Yes, but the stories and abilities regarding that greater entity will be as varied and inconsistent as those found all over the world. And most importantly will not be the same as any of them. How many wildly different stories are there regarding the creation of the world?
Whereas the axioms of math will be substantially similar to the point that any modern mathematician would recognize it. We see this on ancient tablets where folks were calculating the square root of 2. Or any of the cultures all around the world that had no significant contact with one another that deal with pi. Sure we'll see base-12 number systems as with the Babylonians or base-20 as with the Maya, but the underlying principles and lessons are largely IDENTICAL.
The worlds of math and the metaphysical could not be more different in that regard. Rather than being a very shallow statement, it is one of the most all-encompassing and profound in all of human history. It gave rise to the principles of the scientific method: humans are biased, so multiple people performing the same steps should come to the same results and predictions made based on those results should yield their own repeatable consistent results.
Funny enough we discuss in such religious discussions often being religious vs. not being and ignoring the huge difference of existing religons.
I had a discussion about this topic with a more hard core christian: I said 'look if it is a good god, it doesn't even matter if i worship her right?' and he said 'nope, its written that you have to worshop'.
So one believe doesn't equal to another believe.
Your underlying base changes based on your believe.
"An axiom, postulate or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments." this is not true for two religions being created independently from each other while this is very well true for science.
Math is based on human chosen axioms. Actually, there are a lot of different sub fields of math that have different subsets of axioms to solve different types of problems. The axioms can never be proven though, they are just grounding.
Isolating a human is analogous to removing oxygen. Few would argue that someone brain dead could create anything.
I'm really not sure how you can missread my example to come up with 'isoalting a human is analogous to removing oxygen'.
My comparison is based on sciencse vs. fiction. 1+1 = 2 is a reality which works in german, africa, usa and everywhere else. There might be a difference on how those symbols (1, 2...) look like but the axiom is true and valid and is discoverable.
In religion its not.
Concept of god exists but it looks different depending on your believe. Multiply gods, one god, good god, bad god...
Even the stuff written down is based on someone who wrote it down and still people interpretate it totally different.
Never seen someone implying they are right that 1+1=3 if the interpretation of 3 is not 'next after one'.
1+1=2 is not really an axiom. There's a set of axioms that lead to that. They are even more primordial statements like "1 is a number" and "x=x" and "all numbers n have a successor number S(n) such that m=n if and only if S(m)=S(n)". Even if it seems clear (to most of us, at least) that these axioms represent some part of reality, they are still human-chosen -- and they have to be agreed upon. At some point, nearly everyone would have agreed that Euclid's 5th postulate was obviously true, and anyone alive could verify this for themself. Well, sometimes it's "true" and sometimes it isn't.
That said, the Peano axioms seem less nebulous that the varying axioms relating to the existence of god, as that concept can change so much from person to person.
Religion is dividing our society. Its reasonable to wish for an independent believe system for our whole society.
Nonetheless arguing on hn is not a mob.
But yes discriminiation of woman is a bigger problem than religion. Forced marriages, hanging gay people, raping children, religious conflicts are a huge issue still today.
Unfortunate for us, sciencse or a global believe system doesn't need to have a church. It happens trhough alignment, communication etc.
We are already more aligned through knowledge but we just don't promote that. My friend and i are not going to our science church on sunday because we don't need to. We don't need to discuss 1+1=2 because its proven. And while social norms are not that explicit, we see big progress here as well: In germany for example, we don't hang people on carcranes because they are gay.
Its just harder to keep track of this and doing the right thing if you don't get it pushed in every sunday. And indepenedent of this, in bavaria you had one hour every week christian religion in school. I grew up with plenty of assholes. Clearly religioun did not brought us as humans together.
"What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then?"
But we have studied this and the answers tell us what the most realistic thing actually is and thats why we see 'divine being communicating to them' as a mental illness.
You can expierence this challanging thought yourself by taking LSD. Realizing that you are actually know everything for a few hours and than getting back to your 'normal reality' is exhausting.
But i still don't believe we are all caught on the earth and we need LSD to shackle those bounds. I know how many people are on the planet, how many people i have seen die and leave our planet in the normal rational way. I have never ever seen anything which makes me believe otherwise and LSD showed me even more how fragile my own reality is.
You might want to look in a medical book on different topics you refered to to see what you believe. Nonetheless its just more realistic that human a had a similiar brain issue than all other similiar independend cases before than that this person is now talking directly to god and we areound us are all dumb shits not being able to recognise it.
My default sentence for this is simple: I'm a good person, and i don't like the idea very much that there is a god who allows cancer in kids and rape from religious people and murder etc. and either this god is a massive asshole, clearly not relevant enought to woreshop or doesn't exist anyway.
I don’t know much of the field of rationality, yet I can’t help but think that you confirm my idea that rationality is subjective. You determine rationality based on probability, so essentially when you’re saying something is irrational, you mean it is improbable (or in your words realistic).
