Is atheism a religion?

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A true professor, a senior academic who heads a department, will get income beyond what any normal policeman or security guard can make, of course. I judged my chances of ever getting that high up to be quite slim. Besides the huge competition from seriously ambitious colleagues, I seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to reading books. I tried reading the Lord of the Rings once, so I started reading the first page. I woke up a few hours later (so it's more like book-induced narcolepsy than ADD) But in terms of income, my carreer potential is the same or better than a regular doctor, who works in a department under that professor.

Security gets much better pay in Holland. I'm just starting my carreer, and I'm already past those wages. I have a completely average job in terms of income; middle-middle-class. It may be due to a yellow streak in dutch culture, that jobs with obvious risk are avoided. I see it all in perspective since medical doctors are exposed to diseases, and lawyers regularly come into contact with crime and criminals.
In Holland, only the real professors (department heads) earn that $85k. In the States, I think department heads can earn much more than that. American unis brain-drain the rest of the world to staff their departments, and the money is a necessary incentive. One of my old professors was hailed as being a real genius, and was offered salaries in US unis way beyond what the University of Amsterdam offered. He chose to stay because he loved the city too much, and his employers are greatful beyond words.

 

That's not the only incentive in the US. For most of the sciences, US universities also have research facilities most other countries could only dream about. ODU, my university, has a partnership with Langly Air Force Base (not far away), which means our aerospace professors have pretty regular access to a full-scale wind tunnel that can pass supersonic speeds. I'm not sure what the max speed is, but it's impressive. Several other universities have full-scale wind tunnels with max speeds in the rance of Mach 1 on-campus. That's research gold for these professors. We also have a fully functioning nuclear physics lab, we have a whole 1/3 of a building dedicated to laser and plasma research (I think), etc. Not sure how big of a deal that is in biology, especially since ODU doesn't have a big biology department.

 

What do you have to do to get a loan over there? My mother is a Dutch citizen, and my step dad is an actual Dutch guy. Is that good enough? I really want to study in the Netherlands, preferably in English as I cant speak Dutch...yet.

I trust my text books because they are written by experts in their fields. Reason why I didnt throw out Biology 8th Edition is because it covers everything I needed. Later on if I do Animal Behaviour then I will get something more indepth. You know...as you progress up the levels your text books get more indepth and comprehensive. Also, the reason why I disregard the bible is because it is not written by experts on anything to do with science, philosophy or reality. As you said, the bible is not a science book. Also, while there are more than plenty of bible translations, there are no new editions updated with new discoveries, the knowledge contained in it is stuck in time, locked to the time and place and level of understanding that the men who wrote the bible were in at the time.

I never lie. I do take a lot of things here seriously, but at the same time I do like just winding you up
because you react so well, its hilarious.

Which is all of them so far that I have met in my every day life. Some on here are cool, Im looking at you there Chandos . NOG, you are ok too, but Chandos is more of a calming influence on me than you are most of the time

Not screwing with you hehe. I was being serious. But when I said there wasnt much I dont know about the bible, I was refering to the fact that I have read it cover to cover many times.

Of course. I know there is more to life than just DNA, but DNA is where it all starts from. It makes the proteins that make the brain, for example. So when I say all our potential and all of our behaviour comes from the DNA it is true, in a sense.

 

I'll translate the requirements for you:
- you are between 18 and 30 years old.
- you are dutch. In some cases non-dutch living in Holland are eligible for study finacing.
- you are taking a full-time course in professional education (training for a profession), or a full-time or dual course at a university or college.

If you find a way to follow a study in time to be eligible for financing, then you get 250-450 euro/month which can be converted to a gift, depending on your living situation and financial background. Most students require more money to get by, so they take a loan or work on the side, I did the latter mostly. The IB-groep which handles the financing, can also serve as a lender for up to 500 euro/month, with beneficial repayment terms.

Unless you find a way to move here quickly, and get an exception from the IB-groep somehow, I think your chances are slim. But there's a small chance you might get financing for a master study.

Check out this site.

 

Hmm, thanks...its a tough decision. I want to stay here because my biology department does a project in Nigeria, The Nigerian Montane Forest Project, and I want to get involved in that maybe, also they do research a lot in Antarctica, and I might be interested in that. My main dream is to work in exobiology or astrobiology, depending on what you like to call it. Antarctica is a back door into the space program, so I might work on that. But I also like plant-insect mutualisms, and how plants that depend on insects and vice-versa are adapting to climate change, so I might work in Nigeria. I mostly want to study in the Netherlands to be near my mother and her cats, and also to smoke buds without hassles from the cops. So I might just go for a holiday instead.

