do all atheists consider themselves to be teachers of the ignorant? Is that why they get so preachy? I mean, I honestly don't care if I believe the same thing as anyone else. You have your beliefs (or lack thereof) and I've got mine. So what?
These believers are the reason gays can't yet be married legally, why I can't buy liquor on a Sunday morning, why my radio and television are censored to high hell, why my schools must battle with idiotic beliefs and those who would inflict them upon children, why sexual education isn't just a given, why tax dollars are wasted subsidizing churches, and so on and so on.
I dunno, you sound sort of like the American living in France complaining about how everyone speaks crappy English and nobody makes a good cheeseburger. If your views are those shared by the majority of people living in your state, get them together and have the appropriate state laws changed. If not, acknowledge that your views are a minority opinion in your locality and adapt accordingly. Perhaps you might find your life less stressful if you considered relocation to an area whose culture is more similar to your own? Or if you're really set on staying put, you could always try to convince other like-minded people to move to your city. That might work too... Worked in San Franscisco, anyhow.
I dunno, you sound sort of like the American living in France complaining about how everyone speaks crappy English and nobody makes a good cheeseburger. If your views are those shared by the majority of people living in your state, get them together and have the appropriate state laws changed. If not, acknowledge that your views are a minority opinion in your locality and adapt accordingly. Perhaps you might find your life less stressful if you considered relocation to an area whose culture is more similar to your own? Or if you're really set on staying put, you could always try to convince other like-minded people to move to your city. That might work too... Worked in San Franscisco, anyhow.
Sounds like what the slavers said after emancipation.
I dunno, you sound sort of like the American living in France complaining about how everyone speaks crappy English and nobody makes a good cheeseburger.
Talk about bad context. This is the internet where people are on the whole, more educated. Rym has the majority opinion here.
I dunno, you sound sort of like the American living in France complaining about how everyone speaks crappy English and nobody makes a good cheeseburger.
Talk about bad context. This is the internet where people are on the whole,more educated. Rym has the majority opinion here.
Rym isn't complaining about the internet. He's complaining about New York state law.
I dunno, you sound sort of like the American living in France complaining about how everyone speaks crappy English and nobody makes a good cheeseburger. If your views are those shared by the majority of people living in your state, get them together and have the appropriate state laws changed. If not, acknowledge that your views are a minority opinion in your locality and adapt accordingly. Perhaps you might find your life less stressful if you considered relocation to an area whose culture is more similar to your own? Or if you're really set on staying put, you could always try to convince other like-minded people to move to your city. That might work too... Worked in San Franscisco, anyhow.
Sounds like what the slavers said after emancipation.
I dunno, you sound sort of like the American living in France complaining about how everyone speaks crappy English and nobody makes a good cheeseburger. If your views are those shared by the majority of people living in your state, get them together and have the appropriate state laws changed. If not, acknowledge that your views are a minority opinion in your locality and adapt accordingly. Perhaps you might find your life less stressful if you considered relocation to an area whose culture is more similar to your own? Or if you're really set on staying put, you could always try to convince other like-minded people to move to your city. That might work too... Worked in San Franscisco, anyhow.
Sounds like what the slavers said after emancipation.
Oh?
Just because the majority holds an opinion doesn't mean it's right or ethical.
I'm curious as to how long a thread like this gets before someone can link to the first or second post to make a point in their argument. The thread would be like some sort of Internet ouroboros...
/I.D. is still wrong. //You'll never beat science.
Prejudice: unreasonable feelings, opinions, or attitudes, esp. of a hostile nature, regarding a racial, religious, or national group
I think that the hostile opinions expressed here are often unreasonable. In discussions that could actually be pleasant and fruitful, things often turn to arrogance or straight-up bashing. It's crazy that I'm actually on the side of science and yet I seem unwelcome on that side of the argument. It's like saying "Thanks for stumbling into a decent thought process, but fuck you anyway." Again, painting with a broad brush and considering someone to be entirely rational or bat-shit-crazy is foolish. It is a false dichotomy.
