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Religion versus science 
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Post Religion versus science
"That doesn't make sense."

"There are no scientific answers."

Humans need answers that make sense. That is the origin of religion. Interestingly, that is also the origin of science. Both religion and science come from our need for answers that satisfy our "reason". Unfortunately, our ability as humans to reason is incredibly poor.

This is what I have realized from reading Chapter One of "Christianity For People Who Aren't Christians" by James Emery White. James White is the leader of a megachurch in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has created a comfortable life out of preaching to people. Preaching involves convincing people of the validity of your way of reasoning. You must gain their confidence in your logical thought processes. In the end, you want your audience to have faith in your ability to reason properly, explain things, and provide answers that make sense. It is, essentially, a confidence game, and preachers are essentially con-artists. Interestingly, so are scientists.

What is the difference then between science and religion, if both are con-games? Emotion. Religion is built upon emotion, on how your religious beliefs make you feel "good". Science, on the other hand, tries to remove "feeling good" from the equation in the hopes of improved reasoning. Science recognizes that "feeling good" is a powerful bias that can interfere with the search for truth. Science prioritizes truth over comfort, while religion prioritizes comfort over truth.

However, scientists, like preachers, are only human. They need answers that make sense, and they need to "feel good" about those answers. That is why scientific dogma exists just the same as religious dogma. It is because the weak link in the chain is the human mind. We reason poorly because of our need for comfort. While we can choose to emphasize truth over comfort, or comfort over truth, we want both.

It's a dilemma.

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Tue Dec 31, 2019 6:13 pm
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Post Re: Religion versus science
I just searched for other threads in this forum that investigate this dilemma. The first one I found was this one. It's short but sweet, and my comment made me laugh. I wonder if my comment might have unintentionally "shut down" the thread by discouraging the initial poster from pursuing the subject. People are highly sensitive to questioning their beliefs or having their beliefs criticized.

Other related threads worth reviewing:

Science set free

From science to God

Heart Brain Coherence - The Science of Miracles Greg Braden

We Are Spiritual Warriors Of The Holy Science
(Missing video, also posted at Avalon here.)


It's disturbing how many videos are missing nowadays from these posts. I remember we thought back when we posted these videos on discussion forums that they would be around forever, because the Internet was a permanent storehouse of information. Now we know that even the Internet is not what we were told it was. It is a control system, and the information is highlighted or suppressed according to the plans of the ruling sociopaths. They have done this with religion, with science, and now with the Internet.

Sociopaths rule.

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It's not that we can't handle the truth. It's that they can't handle us if we know the truth.


Tue Dec 31, 2019 6:53 pm
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Post Re: Religion versus science
After a litany of impoverished arguments on why God exists, preacher Jim White turns his attention to the question of whether or not Jesus existed (page 68). His arguments are just as bad.

Jim White wrote:
No scholar, no matter where they stand on Christianity itself, denies that the man Jesus, the one the Bible talks about, existed in time and history.

This is a patently false statement. Jim White has obviously never read Joseph Atwill's book. The Christian mandated belief in Jesus is quite likely the same phenomenon of human psychology as the Jewish mandated belief in the Holocaust. "No one denies the story" because they are persecuted by the aggressive believers pushing the story. Deniers are ostracized and discredited through a whole arsenal of psychological weapons and trickery. Their evidence is denied by the believers and even claimed to be nonexistent or nonsensical.

Jim White wrote:
More than a few historians have noted that his is the most documented life in all of ancient history.

And more than a few historians have noted quite the opposite, but Mr. White will not be referencing them. The bottom line is that consensus does not equate to truth. Lots of people have swallowed the official narrative on the 9/11 attack and have written about it, and it is even in the history books already, but the official narrative is a lie. It is not the truth and nowhere near the truth. Jim White's arguments fall in the same boat.

Quote:
We have to remember what it’s like to be lost in order to really have a conversation with someone who doesn’t know what we know, who only knows what culture has taught them. -- source

Preacher Jim White is as lost as everyone else, since we all only know what our culture has taught us. It's the blind leading the blind. We will go far, won't we...

