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Thread: ‘There is NO GOD’ Stephen Hawking’s final revelation of the afterlife REVEALED

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    Quote Originally Posted by sear View Post
    M #399

    "No discipline has all the answers." Physicist & Theologian Ian Barbour PhD & recipient of the Templeton Prize for Religion; on science & religion
    If he has any patents pending they are all for physics and none for religion. Not surprised his sole prize is in theology, which is in final
    analysis, a degree in daydreaming, drinking too much and molesting children.
    Last edited by Micawber; 10-18-2018 at 08:17 PM.

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    There is no God. An individual who believes in a God that actively intervenes in earthly events, keeps an eye on him personally, and listens and responds to his prayers is mistaken. He doesn’t understand basic facts about the world and the provenance of the phone from which he sends text messages, the car that he drives, the antibiotic that cures his bronchitis and the electricity that brightens in his home.

    Belief in such a God is such an ignorant mistake that there’s something mentally disturbed about it. There’s no dispute at all over whether such a God who created the universe exists. There’s no need to assume his existence in order to explain the world, and there’s no objective evidence of his existence.

    Such a God can, of course, exist within a personal and subjective mystical experience, but you can’t establish a religion based on personal and subjective experiences. In a religion, the existence of God is objective.



    Shlomo Avineri argues that “secular intellectuals” who think that “anyone who believes in God and religion is stupid and benighted” commit the sin of arrogance. They do not. Under liberal and enlightened moral standards regarding human rights, orthodox religion is indeed benighted. And anyone who insists on believing in the existence of a God contrary to heaps of evidence that debunks this is indeed behaving stupidly.

    Since when is adhering to a proved truth arrogance? Avineri’s statement is fashionable kowtowing to the wave that’s making the country more religious. It’s not arrogance to say that someone who believes that two plus two equals five is stupid.

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    How can one accuse of arrogance those who fight against the metaphysical foolishness of religion and the moral injustice it entails? It’s the religious who lord it over the atheists and claim exclusive ownership of spirituality, values and belief.


    Avineri holds that God and his ordinances aren’t the main thing in religion. Rather, he says, “many of those who cling to religion (in Israel and elsewhere) do this not because they are certain about the correctness of the theological and metaphysical arguments concerning divinity,” but rather because they need “a concrete framework for their self-identity and sense of security as human beings.” This, he says, is the social power of religion: “It’s above all a focus of identity.”

    This position is of course the ultimate in arrogance. He prefers not to relate seriously to beliefs and opinions to which many people who cling to religion will swear, or to take seriously the unconscious needs they don’t know they have and which he decries. He describes these people as weak; people devoid of confidence.

    No doubt there are sociological reasons for religion. Secularism also has sociological reasons, of course. The exchange of opinions in Haaretz has sociological reasons. Avineri has published an article in Haaretz in part because the publication provides him a framework for his self-identity and because for him Haaretz is a focus of identity.


    But this doesn’t mean that it’s right to identify with his social or psychological motives. We still have to confront his arguments on their merits; it would be arrogant to dismiss them contemptuously as stemming from his psychosocial needs.

    We also have to confront orthodox religion with conviction and determination, without the political correctness that emerges from Avineri’s approach. Why should anyone fake hypocritical tolerance and empathy toward a religion that in its essence is against tolerance? We have to speak the truth and stop trying to curry favor. There is no God and belief in him is stupidity.

    Haaretz opinion piece

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    "actually that is an invalid assumption..." PP #404
    - dandy -
    Take it up with the doctor that asserted it. I didn't endorse the idea. I presented it as an informed opinion. BUT !! If your PhD trumps his, please inform us of the details.
    "..for all you know there may be several that have all the answers.... PP #404
    I'm a scientist.
    Mathematics is the language of science. And quantification is the criterion.
    - 4 nuclei
    - 27 Ångströms
    - 14 carats
    - 40 Coulombs
    - numerous etceteras

    So PP, please tell us. What unit quantifies love?
    "It should be obvious to anyone why conservatives and libertarians should be against Trump. He has no grounding in belief. No core philosophy. No morals. No loyalty. No curiosity. No empathy and no understanding. He demands personal loyalty and not loyalty to the nation. His only core belief is in his own superiority to everyone else. His only want is exercise more and more personal power." smb / purveyor of fact 18/03/18

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    Quote Originally Posted by sear View Post

    Please post the dictionary definition which makes those distinctions.