 

:ROTFlMAO: Oh, T2, I wish I could give you a rep point.

In my not so humble opinion the best post in this thread.

 

In my experience, the higher the text book goes, the more in-depth and detailed it becomes, but the less comprehensive (in terms of the breadth of topics covered). My Compresibility text only actually talked about compresibility issues and super-sonic mechanics. It assumed you already knew the rest of the stuff. The issue, though, is the Bible, and again we come to the problem that, if it isn't hard science, you aparently don't trust it. Again, how do you feel about medicine? How do you feel about sociology? How about metalurgy? Are texts written on these trustworthy? How about engineering text books?

Never lie, yeah, I'll believe that. Try to never lie I'll believe, but it can be awefully hard to achieve, so unless you started 'never lying' the day you wrote that, I'll take it with a grain of salt.

Yeah, reading it cover to cover actually doesn't get you too much of it. That's kinda like saying you've read Mein Kampf cover to cover to cover several times, but you've never studied Hitler, or World War II, or German culture at all.

It's only true in a similar sense to all the potential for all the behaviour of my computer coming from the hard drive. Seriously, it's about par. I guess a better analogy would be comparing DNA to the laws of physics while the actual human being is actual reality. The laws of physics didn't put anything anywhere, they just defined potential courses they could take. If there is a planetary body, it will pull things toward its surface in a given pattern with given force, but only if it's already there. The laws didn't produce the planet. If there are a mass of stars in a given space, they will organize themselves in this pattern to form this kind of galaxy, but that doesn't make the stars. DNA defines what the body will do with a given amount of nutrition, but it doesn't give the nutrition. DNA defines what the brain will do with a given amount of socialization, but it doesn't provide socialization.

Even in there, though, the brain is little more than a super-complex chemical computer. The human being, however, is capable of doing things (whether it be rooted in brain, mind, or something called a soul) that currently appear to be qualitatively different from the capabilities of computers. The most obvious of these at the moment is making a qualitative judgement call.

Oh, and remember what I said about twins developing unique personalities. Again, it seems likely that even environment doesn't account for all influences.

 

I trust it, it is a science based understanding. I would prefer an evolutionary approach to medicine, but that is only just starting to happen...slowly.

I feel that it is fluffy. Same goes for most of psychology and the other social sciences.

Its chemistry, so I like it.

From my personal experience with engineering students at my university, engineers are constantly drunk and after they have finished at university they may have their degrees, but they are a lot dumber than when they went in there first. Aside from that Id say that engineering text books would be trustworthy, the people writing about them know their stuff.

I never do. Dont see the need for it. I dont even lie when Im drinking at a party and talking crap with people. Theres no point. At the end of the day the lies get found out, and you just end up looking like a dick. Im not always honest, however. I find that simply not saying something is better than making something up when you dont want someone else to know the truth. You would be amazed by how dishonest you can be without actually lying, even I amaze myself

Ive done more than just read it, Ive done bible studies, Ive even given bible studies. Ive even had a bible study with a friend within the past few months. It does nothing for me, I feel nothing like I first used to feel back when I was younger. It is meaningless and jibberish nonsensical randomness mixed with common-sense fake wisdom. Dont get offended, its just how I see it these days. I get a lot more from my hindu scriptures than I ever did from the bible...I just somehow forgot that while I was a christian.

Not even close. For a computer analogy it would be more like the binary combination of ons and offs makes the programs, but the programs are more than just 0s and 1s at the macroscopic level. It is the emergent properties of the sequence of the ons and offs that make the program, but only when it is translated correctly and with hardware that can do said translating. The same with DNA, it is the emergent properties of the proteins being arranged in a specific way, themselves being comprised of amino acids arranged in a specific way, which all together combine to form organs from which the emergent properties of said organs arise. The mind is the emergent property of the brain, the result of all the neurons and gluons working together in a certain specific way, and since they are all proteins coded for by the DNA then the entire structure of the brain is encoded in the DNA, with other things coming in to play after the brain is formed in the womb. It is way more complicated than this, as you know, but the principle is correct despite it being simplified. Im not sure what area of psychology those people in your house work in, but I do hope it is something harder than the fluffy social sciences parts of psychology.

That shows you dont really understand DNA, sorry. I can give you some videos to watch about it.

Well, computers can only do one thing at a time, even if it is really really fast 'one thing at a time' things. Thats why people have dual processors or something. With parallel processing though, computers can do what we do. Reason why human brains are so good at being plastic is because there is no central origin of command, there isnt one thing in the brain telling everything else what to do. The brain is a lot like an ant colony, with the neurons being like ants, and with them responding to the amount of chemical stimulation they receive from their contact with other neurons. Have a look at how an ant colony works if you want to see a good analogy of how the human brain works without a centralized controller.

And also remember my information from my psychology text book on this subject was outdated by a few years. Also, ant colony will explain also why twins develop differently as they do.

 

It's science for profit. I would trust it only within reason.

 

Yeah, capitalism sucks. And, no, Im not a socialist...anymore.

 

We live in a post captialist/socialist age now, especially after the events of the last year. Those are essentially meaningless labels at this point.

 

You realize medicine is far more based on experience and exploratory experimentation (they have no theory, just want to see what will happen) than on sciences like biology or chemistry, don't you? The science of biology as it concerns humans and organ functions and such largely rose out of medicine, not the other way around.

There are some 'fluffy' practicioners out there, but the sciences themselves are pretty solid.

About as much chemistry as engineering is physics. Metalurgy deals more with the chance formation of crystal structures, and how to accomodate those inherrant unknowns, than actual chemistry. Chemistry is only the base.

Wow, you must have a soft engineering program. I think if a single student in any of my classes past first year came in with even a weak hangover, they'd have bombed the next test.

The problem with that is that decades of psychological research shows that the vast majority of psychology is not an emergent property of the brain. Humans are increadibly socially dependant beings. We learn almost everything, facts, behavior, some very instinct-like levels of behavior (automatic responses, but not actual instincts), almost everything. If you want to talk about the evolution of the human mind, you're talking more about the evolution of human societies than the human body and DNA. Did you know, for example, that the brain processes involved with basic math varry radically between asian language speakers and european language speakers? The parts of the brain in use actually differ. What language you learn seems to have more to do with how your brain works than what race you are, how much you're fed, or anything else. That is no longer an emergent property of proteins.

How does that show that I don't know how DNA works? What flaws are there in that analysis? Does DNA not (indirectly) tell the body what to do with nutrients recieved, or does it actually produce the nutrients (food) in the first place?

Computers can do as many things as they have processors for at the same time. Dual-core computers can actually do two things at once. I think parallel processing in psychology is basically rooted in the fact that every single brain cell acts as a mini-processor. Still, that doesn't allow for qualitative judgements. That's just a vastly more efficient manner of absorbing information from multiple sources (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, body orientation, balance, the basic seven senses). Qualitative value judgements work on an entirely different level, one that, logically, we don't really understand. As for my sources, my father is a practicing clinical and forensic psychologist with about 30 years of practical experience. He's also taught individual courses at several local universities with psych programs, both at the graduate and undergrad levels, but he prefers practice to teaching. He's one of the top trial psychologists in the region. My wife has her bachelor's in psychology and is almost done with her master's in counceling. She's done practicums and internships on medical psych wards, at private clinics, and with churches. What exactly do you consider the 'fluffy' sides of psychology?

Really? I can see the ant colonies simulating it, but explaining why? Please fill me in.

 

This isnt the case anymore. Most of the biological understanding of humans comes from comparative studies in other species. The best way to understand the human body is to realise it is a highly mutated fish adapted for life on land. This is the same with any other organism that is terrestrial in origin (ie whales, despite them being fully aquatic, as you know). Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin is a good book to read on this.

Its not what I meant, what I meant was that it is a soft science, and Im not a big fan of soft sciences, not because they are wrong, but because they are about social things, which Im not particularly interested in. Sociality is ambiguous, it could have easily been something else. This could be said about biology and the hard sciences, but the universe would be more alien if those were different than if the way in which humans socialize and form social constructs were altered.

Im not talking about psychology, rather the mind, consciousness etc...the underlying framework of what you are talking about here. Daniel Dennett is a good place to start if you want to understand the reasons why we think about things the way we do. His book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon opens up the doors for some interesting research potentials on religion as a natural phenomenon, as the title indicates hehe. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence by cognitive scientist Andy Clark is another good book, but on a totally different subject regarding the human brain/mind, in which he discusses how our greatest technologies become part of our extended consciousness awareness, and how our best tools allow us to think through them. I pretty much rate Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett and Vilayanur Ramachandran as being three of the most up to date researchers on what it is that makes us 'us' in the brain/mind area. Simon Baron-Cohen is pretty awesome too, but I have not studied more than a handful of his research papers so far. And yes, he is the cousin of Sacha.

