Are the roots of religion in goverment?

[QED]

Religious doctrine is based around a set of statements that have logical self-consistency but remain untestable. Reports of eye-witness accounts of events taking place a few thousand years ago are no more easily testable than a personal revelation from god reported by an individual.

Any fictitous story can be produced by such a process. This would account for the diversity found in various secular writings - and there are no shortage of these in the world. A very good motive for such works is easy to see: systems can be constructed to provide structure for peoples conduct. Within these structures key areas of human behaviour can be bought under the control of those seeking the control of populations.

The authority of these systems comes ultimately from the innapropriately irrefutable nature of the statements they make about themselves. After all, they are endorsed by nothing less than god!

[QED]

Indeed, there is no immediate alternative - however I would hope that over time people would come to be more independant in their thinking and question what is put before them more often. In the meantime I would prefer it if religion was kept well clear of political and social decision making. There are alternative principles that could serve better the needs for justice and freedom. Todays political leaders seem to make a great display of their particular faiths, which is extraordinarily divisive in a world of many faiths.

[BeHereNow]

however I would hope that over time people would come to be more independant in their thinking and question what is put before them more often. In the meantime I would prefer it if religion was kept well clear of political and social decision making. There are alternative principles that could serve better the needs for justice and freedom. Todays political leaders seem to make a great display of their particular faiths, which is extraordinarily divisive in a world of many faiths.

Let’s say the recorded history of mankind spans 6000 years, give or take a millennium or so.

Premise 1) During all of this time the [political and social decision making] has been deeply entrenched in religion, or religion in [it] depending on your perspective. Please allow me to include “belief system” with “religion”, in the premise since an non-religious belief system will contain all of the problems you see with religion.

Premise 2) Social workings (for example: habits, structures, actions) which have been continuous for all of record history are unlikely to change significantly within a millennium.
Conclusion: Religion, or a substitute belief system with all of the same problems, will continue to be heavily involved in political and social decision making for the next millennium.

Which statement(s) do you disagree with and why?

I’m not saying there are not utopian belief systems which fill the bill, I’m saying such a belief system will not be accepted by a significant majority of the people. I base this belief in large part because of history, but there are other reasons.
I see no basis for your hope. However, I won’t deny the self satisfaction of what other might consider futile effort. I just don’t think you can make a convincing argument that you have an attainable plan, or can describe a believable scenario, even in the broadest sense.

[QED]

Which statement(s) do you disagree with and why?

What makes you think I'd disagree with either of those premises? The first was the very premise I used to start this topic. The second was at the foremost in my thinking when I stated above that there is no immediate alternative.

Your conclusion - that Religion, or a substitute belief system with all of the same problems, will continue to be heavily involved in political and social decision making for the next millennium - while being probably correct cannot, however, be used to justify such a situation. If you are milking me for a solution, I can offer none other than the suggestion that people refrain from being guided by faith.

This to me is at the heart of the problem. Like science, faith can be used for good as well as for bad. Unfortunately, when faith binds to religion it gains a righteousness that renders it immune from criticism - unlike science which always remains accessible to review. But this is simply paraphrasing what I have said here already.

[BeHereNow]

I can offer none other than the suggestion that people refrain from being guided by faith.

unlike science which always remains accessible to review.

I felt we disagreed somewhere, I believe I have it.

What you actually want is for people to be guided by the same faith you are, quite understandable of course.

Many on this board will tell you it would take more faith for them to believe than is no God, than to believe there is a (personal) God. It would take more faith to believe their religion is false, than to believe it is true.

Science itself does require a certain amount of faith. Additionally, the scientists (shall we call them priests of science?) require our faith that their presentation and interpretation of data is unbiased. Science is not a body of knowledge waiting for us to discover it. Science is a process where we examine the world and attempt to express it in human terms, formulating dependable rules or laws.

We often take for granted those things which are commonplace. It is commonplace to have scientific inquiry that is unbiased and easily accessible for review, so we take this for granted. It does not have to be so.
Scientists are no more honest or unbiased that the other priests, the priests of the church. They are biased for science. In today’s society it is easy to think we do not “trust” them, but in reality we trust them to follow the scientific method of inquiry.

There is much controversy in the word today about global warming, a theory based on science and the results it gives that are open to interpretation. One would think this is just science, no religion involved. Yet there is much disagreement about what the data means. I would say the disagreement is between science and consumerism. I do from time to time see signs that consumerism might be the religion of tomorrow. There is a thread here about “pop culture”, which elevates consumerism to religious standards (indoctrinates our youth).

Science is one of those belief systems I mentioned which can replace religion, but which inherently has all of the same pitfalls of religion.
The “pure science” you see is an illusion.
We both share a bias for science over religion.

[QED]

unlike science which always remains accessible to review.

You're not going to like this, but I quote myself here for these words are what separates science from faith. You assert that science is just another form of faith, yet it is not. The hallmark of science is that its finding consists exclusively of assertions that can be tested - and indeed are routinely tested up to the point of destruction by virtue of the highly competetive nature of peer review.