I think that the hostile opinions expressed here are often unreasonable. In discussions that could actually be pleasant and fruitful, things often turn to arrogance or straight-up bashing. It's crazy that I'm actually on the side of science and yet I seem unwelcome on that side of the argument. It's like saying "Thanks for stumbling into a decent thought process, but fuck you anyway." Again, painting with a broad brush and considering someone to be entirely rational or bat-shit-crazy is foolish. It is a false dichotomy.
I would hardly call "I don't think so and so is rational" hostile or unreasonable. Rym's opinions are not shared by all people who have no religious faith, but again it's his opinion and I would call it a reasonable opinion at that. Religious views (or lack there of) are the basis for the majority of our choices in our life. They are reflected in our everyday actions and choices, and as such I think they are a reasonable measure of one's ability to think critically and their mental process. To say that someone is irrational because they believe a man was swallowed by a whale and spat up on a beach later is not hostile, unreasonable, nor preconceived.
I think that the hostile opinions expressed here are often unreasonable
What's so unreasonable?
Let's say you're walking down the street. Someone comes up to you and is ranting and raving about gnomes that secretly rule the world. You're not prejudiced against this person. You didn't pre-judge them, you are post-judging them. You discovered that they were crazy, then you called a spade a spade, and avoided the crazy person.
Someone who believes in a god or gods is no different than someone who believes in gnomes. They're irrational and potentially dangerous lunatics. Once you find out that someone believes in an all powerful magical invisible man who created the universe, you know that is someone to avoid and look down upon in pity or disdain. Yes, that's most of the world. That is another reason we atheists often have bad attitudes. We are the minority that is a victim of prejudice, not the religious peoples.
Someone who believes in a god or gods is no different than someone who believes in gnomes. They're irrational and potentially dangerous lunatics. Once you find out that someone believes in an all powerful magical invisible man who created the universe, you know that is someone to avoid and look down upon in pity or disdain. Yes, that's most of the world. That is another reason we atheists often have bad attitudes. We are the minority that is a victim of prejudice, not the religious peoples.
There you go. It's not about being frustrated that makes you act like an asshole when religion comes up. It's your clear delusion of self-superiority. Pity or disdain? Regardless of what you believe or don't, to go through life pitying or hating 90% of the world is just plain sad.
For the record I don't believe all people with religious thoughts are irrational. I can respect people who hold religious views similar to Spinoza or Einstein in which they view the vastness and complexity of the universe as mystifying or something to be held with reverence. It's the people who believe in a personal god that I believe are irrational.
There you go. It's not about being frustrated that makes you act like an asshole when religion comes up. It's your clear delusion of self-superiority. Pity or disdain? Regardless of what you believe or don't, to go through life pitying or hating 90% of the world is just plain sad.
Truth is sad. I'm not going to go around believing in lies or falsehoods just because it isn't sad. The fact is that the vast majority of human beings believe in the supernatural. Someone who truly believes in the supernatural is merely delusional, at best. Thus, most of the people in the world are irrational and crazy. I'm not going to deny those facts just because it would be less sad. If I wanted believe my hopes were reality, rather than believing reality was reality, I could go become a religious person.
to go through life pitying or hating 90% of the world is just plain sad.
So you think we shouldn't pity, say, people in developing countries?
I'd probably stick with Andrew here, having thought about it some. I'd say these things fall on some kind of scale of irrationality:- 3) Young Earth Creationism 2) Belief in a Personal God 1) Belief in a non-personal God 0) Atheism I guess I'm okay with a cutoff of no higher than rung 1), while Scott obviously seems to limit it to rung 0)
Someone who believes in a god or gods is no different than someone who believes in gnomes. They're irrational and potentially dangerous lunatics. Once you find out that someone believes in an all powerful magical invisible man who created the universe, you know that is someone to avoid and look down upon in pity or disdain. Yes, that's most of the world. That is another reason we atheists often have bad attitudes. We are the minority that is a victim of prejudice, not the religious peoples.
