There is, actually, quite a lot of evidence that supports Kimi's numbers, though.

Saying there is no definitive proof isn't much of an argument. From where I'm sitting right now I can see no definitive proof that the Wright Brothers ever got off the ground, but it's hardly an act of faith to believe that they did. There's an overwhelming amount of evidence for it.

 

C'mon, Trumpet, that whole thing was filmed in a Hollywood sound stage.

 

Next you'll be telling me there's no Santa Claus.

 

I thought this may be of interest





Barbara Smoker

Should We Respect Religion?

On May 25, 2006, I took part in the Oxford University Union Debate, opposing the motion that "Free speech should be moderated by respect for religion." The chief speaker on my side was Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published the controversial Muhammad cartoons. As there is a seven-figure bounty on his head, the security arrangements for the debate were heavy. Everyone was searched on the way in. In the days when, as president of the National Secular Society, I frequently took part in university debates (mainly during the 1970s through the 1990s). I was almost invariably on the losing side when it came to the vote, but this time we won by a good margin-129-59. If the word religion in the motion were replaced by any other abstract noun, we would have won by 188 to nil. Suppose the word was science. The motion would then have read "Free speech should be moderated by respect for science"; and no reasonable person would vote for that-least of all a genuine scientist. So why is religion given its uniquely privileged status? After thousands of years, it is the norm-so no one ever thinks it needs justifying.

As I pointed out in the debate, the precept to respect religion is similar to the Mosaic commandment, "Honor thy Father and thy Mother." But suppose your father and mother happened to be murderers? They wouldn't deserve your respect, and most religions don't either. Should we, then, respect religious faith? Certainly not. But should we respect religious people? Yes-as long as they are not antisocial and do not aim to impose their religious views on others.


However, even if we respect them as good-living people, we cannot respect their beliefs. Faith, which means firm belief in the absence of evidence, betrays human intelligence, undermines science-based knowledge, and compromises ordinary morality. If there were objective evidence for its doctrines, it would no longer be faith; it would be knowledge.

We have to excuse the medieval skeptics who pretended to respect Christianity rather than risk being burned at the stake, and likewise the apostate Muslims of today who pay lip-service to Islam in those Islamic countries where apostasy is still a capital offense; but we who live in a comparatively liberal society have no such excuse. In fact, it is all the more incumbent upon us to give our support to victims of religious oppression everywhere by coming out of the respectful closet and speaking our minds. Freedom of speech is more important than respect.


Skepticism is of paramount importance, because it is the gateway to knowledge; but unless the skeptical ideas are freely argued over, they cannot be assessed, nor can the ensuing knowledge spread through society.


< social no and knowledge in advance be can there exchange, free that Without religion. least not everything, on ideas of exchange the element important an been always cartoons-has satirical ridicule-including Indeed, ideas. absurd at laugh to right include must speech And expression. means opposition-which open is it unless justified idea wrote, Mill J.S. As speech. concept whole part which religion, from freedom without religion real>
Totalitarian extremists, of whatever religion or sect, invariably put faith first and freedom nowhere. Censorship, including insidious self-censorship, is then the order of the day, followed closely by violence. In a society where religious orthodoxy rules, there is no freedom of religion. Incidentally, the violence provoked by the Danish cartoons was deliberately stirred up by Islamic extremists publishing exaggerated versions of them in Muslim countries, up to four months after the originals were published.


I have discussed this with several moderate Muslims, and while they roundly condemned the violent reprisals, they generally added, "But people ought not to insult religion." Why not? No one would denounce the ridiculing of political views, which are open to free debate. In fact, true respect for religion would allow it to be opened up in the same way, relying on the truth emerging. But at present it is shielded from honest scrutiny. This suggests that the faithful realize it could not stand up to it. We are told by politicians and mealy-mouthed functionaries that it is politically incorrect to call the perpetrators of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London Muslim terrorists-but, of course, everyone knows they were Muslims, of the most zealous kind. Their belief in a blissful afterlife for martyrs is another aspect of the problem, and, since this afterlife belief is unshakable, what we need perhaps is a revered ayatollah to proclaim, with Qur'anic support, that suicide bombers will actually go to hell (or, at least, that paradise has run out of virgins).


