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[-] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 103 points 1 week ago

I met people on both sides that had either of those attitudes.
The "I'm always right because I have a PHD" is not uncommon, even on fields not covered by their education. At the same time, I've met many religious people (Muslims, Hindus, Christians) that for them religion was a private, personal aspect that helped them deal with their lives. As a kind of a routine, something done time and time again enough to clear up their minds from stress and give them an anchor when lost.

I'm not religious, but I believe in freedom and the pursuit of happiness, and I support anyone as long as it doesn't interfere with other's.

[-] morrowind@lemmy.ml 35 points 1 week ago

My God, a reasonable person talking about religion on lemmy

[-] SnowChickenFlake@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 week ago

I see somebody downvoted you already, but I completely agree with you đź’Ż

[-] Shou@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

I agree, but I also fear religious people. Religion has time and time again interfered with people's autonomy.

It still does to this day. Women in Oman, for example need a man (even if it is their son) to approve of her surgery. A woman needed surgery, but had no male relatives closeby to approve it for her. It was an emergency. Thankfully it was approved, but required a lawyer.

Christianity isn't any better where I live.

Religion is fine on a personal level, but dangerous for everyone on a larger scale.

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[-] uncle_moustache@sh.itjust.works 79 points 1 week ago

"I'm 14 and this is deep."

[-] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago
[-] nyamlae@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago

Not really. If you read about the history of medieval universities, madrasahs, and mahaviharas, you will see how deeply and widely religious people have studied throughout history. It was customary for religious scholars to learn all kinds of topics, such as grammar, logic, and medicine.

Religions are made up of people, and have accommodated all kinds of people. Some are wise scholars, and others are ignorant conspiracists. Religion can't really be boiled down to one side or the other, though I understand how the rise of fundamentalist Christian fascism might make this hard to see.

[-] 6mementomorib 15 points 1 week ago

this is a common fallacy with religion, but basically it's not that religion has aided studies, but rather studies have made it despite religion. just because it happened under religion doesn't mean religion is what helped it.

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[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

"Studying" in madrasahs is literally just the rote memorization of a version of the Koran in a language that students don't even speak and don't get me started on just how Christian belief was so thickly weaved into medieval university teachings that being against the Aristotelian earth-centric view of the Universe was cause to be burned at the stake (the medieval times aren't called the Dark Ages for nothing and during the time of Medival Universities Europe actually went back a lot on technology and scientific knowledge)

Having studied Physics at university level in a country which still back them had quite a bit of religiosity, I have come across a handful of people who were both true believer Christians and Physicists and the only way to manage it was basically to keep them apart except for the single point of contact which was "by discovering the wonders of the World, I'm discovering the wonders of God's creation" which is not a logic link in any way form or shape, just an attempt at getting two very different perspectives to be side by side, never really touching.

Religion simply does not inform Science in any way form or shape (and vice-versa), not in terms of logic, not in terms of information or knowledge and not in terms of methods - at best some people manage to have personal motivations to practice Science include Religious motivations, but any actually "knowledge" they have from Religion does not feed through into their Science because it doesn't obey even the most basic criteria to work (for starters, it's just "belief" rather than actual measurable or at least detectable effects that could not be explained in any other way than divine intervention).

Religion is absolutely fine when it's about how people feel, but it ain't fine when it tries to intervene into the domain of Science: back in the Medieval times the most advance civilization was Arab and mainly Muslim (such as the Moors, who invaded and occupied the Iberian Peninsula) - they were the true inheritors of the knowledge of Ancient Greece and Rome - but at some point in the 15th century within Islam the idea that all that Man needed to know was contained in the Koran spread, hence why Madrasahs are "schools" were people rote learn the Koran and why those nations have been going back Scientifically and Technologically ever since.

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[-] nargis@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago

While I broadly agree with the view that debate was sometimes a part of religious institutions in the past, this changed dramatically in the 20th century, especially with regards to Islam, perhaps due to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. When is the last time you've heard of a madrassah teaching that homosexuality is natural? Not to be Muslim-phobic, I am aware if the rich history of debate and science in the Middle East, but the material conditions have changed now, conservatism has been on the rise since the 70s.

You speak of mahaviharas, but Buddhists I have met are just as conservative as the average religious person when it comes to women's rights, feminism and gay rights. Madrassahs were not 'open', even during the Islamic golden age. Even when Islam was less rigid, Mansoor al-Hallaj was executed for saying 'Ann-al-Haq', Omar Khayyam had to go on a pilgrimage to prove he was pious, al-Qadir ordered to kill every Mu'tazilite in Baghdad and no doubt there are countless other stories of persecution. That rational thought survived when people were religious is hardly to the credit of religion, and even in periods of prosperity when religious institutions weren't on the defensive, such things happened anyway and under the sanction of religion. As long as religion is under an institution, it is the nature of institutions to cling to power and hence, suppress dissent.

