Thanking God, when it was really science that helped.

i have read all your comments and lets face it none of us no the answer to the creation of life on earth.if you know anything about science such as the elements in action the workings of the human body etc and how an oak tree starts as a acorn.......atoms and all that are connected to this subject humans can work with these things but no human can create from nothing and now we are told there is no such thing as nothing because beneath something there is always something else right into infinity.learn about true science and maybe you will all stop thinking so simply....Lillian

I think I have said before on a another thread that we really need a secular "religion" - one that provides social outlets and a sense of community and structure without the need to suspend one's intellect and believe in (what for me is) the unbelievable.
Many of my religious friends admit to "not knowing" about fundamental things, but they are part of a church community and find some of its ideas consoling. I can understand that.

PoppaRob - that idea that is is too hard to change now, ie too hard or too late to leave one's religion behind, is probably the reason a great many people continue on with it.

Still, we should be glad of the Mormons - it is a daft enough religion to keep that ultra right wing destroyer of jobs, Mitt Romney, out of the White House.

I hope.

Butternut - For a while the leader of the Opposition in our State Parliament was a guy who was an ex SAS officer. Whilst I didn't agree with his politics I couldn't fault his character or commitment, but he proved to be a crap leader as he was so used to a system of top down command and control. Once he got to the top he was lost. Surely those who choose by tradition, revelation or authority to abrogate responsibility for their moral code to a god are trusting that he has a desk somewhere with a sign that says "The buck stops here"? Of course the vast majority of followers of belief systems are well meaning and good people, but we've seen a significant minority who are quite the opposite in many religions. Where are the checks and balances? Prayers were said by soldiers on both sides of the same trenches and battlegrounds invoking blessings on their cause - someone had to be wrong? The suicide bomber cries Insha'Allah as he presses the button and the padre blesses the fleet as it goes into battle and they're both praying to the same Abrahamic God.

Bags - my ex mother in law is Mormon. She can accept logically that Joseph Smith was a liar and a fraud, but she would be completely lost without the church and its structure. I explained the concept of cognitive dissonance to her once and she said it made sense, but it was too hard to change now.

Me too.

Yes, you're right. The lives of my Mormon friends, for instance, would collapse into an incomprehensible heap if their religious props were taken away. Their entire lives revolve around their church/religion. They would be bereft without it. I sympathise and I'm jolly glad I don't have that problem!

I agree, the control does not go away, but I wonder if sometimes it might feel as if the control (comfort) no longer exists if suddenly religion disappeared overnight. Then one would be faced with a void; no rules, no structure, no personal compass - no spirit, no soul.
Becoming autonomous can be quite a difficult place to be for some, (and I frequently attend to it to keep myself on track), yet for some, without the structure of the church and it's dichotomous thinking, the balancing of non-judgmental insight and moral precepts can be hard to hold within oneself, engendering a need to look elsewhere for validation and support.

After all, it is not always an easy place to hold, this autonomous lark.

If you take religion away you don't take control away. That is a myth. Moral precepts exist without any need for religion to dictate them to us. As a non-religious person I think about rights and wrongs (most of it is, in fact, rather muddy, which religion is not happy with; they want it balck and white; life isn't) and make my own mind up. Hard to describe the process but I think of it as being aware of the human inclination to react in a knee-jerk way to moral issues, and trying to avoid doing that. To me that is what being non-judgmental means. It doesn't mean one doesn't make moral judgments, but that one deliberately avoids taking the easy way out of moral probelms as in "The Church, or my religion, says this is wrong (or right), therefore it is."

I completely agree, Poppa and B,particularly about the issue of religion and control.
Yet if one was to take control as the central tenant of religion, might it not go a long way in explaining why many people need and actively want a sense of control, order and certainty in their lives,(I'm thinking the sort of boundaries we give children for instance), and that if this control no longer existed, then the wondering who or what we are, our place in the world, and the reason for being on this earth, might become just too uncomfortable?

Just thinking aloud really, and trying to understand why religion exists.

Bang on, poppa. Religion is about control and nothing more.

Bags, if we accept that there is no point to life except the evolutionary imperative to reproduce and foster subsequent generations to the best of our ability then those who run the world lose the ability to control us (for our own good of course).

I remember the nuns at my convent school telling me that anything good came directly from God, but he liked to test our faith by sending us trials like tsunamis etc, - the devil sent us our bad thoughts and actions like murder etc.

One of my favourite quotes is "If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand we'd be so simple that we couldn't".

I saw a YouTube clip of Tim Minchin and Brian Cox playing keyboards together in concert. Sounds similar to what your son saw with lots of banter and taking the piss as well as some great playing.

PoppaRob that's exactly my experience of listening to the science buffs like Brian Cox, who explain things so well that I start to think I've really got it.....then I realise I was caught up in the moment, and it makes my brain ache!

My son went to see Brian Cox do a 'performance' with Tim Minchin in a local theatre recently. They were very good together, he says, because Tim Minchin would stop Brian Cox every couple of minutes and say 'what the hell are you ON about?' Very funny!

With you there, popparob. My feeling is that anyone who can get back to the stardust idea doesn't need a personal god, so why do they bother? I think they bother because it's easier than saying we don't know and it's probable that we never will. That won't stop astro-physicists from trying to find out though. Which thought makes me at the human condition and our inbuilt self-importance. We don't really do humility, do we?

imjingl - didn't mean to and didn't think I was... and yes, we seem to have very different ideas on the subject and that's fine too. I was more expanding on your comment about your son saying about electrical processes etc. It's all good!

grannyactivist - Starstuff... Well... the whole universe was in a hot dense state then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started... wait... Oh bugger it. the basic building block in the hydrogen atom. Fuse two of them together in the fusion reaction within a star and you get a helium atom... and so on... the bigger and bigger stars required to create elements further up the periodic table. And that's about the extent of my knowledge. I really can't get my head around quantum physics and dark matter and all that stuff. I read Hawking's "Short History of Time" twice and it was like nailing jelly to a tree! I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent but a lot of maths and physics makes my head hurt. I've watched several documentaries and interviews with Brian Cox, and despite him being a passionate and effective communicator (probably better than Carl Sagan to be honest) a lot of it is just too hard. I understand the space between subatomic particles and that the charged valence shell thingy is what stops us walking through walls, but after that my brain goes into neutral.

Only grannynet can go from metaphysics to chocolate in a couple of posts!!

Oh! I see what you mean grannya!

Don't know.

sort of

Erm......where did the stardust come from? Just asking.

And please don't talk down to me.

PoppaRob yes I know we all come from stardust. I did, in fact, have some education, and more importantly, I've got a son who tells me everything.

You have your views on religion, I have mine. x

Err,I don't think so

jeni Even better. Does that mean I can fill up on chocolate and it won't show?

Actually I think we are mainly space.