I don't believe that just because someone is irrational that they should be looked down upon with disdain like Scott. Religious belief is a by-product of what makes humans so intelligent. We are pattern seeking machines, perfected over time to find even the most minute relation in our world around us. Now there are problems which are by-products of this evolutionary trait, we experience false positives and false negatives.
Let's say we are cavemen, struggling to survive in the plains of Africa. Our brains are searching for patterns in the world. How do animals react when we get close by? Does fire start if we bang two rocks together? Does the fire go out when it rains? Do we get sick if we eat a red colored fruit? These are all thought processes which helped us survive. The more curious and pattern seeking we were, the better off we would do. We learn that if an animal has pointy teeth, it could probably hurt us. We learn that if we bang two rocks together near some dry leaves we can start a fire. We learn that eating small colorful frogs makes us sick. However, this line of thinking also gives us false positives. We begin creating patterns where none exist. For example, we begin to believe that if we do a dance before a harvest, it will yield a higher crop. Oppositely we have false negatives. We reject truths in our world, yet they might not get us killed. We might reject the idea that putting manure on the crops makes them grow more plentiful. It won't necessarily get us killed so it persists. These errors don't hurt us in the long run, they are just phantoms; patterns which don't affect us negatively yet don't provide a benefit. Combine these errors with Confirmation Bias and you get a very irrational being. Humans are irrational by nature, it's a by-product of our evolution.
Recently though, we have learned of our irrational nature. It has become apparent that there are false positives and negatives in our cognitive patterns. So how did we combat our irrational nature? We created double blind studies to remove the phantoms that our pattern seeking minds have learned to indulge on. We developed the scientific method and learned to apply rigorous testing to our beliefs. It has helped us overcome our evolutionary short comings.
Irrationality is innate in all of us. We must learn to train our minds to avoid the false positives/negatives in our lives. Rational thought is a skill, a sword which must be continuously be sharpened and used in order to be effective. We should encourage people to use this skill, but I don't think looking with pity or disdain will improve our lives or theirs.
I agree nearly 100% with what Andrew said, religion is a by product of the evolution of our mind. I also don't look down upon non-personal god believers...
As an ex-hardcore Christian, now a non-theist, I don't see everyone who believes in god to be irrational. I was bought up in a home that had no TV, went to church 3 times a week, had no friends outside of church, etc, etc. Aged 11 years old there was nothing irrational in my beliefs. Everything I knew about the world fitted with everything else, including the notion of miracles and demons and angels.
It isn't irrationality, more like ignorance. And when you are told that by learning more about science you may lose your faith in Jesus and therefor might end up in hell, the RATIONAL thing to do is to reject the study of science and try to avoid other non-Christian. When I was young my father told me that a man he worked with was cursing God, and that the Holy Spirit told my father that because of this God had planted a bomb in this man's chest. A few days later, the man died of a heart attack. Do you have any idea how much impact a story like that had on a young boy like me? My reaction to keep praying was the rational course to take, if those were the facts I knew.
The preaching of ignorance is the main evil I see in religion, not the irrationality of the belief itself.
Finally, I know that pretty much nothing people do or say will turn the majority of believers away from their faith. Reason and rationality is very hard to teach to someone who has grown up in a completely different world. Nothing you will say will make sense or convince them you are right. Seriously, how many atheists have ever converted someone away from religious beliefs? I have no figures, but from all I've seen (anecdotal evidence only) the believer will do their own research and own reading and own thinking and come to the conclusion in their own time and at their own pace.
That said, believers in God do deserve pity, not for their lack of intelligence and rationality, but for the circumstances of their upbringing. I pity the 14 year old me, I really do.
