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RE: Microraptor: We have to admit it, folks - 4/23/2008 2:12:39 PM
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Agahnim
Posts: 160
Joined: 2/27/2008
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quote:
Oh, I see, so you postulate there's a Heaven for good Christians and there's a heaven for members of other less exclusive religions. This makes about as much sense as your views on evolution, Agahnim! Thanks for the consistency.
No, that’s not what I believe either. Do you want me to explain what I believe about this? Or are you only interested in making snide comments about my opinions, while not even attempting to address any of the evidence for them that I’ve posted in this thread?
If you want to discuss my current beliefs about spiritual matters, we should get Raptorman’s permission to discuss it here first, since this is his thread and it’s completely off-topic here.
< Message edited by Agahnim -- 4/23/2008 2:19:18 PM >
_____________________________
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." --Mahatma Gandhi
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RE: Microraptor: We have to admit it, folks - 4/23/2008 2:17:49 PM
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drmark
Posts: 3108
Joined: 7/10/2006
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You really need only to explain it to God. You will find Him much more interested in your opinions of afterlife and spiritual matters than I am!
_____________________________
Jeremiah 31:31-34. The time is NOW, fellow saints!
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RE: Microraptor: We have to admit it, folks - 4/27/2008 12:15:31 AM
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Agahnim
Posts: 160
Joined: 2/27/2008
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Well, what I believe about the afterlife doesn’t really have to do with origins theories, so an entire thread about it might be a little off-topic here. But if Raptorman is interested in hearing about it in this thread, I guess I’ll explain it.
As a Deist, I believe that the only accurate way to learn about the nature of the spiritual world is by studying the effects it has on the physical world. I think almost everyone can agree that to whatever extent the effects of the spiritual world can be seen directly like this, that is a reliable way of learning about it. I consider this fact to be kind of a big deal, since no two religions can agree on any other method to learn about this. Christians say that it’s possible to learn about the nature spiritual world from the Bible, Muslims say it’s possible from the Koran, Hindus say it’s possible from the Vedas, and each of these books claims to be divinely inspired. It isn’t possible for that claim to be true of all of these books, though, because each of them says something completely different.
In other words, if you’re hoping to learn about the spiritual world from a religious text, the only way it’s possible is if you’ve managed to pick out whichever one of the dozens of them is telling the truth when it claims to be divinely inspired, assuming this is true of any of them. But on the other hand, there’s only one physical world for us to learn from, and most of the time what can be learned from it doesn’t require any more interpretation than any of the religious texts do. So basically, the only uncertainty involved in learning from physical evidence is whether you’re interpreting it correctly, whereas with any religious text you have to wonder about that question in addition to whether it’s been translated accurately over the thousands of years, and whether you’ve picked the right one of them to begin with.
So, what can the physical world tell us about God’s nature? One way to learn about this is by studying the effectiveness of prayer.
It turns out that studies have shown prayer to be effective. One such study, described here, showed that patients recover from illnesses more quickly when they have family members praying for them. Another study, for which I can’t find the URL at the moment, showed that religious people tended to live longer lives than non-religious people and have fewer health problems, which is what you’d expect if God was answering their prayers to help heal them. And as you also might expect, these studies generally do not show praying to be effective when it’s being done for no reason other than to study its effects. It only works when you actually care about what you’re praying for, such as in the first study where people were praying to help their loved ones recover from illness, about which they’d probably have been praying even if it weren’t for the study.
But here’s the interesting part: these studies show exactly the same results regardless of the religion of the people involved. Both of the studies I mentioned covered prayers made by members of several different religions, and there was no measurable difference between the effectiveness of prayer for any of them. In the case of the second study I mentioned, that could just be because the health benefits of being religious were nothing but a psychological placebo effect—but if you believe in God, and you believe that God answers prayers at all, then the inescapable conclusion from this is that God is not offering any preferential treatment towards one religion over another in this respect.
I’ve also encountered what I consider to be some physical evidence for the existence of an afterlife, although I probably don’t need to put forth much of an argument for its existence in this thread, since I’m sure most of the people posting here already believe in one anyway. But based on what prayer studies have shown about God’s nature, it seems inconsistent to assume that even though God offers the same help to everyone who worships him in this life regardless of what we believe about him, he would also reward or punish people in the next life based on the same criteria. For this reason, I don’t think what afterlife we go to depends on what religion we follow. I tend to think of the afterlife itself as being the same for everyone who dies, and that it’s basically just being faced with the absolute truth about everything there is to know about the universe. For someone such as Einstein, who devoted his life to learning as much as he could about the world, this would be a sort of paradise—whereas for someone such as Hitler, who devoted his life to pursuing his own delusions, being unable to ignore the truth for any longer would be equivalent to torture.
Raptorman, if you want me to, I can also go into more detail about why I decided around six years ago that I don’t think Christianity can be true. I’d like to eventually get back to our paleontology topic also, though.
_____________________________
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." --Mahatma Gandhi
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