I want to have an afterlife. I study science, and sometimes I feel like there are things humans won’t get in my lifetime. So I like to think that I can continue on learning even after I die.
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Because I’ve personally met Jesus Christ. He’s a 10,000 year old former cave man.
What a movie!
Starring both the Candyman and The Greatest American Hero!
Oh, hey, I’ve seen this one.
They don’t make films like they used to!
You sacrifice for me, I sustain you. I sacrifice for you, you sustain me.
I believe this because nature is hungry, but expected to sustain life.
I don’t have a religion, but consider myself to be “religiously neutral.” Either smart men from all over are running the same scam — or there are common bits of wisdom in most religions and there may be something to that. Either way, I ultimately believe in Humanism, I suppose. That humans are inherently good, or want to be, and/or enough actually are.
I do not believe in anything original myself. It’s all academic to me.
or there are common bits of wisdom in most religions and there may be something to that.
The entire point of religion is to make important rules followed.
When a food is banned, it’s because that food was killing people when the rules were written. Abrahamic religions don’t like sex that doesn’t make babies, because they all start as persecuted cults by the main branches and the fastest way to grow is to have kids born into it.
It’s obviously all outdated, but it boils down to how you’d convince a kid not to do something when you can’t watch them 24/7: follow the rules or Santa will find out.
Like there’s always jokes about Jewish Sabbath, but honesty that was just the equivalent to modern union mandated lunch breaks. The only way to guarantee a day off back in the day, was to explicitly outlaw doing anything. Pretty much all anyone in the household could do was just relax and hang out together.
Like I said, it’s all way outdated. But every time you try something new suddenly the ATF starts hanging around…
“'Cause, in those days, a pork chop could kill ya!” - Chris Rock
The really weird one is shellfish.
Shellfish allergy is a big deal, And prior to refrigeration it wasn’t a common food unless right near da beach.
So people could not try it till they were adults, and just keel over on the spot. But since shellfish allergy is weirdly genetic, the populations most at risk for it now, are the ones who spent centuries avoiding it. Because everyone else kept losing at least some of the people who were allergic
Exactly what I think. Otherwise, I just attempt to follow the Scriptures (both to the left and right of Matthew), with exceptions due to geographic restrictions, political power restrictions, or divine decrees of course.
Either smart men from all over are running the same scam — or there are common bits of wisdom in most religions and there may be something to that.
Or C: There was an original scam that not so original humans copied over and over through the years.
The scam of hedonist-denying self-restraint, says the Western man. The scam of purpose and belonging beyond the scope of the party, says the anti-religious commie.
“Religion is true to the poor, false to the rich, and useful to the powerful.”
I believe in God and His judgement because I just do. There’s something instead of nothing, and nothing takes considerably less effort than something to exist (no need to argue this, nor any way to do so, hehe), and for me the idea of a Creator makes entire sense and completes the puzzle. I believe in His judgement probably because of that inner morality and desire for truth and justice everyone has but many deny and avoid. Finally, I do because it makes me happy, and helps me tame the animal and just be overall a person I’m proud of being, one that walks his talk and is at peace with himself and others.
Of course, none of this just came to me, or at least not as well defined and convincingly spoken, this is all thanks to the words of the prophets and the word of God as encapsulated in the Qur’an. Jesus always made sense to me even as an atheist kid (I just thought he was a pretty clever and kindhearted dude, not, you know, “God made flesh” or whatever people believe in), Solomon should make sense to any adult with enough working neurons, Muhammad’s message is basically just a reiteration and perfection of it all, a little bow that ties it all of monotheism up. 👍
Could you expand (or link to something that expands) on the Solomon thing?
Please read Ecclesiastes, written by Solomon, (son of David, king of Jerusalem), one of the wisest men in recorded history and the OG panicking existentialist!
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ecclesiastes+1&version=NIV
It’s a short read, I promise. 👍
username checks out
Hi! 😅👋
hi yourself there, buddy.
Do not want to find out if your username checks out.
I disagree with everything you’ve said, but upvoted because you answered the question.
Plus real honesty and good intentions.