Taken further, is it not then irrational to think that the earth arose out of absolute nothingness, to become the perfectly aligned world we know? Is this realistic? Is this probable? (Not saying the alternative is necessarily more probable, just asking)
As to your default sentence you might want to look into the discipline of Harmatiology (the doctrine of sin), for you do not understand the commonly held view of Christians on this point.
Of course there is always an unkown right? We don't know it all.
But as i said somewhere else: math for example is universal, you can come up with the same rules independently were you are.
This doesn't happen with religion/believe.
There is no experiment in the world, which shows any universal truth to believing in one specific god or more specific gods or religion.
Nothing spiritual was proven ever in my lifetime. None.
So i dream. I like to come up with things, ideas, stories, places etc. but that doesn't motivate me to believe in it so hard that it affects my normal life.
'We' think about the big bang 'we' wrote the book on it.
Religion writes books about 'gods' and repeat stories from the past.
Math unites people across the globe. Everyone agrees globally on the scientific truth.
I understand that there are plenty of countries which you would prefer not to life in but i do believe in my country but my country is a good one. We don't kill people anymore because they are different than the norm.
Religious types often say the same of the non-religious. Here's other analogies to illustrate the reductio ad absurdum: plenty of people prove school not to be working (by getting failing grades, passing by cheating, etc), plenty of people prove entrepreneurship not to be working (by going bankrupt), etc. All this line of observation shows us is that variability exists everywhere.
Something to keep in mind is that religious societies have existed for millennia, whereas societies that are openly non-religious are a relatively recent development, so comparing the two ought to account for a potential lack of historical hindsight on one of the sides.
> The parent mentioned specifically religious believes as a tool for good child upbringing.
No, I merely pointed out that religious upbringing is explicit about some topics in ways that non-religious one usually aren't.
Your counter argument can be flipped around into "religious upbringing doesn't necessarily mean bad morals & ethics", so in effect it's not really saying anything meaningful.
Not everything must necessarily be a religion-vs-atheism competition (in fact it's tiresome that some people insist on putting every religion-related discussion in that light). I believe I was clear enough when I indicated that I'm open minded to ideas from religious groups, but I don't subscribe to their faith, so I don't understand the insinuation that I'd get brownie points or something for "shilling".
If you're seeing a factual argument exclusively as some sort of attack on your belief system, then you're missing the point that self-improvements efforts shouldn't be discriminating against an idea solely due to the source of insight.
In other words, if a statement is "you don't talk to your kids about morals as much as [insert religion] people do", it's petty to respond by saying "well the religious group you belong to has people that do poopy pants stuff" (even more so if some atheists also do said poopy pants stuff); it's more productive to instead say "huh, how then could I talk to my kids about morals more often?"
"One aspect of religion I appreciate is that these aspects are well codified and debated – i.e. much more explicit."
They are not well debated in a sense that it would be called reasonable in a normal and educated world. Thats why we call it believe. Its much easier to say 'whats written in a book from some people from some 2000 years ago is true' and start to philosoph around it than actually not stoping questioning until there is a real truth to it. My discussion with a very religios person stoped after i realizied they are convinced that stuff in that book is relevant and true and moving the debate of it to 'our old people studied it and gave those learnings to future people'.
Interesting to read that for you, becoming more religiuos made you aware of other religious tendencies. For me it actually started in school with discovering group dynamic and then after that, questioning religion which lead me to being non religious and i'm very very aware of how other cognitive biases and media and co are forming us.
The biggest problem you might not understand in your world of codified: 'the other believe system' is universal and doesn't need to be codified its just that you might need to discover it for yourself or accept the truth yourself.
Ah it sounds much more spirital than i wanted it to be. Effectively my family/friends are normal good people. We don't identify us through religion and we don't hurt each other. We basically are all on the same planet, we know who birthed us but we don't know why. Single wall of truth: the big bang. Single simplest rule: Don't harm others / don't do things you don't want others to do to you.
And actually, certain states have very well defined law books which answers a ton of questions. Even slightly weirder ones that if someone had an accident with a car, to a degree both parties can be in fault. Its basically us wo build our believe system through living together.
An interesting thing to consider is that most religious people do not really believe with much conviction. They can clearly see that scripture is not literal truth and that there is no scientific evidence. So religion becomes about faith and faith becomes virtuous.
But a Roman citizen 2000 years ago didn't have faith. They just knew that God(s) exist. It was obvious, self-evident and compelling. The greatest thinkers of the time really believed.
Most Christians talk about faith and belief because that is the only thing left that science hasn't overturned. Our understanding of the world is dominated by science not religion. We won (mostly).
Math is based on fundamental global laws which exist and can be checked from everyone and they can come up all with the same math.
We could isolate a baby and it could create the same math while it couldn't create the same religion.