Frigidus wrote:InkL0sed wrote:Well, come to think of it, I guess it doesn't settle anything. Because if free will doesn't really exist anyway, then there's still a contradiction in the Bible.
Much like evolution and a 14 billion year old universe, the Bible is a trump card to scientific inquiry.
No it isn't. They work side by side.
Science answers some questions. Religion approaches those questions science cannot answer.
This is why I made the comment earlier about needing to "expand your mind", though I should have worded it more nicely.
Most (not all) of you are pretty young. You have, in the scheme of things, more or less recently discovered real debate, intelligent, adult conversation. That is great. Adults around you no doubt are encouraging you .. and SHOULD, to a point. BUT, sometimes we are limited, not by our perceptions, not by logic, butby our abilities to explain things with human words. More importantly, though it sounds quite trite and simplistic, sometimes you really and truly DO have to experience things to really understand. Parenting is the most wonderful example. NO ONE ... I don't care how much experience you have before, really and truly understands what it is to be a parent until they experience it. No one I have ever met or talked to anyway! (parents .. back me up???)
Why? One reason is because so much of parenting is just not logical, not in the sense that most folks here want to define it.
MeDeFe wrote:PLAYER57832 wrote:Our perception and what is are not the same thing necessarily. Logic changes as people's abilities to measure, see, understand expands.
And that's what a logician (is that a word?) would dispute. The rules of logic are unbending and do not depend on what we find out empirically, occasionally we find out a new rule the way a biologist might find a new species of some insect, but not through observing the world.
Except that is precisely my point. Because when you "discover a new rule" things DO change.
Prejudice provides an excellent, albiet negative, example.
How is it that so many intelligent people, historically believe prejudices?
First, every prejudice has a
grain of truth, (sometimes many grains even). Take old prejudices against blacks. How did it happen?
First, Europeans back then had pretty narrow ideas. They saw these people without much clothes, with a different language, living in tents, "mud huts", etc. (they did not bother to look beyond, of course). These were the things Europeans had "just" discarded, "outgrown". They were not the markings of "advanced" civilization! So, "of course" these blacks simply had to be inferior. Many looked to various passages in the Bible to back up their claims. (modern scholars dismiss these as misunderstandings ... but that is another debate).
Anyway, they already had a slave trade going. So the Europeans bought into it. There WERE big differences between slavery in Africa and in America. BUT, slavery in Africa was not that much nicer ... We like to group (when talking of slavery, conquest, etc.) all blacks together, but of course they were very, very different groups. Only some tribe, some groups were enslaved. Just like Europeans looked down upon other Europeans, blacks looked down upon the tribes they had conquered.
Anyway, fast forward to the booming and predominant institution of slavery in the US. What happens when you take people and don't give them opportunity, education (even the limited sort available back then), or even enough food and clothing. They look "dull", they smell, etc. ALL of these things "proved" to the American, particularly those down south, but not only there, how "inferior" these blacks really were.
What do you do if you are faced with losing your children to trade. You protest, you object ... and you go on. Because you MUST. How easy, then, to look at this stoicism and call it "unfeeling".
THAT is why it took so very, very long for the prejudices to die. Because folks would look around and see "proof" of their feelings. It took those able to think "outside the box", those able to look beyond the surface "logic" and see deeply. It took feeling to change all that.
The reprecussions of slavery are still being felt in the black community, and the white community. The ideas we each have in our seperate communities attest to the rift. Nor did it stop there. Why is it so easy for blacks to believe AIDS is a government conspiracy? In part, because of the Siphilus studies of just last generation ... where men were intentionally infected and not treated,
even after treatments were available (note this is documented fact, not conspiracy). So, is it not logical that if it happened once, it could happen again? Perhaps ... except if you look beyond the "possible" and to the real evidence, AIDS was most definitely not introduced by the CIA or any other US entity. In fact, it came to this continent through Canada, not even the US at all (and then down to the US). Where did it start? Scientists are not 100% sure, but the theory is it originated from monkeys. NOT, as some racists proclaim because of sexual activity, BUT because people kill and even sometimes eat monkeys. In so doing, you do get contact with blood ... and there is the mode of transmission. The rest .. it entering the Gay community, etc. is a matter of "chance" as much as anything.
Anyway ... again, there is a HUGE difference between how we perceive, see things and "true" reality (that is, what is). I believe, certainly, that we can trust logic. BUT, I also know there is a lot out there that neither logic nor science have even begun to "touch", to understand.
Future generations will probably look back on many of our ideas and find them as backward and ignorant as we see our racist ancestors now.
Anyway, this discussion is just going in circles. The nice thing is that people are free to have different ideas. The only thing I would say is don't outright dismiss something just because you don't understand it. THAT is one true route to fanaticism. Remember, the Nazis were completely and utterly logical ... and completely atheist. Religion certainly can be used by people, but so can logic.
). Science, right now, cannot answer this either. Logic allows that it 
