SamBridge

I can't seem to find it but I remember seeing an article in which claimed scientists finally found enough evidence to confirm it's existence by looking at the paths particles took in the hadron collider, something like this http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/14/tech/innovation/higgs-boson-god-particle/index.html?iref=allsearch. Supposedly they have imaginary mass which is why we do not see their existence until they interact with matter and energy, much like virtual particles.

Obviously the confusion is not only my own if others are having conflicts with him. I would argue the only time hijacking is involved is when people are being manipulated, but that only occurs by the choice of at least another person. Instead, religion does not hijack emotions, but is built from them. Think about it: Why would religion have such a large effect if itself was not "built" directly from human feelings and perceptions? This is why religion can be used to manipulate people emotionally. The ten commandments for instance. The mono-theistic religions referred to don't necessarily hijack things, it merely makes sense that to have a cohesive society that you cannot have people going around killing and stealing from each other and having a hierarchy requires loyalty which is why those things were included in religion in the first place. First off that sounds very bias, I have no idea how you can quantify that and thus prove that statement. I would ague that the purpose of the modern judicial system in the US is the dehumanize people in an attempt to get objective and logical views, in my opinion these systems are much more effective than religion, because isn't it in fact a human thing to dis-like those who are different or threaten those who threaten you in some way or seek power and or control? That's not even limited to humans, that's just something that generally happens in all of the animal kingdom. As I started explaining before, religion effects people because it is so human. Throughout all of history, people were people. Are you seriously suggesting that in no previous time period there was not a large group of people who dis-liked seeing people killed for being prosecuted or hated wars? There were plenty of people who were religious but were peaceful and did not necessarily like all of the things that the hierarchies of their religions did, after all, it wouldn't be exactly human to not have a problem with what those organizations did. Instead, technology was limited and so was dissemination of information throughout the world. Religious organizations had a lot of power to control the media and power merely from armies with swords and as any powerful group they eventually become the foundation for some kind of society.

I don't care how many posts you have, stating something is incoherent does not magically make it incoherent. I read it and it makes sense, and apparently others have made sense of what I have been saying as well even if they do not agree with me. You are referring to bad effects which in of itself is not incorrect or illogical. However, you base assertions of the nature of all religion on these personal assumptions or conflicts. It doesn't even matter if it is a personal opinion, it doesn't make sense to only see bad or only focus on the bad things of religion in a discussion of the whole of religion. Then why did you not confine your arguments to the different threads you mentioned which actually regard these matters of focusing specifically on negative effects of religion? If they are personal opinions, how can they be logical if they are merely arbitrary assumptions? I suppose that is why I find trouble making logical sense of them. My disagreement was that you stated an agreement that religion can lead to both good and bad and that ultimately those actions stem from humans themselves and not religion itself, and then spontaneously you only focused on bad traits or effects religion can have. I see now that this does not necessarily suggest you see no good for religion but it was a seeming self contradiction which was confusing, it would be better to make those arguments in the other topic you mentioned if you are not going to debate about the total effects religion can have or the open nature of belief itself.

The initial notion that other universes are "created" as a result of decisions makes no logical sense. I mean in order for that to happen there would have to be a big bang in a plane of existence, that plane of existence would have to be created first anyway, then the universe would have to be sped up in a purely deterministic manner such that the only thing that varied for certain was that specific outcome. Instead, a better interpretation is that there are an infinite number of universes existing in which independent matter and energy exist which thereby expresses all possibilities at all all times.

If that was true, then we shouldn't have different conclusions. I did not specify that I did not mis-understand your whole argument, I almost didn't specify at all. Having an issue with a specific piece of your argument does not make every point I make about the whole of your argument invalid. But if you cannot provide evidence that it is a false dichotomy then those words are worthless. The only way it can logically work is in either of those two systems based on whatever logical view you decide to settle on as a viewpoint, which seems to be shifting throughout individual posts. We know it cannot be true that religion only leads to either good or bad, yet you keep insisting on negative assertions that you cannot ultimately withstand religion because it negatively "hijacks" peoples feelings even though there is no statistical proof nor any component of physics that suggests it always is or has to be and that it cannot happen negatively as much as positively if it does happen, and you have still avoided the point of using that "hijacking" for good, the link in your video also does not work. Religion in general not too widely comparable to the marketing a bigmac. People "can" use any belief or system to manipulate others, and furthermore there is no indication that manipulation is always executed. If you could prove that religion was created for the purpose of manipulating others for one's gain, your argument would be better supported, otherwise it seems biased to assume what you have assumed. And you choose to ignore it. You seem to have a large bias against religion regardless of whatever religion it is or its history. It can easily be true that Buddhism in fact discourages violence and makes a culture such as a Tibetan culture more peaceful, yet it is still a religion. However, this does not mean all religions always lead to peace in the same exact way that religions don't always lead to wars. I implore you to objectively consider that religion is not confined to be a tool of manipulation. There are numerous reasons for which one may choose a religion, some people may have little to no influence of others, or start a different religion entirely.

