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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[origamiscienceguy]

Many of those have similar stories to stories in the bible. Just with differences which leads me to believe that they were stories passed down through word of mouth and written down later, after they had changed.\

I just realized that the bible talks about unicorns:

Job 39:9 will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?

It's too bad we don't call rhinoceroses unicorns anymore.

Spoiler: UNOCORN!! (click to show/hide)

[Adragis]

I always thought that was narwhals.

[TD1]

I'd actually like an answer as to why the Bible is taken as being reliable (by believers) in nearly everything it says

Dude, not everyone has this literalism fetish that you share with the more hardcore protestants. Even the pope will happily tell you that the bible is wrong in many places - though he'll use another word, of course -, since it was written down by fallible men who were only inspired by God.
TL;DR: You're operating on a false premise.

I didn't say that the Bible is absolutely correct. I said they believe it. The spirit of it, if you will. The message.

The same cannot be said of Homer.

Also, literalism is probably the only way to justify religion. Not that it's much of an excuse, mind, but if your religion is relative then it's not really convincing. But that's a debate already had many times.

Many of those have similar stories to stories in the bible. Just with differences which leads me to believe that they were stories passed down through word of mouth and written down later, after they had changed.\

I just realized that the bible talks about unicorns:

Job 39:9 will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?

It's too bad we don't call rhinoceroses unicorns anymore.

Spoiler: UNOCORN!! (click to show/hide)

You do know that the Bible was written down sometimes generations after the life of Jesus? And that the Old Testament almost certainly circulated through an oral tradition before it was written down. It has more inconsistencies than the Odyssey or Iliad do.

Edit. Unless you mean that the stories in Homer stemmed from the Bible events? Where is there correlation between the two tales to justify this?

[origamiscienceguy]

I'd actually like an answer as to why the Bible is taken as being reliable (by believers) in nearly everything it says

Dude, not everyone has this literalism fetish that you share with the more hardcore protestants. Even the pope will happily tell you that the bible is wrong in many places - though he'll use another word, of course -, since it was written down by fallible men who were only inspired by God.
TL;DR: You're operating on a false premise.

I didn't say that the Bible is absolutely correct. I said they believe it. The spirit of it, if you will. The message.

The same cannot be said of Homer.

Also, literalism is probably the only way to justify religion. Not that it's much of an excuse, mind, but if your religion is relative then it's not really convincing. But that's a debate already had many times.

Many of those have similar stories to stories in the bible. Just with differences which leads me to believe that they were stories passed down through word of mouth and written down later, after they had changed.\

I just realized that the bible talks about unicorns:

Job 39:9 will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?

It's too bad we don't call rhinoceroses unicorns anymore.

Spoiler: UNOCORN!! (click to show/hide)

You do know that the Bible was written down sometimes generations after the life of Jesus? And that the Old Testament almost certainly circulated through an oral tradition before it was written down. It has more inconsistencies than the Odyssey or Iliad do.

Edit. Unless you mean that the stories in Homer stemmed from the Bible events? Where is there correlation between the two tales to justify this?

We keep finding manuscripts closer and closer to the life of Jesus. here for example. There are some parts about the old testament that could not have come from anybody but God (creation for example) which means that God must have spoken to the writer about it.

I don't know anything about homer, I was mainly talking about Giglamesh.

[TD1]

Alright. What are the correlations with Gilgamesh, then?

[Orange Wizard]

Deity creates the world, floods it, spares some dude in a giant cube-boat full of gold, pretty standard stuff.

I didn't say that the Bible is absolutely correct. I said they believe it. The spirit of it, if you will. The message.

The same cannot be said of Homer.

People believe it because other people say they believe it. No-one believes in Christ Homer, so to speak, so no-one else believes in him either.

[Frumple]

There are some parts about the old testament that could not have come from anybody but God (creation for example) which means that God must have spoken to the writer about it.

... no? Those parts could have come from anybody, and says nothing about the writer(s) except they wrote it. We make creation stories and fantastic tales literally for fun, and have since pretty much as far back as we can trace. Fiction is a thing, and it doesn't require a god speaking to someone to make it.

[Flying Dice]

Science doesn't prove, though. Only provides overwhelming evidence in support.

Indeed. The only things in the realm of science that you can actually "prove" are those in the more theoretical based sciences like math and computer science, and that's only because those particular fields are based solely on rules that we made up ourselves (thus letting us know all of the "base" rules to their full extent), unlike things like physics where we only know some of the "base" rules, and those that we do know we only know to a limited degree of precision. As scientists work more and more on a given theory they are able to refine those laws to a higher and higher degree of precision, but AFAIK at this point it is actually impossible for us to ever reach the point of actually being able to "prove" something based on the physical world since everything we've done so far seems to indicate that many of the constants that it is based on are infinitely precise (like pi), meaning that you will always be able to calculate any given answer to "one more decimal point".