I did indeed know that. What this is is that in the east Asian languages the way in which they name their base-ten numbers is to say "10 1" for 11, "10 5" for fifteen. So when the child hears it being said all the time, it ingrains in them the understanding that 15 is 10+5. This is a feature of the Chinese languages, as well as Korean and Japanese. When you think about it, saying the number based on what it is comprised of in base-ten is a lot easier than trying to remember that twelve is 10 + 2. Most children who speak English will never realise the association of the sounds 'twelve' with 10 + 2. These sort of language emphasis patterns can be seen globally in all languages. Specific examples escape my mind at present. However, the capacity to actually have language is dependent on the brain, which is made from proteins coded for by the DNA, as well as bioelectricity, and chemical reactions. So these things do emerge from the properties of the brain. The mind and consciousness is still an emergent property of the brain.

The DNA doesnt tell the cell what to do with the nutrients. This is all controlled by concentrations of various substances, usually K+ ions, or ion channels in the cell membrane, or various enzymes. The DNA just makes the proteins that make up the cell and the enzymes that do all the work. Proteins are the workers that drive the body, and nothing really tells anything to do anything, it is just a lot of controlled randomness, ie it is randomness within parameters.



This one is actually a video my biochemistry lecturer played our class during a lecture.

The social sides, and only because I think that sociality is ambiguous. I have the same feelings concerning sociology. I know that it is science, Ive studied the sociology of the Antarctic Tourist, and I have studied the psychological effects of wintering over in Antarctica, as well as other related psychological effects of living in Antarctica. I know it is real science, its just fluffy science. Fluffy in a soft way, not in a negative way. Its like cuddly science.

The way an ant colony functions as a super organism comprised of unintelligent component organisms which are virtually blind and deaf is through chemical smells. Each ant is covered with a hydrocarbon with degrades or reacts differently depending on what the job of the ant is. If an ant is a forager, for example, and it goes out foraging, then finds food near the nest, it then comes back in to the nest quickly, and the state of the hydrocarbon will indicate to other foragers who come in contact with the forager that there is food near by, so they all go out and get it. The longer the ant is outside the nest the more the hydrocarbon degrades, and so the ants it comes in contact with will know it had looked for food for X minutes and was unsuccessful, or that it is such a distance away will make the food too much of a hassle to get. The ants themselves have a memory of only a few seconds, so they are constantly in contact with each other to smell how the other ants smell, and they respond accordingly. This is very similar to how our own brain works. In the case of twins, each individual neuron is being reinforced differently, and so a unique personality emerges from the way the neurons interact with each other based on external and internal stimuli. This is the best I can explain it at present. I might have more to add after first semester is over, I am doing more psychology this year because it might help with animal behaviour, should I end up down that path.

 

I'll look into those once I have time. Time not spent looking for a job. I hate job hunting.

My point is that many things in nature are ambiguous. Meteorology is probably the softest science there is, and it's not society that makes it so. My point here is that certainty is something science finds in the lab, not in the outside world. I mean that. You start applying these things in the real world and you find that many things that are absolutely true in the lab are more like averages in the real world. This is why engineering (real-world application of physics) is so careful applying factors of safety (aka fudge zones). Sure 100 people can safely average a certain amount, and thus apply a certain force on the floor, but when they're walking around that force can more than double, and the periodic application of force creates cyclical stresses that can tear a structure appart in just days. How much do they do this? How strong is that steel? All these things are uncertainties that exist within certain probability ranges, but if you get it wrong you'll kill people. In engineering, there is no such thing as 'overkill'. Anyway, the point is that the world is rough, messy, and fudgy. Just about all practical applications of science recognize this, from medicine and pharmaceuticals to engineering a satellite into orbit.

Umm, just to be clear, psychology is the study of the mind. If you're talking about the mind, you're talking about psychology. And the truth is that we really don't understand the underlying framework. It's probably the biggest area of research in psychology today, and it's mostly generated functional theories that are iffy at best. Modern psychology is really going more by feel than sight, if that analogy can be applied.

I'll look into them, but I'll tell you now that every attempt I've seen to explain religion as a naturally occurring phenomenon has ended up begging the question, assuming it's own conclusion in order to prove it. This is the kind of thing that I classify as 'fluffy' psychology. The good practicioners are the ones that admit this and say their theories are, at best, a way of looking at things.

That's not the difference. Past the number 12, german does the same thing, yet german speakers side with other europeans on how they do math, not asian speakers.