Though we must take care to avoid a native backlash against the mostly peaceable British Muslim community, succeeding governments have carried the exoneration of Muslim villains too far in the past. For instance, as long ago as 1989, when imams were offering bribes on BBC television for the murder of Salman Rushdie, they were never charged with incitement to murder.


The July 7 suicide bombers were British-born Muslim youths, three of whom-all found dead-were quickly identified. At least one of them used to attend the Finsbury Park Mosque, where Abu Hamza was knowingly allowed, for eight years, to preach violent hatred and incite young men to murder, before the Crown Prosecution Service started criminal proceedings against him in 2004-and only then because the United States was demanding his extradition to their country to be tried for crimes against it.

The word appeasement is rarely used except in the context of Neville Chamberlain's deal with Hitler in 1938, but what about the present appeasement of Muslims in Britain? It is obviously impossible to genuinely respect an ideology that our reason rejects as superstition, let alone dangerous superstition; so what the motion that we should respect it actually means is that we should pretend to respect religion for the sake of political correctness. Thus, at the very least, the motion that I was debating in Oxford demands hypocrisy.


But hypocrisy is not the worst of it.
When the ideologies that we pretend to respect are allowed to indoctrinate children, some of whom may even grow up to be suicide bombers because of it, hypocrisy becomes complicity in the mental abuse of children, the oppression of women, and even incitement to terrorism. This has been exacerbated by our political representatives, for the sake of votes, setting up state-supported schools to promote indoctrination in a particular faith, though they themselves probably accept a different, incompatible set of superstitions.


We are told that Islam itself cannot be blamed for the terrorists' attacks on New York, Madrid, and London, followed by widespread carnage in retaliation for the publication of a few innocuous drawings. That is like saying that the horrors of the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity.


In the Gospels, Jesus consistently identifies righteousness with believing in him; and in the ages of faith the statement by Thomas Aquinas that "Unbelief is the greatest of sins" was incontrovertible. Hence, the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Christian burning of witches, heretics, and Jews-the flames being fanned by Christian faith. This use of torture was not a case of bad people perverting a good religion; the persecution of skeptics follows logically from the Christian correlation of faith with salvation, not to mention the scary notion that God could punish the whole of society for the disbelief of a few.

Muhammad followed on from Jesus, and the Qur'an contains even more manic denunciations of disbelief than the New Testament. Moreover, Islam has failed to moderate its cruel practices to the extent that mainstream Christianity has done in the past couple of centuries.


The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Iraq's Badr Corps (commanded by that country's Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution) are certainly extremist, but they are orthodox-deriving logically from the Qur'an, which denigrates women and tells believers to wage jihad against heretics and infidels. Moderate Muslims may explain it away as misinterpretation-but why, then, did Allah or his Prophet lapse into ambiguity? Even the two major Islamic sects, Shia and Sunni, are at each other's throats in Iraq and elsewhere.

Muslims, we are told, are sensitive and are really hurt when their religion is joked about. Don't they credit their supposed creator god with any sense of humor? Didn't he actually invent laughter? And is he too weak to withstand a joke without some humorless cleric rushing to his defense? Or is their own faith so weak that they fear its contamination? Let them heed the old playground retort: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me."


Claiming to be ultrasensitive and really hurt by mere words or pictures is, of course, a way of gaining privilege. Everyone else has to speak softly so as not to hurt you. It is argued that, since the common-law offense of blasphemy survives in Britain, though only for the protection of the doctrines of the Church of England, parity demands that the law be extended to protect other religions. But it is now practically a dead letter, and the best solution would clearly be to abolish it altogether, as, in fact, the Law Commission has recommended several times to succeeding governments, the ears of which are more deaf even than those of a person my age. But now the concept of blasphemy has been given an independent lease of life by renaming it "disrespect for religious feelings."
Our present government has even endeavored to criminalize such disrespect with another change of name, "incitement to religious hatred"; but, fortunately, ameliorating amendments to the relevant bill introduced in the House of Lords were finally accepted in the Commons-by just a single vote, when Blair himself was absent-on January 31 this year. But the attenuated bill then became law.


Of course, the law should protect people-in fact, that is basically what law is all about-and we have plenty of general laws for the protection of people, without special laws for the protection of ideas of a particular kind.

