That's not what He told me. But, why drag God into it?

Promulgating the idea that God would frown on a woman for her choice is causing an unbelievable amount of unnecessary suffering. It breaks my heart.

The government is us. Of course we should be helping our sisters in need, with what they have decided they need, just as we would expect our sisters to help us, and yet still let us make our own choices.

Access to safe, legal abortion is absolutely vital to a moral society and to women's equal rights. It is the norm in all the prosperous democracies because the alternatives are truly horrific. It is our obligation to spare our sisters the horror.

Planned Parenthood does raise a lot of money. They regularly canvas our household for support and we contribute when we can. However voluntary donations are far from enough. The health care needs of women are monumental and meeting them is vitally important. The success of society rests on the health and well-being of the women in the society.

Women have a large number of specific reproductive issues throughout our lives. We are blessed by the technology and medicine and ethics that we have evolved to help women survive our reproductive years, and decide for ourselves how many children we will have. That blessing should be available to each and every woman in our society, not just those with money.

We have an obligation to make sure that blessing reaches all of our sisters in need.

I had a conversation with my mom a few years ago. I said, "Born of a virgin? Really? You don't honestly think that's true, do you?"

She said, "It could be true. You know, you don't have to have actual sex to get pregnant, it sometimes happens from heavy petting if you just get real close..."

I said, "Is that what Christianity is claiming? That Joseph and Mary were into heavy petting and Joe accidentally got Mary pregnant without sex?"

"Well, no..."


There probably were - and are - "virgins" getting pregnant from time to time. There is no reason to think it has anything to do with gods.

Christianity does not seem to be true. Pointing this out is not hateful, it is necessary.

How do you suggest people discuss the fact that Christianity does not seem to be true?

Great! Let's get started.


I didn't say I don't believe it is true. I said, Christianity does not seem to be true. Even people who think it is true can do nothing to establish that it is. Establishment is where seeming to be true comes from. The accuracy of true statements can be established.

No matter what you personally think, you have to see that this lack of establishment is going to cause a lot of problems.

People have no means at all to judge the accuracy of the claims they are making about gods, the afterlife, etc. The claims could be completely wrong. They could be ancient superstitions indistinguishable from the other ancient superstitions. They can be, and are, mutually exclusive. They can be, and are in the case of Christianity, cruel and exclusionary.


So, what are we as a society to do about the fact that we have these huge institutions, which shape the very worldview of millions, that are mutually exclusive and do not correspond to observable reality and seem to be ancient folktales?


The more we understand about how reality really works, the less accurate the ancient tribal descriptions appear. Yet, people want to be free to continue making claims, without anyone ever being accountable for the accuracy of the claims.

This lack of accountability is a big problem. The difference between the supernatural claims and what we can observe and establish as actual truth is creating a lot of error. How can this error be addressed?

Most Christians I know understand global warming and dinosaurs. But, they also believe things which do not seem to be true, like that people thousands of years ago were writing for gods.

It's not the fringe beliefs that make Christianity problematic. It's the core beliefs.

Great questions MomtoFive, thanks for asking.


I would say that all unsubstantiated claims of truth are problematic. The Abrahamic faiths are, as you say, all three based on unsubstantiated claims and are problematic to that extent.

As for Buddhism, it has a tendency to pick up local beliefs as it spreads, so it has sects making all manner of claims. But the basics of Buddhism do not contain supernatural posits about gods, afterlives, prophets, scriptures, etc. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold path are just advice from a human about how to minimize suffering.

So I would say that the problematic part of religions - unsubstantiated claims of truth - lie at the heart of the Abrahamic Faiths (and Hinduism, etc.), while are somewhat more peripheral to Buddhism.

Religion is far from the only place where unsubstantiated claims are problematic, btw. They are problematic everywhere they occur, in business and government and politics too.


That said, I don't think religion (or business, or government or poltics) are a problem. They are systems. They fail when the distance between what they are claiming and the reality is very great. The point of truth, and of reason, is to make the distance between what we think, and what is, as small as possible. This allows us to base action on accurate understanding. Substantiation is what makes it all work.


Religion arose because it serves a lot of important purposes for humans. It allowed us to use narratives to explain where we were from and what we were supposed to do. It created social and personal cohesion by tying together facts and values, what this all is with what is important.

I think we could still use narrative traditions which provide cohesion to understand facts and values. But we understand so much more about facts and values than the people who lived thousands of years ago. Why not have religions and philosophies based on what can be substantiated to be true? The true stories we are just beginning to understand about what we are, where we come from and what has value are better, not least because they can be shown to be accurate and to grow in accuracy with time.

There is really no reason humanity should be stuck with the unsubstantiated claims of legacy religions from thousands of years ago. We could do better.


Thanks again Mommato5kids!

It is the basic tenets of Christianity which make Christianity look bad. "Belive in Jesus or you don't go to Heaven" is not good, or believable.

When I use the word true I am using it as a description of the accuracy of a statement. A statement is true if it corresponds accurately to what it describes.


Agree or Disagree?

Actually I think your examples are perfect. Those types of examples may be the "only" things people agree on. But "only" the things that can be agreed upon comprise the sum total of all certain human knowledge.

What we agree to be true includes the incredible knowledge we have gained about the universe since the Renaissance which has transformed our lives from endless toil and danger to modern comfort and safety.

