Hypothesis: the more educated you are the less likely you are to be religious

Renzatic on 30/1/2012 at 02:30

Yeah, it's been a little bit. But I offset it with furious masturbation and calling people out on messageboards.

...which is ultimately about the same thing.

Scots Taffer on 30/1/2012 at 02:38

lollin' pretty hard over here

Tocky on 30/1/2012 at 03:20

Quote Posted by Scots Taffer

Hypothesis: Renz hasn't been laid in a while

I don't give a damn how educated you are, if anything will make you pray to a god you don't believe in it's having your junk in a funk. That there is a foxhole conversion for you. "Hey Linda? Yeah, say, you aren't a diseased whore or anything are you? No? Would you mind giving me the number of your friend Jessica?"

Renzatic on 30/1/2012 at 04:20

Quote Posted by Tocky

I don't give a damn how educated you are, if anything will make you pray to a god you don't believe in it's having your junk in a funk

Well, it isn't my junk that's in a funk. Rather the surrounding junkal area. Trust me, if it were my junk, I would've been in the ER the first night of. Probably crying like a 4 year old the whole while.

june gloom on 30/1/2012 at 08:06

Quote Posted by Renzatic

surrounding junkal area

faetal on 30/1/2012 at 08:29

Quote Posted by Jenesis

I was going to post some stuff about this anyway in response to the original post, but it speaks directly to this anyway:

My experience (Cambridge University, 2002-2006) - and I'll admit up front, I don't have numbers to hand for this, and I'm talking about Christianity rather than religion in general - is more or less the opposite. By a wide margin, the Christian Union and student-heavy churches were full of science students, not arts students. The science students, having been trained to look at evidence and to believe that there really is one right answer, had examined the Bible and been satisfied by its claims.

They can't have been very good scientists then if their religious beliefs are supposedly evidence-based. I say this as a relatively experienced scientist. Also, you contradict this later by saying that scientific evidence is nothing like the evidence used to back up the bible, so the anecdotal and irrelevant claim of most uni christians being scientists loses some gas.

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The Bible is full of historical evidence, all the way up to multiple eyewitness accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. (We can argue whether the evidence is reliable, of course, but it's there to be examined.)

Misnomer. It is full of quasi-historical accounts, but as mentioned by others later, these are meaningless without archaeological evidence or independent historical accounts which cross-reference them. Otherwise you are basically saying that anything written in old books is true so long as someone doesn't specifically say "this is fiction/hearsay/exaggeration". There is also a tonne of contradiction in the bible's historical claims.

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For an arts student, on the other hand, to subscribe to some kind of absolute truth that applies to everyone is precisely what they're trained not to do. Postmodernism has made absolute truth among arts academics exceedingly unfashionable. There were Christian arts students, of course, just not as many.

Stereotyping much? "Arts student" is not a type of person. Why not go the other way and say "because all art students smoke weed, they are more likely to have had a religious experience". Or similar blanket statement?

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From the Christian viewpoint, there are plenty of people in churches calling themselves Christians who are there because they're going with their family, because it's 'traditional', but who don't have a relationship with God - I wouldn't call those people Christians, but I guess for this discussion they must be included under the heading of 'religious'. For them, a move away from Christianity when they hit higher education may simply be moving out from the influence of family etc., rather than because their beliefs have been actively challenged. Someone who doesn't go through that, especially if they take a job close to their parental home once they leave school and so don't have such a clean cultural break, is probably more likely to continue going along for the ride, religiously.

This makes a great deal of sense. A lot of people consider themselves culturally christian and never thought to properly classify their beliefs until faced with an environment where it's not taken as default.

faetal on 30/1/2012 at 08:56

Quote Posted by Jenesis

Historical evidence does seem to get a bad rap these days. But if you want to look into whether Hannibal marched across the Alps, scientific evidence isn't generally what you look for. It's not an experiment you can repeat and check your observations. Yet no-one is going to use that as a grounds for arguing that we can't be sure it happened.

It doesn't get a "bad rap", it is just given criticism based on what it is - unreliable. Anyone can write down a story about something and call it true. What helps is if there is corresponding archaeological evidence or independent historical accounts which cross-reference similar events, as the chance of two separate non-affiliated accounts having fabricated the same claim are improbable.

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Consider the Christian position on the resurrection of Jesus: (The resurrection is a useful thing to look at. It's a claim of history, so either it happened or it didn't, and Christianity stands or falls on it - the Bible itself says that if Jesus didn't rise from the dead then Christianity is a bust and Christians are to be pitied above all men for believing a lie.)

God is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. He dictates how (and if) it runs from moment to moment.

This kind of statement begs the question. Would be better starting with "Suppose God is the...".

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There's no particular reason why it should work the same way from day to day, but God, in general, chooses to make it so. And it's great that he does, it means we can plant crops and expect them to grow, build transistors and expect them to work, and send men to the moon and expect the maths we did to get them to the right place. It's because God makes his universe run that way that we can do science at all. But the Biblical claim is that after Jesus' death, God decided to do something different to the norm, and raise Jesus from the dead. Faced with that, Science has no option but to hold up its hands and say 'Look, sorry, I'm not equipped to cope with this, I deal with repeatable observations. If you want to know whether this happened or not, you'll have to look elsewhere'.