    Yours is at best an oversimplification.
    Conservative

    Noun

    1. a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes, typically in relation to politics.
    synonyms: right-winger, reactionary, rightist, diehard; Republican; Tory

    • a supporter or member of the Conservative Party of Great Britain or a similar party in another country.

    Adjective

    1. holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.

    synonyms: traditionalist, traditional, conventional, orthodox, old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool, hidebound, unadventurous, set in one’s ways

    Source

    Billions of Left winged people are religiously conservative (using the adjective). Africans, South Americans, and Indians are good examples. If you see a stern, religious Muslim stoning a woman for breaking some rule, you can be forgiven for thinking he’s probably conservative politically, but as soon as he immigrates to the U.S., he will most likely vote for the Democrats.

    Regardless of how religiously conservative such foreigners are, when they immigrate to America most vote for socialists. Then the Democrats start chanting about the ‘religious right,’ as though none of their mob carry a Bible, Torah, Quran, Vedas, Tripitaka, Guru Granth Sahib, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Agam Sutras, Kojiki or Avesta between them.

    Democrats support immigration and bring family members together through chain migration. They provide immigrants welfare, give them free education, medical care, and food stamps. Obviously, immigrants vote for them. Many came from countries that war with American marines who were sent by Republican Presidents. Let’s take a closer look at the United States itself:

    A Religious Portrait of African-Americans

    Overview

    While the U.S. is generally considered a highly religious nation, African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion’s importance in life. Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation, with fully 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Latinos also report affiliating with a religion at a similarly high rate of 85%; among the public overall, 83% are affiliated with a religion.

    Source | Pew Research Center

    Most African Americans vote for the Democrats.

    Latinos

    77% of America’s 35.4 million Latinos are either catholic (55%) or protestant (22%). 18% are unaffiliated.

    Source | Pew Research Center

    66% of America’s Latinos voted for Clinton on election day.

    Source | Pew Research Center

    Asian Americans

    According to a comprehensive, nationwide survey of Asian Americans conducted by the Pew Research Center, Christians are the largest religious group among U.S. Asian adults (42%), and the unaffiliated are second (26%). Buddhists are third, accounting for about one-in-seven Asian Americans (14%), followed by Hindus (10%), Muslims (4%) and Sikhs (1%). Followers of other religions make up 2% of U.S. Asians. Altogether 74% of American Asians belong to a religion, while 26% are unaffiliated.

    Source | Pew Research Center

    73 percent of Asian Americans vote for the Democrats, and the number is growing fast.

    Source | The New York Times

    Don’t forget, Asia includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam And Yemen.

    Arab American Voters: Clinton 60 Percent, Trump 26 Percent

    “Arab Americans have increasingly come to identify themselves as Democrats and vote for Democratic candidates.”

    Source | The Huffington Post

    U.S. Muslims are a strongly Democratic constituency

    Fully two-thirds of U.S. Muslims identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (66%). Far fewer say they are Republican or lean Republican (13%), while one-in-five say they prefer another party or are political independents and do not lean toward either major party. Muslim Americans’ partisan composition is little changed over the last decade, and they remain much more strongly Democratic than the public as a whole.

    Muslims from a wide variety of social and demographic backgrounds express a preference for the Democratic Party over the GOP. Muslim adults of all ages, for example, heavily favor the Democratic Party. And attachment to the Democratic Party is strong among U.S.-born and foreign-born Muslims alike (67% and 66%, respectively).

    Source

    Here is a page that lays out the information on American religious groups and their political leanings.


    I’d say there’s more blue on there than pink, wouldn’t you? Show me a Mexican woman, and I’ll show you a Catholic Democrat who opposes abortion. Like millions of American conservatives, millions of Democrat-voting Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Africans, and Asians oppose abortion. Instead of presenting this great mishmash of differences, liberal reporters hawk the old line that,

    All the right are religious pro-life nuts, and all the Left are open-minded pro-abortion atheists.
    The fairy tale that Lefties are not religious is applied equally in Canada, Australia, Britain, and New Zealand, dolloped out by Fake News in enormous quantities each day. When confronted with these facts some Lefties cry, “Stop categorizing people – it’s racist!” Tell it to Pew Research, the CIA and a hundred other organizations interested in politics and immigration. I will stop categorizing people when they do. Lefties in the U.S. and around the world want the immigrants mentioned above because they need to replace vanishing Baby Boomer votes.

