Proof that the whole 'god' thing is baloney!!

[max_tranmere]

If we accept that the further back we go the less understanding there was, then I think that we should not pay any attention to theories on things that people thought about 2,000 ago.

Every generation that you go back you can see there was less understanding and they had more things wrong. Just 100 years ago, in about 1900, the greatest professors of the day were sure that those lines and blobs on Mars were remnants of old cities, canal and railway networks, and everyone beleived it. These boffins gave lectures and the greatest brains in the land attended and thought it true aswell. Newspaper editorials wrote about it - everyone really believed it. Now of course telescopes are more advanced and we know it all to be wrong.

400 years earlier, in about 1500, people thought the earth was flat and if you got in a boat and kept going you would eventually fall off the edge. I need not point out that we discovered later that was NOT the case, and that the world was round. Well, all this god stuff was 1,500 years before that! Some 2,000 years ago. As I said if one accepts that the further back you go the more they had it wrong it seems very clear to me that all of this god stuff is bullshit! Considering all I've said here, surely people must agree?

[vostok 1]

Talking about the surface of Mars made me think of this:

Here are the words of the last participant in the biggest scientific experiment of all time.

?I felt that I was literally standing on a Plateau, a Plateau that science and technology had allowed me to get to. But now what I was seeing and more importantly what I was feeling at that moment in time was that science and technology had NO answers.

Because there I was and there you are, the Earth, dynamic, overwhelming and I felt that there was too much purpose, too much logic, it is just too beautiful for it all to have happened by accident, for creation of the universe to have happened by accident.

There has to be someone bigger than you, bigger than me and I mean this in a spiritual sense, not a religious sense, but there has to be a creator of the universe that stands above us all, that stands above the religions that we use to govern our lives.?

The words of Gene Cernan, the last Human to step foot on the Moon.

[jj]

That's piss-poor logic on his part- it does not follow from the
understandable awe we often feel at the grandeur and immensity
of the physical universe that we need then to infer a Creator.

[jj]

It's all about facts- without a knowledge of electromagnetism it
isn't all that unreasonable to infer an angry god as a cause.
People certainly weren't more stupid in the past [although you
obviously weren't implying that].
And these things are rarely 'straight-line': the Ancient Greeks had
a working steam-engine, which they failed to exploit; and Aristarchus
asserted that the Earth went around the Sun. But ths knowledge
didn't fit into the prevailing world-view and was forgotten for 1000
years or so.

[jj]

My thoughts exactly- although I'd qualify that 'right' in your last
sentence by 'more' or 'probably' [img]http://bgafd.co.uk/forum/smileys/grin.gif[/img]

[mrmcfister]

Yep,ancient man was even more stupid than us lot!Trouble is even though we are much more aware there are still loads of twats that believe this shit.

[jj]

I've previously made the point about our scary world and the
[IMO wholly illusory] comfort religion gives.
It's also a truism that religion tends to flourish amongst those
who have less material investment in this world- the 'downtrodden
and dispossessed'. It's a comfort to believe in an afterlife where
scores will be settled.

[Sam Slater]

[quote]It's all about facts- without a knowledge of electromagnetism it
isn't all that unreasonable to infer an angry god as a cause.[/quote]

Well, it is unreasonable if you think about it. A better way of putting it is, 'it is understandable.' For instance:

Without an understanding of the weather, or nature, it's reasonable to assume a cause for why your crops failed this year, while in the previous 10 were large harvests. It is, however, unreasonable to assume the cause to have a conscience and motive. It's understandable, if you didn't know better, because our brains have worked out cause and affect from a very young age. It's vital to survival. The cause of the burn on your arm was getting too close the the fire; your friend is dead because the lion caught him; your sister has a broken leg because she fell off a cliff, etc...

Where the cause is obvious, we are comfortable with it (falling off cliffs). Where the cause is hard to fathom, we assume underlying motive for good and bad luck. Assuming motive kept our ancestors alive in the past and so this is why it's understandable that some cannot understand how the universe exists without a creator. It was never logical or reasonable to assume so though.

[Sam Slater]

Generally true, but we can still learn from less civilised societies and ancient cultures.

For instance, many simple, less educated and worldly tribes - what we might call primitive - are much more content and happy with life than we are.