Thanks for the positive interaction. 👍
because the book said itself was real
My religion isn’t really based on belief, just practice. And I do the practices because they make me feel better and more connected.
I used to, because my parents did and I went to church and all that.
But then I started to actually think about it.
Now I don’t believe in anything supernatural.
There are parts of nature we don’t understand (yet) but I don’t think there’s any ‘higher power’ that created the universe, and especially not earth or humankind specifically.I believe in the Goddess of Luck because, hopefully not sounding too cocky, she’s been kind to me. I’ve told people about her before and they think I’m slightly insane, but then as they hang out with me they start to thank her on thier own luck because they see how she speaks in crazy ways.
All you have to do is thank her when luck is on your side and you’ll see the difference.
beautiful
I believe in intelligent design because the theory of evolution boils down to: if you left your room messy for 1 billion years, when you came back it would be the Taj Mahal.
The real fundamental root cause of my belief in God comes from personal experiences.
Except the room is entire Earth, it’s filled to the brim with most elements of the Periodic table, and constantly receives hundreds of terawatts of energy. Oh, and it actually took several billion years, not one, to come from this to Taj Mahal.
Modern science has shown ways in which many of the organic molecules could be spontaneously formed out of basic elements under conditions observable on early Earth. We’re also about to bridge synthesis of organic molecules and synthetic biology.
Intelligent design, on its end, gets stuck with several big questions, like the fact our design is actually very bad, just workable, and the fact we share not only visual properties, but most of our DNA with other animals - particularly other primates.
Not here to alter your beliefs - you do you - but setting the record straight.
So the record is, we’ve never been able to achieve synthetic biology under the most ideal laboratory circumstances?
What do you mean by bad design?
Just because we share DNA with other animals doesn’t mean it wasn’t by design.
Conditions of early Earth are often complicated to recreate, and it takes a lot of simultaneous reactions going just right to make it work - but Earth had billions of years, and we don’t have such a luxury. Still, we are very close, and we already created a lot of biomolecules out of basic blocks like water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia.
Humans have plenty of faults in their design - why do we have reproductive organs, which need to be kept clean, right next or combined with exhaust (urethra/rectum)? Why do we have two legs and vertical organization of the body that adds huge gravitational stress? Why do we have pelvis shaped in a way that makes birthing more painful and complicated? Why people with uterus have bloody and painful periods? Why do we have so many vulnerable spots on the body where they should clearly be reinforced? etc. etc.
We also have plenty of rudimentary organs we don’t need anymore, that are either just sitting there for no intelligent reason at all, or are actively causing trouble for us (like appendix or wisdom teeth).
This all doesn’t fall into the line of intelligent design, unless divine creatures just enjoy crafting us at random and see how we survive anyway.
Sure, they could still do that, they may engineer us in a very odd and imperfect way, they could make our DNA similar to other animals to make us guess if we actually descent from them instead, etc. But this involves so much jumping through the hoops we may as well cut it off with Occam’s razor. Evolutionary theory offers clear sequence of how we got where we are, it shows clear relation of all living organisms and the ways they develop into what we know today. So, it wins.
What? So first of, it really doesn’t. You don’t understand evolution if you think that’s what it is, but that’s beside the point.
You believe that a supernatural sky being made a mud man and a rib woman, who were tricked by a talking snake into eating magic no no fruit. Then 4 thousand years later, a zombie came and made everyone drink it’s blood and eat it’s body in order to get into the good magic sky place.
It’s real easy to dumb down peoples beliefs and make them sound stupid, especially if you misrepresent them.
The question was why do you believe in YOUR beliefs. It was not an invitation to be a superior asshole.
As I said, personal experience. I’m not sure how I was insulting anyone else’s beliefs. That’s literally why I believe in intelligent design: I believe that evolution is mathematically impossible.
If you think that the theory of evolution puts forth the any argument like Taj Mahal coming from a messy room, then you don’t understand the theory of evolution.
Evolution does not “boil down” to that.
You are correct and don’t deserve the down votes.