    Every African who comes to the U.S. brings their religious beliefs and their political views. Every Mexican immigrant does the same, as do all the others, from Asia, the Middle East and the rest. Their religious, left winged political views are very relevant and concerning to Americans in general. The “Christian Right” is not a problem in the United States. The “Religious Left” is, and one that is never mentioned by Fake News.

    It is the religious Left who torture and kill gays back in their own countries. It is the religious Left who burn people alive and commit untold numbers of atrocities, not the religious right. Islamic fundamentalists don’t have “conservative governments.” They have “conservative religion.” It runs the State and country. Its “government” is governed by Islam.

    When you introduce them to a country like the U.S.A., where there are conservative politics, they nearly always side with and vote for the Democrats. The next time you hear the Left harping about ‘the religious Right,’ ask them, “What about the religious Left?”
    The first witchdoctor 100,000 years ago said, "God did it," and today the Pope says the same thing.

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    Quote Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet View Post
    not logically.....if there is no cause there is no reason for a big bang to have happened and we would still be unbanged......
    That's the term people used before they invented the word 'virgins'.
    The first witchdoctor 100,000 years ago said, "God did it," and today the Pope says the same thing.

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    "typically in relation to politics." RL #409
    "Typically", not exclusively.
    "It should be obvious to anyone why conservatives and libertarians should be against Trump. He has no grounding in belief. No core philosophy. No morals. No loyalty. No curiosity. No empathy and no understanding. He demands personal loyalty and not loyalty to the nation. His only core belief is in his own superiority to everyone else. His only want is exercise more and more personal power." smb / purveyor of fact 18/03/18

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    Quote Originally Posted by sear View Post
    "Typically", not exclusively.
    Conservative

    Noun

    1. a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes, typically in relation to politics.
    synonyms: right-winger, reactionary, rightist, diehard; Republican; Tory

    a supporter or member of the Conservative Party of Great Britain or a similar party in another country.
    The first witchdoctor 100,000 years ago said, "God did it," and today the Pope says the same thing.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Havana Moon View Post
    The famous theoretical physicist died in March this year at the age of 76 but left behind some truly astonishing predictions in his final book which has just been released. One of his bold predictions in his book titled Brief Answers To The Big Questions was that God does not exist.

    He described his claim there is no afterlife or higher power as a “profound realisation”. Professor Hawking wrote in the newly-published book: “We are free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God.

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/scien...n-hawking-book
    That's not a "revelation" it is an opinion. While he and I generally agree on this one, it really isn't a revelation and it wasn't "from the afterlife". Unless this is going to be me "from the afterlife" once I die too...
    Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
    - -- Aristotle

    Believe nothing on the faith of traditions, even though they have been held in honor for many generations and in diverse places. Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it. Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past. Do not believe what you yourself have imagined, persuading yourself that a God inspires you. Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests. After examination, believe what you yourself have tested and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.
    - -- The Buddha

    It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
    - -- Aristotle

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    Thank you for affirming my exact position RL.
    Yours is a mark of a genuine gentleman.

    BTW
    You seem perplexed at my pervasive acumen on the meaning of "conservative".
    No one will ever waltz around me on that; as I am a conservative, in multiple categories:
    - fiscal
    - political
    - financial
    - environmental
    - etc.
    "It should be obvious to anyone why conservatives and libertarians should be against Trump. He has no grounding in belief. No core philosophy. No morals. No loyalty. No curiosity. No empathy and no understanding. He demands personal loyalty and not loyalty to the nation. His only core belief is in his own superiority to everyone else. His only want is exercise more and more personal power." smb / purveyor of fact 18/03/18

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    I just want to know if Adam and Eve had bellybuttons!

    Please! Anyone know the details?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Micawber View Post
    Faith is stupidity. Anyone who says otherwise is irrational. The big bang is a scientific theory, anyone who says otherwise is ignorant. It is supported by observation and known scientific laws
    and consistency those laws have with observed effects on matter and electromagnetic radiation. Gravity, wave propagation, cosmic background radiation and expansion all observed.