On February 20, Pope Benedict XVI called for mutual respect for all the world religions and their symbols-though he failed to mention, of course, parallel respect for atheism.

Anyway, how can the pope sincerely respect Islam when it teaches that believers in the "blasphemous" Christian Trinity are destined to spend eternity in hell? Not to mention that the death sentence is often passed in Muslim countries, to this day, on anyone who converts from Islam to Christianity. The fatwa recently issued by Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani states not only that all homosexuals should be killed but that they should be killed in the "most severe way" possible. By comparison, Pope Benedict's homophobia is quite restrained.


Pressured by religious leaders sinking their differences in the common cause of authoritarianism, the Council of Europe is currently considering the introduction of legislation in the European Parliament and even the United Nations to enforce "respect for religious feelings" internationally. Insertion of the word feelings lends this tendentious goal a semblance of humane empathy. But religion cannot, in all conscience, be intellectually respected if honesty is to prevail over hypocrisy-and giving it false respect would not just be obsequious and dishonest, but it would actually allow superstitions of the Dark Ages to triumph, destroying the whole range of social and individual freedoms courageously won over the past few centuries.


So, for the sake of liberty as well as truth, we must resist the indefensible furtherance of hypocritical respect.


Far from being willing to moderate free speech by respect for religion, we should moderate respect for religion in favor of free speech.


Barbara Smoker was president of Britain's National Secular Society. She was recently honored with a lifetime achievement award for Distinguished Services to Humanism.

 

Well folks... you've waited... it's finally here... the religion post...

Here is my main point [don't worry I'll support my opinions... with more opinions...]

I was raised in a Southern Baptist church, and I've come to realize that religion is a crutch.

I'm not going to say that there isn't a supreme being, because I don't know...

But I'm not going to say there is either.

My point is this:

Every religion says they same things.

"There is a heaven and hell [of sorts]."

"Our religion is the only true religion."

"If you don't follow us, you're going to hell."

But, this is what I say:

"Religion is [like anything else] relative."

"Each religion has two common factors, a supreme god and a prophet. I.e. Allah and Muhammad [Islam.] God and Jesus [Christianity.] One's self or self-consiousness or Darmah and Buddah [Buddism.] etc.

"No one [myself included] can say that their 'god' is the only 'god'"

"Religion is a crutch [I already said it, but it's a point]."

Now here's why I say these things:

Point one]. Religion is relative: If you grew up a radical Muslim you would believe that Allah was the "one true god." Just the same, if you grew up Christian you would believe that the God of the Bible was the "only god."

Point two]. Well, that one explains itself [if you don't understand it, then you shouldn't even be reading this...]

Point three]. I really shouldn't have to explain this one. But, for the slower readers...

People can't take resposiblity for what they do, so they need someone pat their back and tell them that they're ok.

They can't stand on their own, so they need a "god" to hold them up.

It's just an excuse, and it's bullshit.

Summation]. I hope that as you've read this you've thought about what I've said. That was the whole point of this blog. I'm not trying to tell you what to think, I'm just trying to express my opinion. You don't have to say "You're right Brendan." But, just open your mind to the possibilty that I could be right. I give you enough respect not to say "You're wrong." and that's all I ask of you. The sad thing is, the people that will right this off as blasphemy are the exact people that its about. I'm not supporting any religion, and I don't actually believe in any of them. So, in a way, this whole blog is objective.

I hope you've thought about the things I've mentioned. Go forth and learn things for yourself.

-b

 

Perv, thanks for posting that article. Good stuff.

 

One you may like found at https://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-thinkingchristians.htm


--------------------------------------------------------------------

Is it more logical to be a Christian? Is religion the natural choice of a smart person familiar with more of the evidence? Not according to a broad consensus of studies on IQ and religiosity. These studies have consistently found that the lower the IQ score, the more likely a person is to be religious.

To place these studies in perspective, it is helpful to know the general religious attitudes of Americans today. According to a February 1995 Gallup poll, 96 percent of all Americans believe in God, and 88 percent affirm the importance of religion. However, the degree of religiosity within this group varies considerably. Only 35 percent can be classified as "religious," using a definition that requires them to consider religion important and attend religious services at least once a week. And a March 1994 Gallup poll found that only 20 percent of all Americans belong to that politically active group known as "Christian conservatives."

