Why Religion is Outdated in the 21st Century - Lawrence Krauss

Prominent atheist professor Richard Dawkins described religion as “redundant and irrelevant” as he took on the former Archbishop of Canterbury in a debate.

Speaking at the Cambridge Union debating society, Prof Dawkins argued that religion hindered scientific endeavour by "peddling false explanations".

"It is a betrayal of the intellect, a betrayal of all that's best about what makes us human," he said.

"It's a phony substitute for an explanation, which seems to answer the question until you examine it and realise that it does no such thing."

He added that in the scientific world, religion was a "pernicious charlatan".

"It peddles false explanations where real explanations could have been offered, false explanations that get in the way of the enterprise of discovering real explanations," he said.

 

This deserves its own thread. I’m dead.

 

I don't know if this is true or not but when you chop up a potato and you get very close to it and listen very, very carefully, you can hear it screaming. At least that's what I heard is happening with lettuce when you are chopping it up.

 

Why do you value human life more than animal life? Are you pro death penalty? Pro war? Pro gun? Then you are not pro life imo.

 

Actually, I was wrong. They become defensive when they are being eaten. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2677858/Bad-news-vegetarians-Plants-hear-eaten.html

 

The problem here is that Mengele defined a human being by his self-awareness ability. Now, that's a very dangerous definition because it imply that if you don't possess the ability then you're not human.

 

Plants releases gases are the equivalent of crying out in pain when cut or injured.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pain.htm

 

I’m fairly certain what she said was a joke, since she implied tossing out babies already born as well.

 

I would never hurt my plants

 

Not only do I feel bad whenever I eat meat, but now I feel bad whenever I eat vegetables.

 

You can still eat seeds/nuts/fruit/eggs

 

I would define being human as being a member of the homo genus, regardless of mental capacity.

But, back on the actual topic, here are some thoughts from Sam Harris on religion in the 21st century:

Religious language is, without question, unscientific in its claims for what is true. We have Christians believing in the holy ghost, the resurrection of Jesus and his possible return – these are claims about biology and physics which, from a scientific point of view in the 21st century, should be unsustainable.

I wouldn't dispute that the horizon of what we know and consider true changes, but we do this in the context of a background reality which we are dimly coming to understand. I suspect that while you are reluctant to think we can ever grasp absolute truth, we can still recognise falsehood, or how implausible certain [religious] claims are.

I'm more worried than angry, and perhaps impatient. I don't see any reason to believe that we can survive our religious differences indefinitely. I am worried that religion is one of the forces that has balkanised our world – we have Christians against Muslims against Jews.

Humility is very much on the side of science and honest self-criticism. The arrogance is claiming to be certain about truth claims of Iron Age philosophy, which someone like Collins does.

You wouldn't say that a doctor is entitled to believe his patients were sick from the evil eye, or voodoo. You wouldn't say Francis Collins is free to deny the germ theory of disease. You're recommending he practises his science in a walled garden. That's an intellectual problem. Every scientist has to admit what is offered as true in the context of religion is scientifically unjustified.

 

But fertilized eggs become animals. And the chair I'm sitting on is made out of wood. And I stepped on a bug earlier.

 

Don’t eat fertilized eggs or step on bugs!! I’m always watching out for bugs on the sidewalk. My bf finds it rly annoying.

 

**** that motherfucker, he got owned so bad by Chomsky.

Yeah, it's not.

Josef Mengele on being human.

 

I’m not saying Josef Mengele was joking lmao. I’m saying sakeinbo was joking about killing 12 month old babies because they lack self awareness. I truly think you need to take a lesson in reading comprehension.

 

So you agree that a human being is defined by his self-awareness ability?

 

Can’t tell if trolling or genuinely confused.

 

Christopher Hitchens on religion in modern times:

Religion is, on overwhelming balance, a force for evil in the world. It is unnecessary, malevolent, and impedes mankind’s march towards truth and a livable future. Time to rid ourselves of it.

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs.) Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think – though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one – that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path [as a state form] had to pay for it. Their societies would decay, their economies contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. […] Faith-based fanatics could not design anything as useful or beautiful as a skyscraper or a passenger aircraft. But, continuing their long history of plagiarism, they could borrow and steal these things and use them as negation.

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made. Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and destruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two. Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitutes our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” It is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit.