a pro-life site. It's an article about the death penalty that I think is quite brilliant.
http://www.meehanreports.com/dozen.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/U179697 wrote

>>Apparently, according to those who have had near death experiences, hell is more cold and dark than hot and red... and the scariest part is the hate, people are there because they feel hatred and negativity, and so they tale that out on newcomers. That makes sense to me!



Hell is a Christian concept. Part of the death cult thing. Hel, however, is a place where the ancestors welcome their kindred to the mead halls of the dead. It would be interesting to see where http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/U179697 's evidence for this is taken from, as it shows clearly the way that Christianity has infected and terrorised the death experiences of people brought up in Christian cultural areas.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/U179697 wrote
>>I am reading an awesomely good fantasy novel by David Gemmell, 'The Last Sword of Power', and his portrayal of hell is very interesting. (It's not a Christian book, or a book about Christian or religious themes, it seems quite pantheist, really, and is about gods/immortals who come from an other dimension via Atlantis

Pantheism is not about beings from Atlantis. Perhaps http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/U179697 would like to check her termiinology.

Jez

Thanks, Apple. The author's name rings a bell. It's about time I read some more fiction. Must get to the library more.

So it's our fellow sinners, rather than Satan, who give us a hard time. Hmmm.

toxx

God: Fiction

The atheist
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion,
religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Gordy Slack

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/print.html
-------------------------

During our conversation in my hotel room, Dawkins was as gracious as
he was punctiliously dressed in a crisp white shirt and soft blazer.

Once again, evolution is under attack. Are there any questions at all
about its validity?

It's often said that because evolution happened in the past, and we
didn't see it happen, there is no direct evidence for it. That, of
course, is nonsense. It's rather like a detective coming on the scene
of a crime, obviously after the crime has been committed, and working
out what must have happened by looking at the clues that remain. In
the story of evolution, the clues are a billionfold.

There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes throughout the
animal and plant kingdoms, of protein sequences, of morphological
characters that have been analyzed in great detail. Everything fits
with the idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The
distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world
is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution
of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if
evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the
same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.

British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute
evidence against evolution, famously said, "Fossil rabbits in the
Precambrian." They've never been found. Nothing like that has ever
been found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts. But all the
fossils that have been found are in the right place. Of course there
are plenty of gaps in the fossil record. There's nothing wrong with
that. Why shouldn't there be? We're lucky to have fossils at all. But
no fossils have been found in the wrong place, such as to disprove the
fact of evolution. Evolution is a fact.

Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the
resistance come from?

It comes, I'm sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You
won't find any opposition to the idea of evolution among
sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly
retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at
present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe,
not in Britain, but in the United States.

My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic
Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of
educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America.
Unfortunately, at present, it's slightly outnumbered by the ignorant,
uneducated people who voted Bush in.

But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I
think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to
be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My
advice would be, Don't despair, these things pass.

You delve into agnosticism in "The Ancestor's Tale." How does it
differ from atheism?

It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can
neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator.
I find that a weak position. It is true that you can't disprove
anything but you can put a probability value on it. There's an
infinite number of things that you can't disprove: unicorns,
werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any
heed to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they
do exist.

Believing in God is like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars?

Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the
beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for
a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized
three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an
infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things
like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed
because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if
anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing.
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only
be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a
designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is
explained by natural selection.

Those who embrace "intelligent design" -- the idea that living cells
are too complex to have been created by nature alone -- say evolution
isn't incompatible with the existence of God.

There is just no evidence for the existence of God. Evolution by
natural selection is a process that works up from simple beginnings,
and simple beginnings are easy to explain. The engineer or any other
living thing is difficult to explain -- but it is explicable by
evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of evolutionary
biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only
known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design,
could ever come into the universe anywhere.

So why do we insist on believing in God?

From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories
about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in
supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for
very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a
computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable,
to obey whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it
vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, "Spread
me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral program gets started, there is
nothing to stop it.

Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to
obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general,
it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being
taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily
carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time
ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be
passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to
this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross
infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds
that were previously uninfected.

You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be
a form of abuse.

What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels
like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our
civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4
years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much
too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality.
We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child.
And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion.
And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an
atheist child.


You are working on a new book tentatively called "The God Delusion."
Can you explain it?

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of
evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood
delusions like the "imaginary friend" and the bogeyman under the bed.
Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a
minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word "delusion" also
carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.

What are its negative connotations?

A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking
for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be
settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out
of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements
are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become
violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight
over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek
new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and
literary critics.