The following is a review of several studies of IQ and religiosity, paraphrased and summarized from Burnham Beckwith's article, "The Effect of Intelligence on Religious Faith," Free Inquiry, Spring 1986: (1)

STUDIES OF STUDENTS

1. Thomas Howells, 1927
Study of 461 students showed religiously conservative students "are, in general, relatively inferior in intellectual ability."

2. Hilding Carlsojn, 1933
Study of 215 students showed that "there is a tendency for the more intelligent undergraduate to be sympathetic toward… atheism."

3. Abraham Franzblau, 1934
Confirming Howells and Carlson, tested 354 Jewish children, aged 10-16. Found a negative correlation between religiosity and IQ as measured by the Terman intelligence test.

4. Thomas Symington, 1935
Tested 400 young people in colleges and church groups. He reported, "There is a constant positive relation in all the groups between liberal religious thinking and mental ability… There is also a constant positive relation between liberal scores and intelligence…"

5. Vernon Jones, 1938
Tested 381 students, concluding "a slight tendency for intelligence and liberal attitudes to go together."

6. A. R. Gilliland, 1940
At variance with all other studies, found "little or no relationship between intelligence and attitude toward god."

7. Donald Gragg, 1942
Reported an inverse correlation between 100 ACE freshman test scores and Thurstone "reality of god" scores.

8. Brown and Love, 1951
At the University of Denver, tested 613 male and female students. The mean test scores of non-believers was 119 points, and for believers it was 100. The non-believers ranked in the 80th percentile, and believers in the 50th. Their findings "strongly corroborate those of Howells."

9. Michael Argyle, 1958
Concluded that "although intelligent children grasp religious concepts earlier, they are also the first to doubt the truth of religion, and intelligent students are much less likely to accept orthodox beliefs."

10. Jeffrey Hadden, 1963
Found no correlation between intelligence and grades. This was an anomalous finding, since GPA corresponds closely with intelligence. Other factors may have influenced the results at the University of Wisconsin.

11. Young, Dustin and Holtzman, 1966
Average religiosity decreased as GPA rose.

12. James Trent, 1967
Polled 1400 college seniors. Found little difference, but high-ability students in his sample group were over-represented.

13. C. Plant and E. Minium, 1967
The more intelligent students were less religious, both before entering college and after 2 years of college.

14. Robert Wuthnow, 1978
Of 532 students, 37 percent of Christians, 58 percent of apostates, and 53 percent of non-religious scored above average on SATs.

15. Hastings and Hoge, 1967, 1974
Polled 200 college students and found no significant correlations.

16. Norman Poythress, 1975
Mean SATs for strongly antireligious (1148), moderately anti-religious (1119), slightly antireligious (1108), and religious (1022).

17. Wiebe and Fleck, 1980
Studied 158 male and female Canadian university students. They reported "nonreligious S's tended to be strongly intelligent" and "more intelligent than religious S's."

STUDENT BODY COMPARISONS

1. Rose Goldsen, 1952
Percentage of students who believe in a divine god: Harvard 30; UCLA 32; Dartmouth 35; Yale 36; Cornell 42; Wayne 43; Weslyan 43; Michigan 45; Fisk 60; Texas 62; North Carolina 68.

2. National Review Study, 1970
Percentage of students who believe in a Spirit or Divine God: Reed 15; Brandeis 25; Sarah Lawrence 28; Williams 36; Stanford 41; Boston U. 41; Yale 42; Howard 47; Indiana 57; Davidson 59; S. Carolina 65; Marquette 77.

3. Caplovitz and Sherrow, 1977
Apostasy rates rose continuously from 5 percent in "low" ranked schools to 17 percent in "high" ranked schools.

4. Niemi, Ross, and Alexander, 1978
In elite schools, organized religion was judged important by only 26 percent of their students, compared with 44 percent of all students.

STUDIES OF VERY-HIGH IQ GROUPS

1. Terman, 1959
Studied group with IQ's over 140. Of men, 10 percent held strong religious belief, of women 18 percent. Sixty-two percent of men and 57 percent of women claimed "little religious inclination" while 28 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women claimed it was "not at all important."