Ok, first off, I apologize for some of my previous comments. I was angry because of the way I felt Scott (and some of the rest of you) was, intentionally or unintentionally, mutilating what I actually think. Let me preface this with the fact that I am not firmly grounded in my beliefs. I discover what I believe best by making arguments with people; the side effect is that I often say things I don't mean, and my words are turned against me. I was rather tired, but I don't want to use that as a crutch.
Onto some of my statements and some replies to them.
First of all, stop acting like science can prove everything. If it could, why are we still discovering things?
Ok, this was a bad statement. Science can't be declared to prove everything because otherwise we would not be aware there were other things to discover. We are still discovering things, but at this point, science seems to have become far more theoretical than it once was. It's much more difficult to declare the existence of alternate dimensions than to declare the existence of gravity, an everyday easily-testable force. I'm not saying that they aren't right, I'm just saying that there may be certain limitations to science's reach. For example, say a certain technology would be virtually impossible for us to discover based on physical and/or mental limitations. It becomes a dead-end. It may be discovered in another way, but perhaps not. The tricky part seems to be when we notice these dead-ends but cannot fill them with a very high assurance of accuracy. Regardless, this sort of thing doesn't really have a place here. A bad point, as many of you recognized.
How can you assign a probability to something that may be possible? You cannot say "there is x% it is possible and x% it isn't. It either is or it isn't, we just don't know.
I think this is still valid. jcc said it was important what we did when the answer is unknown. You have a couple of options. You can make something up that may or may not be true (supposedly creationists). You can say you don't know (I think I fall into this camp). Or you can assume based on probability assigned by human perceptions (most of you it seems). I think one of the most important parts of this is that you choose your path. Teaching at a young age seems to inhibit choice, possibly by ingraining it moreso into a child's foundational structures. This seems to be why so many young Germans believed in Nazism. This is one of the real issues that pertains to this thread's topic.
How could the teacher be so arrogant and ignorant of the real truth in the Bible? 15 years on I see there is no debate on these issues. Infinity, I was once where you are now. It looks like arrogance to be told you are ignorant, but if you did any amount of reading on the questions you asked you'd find that it might just be the truth.
No you don't. While it's true that I was raised by a churchgoing family, and that I still go to church, I do not believe the Bible is truth, nor is it necessarily untruth. I am considered a Christian, but I don't call myself one, I don't act on it, and I don't feel connection with the church. Rym called me out for creating stories and "believing in stories", and for being "irrelevant". I was mostly just trying to point out that I am abstract. I don't believe in my "stories"; I understand what reality is and isn't, according to my perspective. lackofcheese talked about my "believe in the supernatural". I believe in some kind of force that carries through nature; by that, I do not mean something "supernatural", but something undiscovered that links and ties these various forces together. I think of it something more like "dark matter". Perhaps it's just the "emergent behavior" of the complex system of life. I do not think of it as supernatural. Perhaps it doesn't exist. I am not willing to commit myself to it (though here I am trying to explain it...).
Everyone keeps on explaining "Oh, look past the arrogance", or "It only seems like arrogance (because you're wrong)", but that certainly turns me off from your perspective. If you want people to believe you, you better appeal to them on a human level. I think the arrogance comes from absolute conviction. Such blind loyalty disturbs me. Science says we should always be questioning to figure out what's truth. Some have said truth is not subjective, and I think they are right. However, our interpretation of the truth is most certainly subjective, and there's no way of knowing if it's actually the truth. For example, colorblindness. You see something one way, and it perfectly aligns to the rest of your knowledge, yet you can see other people can distinguish certain objects that appear to be the same color to you. You may recognize this new "truth", but had you never realized the difference, you would've always seen what your eyes tell you as the truth, and for all purposes, it would have been the truth for you. This is how your view of truth is subjective. Andrew makes very good points above, but if you tried to explain "rationally" to frogs, they would not understand you, which would make you irrational to them. There is not a certain common meaning shared by everyone associated to everything. Read up on semiotics, the study of how humans derive meaning, and question whether we as humans can define ourselves as "rational". To me, that is where your arrogance comes from: your inability to understand people not like yourself.
do all atheists consider themselves to be teachers of the ignorant? Is that why they get so preachy? I mean, I honestly don't care if I believe the same thing as anyone else. You have your beliefs (or lack thereof) and I've got mine. So what?