So I was skipping steps, just like you were. By defining the protiens that shape the enzymes that order the cell, DNA is 'telling' the cell what to 'do with' the nutrients. It's a simplification, but not a misunderstanding.

Lol. The so-called 'soft' sciences are typically called that because experimentation becomes an art, rather than a science. In psychology, you can never control for all the variables, and even if you could, it'd probably destroy the subject of the experiment (highly unethical). I don't think physics has any 'forbidden' experiments, but psychology and sociology have a ton, usually dealing with extreme isolation or intentionally driving a victim insane to see what happens. These are about the same as the Nazis infecting people with diseases just to study the progression of the disease, only the results would probably be useless. Psychology can only study brain damage when it happens in the real world, which means people with damage to particular parts of the brain can become huge centers of research just because it's so odd. Look up a book called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat for some interesting examples. It's all about functional disorders of the brain, and most of the cases may well never be seen again. Medicine has some stuff like this, but not as much. Meteorology has far more than even psychology or sociology. The issue at hand here is that, once you move out of the lab, things become much, much more messy, and yes, ambiguous.

This is, at best, a poor example. It assumes that the minor, unmeasurable differences in upbringing (who got to slide down the slide first this time) are significant enough to produce such radical differences as a distaste for art versus a love for it, or a substantial talent at music versus nothing more than average. Is it possible? Yes. This is one of the soft areas of psychology. If we put two twins in exactly the same situation, controlling for all the same variables, simply due to the nature of controlling those variables, we'd only be able to tell if their resultant madnesses were the same. Still, it is unlikely that even a 10 year collection of such minor variations would result in as drastic differences as we see.

 

It's funny how I should have named this thread "What do you think of Religion?" because that's what the discussion has turned into.

I'm just gonna say one final thing here -- IMHO, the position you take on the existence of God is your religion. Zero is still a number. Religion does not necessarily mean an organized group, a set of laws or ordinances, or a collection plate. It is your belief about the nature of the universe. Religion as a word does not imply mental deficiency or lack of courage to face reality, it simply means the position you take on the issue of God -- even if that position is "I don't think there is one."

 

If there is any opinion on the matter that I would say is not a religion, it is weak agnosticism, meaning the "I don't know, I don't care" crowd. Even strong agnosticism (the "We can never know in this life" crowd) is one, I think.

 

LKD, zero is a defined number. I don't have a religion, because I'm not entirely convinced one way or another what the nature of the universe is (or God, for that matter). If I've determined that your concept of God isn't likely, then all I have determined, is that it is "not one". "Not one" is NOT a number.
Religious people have faith, and they 'pick a number', because they are convinced, or believe, that this is the truth. A truly enlightened person doesn't believe anything, never takes leaps of faith, and won't make premature assumptions. God doesn't play dice either
Nobody's perfect of course, but this is the form of enlightenment that I strive to achieve. If God were a real entity somehow, and we were Its creations, wouldn't it make more sense to honour It by seeking to improve one's self by knowledge rather than herding to church once a week like a bunch of zombies?

 

You mean like a flock of zombie sheep, since Jesus is the Zombie Shephard.

 

Coin, without assumptions and belief in the unproven, you can't know anything, not even that you're sitting at your computer right now, as you read this, I see you! It could be a hallucination, or a dream, or some odd (dys)function of your true butterfly body. You can't prove it isn't, not based on anything absolute, so you can't believe that what you're reading is actually what I've written, or that I actually exist, or even that you actually exist. Without assumptions of some kind or another, you have no sense of reality at all. This is the fundamental problem with relying on logic 100% and nothing else. Logic, by itself, is only a series of 'if...then' statements, with nothing to guarantee the 'if' is ever satisfied.

I do agree that your position of uncertainty isn't a religion, though.

Nataraja:
Wait, what is...
That was good, in a very twisted sense.

 

I use empirical measurable data on which to base my assumptions, then hypothesize, theorize and so on. You're saying that I can't trust my assumptions, because I can't prove the existence of the empirical data on which it is based, because it must be proven with measurements, which in turn, I can't prove conclusively either.
Since I can't know anything for sure, it doesn't matter; anything goes, even religion! I can understand now, how religious people let society and the environment be destroyed while they sit around being pious: You're literally God-damn-confused!
I'm a fairly down-to-earth person, and I admit I don't question my old assumptions quite as often as I should. But you're taking this philosophical perspective way too far...

Science makes one basic assumption that sets it apart from philosophy: That empirical (measurable) data can be trusted as proven facts.