How come no good things can come from the result of teaching religion as well? You need to be more clear because that doesn't make sense. As I stated before, it can possibly bring communities together or scare people into being less violent, allow people to cope with death, ect, these are examples off the effects of religion eventually leading to good things assuming we have a similar standard of good. It seems illogical to say all good must come from humans and none comes from religion, especially while simultaneously stating that evil comes from religion without stating evil comes from humans which implies that only evil must come from religion. It is not a personal incredulity if you lack evidence, it is a statement of the nature of your argument. I am familiar with instances where people may claim that goodness may come from a deity or religious construct, but they generally also claim that evil does as well, with demons like Satan and sometimes various gods. Religion as I mentioned before or possibly in another religious thread may also be used by someone to take advantage of people using beliefs, however religion alone is incapable of this, this phenomena is a person choosing to say things in a particular context or skewing information so that people will behave in a way they desire. Since religion is not a living or conscious thing, it cannot have desire and therefore cannot manipulate people for its desire. As I said before, what about religion being manipulated by someone into getting people to act better? Stating something is broken logic without any proof of any logical deduction whatsoever is just as bad as the very thing you claim to abhor. Good and evil does not come from religion, it comes from people and their interpretations of the world. If you want to argue that religion causes more bad than good you would have to show in some way bad actions occur more often in an objective manner at least for a start which I believe would require statistics. I have already stated that wars occur all over the world without religion as a constant factor, so I see little room for this, but if you have anything you can bring it up.

So you're going to take an astronomical chance to bet that the cross sections of the lines of the stars happen to intersect where hidden star is? That's hardly reliable, I can't believe I thought it was anything more than that. On top of all of that, the intersecting lines will only give you information about the position of the star relative to any star in the system, it will not tell you anything about the distance of the ship. Oh, this must be that "civil tone" I heard you bragging about so much. I didn't answer because I already walked through a method which you clearly ignored. I worked out a solution, now it's your turn.

I use a similar method as before, I calculate a distance based on brightness and use sohcahtoa. With your method the only information I could obtain would be the location of the hidden star relative to any star within the cluster, not relative to your space craft without any further information. How about you go talk to an astronomer and actually ask them how they do it?

But in both instances they have to be equally as effective. Good things are as related to human behavior, emotions and feelings as bad ones, and since religion does not cause those things, it cannot be the root for either of those things. Religion may divide people, but anything more than a grouping similar to any other grouping, like squares and circles, multiples of 3, ect, is by the choice of people of how much they want to separate themselves. By suggesting that religion is ultimately bad yet that "causative" elements come from the sum of both people and religion, you are thereby (regardless of intention) saying that ultimately religion causes only bad and good can only come from humans themselves. You have to pick a compromise somewhere because we know this is not true, your notion of "hijacking" is not one I see much evidence for and even if it did somehow coincidentally exist in all religion in the entire world, based on some of the positive effects of religion, I cannot rule out that it is necessarily a good thing. Either people can be just as bad as good and religion has little effect on that or merely amplifies, or the effects of religion can be just as bad or good on people.

I am merely re-affirming or re-summarizing where I think we are at in that situation. Then I do not see how you can see religion as a source of bad if you label both good and bad as stemming from human emotions and feelings. I also do not see how religions "hijack" this, they can certainly encourage it or discourage it. Saying all religions hijack emotions which to me doesn't make complete sense seems very biased, I can only think of 3 at most that may or may not do that such as perhaps when an orthodox Christian says goodness is placed in people by God. However, you do not always see this with greek mythology, shintoism, taoism, buddhism, old celtic religions, Native American religions, ect. I suppose Hinduism may do this as well with the many gods representing he different forces, but I am not sure to the extent such that not having gods in Hindu terms would mean there can be no goodness or evil. It doesn't relate necessarily, we went off on a tangent. It means any value or meaning you place on anything is relative and arbitrary which makes any personal value placed on something scientifically meaningless, which is why logically no single religion should be regarded over any other. They are all equally meaningless considering that wiki definition posted.