Atheists are the preachy ones? Hmmm.... lets think of the associations that one makes when someone says "preachy". Atheists are not pushing for anyone to "believe" anything. Atheism is not a belief. Atheists push people to be rational thinkers, and (at the very least) to understand that their beliefs are no more valid than a child believing that watermelons will grow in their stomachs if they swallow watermelon seeds. They only believe it because someone told them to, they have no proof and they are scared of the consequences of not abiding by that belief. Religious is passed down through social conditioning and fear. If someone still chooses to believe for their own personal reasons, so be it - but attempt to make the word 'belief" synonymous with "truth" even in ones own mind, let alone the minds of others, is irrational and unfounded. At minimum the word "belief" should be synonymous with "feeling" or "emotion" as it has no place in the temple of thought.
That said, believers in God do deserve pity, not for their lack of intelligence and rationality, but for the circumstances of their upbringing. I pity the 14 year old me, I really do.
Ah, the upbringing... honestly I think that this is one of the big hurdles in keeping open lines of communication. Because of circumstances in their upbringing, some atheists associate all religious people with a time in their lives when they were miserable, and end up viewing them as personifications of the people that made them feel that way. Next thing you know, some people they barely know are acting exactly like their old pastor or their father, and all the rage and shame that they couldn't express as terrified kids gets vented onto the religious at large, regardless of their creed or competency.
Infinity: IF truth were SUBJECTIVE then it WOULDN'T be TRUTH by definition. (pardon my Stan Lee isms) You are arguing a point that has provided not a single shred of evidence to back itself up TO DATE. It never has and it never will. The entire basis of the argument is "We don't know, so it must be god", when the truth of the matter is we know a hell of a lot, and what we haven't figured out yet certainly isn't an omniscient, omnipresent being.
In it they explain what science really is and what it isn't. It comes down to this: for everything "science" claims, one person, with the right amount of work going as far back as they want, could replicate the studies and come to the same conclusion. That is the whole point. Science is based on many, many, many well tested layers of observed data going back hundreds of years. There is nothing else needed to come to the conclusions of modern science than access to the same data through repeatable experiments.
There is nothing subjective in believing in the major claims of science. There is nothing arrogant. There is nothing condescending. There is no faith either. The scientific method itself has been scientifically studied over the years and more elements have been added to it (like falsifiability).
Science is the thing that gives you a lifespan more than 40 years. Science gives you the ability to live in a warm house with double glazing. Science is what was used when electricity was harnessed to power that light bulb. Science has led to the understanding of powered flight to take you on holiday. Science and the scientific method is the basis of almost every single technological advance over the past few hundred years. Do you have anything plastic? It wouldn't be there without the scientific method.
Holding to the scientific is NOT arrogant. It works. The modern technological world is the proof I need.
Being abstract and believing things without evidence does NOT lead to the same results as the scientific method. It helps you feel good, and helps communities stick together, and does a lot else. If you doubt one major idea developed by the scientific method, you've got to doubt it all. Evolution is as accepted as true in science as much as the fact that the Earth isn't flat. It is that cut and dry.
For example, say a certain technology would be virtually impossible for us to discover based on physical and/or mental limitations. It becomes a dead-end. It may be discovered in another way, but perhaps not. The tricky part seems to be when we notice these dead-ends but cannot fill them with a very high assurance of accuracy.
If something can not be observed, and it has no observable effect on the universe, then it effectively does not exist. If something can be observed, or has an observable effect on the universe, then using the tools of science we can eventually learn everything there is to know about it. The only things that are beyond the reach of science are things which can not be observed, and have no observable effect on anything else. In other words, the only things that science can't reach are things that effectively do not exist.