It is insulting because it downplays the theory to the point of “to believe this would be absurd and stupid” which obviously has implications for its believers.
Imagine an atheist stated: “I am an atheist because intelligent design boils down to: if you leave your room empty for 6000 years, a magic fairy will appear and create the Taj Mahal”. Can you see how this is not only just an outright false statement, but also making a mockery of those who believe?
Not really. I don’t find that statement insulting at all. That is what Creationism boils down to.
The analogy to a messy room fails. I recommend you read this (and the rest of the archive, it’s great stuff):
https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF001.html
Of note is “The Earth is not a closed system”
Realizing that the root cause is just because you want it to be true is fine, commendable even. Just don’t try to justify it post hoc with sciency-sounding arguments.
I understand that the sun gives low entropy energy to earth, and pockets of entropy can decrease as long as the whole system increases. However, my room exists on earth, so I still think it is an adequate analogy.
More seriously, I would like to see a mathematical treatment of the probability of biologically detrimental mutations vs. beneficial or neutral mutations.
That treatment has been done. From the same page:
https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html
Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).
The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.
First, I want to thank you for having this discussion with me. I’ve been wanting to discuss these ideas with someone for some time.
As to the referenced article, a couple of points stand out to me:
- The first paper cited by Nachman and Crowell compares pseudogenes between humans and chimpanzees assuming that one evolved from the other over a known period of time. Rejecting the assumption that humans did not evolve from chimps would render this sort of evaluation inaccurate.
- The last sentence of the first point, that harmful mutations do not survive long, is not supported by any literature on the page, and I believe it to be wishful thinking. There are many examples of human genetic diseases that do not decrease the reproductive capacity of those carrying them, which to me would imply, again without literature support, that those mutations would accumulate over time in a population.
- I would also disagree with the 5th point, where any beneficial mutation disproves young earth creationism. Young earth creationists must believe in a much higher rate of so-called micro evolution, since all the variation we see on earth must have taken place in the last 6 thousand years or less.
- It’s a common misunderstanding, but humans and chimps didn’t evolve from each other. We each evolved from a common ancestor. Regardless, it seems like you wouldn’t accept anything other than something from the now, so here’s a study that agrees with the general mutation rate done by comparing parents and children in Iceland: Parental influence on human germline de novo mutations in 1,548 trios from Iceland Here’s also a paper on calculating the distribution of those mutations across deleterious/neutral/beneficial: Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome
- If a mutation doesn’t decrease the reproductive capacity of the carrier, then it’s not harmful. If it’s harmful, then it will affect the reproductive capacity. That’s just how it’s defined in this context.
- I think it’s slightly sloppily phrased, but is a counter to a specific claim found in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Creationism-Henry-M-Morris/dp/1982697091. I don’t have a copy so can’t comment further.
Sorry, it took me a little while to go through the Boyko paper. It’s super statistics heavy. What I’m reading from there is that 27.3–29.0% of mutations are neutral, 30-42% are moderately deleterious, all the rest are highly deleterious or lethal. The statistics indicate that 10-20% of mutations have been fixed by positive selection (again assuming a common ancestor with chimpanzees). Deleterious, as you mentioned, specifically means harmful to reproduction. So in this context, diseases like Huntinginton’s, hemophilia, familial ALS, sickle cell, Lynch syndrome would be considered “neutral”. These statistics are mostly derived from Americans of African decent, as the clustered rate of mutation in Americans of European decent was too high to model well.
The Jonsson paper had a similar average rate of mutation of order 10^-8 per base pair as the other paper we looked at, which translates to about 3 per generation.
So what I don’t understand, and maybe you can help me, is that in the extreme case of 20% of mutations being avoided by positive selection, there’s still 7% of mutations with potentially horrific consequences. This is already excluding the over 70% of mutations that decrease reproductive fitness. What evolutionary pressure is there to keep “neutral” genetic diseases from accumulating in a population over time? How can “beneficial” mutations outweigh this burden? Mathematically, it seems to me that macro evolution is impossible. Am I missing something?