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Sun Jan 12, 2020 7:24 pm
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Post Re: Religion versus science
"Christianity For People Who Aren't Christians" should have been titled "Christianity For People Who ARE Christians". The arguments supporting Christianity are so poor that it's a chore to read them. And look at all the positive ratings on Amazon! Those ratings are obviously "maintained" by discarding negative reviews. I should know, as Amazon won't let me leave reviews on their site because I'm too honest. They make money selling books, so of course they want everyone raving about how good the book is. True critics are not really welcome there, as they can be bad for business.

I guess I should give a few examples of the sorry "reasoning" James White dishes out to his readers. I simply highlight them in yellow as they disgust me, so here are the latest ones:

  • ... he (N. T. Wright) writes that no one would have ever thought up the resurrection, because nobody believed such a thing possible. Nowhere in paganism, nowhere in Judaism, nowhere in any worldview or philosophy did anybody ever conceive, posit, contemplate, or even suggest that such a thing could - or ever had - taken place. -- page 99

  • If it (the resurrection) happened to him (Jesus), it also means it can happen to us. To you. -- page 100

  • The Bible says that if there was no resurrection, then there's no hope for life after death. And if that's true, then life has no purpose and no meaning. -- page 101

I don't think I even need to explain why I highlighted these examples, but the first one is refuted quite famously in the Zeitgeist video by Peter Joseph.

So I am about half way through this book, and I am seriously considering stopping at this point. I have no hope of it "going straight", as we say regarding habitual criminals. It definitely does not provide "uncommon answers to common questions". No, it provides common religious answers to common questions, following the practiced "reasoning" of generations of religious preachers. Anyone who has listened to Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, or Christopher Hitchens knows what is wrong with this kind of thinking. I knew what was wrong before I even listened to such scholars, back when my first college roommate Jim Lazere was the head of Campus Crusade For Christ. His reasoning was always flawed and faulty, and I reduced him to tears by logic alone at least once before I realized how badly he needed his religious crutch. Jim was a definitive example of the saying "Religion is the opium of the masses." He was happy as a lark in his religious fantasy land, and quickly fell apart without it. Who was I to deny him his comfort? So I eventually left him in peace with his Christian beliefs, and turned my attention to more robust thinking.

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Sun Jan 26, 2020 8:56 am
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Post Re: Religion versus science
James Emery White wrote:
When he (Jesus) died he carried the evil of terrorism and genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the brutality of ISIS. He shouldered the acts of Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden...and me and you. -- page 108

We now know (at least those who are less brainwashed than average) that we are massively lied to about Hitler, the Holocaust is a gigantic con-game, as was the whole Osama bin Laden scam. Like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein worked in alignment with the evil-doers in the CIA, until they decided he was more useful as an enemy than as a friend. And guess what? The brutality of ISIS is another CIA production designed to scare the public into submission of the Hegelian Dialect (problem, reaction, solution) orchestrated by the ruling sociopaths. The Charles Manson story is not the whole truth either, so all the evil Jesus supposedly died for is still flowing from the pursuits of the ruling sociopaths.

This is an illustration of how James White, and religion in general, incorporates convenient yet falsely believed "facts" into their arguments supporting their belief system. That belief system has its roots in the sociopaths' pursuits of power and control from thousands of years ago. Sociopaths constructed religion to serve their purposes. We see that even in modern times with the construction of Mormonism and Scientology.

I know James White would approve of the following video being added to his arguments for Christianity For People Who Aren't Christians. Emotional manipulation is a very powerful tool that the ruling sociopaths fully exploit in brainwashing us. White's arguments rest on the same foundation, which is why I believe he would give this witness testimony his stamp of approval. This same emotional manipulation technique is heavily used in the shoring up of the Holocaust Lie, and I have seen a lot of it. It works very effectively on people with normal levels of empathy, which is why the sociopaths turn to it so often.




Atheist College Professor dies and sees hell and demons. It changed his life, part 1
(duration 13:26)

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It's not that we can't handle the truth. It's that they can't handle us if we know the truth.


Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:52 pm
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