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[-] underwire212@lemm.ee 47 points 1 week ago

Yeah I’m not so sure about this haha. I work in academia, and there is quite the abundance of closed mindedness and dogmatism.

[-] stormeuh@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

I think that's just the comfortable position for humans. Questioning what you know to be true is hard, and the more fundamental the fact the more uncomfortable it is to doubt. Which is also why religion is so attractive.

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 14 points 1 week ago

Yeah no one seems interested in my perpetual motion machine.

[-] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

In this Lemmy we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

I don't think Lemmy is a closed system.

[-] ameancow@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I work in academia, and there is quite the abundance of closed mindedness and dogmatism

Are we talking about discrimination against young or foreign academics not getting grants and degrees because of bias about who should be the ones leading research and hesitancy to invest time, money and political capital into new tech, or are we talking about "They didn't want to read my paper about how I think the sun pooped out the Earth and why this is evidence for God"?

Seriously, that's a loaded claim, you need to provide some context and nuance there, I haven't met many actual scientific-minded people who are dogmatic, that is usually the exact accusation thrown out by theists who are butthurt that evolution exists and can't be disproven.

[-] galanthus@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science

Read this. I used to favour Popper, but I now quite like Kuhn. Kuhn is based.

My point is that the scientific endeavour according to Kuhn is not an inherently critical one(as it is with Popper, for example). Science is based on dogmas, positions and suppositions that are not questioned within a paradigm.

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[-] ProstateTickler@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago
[-] MellowYellow13@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Look at your fucking username before you blabber about edgy 14 yr olds

[-] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 27 points 1 week ago

Except they don't even read their own book.

[-] lugal@sopuli.xyz 26 points 1 week ago

Religion is a very broad umbrella. Quite many people understand the divine as an unknowable mystery they never stop being curious about

[-] alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 week ago

Not all religions claim to know everything.

Yes, the ones that do tend to be violent and oppressive, so I understand the criticism.

But many religions are more about searching truth, learning to love each other and have community. And their followers definitely tend to be modest and have a "I don't know enough" mentality.

[-] CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 1 week ago

Religiosity is a spectrom and people of any extreme can be found in every religion. Because religion is human made fairytales and used for whatever it needs to be.

[-] callouscomic@lemm.ee 18 points 1 week ago

Sometimes religion: "it requires faith, therefore we can and should stop learning."

[-] peekingduck@lemm.ee 18 points 1 week ago

Religion is an absolute rotting cancer

[-] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 18 points 1 week ago

You do realize that's straight up not true right? As a Muslim I don't know how much of a thing biblical scholarship is, but on the Muslim side of things, uh... yeah. Literally no Muslim will say they "know everything", because the non-scholars vaguely know they don't know shit and the scholars will tell you "I don't know shit".

[-] Saleh@feddit.org 12 points 1 week ago

I've met a scholar who joked that these days you are called a Hafiz, if you memorize the entire Quran. During history many scholars referred to as Hafiz also memorized a hundred thousand Hadith (reports about the life of the Prophet Mohamed sas) or more.

It is really crazy how strong many peoples convictions about Islam are, with how little they usually now about Islam outside of the hate filled propaganda they have been fed for the past decades in many western countries.

[-] Blueshift@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

I interpret the image as saying: (some) religious people believe all answers worth knowing have already been revealed to us, and can only be found through study of the same few religious texts written hundreds of years ago. So those religious people don’t necessarily feel they already know everything, but they are convinced that the religious texts are the source of all knowledge.

I don’t know enough about Islam to claim that this applies, but it certainly applied to Christianity up until the enlightenment: there was no point in doing experiments to find out more about the world, the answer was already in the Bible. If you couldn’t see it yet, you needed to study the Bible more.

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[-] Naevermix@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

The less you know, the less you know you don't know.

[-] Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)
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[-] shawn1122@lemm.ee 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

There are multiple points in human history where science has overestimated itself.

In Abrahamic religions, God is all knowing, not people. Eastern religions are more abstract, some have all knowing deities and some do not.

[-] PunnyName@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

Science is a process, like running. It has no consciousness.

[-] shawn1122@lemm.ee 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's certainly an oversimplification.

Science has representatives that are susceptible to the flaws in human thinking that are also apparent in religion. The recent pandemic made that very clear.

There is a scientific community that has good and bad players in it. Science doesn't get to wash itself of human corruption just because it's a process

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[-] Dreamer@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago

Science is a construct made by humans in their effort to best understand the world they exist in. The consciousness of science is not nothing, but the collective conciousness of every human being that has participated, and along with it, their collective follies and limitations.