But you don't do that if you just know your holy book is the
God-written truth and the other guy knows that his incompatible
scripture is too. People brought up to believe in faith and private
revelation cannot be persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No
wonder religious zealots throughout history have resorted to torture
and execution, to crusades and jihads, to holy wars and purges and
pogroms, to the Inquisition and the burning of witches.

What are the dark sides of religion today?

Terrorism in the Middle East, militant Zionism, 9/11, the Northern
Ireland "troubles," genocide, which turns out to be "credicide" in
Yugoslavia, the subversion of American science education, oppression
of women in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Roman Catholic Church,
which thinks you can't be a valid priest without testicles.

Fifty years ago, philosophers like Bertrand Russell felt that the
religious worldview would fade as science and reason emerged. Why
hasn't it?

That trend toward enlightenment has indeed continued in Europe and
Britain. It just has not continued in the U.S., and not in the Islamic
world. We're seeing a rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning
theocracy in the U.S. and its allies, the theocrats in the Islamic
world. They are fighting the same battle: Christian on one side,
Muslim on the other. The very large numbers of people in the United
States and in Europe who don't subscribe to that worldview are caught
in the middle.

Actually, holy alliance would be a better phrase. Bush and bin Laden
are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against
the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that
they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies
he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other,
his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The
delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would
be a much better place without either of them.

Does religion contribute to the violence of Islamic extremists?
Christian extremists?

Of course it does. From the cradle, they are brought up to revere
martyrs and to believe they have a fast track to heaven. With their
mother's milk they imbibe hatred of heretics, apostates and followers
of rival faiths.

I don't wish to suggest it is doctrinal disputes that are motivating
the individual soldiers who are doing the killing. What I do suggest
is that in places like Northern Ireland, religion was the only
available label by which people could indulge in the human weakness
for us-or-them wars. When a Protestant murders a Catholic or a
Catholic murders a Protestant, they're not playing out doctrinal
disagreements about transubstantiation.

What is going on is more like a vendetta. It was one of their lot's
grandfathers who killed one of our lot's grandfathers, and so we're
getting our revenge. The "their lot" and "our lot" is only defined by
religion. In other parts of the world it might be defined by color, or
by language, but in so many parts of the world it isn't, it's defined
by religion. That's true of the conflicts among Croats and the Serbs
and Bosnians -- that's all about religion as labels.

The grotesque massacres in India at the time of partition were between
Hindus and Muslims. There was nothing else to distinguish them, they
were racially the same. They only identified themselves as "us" and
the others as "them" by the fact that some of them were Hindus and
some of them were Muslims. That's what the Kashmir dispute is all
about. So, yes, I would defend the view that religion is an extremely
potent label for hostility. That has always been true and it continues
to be true to this day.

How would we be better off without religion?

We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to
have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good
fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born.
An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be
born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came
up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and
presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better
place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a
better place if morality was all about doing good to others and
refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession
with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.

Are there environmental costs of a religious worldview?

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the
world is just as important as it is to scientists. But there are
certain religious points of view where it is not. In those apocalyptic
religions, people actually believe that because they read some dopey
prophesy in the book of Revelation, the world is going to come to an
end some time soon. People who believe that say, "We don't need to
bother about conserving forests or anything else because the end of
the world is coming anyway." A few decades ago one would simply have
laughed at that. Today you can't laugh. These people are in power.

Unlike other accounts of the evolution of life, "The Ancestor's Tale"
starts at the present and works back. Why did you decide to tell the
story in reverse?

The most important reason is that if you tell the evolution story
forwards and end up with humans, as it's humanly normal to do so
because people are interested in themselves, it makes it look as
though the whole of evolution were somehow aimed at humanity, which of
course it wasn't. One could aim anywhere, like at kangaroos,
butterflies or frogs. We're all contemporary culmination points, for
the moment, in evolution.

If you go backward, however, no matter where you start in this huge
tree of life, you always converge at the same point, which is the
origin of life. So that was the main reason for structuring the book
the way I did. It gave me a natural goal to head toward -- the origin
of life -- no matter where I started from. Then I could legitimately
start with humans, which people are interested in.

People like to trace their ancestry. One of the most common types of
Web sites, after ones about sex, is one's family history. When people
trace the ancestry of that name, they normally stop at a few hundred
years. I wanted to go back 4,000 million years.

The idea of going back towards a particular goal called to my mind the
notion of pilgrimage as a kind of literary device. So I very vaguely
modeled the book on Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," where the pilgrims
start off as a band of human pilgrims walking backward to discover our
ancestors. We are successively joined by other pilgrims -- the
chimpanzee pilgrims at 5 million years, then the gorilla pilgrims,
then the orangutan pilgrims. Starting with humans, there are only
about 39 such rendezvous points as you go back in time. It's a rather
surprising fact. Rendezvous 39 is where we meet the bacteria pilgrims.

