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Comment by nathan_compton | Hacker News Reader

The fact that billions of people believe mutually contradictory forms of religion is one of the best pieces of evidence that its made up shit. Most people believe you can talk about the location of an event unambiguously with four coordinates and wouldn't understand a superposition if they were put into one and yet these are much more reasonable ideas than anything any religion in history has asserted.

What is asinine is suggesting that because all knowledge is provisional there exists a kind of great democracy of knowledge in which we must respect anything anyone has ever believed. Some ideas hew more closely to the real way the universe is than others.

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The existence of a God isn't incompatible with the laws of the universe, because if God exists, then it exists outside this universe. As such, it is a textbook definition of a non-falsifiable concept, and you're setting up a strawman.

As for religion, the important aspects about it aren't the supernatural beings that judge us. God and the devil are a reflection of our "soul", and religion is a recipe for morality, being simply tradition that found a full proof way to be passed between generations. Even if you don't believe in God, you should believe in the power of tradition to pass on knowledge in the human culture.

I've also replied to another comment that (IMO):

1) All humans are religious, if we define religion as faith in non-falsifiable theories, with the existence of a God not being required;

2) We are not enlightened enough, and we don't have enough resources to base morality simply on observations of the natural world.

In general, if you're going to be an atheist, might as well be the kind that understands our history. Hubris isn't good, and we aren't more enlightened than past generations, we just have more resources and slightly better traditions; although here I'd add that social progress isn't guaranteed, given how ancient civilizations crumbled.

These aren't good arguments.

I think its pretty disingenuous to suggest that all humans are religious. I don't have faith in anything. Faith isn't an operating concept in how I approach the world.

And I don't even understand what you are talking about in the second point. As a matter of fact, technically speaking, I'm a so-called moral skeptic - I don't believe morality constitutes any kind of universal truth. I see it as an often unfortunate shorthand for social conventions. Not only I am ok with the idea that humans have to live together and come to accommodations about behavior, but I think in general the world would be a better place if everyone else understood that social convention is precisely what we are up to when we discuss morality.

And the mere desirability of moral certitude in itself is neither evidence nor justification for believing things that are implausible.

History, hubris, enlightenment have nothing to do with it, from my point of view. God is just a very implausible assertion about the world and therefor I don't take the idea all that seriously.

Science is full of competing understandings and explanations, that isn't unique to religion. There are quite a few commonalities between many religions also, focusing on only the parts that don't align doesn't give a full picture.

A democracy of knowledge, if that is a thing, wouldn't require respecting anything anyone has ever believed. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy, where everyone may have the right to their opinion one vote doesn't decide anything. A democracy of knowledge would likely look more like scientific concensus where everyone doesn't have to agree but what is considered "fact" is really just what most people seem to agree they believe to be supported. Facts in that sense can change over time, can be built on assumptions or belief, and can have competing ideas held by others.

Yeah, except science has a system to resolve the claims and bad ones are eventually weeded out or discounted. There are new dumb religious ideas all the time and the old ones never die.

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