[-] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

People who think Science and Religion are opposed to one another don't understand either one.

What is science? Observing how to world works and learning from that.

What is religion? Philosophy (Here how you should behave, and how to live a good life)

Science has no reason to argue with religion, because religion is not scientific. There is nothing that can be proven or disproven.

Religion has no reason to argue with science, because whatever religion believes about the origin of the world, science just seeks to better understand that world. Knowing how electrons move is not an affront to God.

Arguing Science vs Religion is like arguing Painting vs Music. Sure, they're both art but they are completely different and do not overlap. There are plenty of scientists who follow one religion or another.

ITT: people with firmly held personal beliefs that Religion is anti-Science, and refusing to listen to rational arguments or studies that say otherwise. Proving that you can't logic someone out of their personal beliefs and it's a waste of time to try.

[-] glorkon@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago

Religion has no reason to argue with science,

Well, that sounds good on paper. It would be nice if over the centuries, religion wouldn't have ceaselessly attacked and persecuted scientists. If religion was "only philosophy", there wouldn't be so many religious zealots not only denying but actively trying to ban the teaching of evolution at schools. Nope... religion is anti-science. It has to be, because science is the one thing that has gradually taken away religion's authority over the minds of people. Religion is a mind virus, science is the cure.

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[-] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago

You don't need to tell us about this. Religion needs to learn this.

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[-] ameancow@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yah, that's not the problem, it's the fact that religion is designed to push itself where it isn't, and it claims to be able to solve not just the moral problems, but the logical and societal problems as well.

If religion was just fucking "philosophy" we would all be fine with it, there would be no conflict. Science isn't trying to invade people's homes and tell them what they can and cannot do as consenting adults. Science isn't trying to give people an excuse to be passive about injustice. Science doesn't condone slavery and hate and violence and organize mass numbers of people to adopt hateful views.

There is material HARM that comes from religious ideology because it's trying, and has BEEN trying to supplant logic and reason and the scientific process since science became a thing.

This is not a "two sides" issue and I strongly resent the framing as such. Religion is trying to drag the world down to a state of willful ignorance and subservience to magical-thinking as an entity, and science is just a word to describe a process for investigating the universe. They are not equivalent. Do better.

Edit: readers, do not pursue this, you can't "fix" this person, they're some kind of closet theist trying to pretend to be intellectual but they have no idea what they're doing and will lead you in intellectual circles for hours and hours.

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[-] BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Lol do you live in a cave or something, religious organizations used to straight up torture and kill scientists if they made any claims that were not in line with what the religion claimed, read up on what they did to the early astronomers who were figuring out that the sun and not earth is the center of or solar system, and that's just one instance, I can point to a million other atrocities that today's society views as barbaric done by organized religion. Religion has nothing to do with living a good life, it's about centralising power and control over the masses and making them obey your commands.

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[-] samus12345@lemm.ee 12 points 1 week ago

Religion: I don't know everything...but my god does!

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[-] Nangijala@feddit.dk 6 points 1 week ago

This meme was made by a "know it all".

[-] peteyestee@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago

I feel like it depends on the person.

[-] Katana314@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Out of concern for how much the “Bible Belt” throws in with Israel’s Zionist bullshit, I did some basic searches on the topic, and the discussion was a bit different than I thought it’d be.

People need a place to belong. For many, they have communities in cities that fit. For rural areas, it’s one thing to say “Stop listening to that televangelist ordering you to deposit your savings”, but you’d need something else to take that place - something to believe in.

That’s where more progressive preachers, people similar to the current pope, are shaming themselves for not stepping up enough, recognizing people’s needs and being genuine voices of compassion; not trying to be the economic “immigrants pay taxes” or scientific “colleges fuel cure research” voice, but the “Be good to your neighbor” voice.

So even though I’m not a believer, I’m at least seeing the way churches can bring communities together rather than leave all one’s connections to Facebook. The important thing is what sort of voice is unifying them - because by god, there’s a million ways to pervert the message of any major religion into one of hate.

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[-] p3n@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I often see this sentiment on the internet, but I wonder what definition people who hold this view are using for "religion" to reach this conclusion. I have found that the definitions of “religion” and “faith” in use by people are so varied or vague that they are almost pointless to use. The way I define them, everyone is religious and faith is a necessity.

life presents a dilemma to me: I would like to conclusively know everything about the universe and reality before deciding what choices to make, but I do not have that luxury. I must make decisions daily with what amounts to almost no information. Faith is not an optional part of life. Some people recognize that necessity and others do not. It is merely a question of who and what you place your faith in.

Rather than use the word "religion", I would be much more interested in asking about people’s worldviews. Wikipedia gives this description: One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical or consistent theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven.

