Nice sidestep, Sells.

>>Are you really saying that the evils perpetrated by the secular French revolution was just the result of the absence of religion?<<

(Sells, 1 June 2006 11:59:35 AM)

>>I heard someone on the radio tonight talking about the French revolution. I had no idea that it was so bloody. He said that this was the first secular religion and was the precursor to those other bloody secular religions, Fascism and Communism.<<

(Sells, 31 May 2006 11:41:54 PM)

First of all, you might like to comment on the concept of a secular religion, which sounds horribly like a contradiction in terms.

Secondly, it is highly convenient for you, but entirely unconvincing, to attribute any and all evil to the lack of religion, given that there seems to be very little difference - not least to those killed - between a war waged on religious grounds and one waged for non-religious reasons.

The absence of something is not the same as the opposite of something.

Hi again Sells,

I'm afraid that I'll still have to disagree with your statement, 'theology is a science'.

There is simply no reason to follow an ancient interpretation of science that does not involve testable hypothesis and experiment. Why? Because it is inferior as a means for extracting truth from nature.

So, I say again, scientific theory must be preceded by experiment and hard data.

This doesn't mean that theology cannot contain truth. It plainly does as millions of happy well adjusted people will testify. But it's not the scientifc kind. It's the philosophical kind. That is, theological truth like philosophical truth is elucidated by logical deduction. Not in the laboratory with a pile of statistical data.

Religion works in the right context because it is the acquired wisdom of many hundreds of years. There is little doubt that religious figures of the past were brilliant men and women and are therefore worth learning from.

However, as the field of neuroscience slowly marches on we will eventually find the biological causes of happy and well adjusted people. These neurological and biological causes will be tangible unlike theology and will be just as humanistic, and possibly more so. Neuroscience and biology will also take over areas that theology had previously occupied. For example, scientists will define morality according to our evolutionary past. It will be a morality consilient with the true emotional needs of Homo sapiens - not the tyranical needs of Imams, Cardinals, and Rabbis.

And you never know, neuroscience may one day find out the biological reasons as to why the worship of Jesus or Allah is beneficial to some people. And conversly, very harmful to others.

At the very beginning of this thread Sells posed the question “Does God exist?” No-one has attempted to answer that question directly, perhaps because Sells regarded it as silly.

The question might have more relevance if it is rephrased as: Does anyone believe that God exists outside the human brain?

There are things which exist outside (independently) of the body with its brain. There are also things which exist inside the brain and which are ideas or images which are derived from outside but are only immaterial reflections of the outside. The only way to tell whether an idea or image inside the brain is a true image of something outside, is to try to “handle” the image as if it is a true representation of something outside.

If you have an image of a chair in your brain but when you try to sit on it you fall to the floor then it proves that it was a false image. If you have an image of a God in your brain then the only way to tell whether it exists outside your brain is to try to test it. And, to establish that the perceived image is, in fact, a representation of something real outside the brain, the test has to be a physical connection. The stars present an image in our brain but, by predicting their movements and collecting their light, we establish that they are outside our brain.

Will Sells, or someone, try to answer directly the silly but basic question?

If God is only an image in the brain then all the struggles with that image will resolve themselves into emotional responses to social relations.

John Warren,
The fact is believers are not to endeavour to define God in spatial or scientific terms, because these are created human constructs. "Thou shalt not make [imagine, create] any graven [formulate] images". God is outside the scientic testable so we cannot reduce him into some physics / chemical formula. Science is the human definition of our understanding of the nature of the physical universe. God is the revelation of the creator mind and unified motive behind the purpose of the universe and all its forms.

The only images we have are 'God is manifest in love'; 'God is manifest in forgivness'; 'God is manifest in reconciliation'; 'God is manifest in absolute pure character'; 'God is transcendent of basic human thought'; etc. To meditate on God is to reflect on the absolute and pure nature of character and actions. We as creatures have been given mandate to reflect these character traits and actions. Sin is the opposition to reflecting purity of character and actions. 'Doing our own thing', 'having our own way', without thought or reference to the holy.

We can say that someone expresses love because their attitudes show love, but the selfless purity of acts that demonstrate pure love comes from the mind of God. We can say someone has forgiven me for the injury I caused, but the selfless purity of that forgiveness is a reflection of the nature of God.

Until you can contemplate God is not a being, as Kieren continually imagines with his 'teddy gods'; until then, you are not entering the realm of the spiritual.

TR
It is sometimes revealing to look at how disciplines were originally understood so as to understand what transformations have happened. This is why I insists on theology being a science in the original sense of a branch of knowledge. To limit the word science to empirical science is to affirm the hegemony of that discipline and to marginalize all other forms of knowledge.

I have an article on evolutionary psychology and religion at:

http://petersellick.nationalforum.com.au/data/Evo%20herm.htm

There is a great leap between neural mechanisms and the totality of the self. To assume that we may one day be able to describe particular selves in terms of neuroscience is a reductionist argument fraught with problems. For example, despite all that we now know about the visual system, which functions map onto which areas of cortex etc, we are still miles away from being able to describe how we experience the visual world. This may be a God of the gaps type argument but defining a particular self is orders of magnitude more complex than this. We will never be able to map each individual’s personal experience even if we get to the stage of understanding how that experience is laid down in memory. Mechanism does not automatically determine content.

John Warren.

I agree that the radical skepticism that is derived from the distance between the world and our perception of it falls down when you consider how accurately we manage to interact with that world. What I meant about the existence or nonexistence of God being a silly question is that this God is always posited in terms of being or a being and I remarked that this sort of question was not likely to be solved in the near or distant future. The real question about God is about the truth of God. If the concept of God does not lead to a more accurate interaction with the world then he is untrue. This is why John’s gospel insists that Jesus is the truth, ie true man, what we really are apart from the distorting influence of sin. So we must get away from speaking about God in terms of being and look to the bible to see its unique language about God as word event. When Israel says that God caused his Name to dwell among them, or when the prophet says “thus says the Lord” and when John describes Jesus as the Word made flesh we are introduced to a language about God that is not contained in the concepts of being but of event. Similarly, when John tells us that “God is love and those who live in love live in God”. This is not sentimental, it is a statement about the existence of God as event, the event of love. Thus Christians have a stake in classical atheism. There is no one “out there” who looks down upon us. Prayer is a different kind of conversation. The grounding of theology in being (ontotheology) was a mistake fostered by the Enlightenment’s obsession with the objective. Previous Christian writers (Augustine) had a different concept.