This is an ongoing process too - there are few certainties, (except notably in certain mathematical constucts) there is no static picture of the cosmos, but the laws of nature are uncovered to a degree that is reliable for a given frame of reference. Within that framework, such laws can be stated with absolute certainty. This is often overlooked - just becasue newtonian mechanics do not take into account relativity, they do not fail to describe the accurate trajectories of objects at subluminal speeds. The work of Einstein does not contradict Newton in the frame of reference for which it holds. In other words in these conditions it is as close to the truth as matters.

The universe we can observe is set out along specific lines - were it not the laws of nature would different from place to place, yet they are not. This indicates that there is indeed 'truth' that may be extracted. I have demonstrated that faith alone is insufficient to extract this truth in a reliable way. The difference with faith being that it can't be trusted to yield any degree of truth.

Once again I am going to quote myself - this time from another thread:

The type of thought experiments that you are putting forward here are typical of the sort practised by early philosophers from the times of the ancient greeks right up until the scientific approach first clealy identified by Newton. The problem with using common-sense reasoning alone is that it has no feedback mechanism to provide for its validation.

For example, in the fifth century BC Empedocles reasoned that 'seeing' was acomplished by light radiating from the observers eye, thus illuminating the objects and making them visible. This seemed to make enough sense for this hypothesis to persist right up until the middle-ages when Abu Ali al-Hassan had a bit of time on his hands to figure things out! The fact that nobody until then asked why therefore you couldn't see in the dark is testament to the willingness of people to accept the 'wisdom' of others.

Once a hypothesis has been developed to explain an observation it is worthless until it has been tested by way of experiment. Any hypothesis that cannot be tested by such means has an equal chance of being right or wrong and cannot therefore be accepted as a valuable explanation.

The best and safest method pf phiosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and then to establish those properties by experiments and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but should not be assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

[BeHereNow]

The hallmark of science is that its finding consists exclusively of assertions that can be tested - and indeed are routinely tested up to the point of destruction by virtue of the highly competetive nature of peer review.

By “findings” you are talking about the end product of science, which are laws and what we might call near-laws.
There is much more to science than tested assertions and laws.
Scientific data is collected and used at all level of certainty. Not all scientific data is used to make an immediate assertion. Data might be collected for years before an assertion can be made. The media is always grabbing data and getting someone to speculate what it means. “Science” (might we call it pop science?) frequently expresses an opinion. It does not have the approval of the official scientific community, but to the general public that does not matter.

Another hallmark of science is critical thinking.
I will always apply critical thinking to matters of science as well as religion.
It seems at times you are trying to tell me that science cannot be challenged because it can contain nothing but truth. I know this is not true. I know that money, politics and power can buy scientific truth, just as it can buy religious truth. You may not believe that, but I do.

I like your idealism, and wish you well, but I don’t share your optimistic opinion of the general public’s ability to discern the truth.

[QED]

It seems at times you are trying to tell me that science cannot be challenged because it can contain nothing but truth. I know this is not true. I know that money, politics and power can buy scientific truth, just as it can buy religious truth. You may not believe that, but I do.

That is not what I am trying to tell anyone. There do exist objective truths that form the fabric of our universe. Consider these truths to be things awaiting discovery. Things that may furnish an explanation of phenomena having a bearing on our existence.

What I am saying is that science is the only discipline that has the potential to access such things in a wholly accurate way, given the application of sufficient critical thinking.

So while not necessarily knowing that it has ever reached the truth, it may indeed have already arrived. No harm is done by such over-reaching, the conclusion will remain the same in the absence of contradictory data (which by definition will never emerge once an objective truth has been uncovered). It is as though a systematic 'sweep' has been made through the enormous space of 'possibilities' - a sweep that stops upon encountering an objective truth.

Contrast this with the use of faith to furnish such explanations - while faith might stumble across the odd truth by accident now and then, it has nothing to tell it when it is wrong (as if it would listen anyway!) Thus many a false conclusion will inevitably be arrived at - given the vast number of possibilities to choose from.

Supporting evidence for this analysis can be found in the consistency of information contained in students textbooks. I leave it to your imagination to consider the subjects I might be referring to

[BeHereNow]

I do not doubt the qualities of science that you point out.
Ascribing these qualities to scientists is a completely separate issue.

[BeHereNow]

Political pressure changes scientific facts.

[QED]

I do not doubt the qualities of science that you point out.
Ascribing these qualities to scientists is a completely separate issue.

Its qualities are indeed what gives science its potential. Obviously for this potential to be fully realised we can do no better than rely on the individual efforts of scientists to apply them. Fortunatley its methods are such that the outcome of pure scientific endeavour is not flavoured by the 'individual' that produces the work.

Any single man or woman alive in 1864 could equally well have come up with Maxwell's equations describing the behavior of both the electric and magnetic fields, as well as their interactions with matter. These equations represent objective properties of the universe and would therefore be the same irrespective of the individual presenting them as fact.

As for political pressure changing scientific facts, if the biologists had been asked how certain of thier initial findings they were, I think you would find plenty of scope for change. The objective reality of fish stocks would not be a such trivial matter to obtain.