I have boiled this down to two essential questions about the nature of life/existence/reality that can be graphed on a quadrant:

The horizontal axis is the duration of existence. The difference between a worldview with an infinite existence and a worldview with a finite existence is immeasurable. If I believe in an infinite petsonal existence, then my actions have infinite consequences which I must experience the results of. Short of infinite personal existence, I may believe that life/the universe will exist forever, but that I will personally cease to exist when I die. In this case, my actions may still have infinite consequences (for future generations) but I will not personally experience them. A purely finite/temporal worldview would mean that I believe that everything will end in the heat death of the universe or similar life ending event. In this case, it ultimately doesn’t matter what I, or anyone else does in life, everything will end the same way for everyone and all life.

The vertical axis represents the nature of our existence. Is the source of life personal or impersonal? If I believed a completely impersonal worldview, then I would believe that we are essentially just biologically pre-programmed to live our lives based on the DNA that we have been built from and that person hood/personal agency is a construct of the mind with no higher meaning. If I believed in a completely personal worldview, then I would believe that I am created by a personal being that is also interested in a personal relationship with me, and I am created as a reflection of their person hood.

These are foundational questions about the nature of reality that demand an answer. Every choice I make in my life should reflect the answers to these questions. But where are the answers?

In our current society, it seems to be accepted that science and religion are diametrically opposed and cannot co-exist. I have observed, especially on the internet, that if I espouse to be religious, then it is assumed that I believe in flying spaghetti monsters and think the earth is flat. I believe that intellectually honest people will find that they are actually in more similar circumstances than they realize. It would be foolish for me to disregard scientific observation and experimentation, but it would be equally foolish for me to disregard the limitations of those observations and experiments:

It is impossible to take a zero-trust approach with science (never trust, always verify). I don’t have access to a Large Hadron Collider to observe the Higgs boson for myself. I don’t have access to the LUX-ZEPLIN to experiment with dark matter. I don’t have access to the LIGO Lab to observe gravitational waves. I trust that these experiments are conducted correctly and that their findings are correct, but by doing so I am placing my faith in the scientists performing the experiments. I do so also knowing that complete objectivity is impossible. I have a personal bias. My own life experience and observations skew the way I see the world. I assume this is the same of other people, scientists included.

Even if I had access to all the equipment necessary, and dedicated my entire life to scientific experimentation, I would only be able to conduct a tiny fraction of experiments necessary to explore just a few of the questions about the nature of the universe. At the end of my life, I would likely have more questions about the universe than when I began.

Even if I had the time, ability, and equipment necessary to conduct all necessary experiments to explore my questions about the universe, I would be making a fundamental assumption that I am actually able to observe everything. I have no idea if there are other dimensions that I will never be able to observe or experiment with. I simply have to accept by faith that these do or do not exist.

Even if I assumed that everything is observable, and I had the capacity to conduct all necessary experiments, I would still have an impossible problem from a practical standpoint: I need to make decisions on a daily basis. I don’t have a lifetime to wait and scientifically determine the nature of the universe before I make a decision about how I want to live my life. I am living it right now. The fundamental truth about the universe matters in the decisions that I have to make right now.

This is why faith is a necessity. I look around, and I see that I am just one of over seven billion people on this Earth, and that Earth is just one of eight planets orbiting our Sun, and that our Sun is just one of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, a galaxy that is so vast, even travelling at the impossible speed of light, would take me thousands of lifetimes to traverse, and that galaxy is just one of possibly trillions of galaxies in what is just the observable universe. One thing is for sure. I am very small, in every sense of the word. To sit here, and read this paragraph again, and then think that I really know-it-all would make me one of the most arrogant beings in the universe. I know very little, and I live by faith.

[-] _stranger_@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

Trust and Faith are not the same thing. A belief is not the same as a fact. Language is a terrible way to talk about this, which is why science uses math.

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[-] Mohamed@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago

Most people use "religion" to mean "organized religion" in particular, and many people further take it to mean christianity and christianity-like religions. Religion is a word that is hard to define, but I think that although there are many edge cases, most people mostly agree on what is and what isnt a religion. My point here is that, just because they are not definable in a strict sense, does not mean the words "religion" and "faith" are "pointless". They very much have meaning.

Many words are like that: no clear definition but they refer to real things or ideas. For example, existentialism, postmodernism, artistic styles (such as cubism or impressionism), etc. And even many terms in the sciences are like that. None of the words mathematics, physics or philosophy have clear-cut definitions. Hell, i can take this to the extreme. Even words like water or gold do not have a clear definition, in the way that lay people use them. Seawater is water even though it is made up of more than just H2O. 95% ethanol is never called water, even though 5% of it is water.

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[-] misterbrisby@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 week ago

Are you seriously trying to tell me that atheists don't claim to know everything? Come on...

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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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