I do not think of it as supernatural. Perhaps it doesn't exist. I am not willing to commit myself to it (though here I am trying to explain it...).
Why bother believing in something like that? Everyone has feelings of awe at nature and the universe. That is because the universe is awesome. Why do you insist on putting a label on those feelings and assigning some vague "force" to it? It's just feelings. That's what it is. You have no evidence whatsoever that it is anything more than that. We have a giant amount of evidence suggesting that it is indeed just neurology. Why insist that there is something more there when there is no evidence for it? All you are doing is making up a story and believing it for no reason.
For example, colorblindness. You see something one way, and it perfectly aligns to the rest of your knowledge, yet you can see other people can distinguish certain objects that appear to be the same color to you. You may recognize this new "truth", but had you never realized the difference, you would've always seen what your eyes tell you as the truth. This is how your view of truth is subjective
Yet again, your ignorance of science shines brightly. Science is 100% objective. Modern scientific experimental methods take into account the flaws in the five human senses. This is why we have double blind tests, and why we have controlled randomized clinical studies. They allow us to account for the subjectivity of human perception. Take this for example.
Infinity, it really seems like your major problem is that you just don't know the first thing about science. Thus, you are arguing against something you do not understand. Your argue against what you think science is, and we constantly have to correct you. Basically, you've unintentionally created and destroyed a gigantic straw man.
Atheists are thepreachyones? Hmmm.... lets think of the associations that one makes when someone says "preachy". Atheists are not pushing for anyone to "believe" anything. Atheism is not a belief.
There is a subset of atheists who are quite preachy. Evangelical, even. Atheism is not a belief system in the strictest sense, but there is a culture that can develop around the idea which looks suspiciously like one. It's sort of like how being gay strictly doesn't require anything other than sexual attraction to the same sex, but you'll still have a certain subset of gay people who make comments on how "straight acting" a person is.
Comments
The thread would be like some sort of Internet ouroboros...
/I.D. is still wrong.
//You'll never beat science.
I think that the hostile opinions expressed here are often unreasonable. In discussions that could actually be pleasant and fruitful, things often turn to arrogance or straight-up bashing. It's crazy that I'm actually on the side of science and yet I seem unwelcome on that side of the argument. It's like saying "Thanks for stumbling into a decent thought process, but fuck you anyway." Again, painting with a broad brush and considering someone to be entirely rational or bat-shit-crazy is foolish. It is a false dichotomy.
Let's say you're walking down the street. Someone comes up to you and is ranting and raving about gnomes that secretly rule the world. You're not prejudiced against this person. You didn't pre-judge them, you are post-judging them. You discovered that they were crazy, then you called a spade a spade, and avoided the crazy person.
Someone who believes in a god or gods is no different than someone who believes in gnomes. They're irrational and potentially dangerous lunatics. Once you find out that someone believes in an all powerful magical invisible man who created the universe, you know that is someone to avoid and look down upon in pity or disdain. Yes, that's most of the world. That is another reason we atheists often have bad attitudes. We are the minority that is a victim of prejudice, not the religious peoples.
I'd probably stick with Andrew here, having thought about it some. I'd say these things fall on some kind of scale of irrationality:-
3) Young Earth Creationism
2) Belief in a Personal God
1) Belief in a non-personal God
0) Atheism
I guess I'm okay with a cutoff of no higher than rung 1), while Scott obviously seems to limit it to rung 0)
Let's say we are cavemen, struggling to survive in the plains of Africa. Our brains are searching for patterns in the world. How do animals react when we get close by? Does fire start if we bang two rocks together? Does the fire go out when it rains? Do we get sick if we eat a red colored fruit? These are all thought processes which helped us survive. The more curious and pattern seeking we were, the better off we would do. We learn that if an animal has pointy teeth, it could probably hurt us. We learn that if we bang two rocks together near some dry leaves we can start a fire. We learn that eating small colorful frogs makes us sick. However, this line of thinking also gives us false positives. We begin creating patterns where none exist. For example, we begin to believe that if we do a dance before a harvest, it will yield a higher crop. Oppositely we have false negatives. We reject truths in our world, yet they might not get us killed. We might reject the idea that putting manure on the crops makes them grow more plentiful. It won't necessarily get us killed so it persists. These errors don't hurt us in the long run, they are just phantoms; patterns which don't affect us negatively yet don't provide a benefit. Combine these errors with Confirmation Bias and you get a very irrational being. Humans are irrational by nature, it's a by-product of our evolution.