2. Warren and Heist, 1960
Found no differences among National Merit Scholars. Results may have been effected by the fact that NM scholars are not selected on the basis of intelligence or grades alone, but also on "leadership" and such like.

3. Southern and Plant, 1968
Studied 42 male and 30 female members of Mensa. Mensa members were much less religious in belief than the typical American college alumnus or adult.

STUDIES Of SCIENTISTS

1. William S. Ament, 1927
C. C. Little, president of the University of Michigan, checked persons listed in Who's Who in America: "Unitarians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Universalists, and Presbyterians [who are less religious] are… far more numerous in Who's Who than would be expected on the basis of the population which they form. Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics are distinctly less numerous."

Ament confirmed Little's conclusion. He noted that Unitarians, the least religious, were more than 40 times as numerous in Who's Who as in the U.S. population.

2. Lehman and Witty, 1931
Identified 1189 scientists found in both Who's Who (1927) and American Men of Science (1927). Only 25 percent of those listed in the latter and 50 percent of those in the former reported their religious denomination, despite the specific request to do so, under the heading of "religious denomination (if any)." Well over 90 percent of the general population claims religious affiliation. The figure of 25 percent suggests far less religiosity among scientists.

Unitarians were 81.4 times as numerous among eminent scientists as non-Unitarians.

3. Kelley and Fisk, 1951
Found a negative (-.39) correlation between the strength of religious values and research competence. [How these were measured is unknown.]

4. Ann Roe, 1953
Interviewed 64 "eminent scientists, nearly all members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences or the American Philosophical Society. She reported that, while nearly all of them had religious parents and had attended Sunday school, 'now only three of these men are seriously active in church. A few others attend upon occasion, or even give some financial support to a church which they do not attend… All the others have long since dismissed religion as any guide to them, and the church plays no part in their lives… A few are militantly atheistic, but most are just not interested.'"

5. Francis Bello, 1954
Interviewed or questionnaired 107 nonindustrial scientists under the age of 40 judged by senior colleagues to be outstanding. Of the 87 responses, 45 percent claimed to be "agnostic or atheistic" and an additional 22 percent claimed no religious affiliation. For 20 most eminent, "the proportion who are now a-religious is considerably higher than in the entire survey group."

6. Jack Chambers, 1964
Questionnaired 740 US psychologists and chemists. He reported, "The highly creative men… significantly more often show either no preference for a particular religion or little or no interest in religion." Found that the most eminent psychologists showed 40 percent no preference, 16 percent for the most eminent chemists.

7. Vaughan, Smith, and Sjoberg, 1965
Polled 850 US physicists, zoologists, chemical engineers, and geologists listed in American Men of Science (1955) on church membership, and attendance patterns, and belief in afterlife. Of the 642 replies, 38.5 percent did not believe in an afterlife, whereas 31.8 percent did. Belief in immortality was less common among major university staff than among those employed by business, government, or minor universities. The Gallup poll taken about this time showed that two-thirds of the U.S. population believed in an afterlife, so scientists were far less religious than the typical adult.

Conclusion

The consensus here is clear: more intelligent people tend not to believe in religion. And this observation is given added force when you consider that the above studies span a broad range of time, subjects and methodologies, and yet arrive at the same conclusion.

This is the result even when the researchers are Christian conservatives themselves. One such researcher is George Gallup. Here are the results of a Fall 1995 Gallup poll:
Percentage of respondents who agreed with the following statements:

Religion is Religion can
"very important "answer all or most
Respondents in their life" of today's problems"
------------------------------------------------------------
Attended college 53 percent 58 percent
No college 63 65

Income over $50,000 48 56
$30,000 - $50,000 56 62
$20,000 - $30,000 56 60
Under $20,000 66 66
Why does this correlation exist? The first answer that comes to mind is that religious beliefs tend to be more illogical or incoherent than secular beliefs, and intelligent people tend to recognize that more quickly. But this explanation will surely be rejected by religious people, who will seek other explanations and rationalizations.

A possible counter-argument is that intelligent people tend to be more successful than others. The lure of worldly success and materialism draws many of these intellectually gifted individuals away from God. After all, who needs God when you (apparently) are making it on your own?