No worries, I can also be slow to respond. There’s a few things at play here:
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Neutral mutations can become beneficial later on. It’s not just about the genes, it’s also about the environment. Even deleterious mutations can become beneficial, like sickle cell disease likely being selected for due to its protection against malaria.
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Following from that, deleterious/neutral/beneficial are pretty loose categories, and it’s not even really correct to think of them as categories. It’s more about how beneficial it is. Sickle cell disease is bad, but better than dying of malaria.
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Beneficial mutations can be really beneficial. Once somebody has them, they can spread like wildfire through the population. One example is the ability to digest lactose as an adult. It’s “worth” lots of “failures” to get that mutation (using those terms loosely and without value judgement). An analogy might help here, think about it kind of like this slime mold searching for food. The tips have a lot of churn and waste, but the food it finds is worth doing all that work. You can think of the beneficial mutations as the branches that are kept.
(Note that evolution isn’t directed by “something”, even as simple as a slime mold, it’s a description of a physical process, like gravity, so the analogy is loose)
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We’ve seen beneficial mutations happen in person, and shows another example of how useful beneficial mutations can be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment. The E. coli evolved the ability to digest a new substance they couldn’t before. The experiment also touches on neutral mutations sticking around.
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The distinction you’re drawing between micro evolution and macro evolution relies on an assumption that either there are different kinds that are inherently distinct, or some sort of “system” that prevents micro evolution from progressing into macro evolution. For the prior, I’ve never seen a defense of that that doesn’t rely on the supernatural, and for the latter, what happens when the system itself changes due to evolution?
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In my personal experience, the strongest argument against any radical move away from the current general scientific worldview consensus is that everything generally fits together. Sure, the estimated age of the universe might be adjusted slightly from 13.7B to 13.8B years, or the Jurassic might actually be estimated slightly wrong. But across all evidence we have, the current scientific understanding across a diverse range of disciplines is approximately correct. Nobody is counting tree rings and saying “Wait a minute, these show the Earth is 6,000 years old!”. Nobody is dating rocks and saying “Hold on, this dates as twice as old as the universe!”. Note that you’ll find claims of things like fossilized tracks of humans walking next to dinosaurs, but those don’t pan out
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Also, The God Delusion.
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Cutting out philosophical arguments, prophecies and “no way this is a coincidence” types of stuff (which, yeah, there’s a lot of those), it’s a combination of
We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth. But is it not sufficient concerning your Lord that He is, over all things, a Witness?
-Quran 41:53
They have taken their rabbis and monks as lords besides Allah and also the Messiah, son of Maryam (Mary), though they were commanded to worship only One God. There is no god except Him. His Glory is far above any partners they ascribe (to Him).
-9:31
And let not those who [greedily] withhold what Allah has given them of His bounty ever think that it is better for them. Rather, it is worse for them. Their necks will be encircled by what they withheld on the Day of Resurrection. And to Allah belongs the heritage of the heavens and the earth. And Allah, with what you do, is [fully] Acquainted.
-3:180
Of course there’s a lot more where that came from, but the point is: We here have a religious text that encourages independent thought and pondering of the world and itself, promises harsh punishment for hoarding wealth and unequivocally condemns priestly institutions. Does that sound like an attempt to gain wealth or power? Exactly. Also this
He [Muhammad] looked displeased and turned (his attention) away, because a blind man came to him (interrupting his discourse). What would make you realise? Perhaps he would purify himself (by your attention),
-80:1-3
is not how a cult leader talks about himself. It’s admittedly hard to parse from the translation, but this is a somewhat harsh admonition of Muhammad here. The segment continues until verse 10 if anyone wants continue reading, but the gist of it is “you’re ignoring the man seeking guidance and trying to convince those who reject it? That is not how that works. Yes, even if it’s a random blind guy.”
Lovely post! The Qur’an also says something like “and We spared you from committing injustice, had We not intervened you would’ve easily faltered” regarding the prophet Muhammad (sorry, can’t remember the exact ayat). 👍
Grow up, troll
What’s the term for not knowing for sure if there’s a god or not and not giving a fuck about it either way?
Apatheism
Agnostic
