williatw wrote:I am saying that the replacement of religion with ideology is unavoidable, that it will default to that even if not intended. That the irrational side of the human mind will simply substitute one for the other eventually.
Actually I agree and feel that the best countermeasure is a religion-- if you wish to call it that, maybe "post-religion" would be better-- that embraces the teachings of our olders,
all the best parts of
all the holy books, but without the superstition and super magic daddies in the sky and the focus on souls being immortal. Your soul perishes with you; your reputation is all you leave. But that's all anyone ever has; and you still hear the names of Galen, of Aristotle, of Hippocrates, of Democritus, of Pythagoras, do you not?
I think psychologists should consult with all the heads of all the faiths and compare their beliefs with reality, and from that which remains make a universal human religion that recognizes the essential dignity and rights of the human spirit that lives in each of us while we yet live. Ceremonies of appropriate type, and of various individual faiths as appropriate, should be adapted from the "best practices" of the available religions, and rather than dishonor and disrespect thousands of years of human culture we take from it that which is best and honor it all. We'll need a new Holy Book. That should be the outcome, finally. But without all the fairy tales. Just a clear-eyed evaluation of the state of the human spirit and of the best practices we know for sustaining it.
And no more statements of infallibility, or that the Holy Book must not be changed. It will change for a very long time to come; perhaps forever. The procedures for changing it must be well-documented, non-confrontational, and regularly used.
williatw wrote:For instance separation of church and state does not preclude the state imposing whatever ideology it wants to.
The Constitution must rule the state. When it ceases to expect tyranny.
williatw wrote:Atheism will inevitably default to some kind of ideological state worshiping based beliefs because the human animal will yearn for such, the need to believe in something, have faith in something.
Not if we make a real religion, one not based on lies and fairy tales. One that says we should be good to each other and respect our olders (but remember they're easily future shocked and so are we) and all the other good things that all the religions say, like not hating and not killing and not stealing and so forth. Why should we be held by the archaic obsolete beliefs of drunk or insane neolithic sheep herders? It's the space age, not the stone age. We need space age religion.
There are no gods.
We evolved.
The universe came from a quantum vacuum fluctuation in the cosmological constant of a very small region in an 11-dimensional überverse whose characteristic is that it has nothing but so-called "small" dimensions; dimensions that are still wound up like the additional six dimensions in our universe whose degrees of freedom result in electromagnetism and the strong or color and weak nuclear forces. The dimensions we currently think of as "up-down," "in-out," and "back-forth" as well as the time dimension (which is hyperbolic and worth a whole huge long post all on its own) are all small in this überverse; but the small region that will later be our universe is suddenly differentiated from the rest of the überverse because it is expanding. Not only that, it is expanding exponentially. In the next 10^-43 seconds, it will expand from many orders of magnitude smaller than a proton to 40 billion light years, and that's the minimum. We can't tell how much farther it might have gotten; but we know it got to at least 40 billion light years, because we can either see it or see things that were affected by it, and they're all like here.
Then the inflaton, the field that the cosmological constant in Einstein's Field Equation measures, collapses; and all the cosmological constant energy that has been accumulated by the expansion of that many-times-smaller-than-a-proton space to 40 billion light years undergoes vacuum decay, and is dumped as mass-energy into the newly created 4 dimensional spacetime of our universe. And that's the beginning of the Big Bang. This is the true story of the creation of our universe. The Milky Way Galaxy is a very small mote in all of this. And in fact the entire filament that contains the Virgo Supercluster of Galaxies is pretty small. It's surrounded on either side by two enormous voids, completely free of galaxies and (as far as we can tell) matter, other than dark matter, and in fact most of the universe we can see (which today is more like a hundred billion light years wide, since the universe has started accelerated expansion seven billion years ago due to dark energy, aka cosmological constant, aka inflaton) catching up to and surpassing forever the slowing of expansion due to gravity. Our universe will die in the cold and dark, or in a Big Rip, not in a Big Crunch. We know that now. And it will be many trillions of years before it does. The universe is very young yet and is full of energy and opportunity.
The Galaxy formed, its core black hole was created, starforming arms developed from the wrinkles it makes (and other galaxies passing by tweak), and eventually there were enough supernovae accumulated that Population I stars like our Sun started being born, along with large solar nebulae that made rocky planets like Earth. That's where Earth came from.
Do I need to continue with life?
williatw wrote:Remove religion and it will be ideology, or you will end up being conquered, enslaved, converted (or murdered) by an intolerant virulent religion that does not brock what it sees as heresy. How many ultra-rational atheists who don't believe in much other than a general preference for "reason", "logic", etc., would willingly if not enthusiastically wire themselves up with explosives and blow themselves to kingdom come, as long as they get to take a bunch of unbelievers with them? People who fanatically believe in something will go the extra mile to impose their point of view on another even at the cost of their own lives.
Personally I wouldn't blow myself up to prove a religious point, or to kill religious people. I might if someone raped and murdered by wife or mother, but this is the stuff of adolescent fantasies. More likely I'd buy a .45 and confront them and shoot them and either shoot myself or take my chances. I don't have what it takes to torture someone. I step on spiders, though.
We need new religion, better religion, religion that doesn't accept fairy tales but that doesn't necessarily reject all the lessons of the past. No more gods, or spirits, or imaginary places beyond the sky or under the ground, or angels or devils, or any of this other crap. Just people and their mortal spirits that die with them, except the parts everyone remembers in their descendents or their writings.
We need a directorate of science, and we need it to be voted on only by scientists. You don't get to vote on reality. Get over it. Elected officials that deny the findings of the Science Directorate are subject to immediate impeachment for incompetence.