The idea that evolution could be "random" seems to frighten people. Is
it random?

This is a spectacular misunderstanding. If it was random, then of
course it couldn't possibly have given rise to the fantastically
complicated and elegant forms that we see. Natural selection is the
important force that drives evolution. Natural selection is about as
non-random a force as you could possibly imagine. It can't work unless
there is some sort of variation upon which to work. And the source of
variation is mutation. Mutation is random only in the sense that it is
not directed specifically toward improvement. It is natural selection
that directs evolution toward improvement. Mutation is random in that
it's not directed toward improvement.

The idea that evolution itself is a random process is a most
extraordinary travesty. I wonder if it's deliberately put about
maliciously or whether these people honestly believe such a
preposterous absurdity. Of course evolution isn't random. It is driven
by natural selection, which is a highly non-random force.

Is there an emotional side to the intellectual enterprise of exploring
the story of life on Earth?

Yes, I strongly feel that. When you meet a scientist who calls himself
or herself religious, you'll often find that that's what they mean.
You often find that by "religious" they do not mean anything
supernatural. They mean precisely the kind of emotional response to
the natural world that you've described. Einstein had it very
strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word "God" to describe it, which
has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But Einstein had that
feeling, I have that feeling, you'll find it in the writings of many
scientists. It's a kind of quasi-religious feeling. And there are
those who wish to call it religious and who therefore are annoyed when
a scientist calls himself an atheist. They think, "No, you believe in
this transcendental feeling, you can't be an atheist." That's a
confusion of language.

Some scientists say that removing religion or God from their life
would leave it meaningless, that it's God that gives meaning to life.

"Unweaving the Rainbow" specifically attacks the idea that a
materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem
meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic
worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly
privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades -- before
we die forever -- in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the
universe. And those of us fortunate enough to be living today are even
more privileged than those of earlier times. We have the benefit of
those earlier centuries of scientific exploration. Through no talent
of our own, we have the privilege of knowing far more than past
centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any schoolchild could
tell him today. That's the kind of privileged century in which we
live. That's what gives my life meaning. And the fact that my life is
finite, and that it's the only life I've got, makes me all the more
eager to get up each morning and set about the business of
understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to
have been born.

Humans may not be products of an intelligent designer but given
genetic technologies, our descendants will be. What does this mean
about the future of evolution?

It's an interesting thought that in some remote time in the future,
people may look back on the 20th and 21st centuries as a watershed in
evolution -- the time when evolution stopped being an undirected force
and became a design force. Already, for the past few centuries, maybe
even millennia, agriculturalists have in a sense designed the
evolution of domestic animals like pigs and cows and chickens. That's
increasing and we're getting more technologically clever at that by
manipulating not just the selection part of evolution but also the
mutation part. That will be very different; one of the great features
of biological evolution up to now is that there is no foresight.

In general, evolution is a blind process. That's why I called my book
"The Blind Watchmaker." Evolution never looks to the future. It never
governs what happens now on the basis on what will happen in the
future in the way that human design undoubtedly does. But now it is
possible to breed a new kind of pig, or chicken, which has such and
such qualities. We may even have to pass that pig through a stage
where it is actually less good at whatever we want to produce --
making long bacon racks or something -- but we can persist because we
know it'll be worth it in the long run. That never happened in natural
evolution; there was never a "let's temporarily get worse in order to
get better, let's go down into the valley in order to get over to the
other side and up onto the opposite mountain." So yes, I think it well
may be that we're living in a time when evolution is suddenly starting
to become intelligently designed.

shhhez your fingers must be sore lol.ss

If we wanted to read Dawkins, Behe, Dembski or any other author we would buy the book. Now that you've filled these pages with this Dawkins junk [IMO] can you tell us why? Are you, for example, a fan of creationism or do you buy into one of the Darwinian lines of thought? Perhaps like myself you have another theory?

I thought that was what parapsychology was about

I liked the conversation about honesty, I never meant for a conversation about telepathy to get going.

Hey, come on Jeff. What's this shattering theory you're hinting at? Just the gist, if you like.

toxx

OK Sophie. Let's look at some of the problems of obligatory honesty. Some demented person wielding an axe rushes up to you and says: "Which way did he go?". Ummm. Honest answer not cool.

Someone wants to write a work of fiction. Clearly it isn't going to be the truth - so what do we do about that?

Nobody can tell the 'whole truth' as we'd have to spend longer than our own lifetimes describing, for example, what we had said in the past. In fact, infinite time would be required if the 'whole truth' is self-referential.

toxx

Hello again
A perceptive college lecturer I knew once said, to this topic, "Some people never tell a lie because they know the truth will do more damage".