However, this argument does not withstand closer scrutiny. Most of the studies outlined above describe the religious attitudes of students, who have yet to enter the working world, much less succeed in it. Some might then argue that the most intelligent students are nonetheless succeeding in school. But "success" in school (for those who may have forgotten!) is more measured in terms of popularity, sports, physical attractiveness, personality, clothes, etc. Grades are but one of many measures of success in a young person's life -- one that is increasingly becoming less important, as many social critics point out.

The simplest and most parsimonious explanation is that religion is a set of logical and factual claims, and those with the most logic and facts at their disposal are rejecting it largely on those grounds.

 

that chart came out bad


___________________________Religion is _________Religion can
_________________________"very important ____"answer all or most
Respondents _______________in their life" ____of today's problems"
------------------------------------------------------------
Attended college ___________53 percent _________58 percent
No college _________________63_________________ 65

Income over $50,000 ________48_________________ 56
$30,000 - $50,000 __________56_________________ 62
$20,000 - $30,000 __________56_________________ 60
Under $20,000 ______________66_________________ 66

 

I think so.

Katie Girl I'm not gonna try to push my beleifs onto you or anyone else. But I will try to explain how I got to where I am. I can't quote chapter and verse from the Bible but I have read it from cover to cover. As I said when I got into a 12 step program I began to sort out the differances between the various denomination and the one thing that confused me more than anything else was the fact that most denominations of Christianity preaches that they each are the only denomination who has the only true answer. So I went to a bible study at Bethesda Naval Hospital when I was there after Nam that was run by a non-denominational Minister. He explained that each person can get what they need from a particular verse. He demonstrated by having several people from different denominations read the same verse and then write down what they each got from it without discussing it among themselves. I was amazed with what I heard. Then as a musician later on I toured with some of the most devout people that I have ever met and several were from variouse different denominations as well. Then when I went into recovery I met a Catholic Priest who had decided to give up the priesthood for personal reasons but he had a Doctorates in Theology and explained quite a bit to me about other religions and doctrine within the Christian faith. To say that I was surprised at how simular they all were is a major uderstatement. So then as I grew in recovery I began to form the idea that it may be God's plan that there are different religions and doctrins so that each culture can better understand tha basic principals that are simular in almost all religions. Some of my Gospel friends do not agree with me but respect my beleifs. Now here is my last point. In each one, the Bible, the Tora, and the Koran it says somewhere that there are many secrets that will be revealed at the end of time in one way or another. I think that at that time it will all be sorted out, and for those who do not beleive I think that they too will then be given the information they need to to make their mind for the final time. And in the end it may indeed be those who waited for the real truth who will go to the head of the line. After all what sets us as humans apart from other living creatures is our ability to reason.

 

Hey in case you haven't noticed we're not inthat barbaric time anymore. Not only that, but do you really think God came down from the heavens and said go out and kill for me?

 

I don't see how Jesus Christ is the son of God every religion I've ever been in has endorsed him.

 

But the people did that were religious at that time. And doesn't being religious make them "good" men?

 

Mike come on now, you can't be serious. I know you can work this one out for yourself.

 

God commanded all kinds of killing in the bible. You must have missed that day in Sunday School.

-S-

 

Awesome posts. What was it two_swords said... "Oh snap!"

-S-

 

All men don't think the same. Some of those men back then weren't all religious, some of them just wanted to kill.

I've been Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist. Now I know that's not all of them, but somewhere in all religions with the exception of Jehovahs Wittness Jesus being the son of God comes into play.

 

Those aren't religions... those are branches of the Christian religion...

Christianity

Buddism

Islam

Satanism

those are religions...

 

If you have an interest in multiple religions you should pick up Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth; it is phenomenal for comparing and contrasting religions. He claims Christianity but is obviously far from the run of the mill variety. I was trying to memorize particularly great quotes when I started it and then realized I was trying to memorize 2-5 quotes a page so I finally gave up that task and just decided to read it. I can’t say enough good things about it.

 

So You're admitting him. You just said GOD Commanded. Well I guess if he wasn't real he proably couldn't have done that now could he?

 

Please don't insult me by trying to play such childish word games.

-S-