Which isn't to say, of course, that it is impossible that a base theorem like the world being a sphere could be overturned. It just means that anything that replaces it is going to have to give identical answers to what a sphere would in 99.99999999% of the time, since we have huge mountains of evidence pointing towards the Earth being a sphere. Quantum mechanics is actually a great place to see this in action right now, since we have about 10 different readily accepted theories floating around at the moment, all of which give the exact same results for every single experiment we've ever done. The only places that they differ is in experiments that we haven't done, since all of them, by definition, have to at least provide matching results for every single experiment already performed in order to have any chance at all of being closer to the "true" answer than the current ones are.

You could even invert it and phrase it thus: Science does not prove, science disproves. When science repeatably and consistently fails to disprove something, you've begun to describe an empirical fact; additional attempts to disprove it will either do so or further refine the degree to which it is understood. With enough refining an empirical fact which continues to resist being disproved long enough can be sufficiently well-documented and understood to serve as the basis for attempts to disprove other ideas. Bam, science, described (poorly) in plain English.

[Bohandas]

If you knew that the chair would break, would you bother sitting in it?

Where did I say I knew it would break?

I was just making a point.

Faith is believing in something that cannot be proven. If you sit in your chair, you are believing that it will hold your weight, because you cannot prove that it will hold your weight. So you have faith in your chair. If you don't believe that your chair will hold your weight, you probably won't bother sitting in it, since you don't have faith. While you can gather evidence that the chair will hold your weight, it can't be proven.

It is the same with the Bible. While there is evidence, it cannot be proven. You have to have faith in it.

What silliness. Of course one can prove a chair will hold a given weight. It is a trivial element of mechanics and material science. Heck, you could even base it on a body of prior experience - in that case, there was only ever one single act of "faith" in the initial sitting.

I think the idea here is that you could have been hallucinating, or the prior sitting could be a confabulation or false memory.

[Bohandas]

We know what faith is. Faith is believing in something for which there is no evidence.

What you were trying to say is that your form of faith is as valid as scientific faith, which it isn't.

there can be evidence, but not proof.

As anecdotal hearsay however the bible is inadmissible as evidence to both scientific inquiry and legal proceedings

[i2amroy]

Alright. What are the correlations with Gilgamesh, then?

I'd say a lot of the reason why people widespread believe in one and not the other is because a large portion of the bible is aimed at laying down a moral code and a codified way of life. On the other hand while the epic of Gilgamesh has some morals that get stated over the course of it, the majority of the story is simply that, a story.

Law 27: Play on people's need to believe to create a cult like following.

There's a reason why this exists; by giving a list of rules and various morals over its course, the bible is much better at "capturing" converts than the epic of Gilgamesh is. This ensures that even though some people may leave the religion, it can sustain itself by converting people from other religions.

In a lot of ways the study of memes and religions is very similar to that of evolution, funnily enough. Those religions that are best at "spreading" through converts, are good at "surviving" by keeping those that join them present in the religion, and are good at "evolving" by having flexible enough moral codes to allow them to change over time to fit modern values are going to be those that survive the best in a given area, just as how the organisms that are best at spreading, surviving, and evolving are going to be the most widespread ones in biology.

As anecdotal hearsay however the bible is inadmissible as evidence to both scientific inquiry and legal proceedings

Honestly I'd say the biggest problem the bible has from a scientific point of view is a lack of both repeatability (from an experimental point of view) and a lack of supporting evidence (from a historical one). Compared to something like say, ice melting at 100 degrees, the miracles in the bible can't be recreated by people. And compared to something like say, the migration of people over the land bridge from Siberia over into the Americas, which has large amounts of physical evidence supporting it, something like the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt, which has absolutely no physical supporting evidence, is lacking from a historical point of view.

From both sides it fails requirements to be able to be looked at either scientifically or historically on multiple counts. (Of course this says nothing about its philosophical or moral value, which can be taken seriously for discussion if needed).

[Rolan7]

That idea of memes and creeds as evolving organisms has always fascinated me.  I think I usually do a bad job of explaining it to people.

[Bohandas]

RE: Science and wrongness: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Or to put it more briefly

"“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set some limit on infinite error" -Bertolt Brecht

[MonkeyHead]

Science needs to be wrong from time to tome to get better. Without embracing the capacity for being show to be flat wrong, you are not engaging in science.

[TD1]

Alright. What are the correlations with Gilgamesh, then?

I'd say a lot of the reason why people widespread believe in one and not the other is because a large portion of the bible is aimed at laying down a moral code and a codified way of life. On the other hand while the epic of Gilgamesh has some morals that get stated over the course of it, the majority of the story is simply that, a story.

Law 27: Play on people's need to believe to create a cult like following.

There's a reason why this exists; by giving a list of rules and various morals over its course, the bible is much better at "capturing" converts than the epic of Gilgamesh is. This ensures that even though some people may leave the religion, it can sustain itself by converting people from other religions.

I must admit I know little of Gilgamesh, simply adding it as an epic as Homer's works are epics. So, for the example of the Odyssey and Iliad, there is a strong moral message throughout on how to act, and how to honour the gods. Alexander the Great is said to have read a page a day in order to become more virtuous. If the Greeks had a Bible, this would be it.

In a lot of ways the study of memes and religions is very similar to that of evolution, funnily enough.

Oh, hi Dawkins. Didn't see you walk in there