Millions of lives are saved every day by important understanding of truth like "milk will go bad if it gets warm for too long" and why. The amazing machine you are reading this on exists, in part, because of information like "ice will melt at a certain temp" and a million other verifiable, and therefore agreed upon, truths. The truth that anyone can agree on produces cures, inventions, and understanding beyond anything we could have dreamed before the Age of Reason.

There is incredible power in what we can verify as accurate, and therefore agree, is true. Those may be "the only true things," but they include everything that can be shown to work.

That is why it is important to check. What is true can be verified.

If you cannot personally verify that a claim is true, there is no reason to think any other person can verify it when you can't. You don't have to buy any theory or believe anything is true. You can find out.

What does this have to do with anything I am talking about? I am not making that claim. I don't even know any atheists who are making that claim, and I never even mentioned God.


Who are you talking to?

So. Absolutely nothing is known of the existence of gods, either "for" or "against." Perhaps this is why the "existence of gods" question is the most boring and pointless in all religious debate.


Of far more import, and more relevent to the thread, are questions like, "Are any claims known to be true of gods?" Claims about what they do, what they want, etc. Are claims of knowledge of gods warranted?


Claiming that there "is" or "isn't" a "god" is clearly meaningless. If that was the only unsubstantiated claim anyone ever made, there would hardly be an issue.

However people are claiming a lot more than just "Gods exist." They are claiming to know the truth about what the gods are like or what they want. Is that warranted? Are there any statements about gods that correspond accurately to what they describe?

Not at all, the questions of what is true and what matters are important whether gods exist or not.

In fact the utterly null "existence" question, in its complete void of information for or against, is actually a distraction from other important questions.

Belief in gods does not equal belief in every claim about them. Gods could be real as toast and the Bible and the Quran could still be completely wrong. A particular God could exist and the central tenet of Christianity - "You have to believe in salvation through Jesus Christ or you will get the bad afterlife" - could still be utterly wrong and unlike anything any He would ever want.

If claims like that are completely unsupported it would certainly be important to be able to discuss it, whether you believe in God or not.

"God exists" does not equal = "These people are right about Him." I could be 100% positive that God exists and I would still expect people to support any claims they are making about Him. Why accept less?

Except, that is a different question.

There is no information available about gods. There is a lot of information available about where we come from. All of that information is extremely interesting and there is more of it all the time. I would say "where do we come from" has to be one of the most interesting and important questions around, and this is reflected in the great amount of time spent researching it and the amazing discoveries we have made and the incredible understanding we have gained from the search.

The moment some new information about gods is forthcoming that will certainly be interesting, but so far, still nothing for or against, nothing related to where we come from, etc. Ho hum.

"Gods" are not required for religion. Millions of people belong to a religion that doesn't even have a god.

God could exist and religions could still be preaching loads of crap that is not true. People believing "in God" is not causing as much of a problem as people believing in all the other crap from religion, like false history, ridiculous taboos, cruel and exclusionsary tenets, etc.

In particular, changing cruel and exclusionary unsupported claims is very important. We have come a long way in this regard since the Inquisition but there is still a ways to go.

In every human milieu, there are always two major social forces at work. One of the forces is towards change, and the other is towards stability. Throughout history these contradictory forces have been in a contentious balance. It's important to have both, because sometimes change is beneficial and sometimes stability is beneficial and there is a constant struggle to determine which direction is best for each situation.

For the past 100 years or so the forces for social change in this society have been the Democrats and the forces for social tradition have been the Republicans. Generally speaking, the Dems have worked for changes like improving society through social programs and expanded civil rights, while the Repubs have worked for maintaining traditional social and family structures.

In a society which was experiencing massive change because of industrialization, the forces for change have produced better working results because they acknowledge the deep inequities in the traditional systems. The Dems spearheaded important new structures which make society as a whole more workable, by expanding political agency into disenfranchised groups and creating a buffer against the worst ravages of capitalism. The Republicans have mainly stood against social changes - against instituting social safety nets, against expanding rights, etc, but for institutions which lend strength, like religion, militarism and corporatism. Forces against change have actually served in some ways by ensuring that changes are implemented more gradually, in more conservative ways, and by supporting the traditional institutions of strength - gods, arms and wealth.


At this point, I agree that both the Dems and the Repubs are fully owned subsidiaries of the corporations and are both required to only enact the change/maintain the status quo that benefits the wealthy. They do little to address real problems with real answers.



Since the days of the Renaissance, there has been a continual effort to make human life more livable to more humans by pushing power downward and outward, away from the ruling elite and into larger numbers of hands. It began with the rise of the merchant class and the development of democracy, and continued with the ending of slavery, women's suffrage, public education, social safety nets and the civil rights era.

The political position today which is actually working for changes that would make society better for everyone is that of the Democratic Socialist. There are progressive social systems which work and can be shown to work in other societies. The telescoping inequality, teetering economy, out of control militarism and the owning of both parties by the highest class are directly addressed with progressive social policies like those of Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

However in the U.S. progressive thinking has been seriously marginalized up to this point, and we have been locked into a continuous spiral sending all power back upward. So it remains to be seen if Bernie's campaign, successful or not, helps bring some power back down.

Ultimately I think it will. Error correction means that the arc of history gradually bends toward social justice. And people only accept disenfranchisement for so long. If we cannot create an equitable society using our current channels we will create new institutions or a new society to better serve our human needs.