Or, science can say, this claim is equal to that of any other religion's scripture - why should it be a scientific concern? What science can say is that no observable human resurrection has ever taken place and no person in human form has ever been shown to actually be the corporeal embodiment of a hypothetical celestial being, therefore, people claiming it definitely happened are not doing so with any more authority than someone claiming that UFOs made the pyramids.

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What 'elsewhere' is there? History. A lot of history is backed up by science, of course. There's plenty of documentary evidence that the Romans occupied Britain. We can look at stuff dug up out of the ground and verify that yes, the Romans did occupy Britain for a good length of time. But for the specifics of who was where and when, that's not generally something you can dig up barring the odd rare inscription, so it's accounts by chroniclers of the time we turn to. This is just the way history works, and it's not controversial.

Lack of anything better != proof. If we don't know, we don't know - pure and simple. There's no sense saying, "we don't know, but this book says THIS happened, so we'll assume it did.". Also, whose account do you take? The bible isn't the only historical account out there.

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Historical evidence is valid evidence, and if you're going to give Christianity a serious look, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Jay - I'm not accusing you in particular of this, I'm thinking of the many people, here and elsewhere, who when discussing religion have talked as though scientific evidence is all there is, but when it comes to history in general I'm sure have no problem believing the accounts of the time.

I've seen plenty of people say 'the miracles in the Bible can't be true because they're scientifically impossible', but if you understand both what the Bible says is going on and how science works, it's immediately apparent that that's not a position that makes much sense.

Why does it not make sense? Also, without considering evidence per se for a moment, isn't it interesting that miracles only ever occur in the absence of any kind of reliable recording technique and only in places where there are people who are predisposed towards believing in miracles? Why did god get all busy and involved with humans, and then promptly make himself scarce the moment reliable recording and analysis techniques were made available? Also, why were the ancient Roman and Greek pantheons of gods made redundant? They were also backed up by lots of historical accounts and valid by the same standards of "proof" you are giving christianity. What made that entire set of deities suddenly absurd?

Other than the tradition and beliefs being handed down (usually to children before they have the ability to reason) through generations and that belief being dependent on where you happen to live (is Christianity less true in India where the majority are Hindu, or are there just more misguided people in India - and so on and so forth with various other countries and their predominant beliefs) - why should a person decide to choose to follow a religion? There is a great deal of research which shows that religious belief is a distinct neurological entity with various benefits conferred by evolution. For example, it can act as protection software against the cognitive dissonance caused by being sentient and questioning one's existence. It can help with group bonding and make it easier to form communities. These traits almost certainly were useful in years gone by, but since the Renaissance and Enlightenment events, it is proving less necessary as accumulated knowledge is giving a far more broad picture of the nature of our existence and place in nature. While I am sure religion is here to stay, it has, barring the fundamentalists, found itself chased to frontier camps in the gaps where science hasn't yet been able to fully elucidate or does not concern itself with.

Azaran on 30/1/2012 at 09:20

Quote Posted by Jenesis

There's really no way to prove or disprove the resurrection story, but other aspects of Jesus' life that Christians take for granted are disproved by the Bible itself. The most striking one, which concerns what's been referred to as the most embarrassing verse of the Bible, relates to Jesus' return to save the world. Jesus actually said in the NT that the Second Coming would take place in his disciples' lifetime: “And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory....Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled”. (Matthew 24:30-32, 34)

Earlier, in Matthew 16, we see another interesting passage:
For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
It's actually known from 1st and 2nd century sources that the early Church firmly held that Jesus was to return within a few decades. When that didn't happen, it caused great turmoil among the faithful, and the Church then decided to reinterpret the verse to fit the reality (surely Scripture can't possibly be wrong! :erg:)

So there are core aspects of Christianity that are logically inconsistent, and a few others: Why would God send his Son down, and then wait thousands of years (and counting....) for some hypothetical Second Coming to save the world? And if Jesus really was the Son of God, the world should have become a better place after he had come, but the reality is that it didn't happen - on the contrary, the Church for most of its history actually brought more evil to this world than good. And another, if Jesus did say that faith could move mountains, and that his followers could accomplish wonders and miracles, it logically would follow that faithful Christians would be more prosperous, healthy, and happy than the average - but again, that's not the case either.

faetal on 30/1/2012 at 09:30

I think the problem with such debates between someone who is religious and someone who is not is that the latter person can at any moment consider all things more equally. For e.g. a muslim to consider all things equally in an existential debate, they have to temporarily imagine their belief system to be potentially flawed/false in order to properly enable a dialectical approach. Most people who have huge emtional investment in faith will not do this, which renders their ability to do anything but look for reasons to ignore counter-arguments or back up their beliefs, non-existent.

It is harder for the devout to consider all of the information and then make a conclusion, because they begin with the conclusion and then filter the information to fit.

jay pettitt on 30/1/2012 at 11:49

Quote Posted by Azaran

There's really no way to prove or disprove the resurrection story.

Or the time when Mr Tickle used his exceedingly long arms to raid the kitchen biscuit jar EVEN THOUGH HE WAS UPSTAIRS!

In case its not obvious, I'm with Pierre Laplace.
"The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."

At least Mr Tickle has pictures.

I suppose the actual word of god is pretty good evidence. But if your big reason for thinking there is a word of god is because his alleged bastard love child miraculously reanimated after being dead for 3 days, then you would seem to have doomed yourself to spinning round and round dizzily in a nasty circular logic trap until the end times. Which by good fortune is probably later this year.