Recently though, we have learned of our irrational nature. It has become apparent that there are false positives and negatives in our cognitive patterns. So how did we combat our irrational nature? We created double blind studies to remove the phantoms that our pattern seeking minds have learned to indulge on. We developed the scientific method and learned to apply rigorous testing to our beliefs. It has helped us overcome our evolutionary short comings.
Irrationality is innate in all of us. We must learn to train our minds to avoid the false positives/negatives in our lives. Rational thought is a skill, a sword which must be continuously be sharpened and used in order to be effective. We should encourage people to use this skill, but I don't think looking with pity or disdain will improve our lives or theirs.
It isn't irrationality, more like ignorance. And when you are told that by learning more about science you may lose your faith in Jesus and therefor might end up in hell, the RATIONAL thing to do is to reject the study of science and try to avoid other non-Christian. When I was young my father told me that a man he worked with was cursing God, and that the Holy Spirit told my father that because of this God had planted a bomb in this man's chest. A few days later, the man died of a heart attack. Do you have any idea how much impact a story like that had on a young boy like me? My reaction to keep praying was the rational course to take, if those were the facts I knew.
The preaching of ignorance is the main evil I see in religion, not the irrationality of the belief itself.
Finally, I know that pretty much nothing people do or say will turn the majority of believers away from their faith. Reason and rationality is very hard to teach to someone who has grown up in a completely different world. Nothing you will say will make sense or convince them you are right. Seriously, how many atheists have ever converted someone away from religious beliefs? I have no figures, but from all I've seen (anecdotal evidence only) the believer will do their own research and own reading and own thinking and come to the conclusion in their own time and at their own pace.
That said, believers in God do deserve pity, not for their lack of intelligence and rationality, but for the circumstances of their upbringing. I pity the 14 year old me, I really do.
Onto some of my statements and some replies to them. Ok, this was a bad statement. Science can't be declared to prove everything because otherwise we would not be aware there were other things to discover. We are still discovering things, but at this point, science seems to have become far more theoretical than it once was. It's much more difficult to declare the existence of alternate dimensions than to declare the existence of gravity, an everyday easily-testable force. I'm not saying that they aren't right, I'm just saying that there may be certain limitations to science's reach. For example, say a certain technology would be virtually impossible for us to discover based on physical and/or mental limitations. It becomes a dead-end. It may be discovered in another way, but perhaps not. The tricky part seems to be when we notice these dead-ends but cannot fill them with a very high assurance of accuracy. Regardless, this sort of thing doesn't really have a place here. A bad point, as many of you recognized. I think this is still valid. jcc said it was important what we did when the answer is unknown. You have a couple of options. You can make something up that may or may not be true (supposedly creationists). You can say you don't know (I think I fall into this camp). Or you can assume based on probability assigned by human perceptions (most of you it seems). I think one of the most important parts of this is that you choose your path. Teaching at a young age seems to inhibit choice, possibly by ingraining it moreso into a child's foundational structures. This seems to be why so many young Germans believed in Nazism. This is one of the real issues that pertains to this thread's topic. No you don't. While it's true that I was raised by a churchgoing family, and that I still go to church, I do not believe the Bible is truth, nor is it necessarily untruth. I am considered a Christian, but I don't call myself one, I don't act on it, and I don't feel connection with the church. Rym called me out for creating stories and "believing in stories", and for being "irrelevant". I was mostly just trying to point out that I am abstract. I don't believe in my "stories"; I understand what reality is and isn't, according to my perspective. lackofcheese talked about my "believe in the supernatural". I believe in some kind of force that carries through nature; by that, I do not mean something "supernatural", but something undiscovered that links and ties these various forces together. I think of it something more like "dark matter". Perhaps it's just the "emergent behavior" of the complex system of life. I do not think of it as supernatural. Perhaps it doesn't exist. I am not willing to commit myself to it (though here I am trying to explain it...).