    These are all observed phenomenon that your Jebus never even thought to ask about. He was too busy doing a conjob on bedouins.
    Did you miss the part where you made the admission of "scientific theory"??
    SEDITION: incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.


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    Quote Originally Posted by anatta View Post
    I've been doing a lot of stargazing.. I found a place away from the street lights with a wall I can lean against while looking up. .. I was watching the moon and Mars last night, and then Orion came up late. etc.

    The order of the universe is amazing. I get the orbits and so forth and I get we are just a bunch of random DNA accidents. But I'm not too jaded to be awed by the wonder of it all.. It makes you feel small and significant at the same time
    A place away from the lights. I call that home. I live in the middle of nowhere and often take out my telescope to view the skies, though my favorites are Jupiter and Mars... A good telescope can give you an incredible view of Jupiter.
    Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
    - -- Aristotle

    Believe nothing on the faith of traditions, even though they have been held in honor for many generations and in diverse places. Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it. Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past. Do not believe what you yourself have imagined, persuading yourself that a God inspires you. Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests. After examination, believe what you yourself have tested and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.
    - -- The Buddha

    It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
    - -- Aristotle

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    Quote Originally Posted by Damocles View Post
    A place away from the lights. I call that home. I live in the middle of nowhere and often take out my telescope to view the skies, though my favorites are Jupiter and Mars... A good telescope can give you an incredible view of Jupiter.
    Mars just skittered out of sight to the west.
    It's leaving opposition (?) from it's closest approach (opposition and perihelion) in July 2018
    when it was a fat red bastard hanging over the sky most of the night.


    How wonderful to live under a dark sky away from the lights. I got city lights, but I got a dark place
    where the roof next door block the streetlight. I'm gonna go look at Orion and then shut it down. Keep looking up

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    Quote Originally Posted by Micawber View Post
    In so doing you dignify equally that which is apparent to the senses, measured and scientifically evaluated with that which is made up and hallucinated and never credibly perceived by the senses of sane humans or any instruments the
    most intelligent humans standing on the shoulders of giants ever used to aid in perception. That's my problem with you.
    If you are saying that there is any evidence that no gods exist...

    ...produce it.

    There is none.

    The theist with their gods and worship ARE FULL OF SHIT. They are operating from a position of a blind guess.

    The people who say "there are no gods" are just as FULL OF SHIT. They also are operating from a position of a blind guess.

    If you cannot get that...too bad for you.

    Here is what you are doing more or less.

    Rationality may be true.
    Fantasy may be true.
    Therefore they are of equal logical verity.
    That is not even close to what I am doing.

    I am saying that the assertion "there is a GOD" is a blind guess...and that the assertion "there are no gods" IS EVERY BIT AS MUCH A BLIND GUESS.

    Atheists and other people who blindly guess that there are no gods...want to think their position is built on logic, reason, science, and such.

    IT ISN'T. IT IS A BLIND GUESS...just like the blind guess "there is a GOD."

    Hey I can do it too.

    Which of the following is true and real:

    a platonic form horse
    the dog sitting on your hearth
    a rat with a 25 foot dick flying over the moon
    all of the above

    You are an all of the above guy.
    If you are asserting there are no gods...I thank you for sharing your blind guess.

    I put more weight on the dog answer. What you are doing is pure sophistry and you do a disservice to rationality.
    Stop giving retards the warm fuzzy.
    As you should be able to tell from my comments to you, I am hardly likely to do that.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Into the Night View Post
    You cannot prove a negative.
    One CAN prove a negative. The statement "you cannot prove a negative" is incorrect.


    As far as your position is concerned, that is fine. You are free to believe what you will. The mistake is made in trying to prove it.
    Nothing wrong with anyone blindly guessing that there are gods. But attempting to prove there are gods is doomed to failure. It cannot be done. (If there is a god and if the god wants to "reveal" itself in an unambiguous way, it should be able to do so. But no human can prove that a god exists.)

    Nothing wrong with anyone blindly guessing that there are no gods. But attempting to prove there are no gods IS IMPOSSIBLE. And supposing that guessing there are no gods is somehow superior or more logical than guessing there is a GOD...is laughable.

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