Everyone keeps on explaining "Oh, look past the arrogance", or "It only seems like arrogance (because you're wrong)", but that certainly turns me off from your perspective. If you want people to believe you, you better appeal to them on a human level. I think the arrogance comes from absolute conviction. Such blind loyalty disturbs me. Science says we should always be questioning to figure out what's truth. Some have said truth is not subjective, and I think they are right. However, our interpretation of the truth is most certainly subjective, and there's no way of knowing if it's actually the truth. For example, colorblindness. You see something one way, and it perfectly aligns to the rest of your knowledge, yet you can see other people can distinguish certain objects that appear to be the same color to you. You may recognize this new "truth", but had you never realized the difference, you would've always seen what your eyes tell you as the truth, and for all purposes, it would have been the truth for you. This is how your view of truth is subjective. Andrew makes very good points above, but if you tried to explain "rationally" to frogs, they would not understand you, which would make you irrational to them. There is not a certain common meaning shared by everyone associated to everything. Read up on semiotics, the study of how humans derive meaning, and question whether we as humans can define ourselves as "rational". To me, that is where your arrogance comes from: your inability to understand people not like yourself.
Atheists are not pushing for anyone to "believe" anything. Atheism is not a belief. Atheists push people to be rational thinkers, and (at the very least) to understand that their beliefs are no more valid than a child believing that watermelons will grow in their stomachs if they swallow watermelon seeds. They only believe it because someone told them to, they have no proof and they are scared of the consequences of not abiding by that belief. Religious is passed down through social conditioning and fear. If someone still chooses to believe for their own personal reasons, so be it - but attempt to make the word 'belief" synonymous with "truth" even in ones own mind, let alone the minds of others, is irrational and unfounded. At minimum the word "belief" should be synonymous with "feeling" or "emotion" as it has no place in the temple of thought.
Also, listen to this latest episode of Astronomycast: http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-90-the-scientific-method/
In it they explain what science really is and what it isn't. It comes down to this: for everything "science" claims, one person, with the right amount of work going as far back as they want, could replicate the studies and come to the same conclusion. That is the whole point. Science is based on many, many, many well tested layers of observed data going back hundreds of years. There is nothing else needed to come to the conclusions of modern science than access to the same data through repeatable experiments.
There is nothing subjective in believing in the major claims of science. There is nothing arrogant. There is nothing condescending. There is no faith either. The scientific method itself has been scientifically studied over the years and more elements have been added to it (like falsifiability).
Science is the thing that gives you a lifespan more than 40 years. Science gives you the ability to live in a warm house with double glazing. Science is what was used when electricity was harnessed to power that light bulb. Science has led to the understanding of powered flight to take you on holiday. Science and the scientific method is the basis of almost every single technological advance over the past few hundred years. Do you have anything plastic? It wouldn't be there without the scientific method.
Holding to the scientific is NOT arrogant. It works. The modern technological world is the proof I need.
Being abstract and believing things without evidence does NOT lead to the same results as the scientific method. It helps you feel good, and helps communities stick together, and does a lot else. If you doubt one major idea developed by the scientific method, you've got to doubt it all. Evolution is as accepted as true in science as much as the fact that the Earth isn't flat. It is that cut and dry.
Don't like science? Throw out your computer.
Infinity, it really seems like your major problem is that you just don't know the first thing about science. Thus, you are arguing against something you do not understand. Your argue against what you think science is, and we constantly have to correct you. Basically, you've unintentionally created and destroyed a gigantic straw man.