If that were true you would not be debating with me. Not necessarily, only if they are all perpendicular to each other they may describe 3 axis from a specific relative location, but we almost made progress there, amazing. It does not "need" to be used, it simply "can" be used. The fact that bignose was unaware of your method should at least make you stop and think. Furthermore, if I know enough information to place 6 points around an object to my specification, then I likely have enough information to find the object using simple triangulation. If I wonder off in space to the point where I have no idea where you are, no method can tell you how far away from Earth unless have have at least some information already relating to it's location. However, if you know your displacement from Earth, you may be able to possibly find your location by creating a sphere from earth with a radius equal to the displacement to see what star systems lie exactly on the boundary of that sphere. Since it's unlikely more than one will touch the boundary given the vastness of space, you can figure out where you are with actually just one piece of information. You do not necessarily need 6 points to find the location. If I know the exact locations of Betelgeuse and many other stars and can estimate the position of the said star visually, I can use triangulation to find the actual distance to the specific position. Nasa has most certainly not used 6 point box and astronomers could not have possibly had the information for 6 points originaly to find stars in the first place. They look at other stars near and use "standard candles" or supernova to calculate the brightness of a star and use spectrometry to see what star class it is, and therefore how far away it is based on it's brightness. You don't even need triangulation for that, all you need to know is that a star is in the same galaxy as the standard candle and you can roughly estimate it's distance. To find the exact location would require more triangulation. Once again the hostility card despite no hostile action against you, it's getting rather old. You most definitely did not present your idea in a good nature nor did you remain civil seeming. As I recommended before, if I were you I would seriously take some higher math classes and stop trying to say differently than what you said in your original arguments to manipulate your current context to hide the flaws I pointed out in those past arguments. You did not demonstrate any awareness as far as I can tell that 3 dimensional coordinates are the basis for any 3 dimensional calculation in 3-D space and that you can describe any relative location in space as being a relative distance along the 3 dimensional axis in the form of variables and relationships between them regardless of if you know the exact positon.

I think the issue is that if you observe matter, then when you observe it, it cannot possibly be in another state and thus cannot comprise another universe as two different states or locations, you would call it an Eigenstate.

The problem is in a way between knowing and existing. Just because I cannot locate an object doesn't mean 3-dimensional space doesn't exist, which is where the problem seems to lie, the only way possible to locate an object in 3-D space is using 3 dimensions, which split's method does, but he refuses to acknowledge it most likely because he thinks it is some sort of personal attack on what he thinks is his idea.

You said religions often "cause" violence, but they never do, people "choose" to enter into a war. Besides, there are many non-religious things that may encourage violence or amplify emotions such as politics, family, death, even science if someone steal's someone else's idea. This is true as well. Just as people may have evil tendencies regardless of religion, they may have good tendencies as well. While religion may lead to much bad, it still does lead to much good, allows some people to cope with death, can bring communities together, perhaps scare some people into being less violent. But I do think it is true that the good comes from people themselves as well, that the "catalyzation" works both ways, I even wrote an essay on this at once point explaining how the ten commandments are related to the foundation of modern society because they are based on natural social interactions. You state that you acknowledge that religion uses human emotions for good and bad, but it then it seems you spontaneously think religion only causes bad. I don't exactly see what's going on. For any system it is always easier to see the negatives than the positives, that is why we take so many things for granted. The positives and negatives both the same, both ways. If positive reactions don't solely come from religion, neither do negative ones. Just because something is meaningless doesn't mean it doesn't exist, things are only meaningless in that they are not more important than any other thing as there is no component of physics forcing them to be, thus any value we place must be arbitrary.

The psychiatric definition of delusional is as follows from dictionary.com: "maintaining fixed false beliefs even when confronted with facts, usually as a result of mental illness." I have stood by that definition, because if it cannot be strongly proven or disproved, then it cannot be determined to be fact, therefore you are either in error or said what you said with bias. I will run a scenario by you. One tribe disagrees with another tribe 4,000 years ago. Tribe A thinks the universe was created from an indefinite number of deities representing each unique type of object or force that exists, while tribe B thinks that the universe was created from a single deity which represents all objects and forces. Both tribes are members comprised of only humans. When confronting each other, both tribes are insulted by the other's suggesting, both being emotionally provoked violently. They enter into a war. You would argue that this is proof that religion can cause violence, however the situation is more complicated than that. If those tribes were less violent, they would merely agree to disagree and either debate logically, or ignore each other. However, it is because they are inherently violent that they chose to enter into a war over other actions, thus it is not the religion that is the root for the violence, but the nature of those members. The religion merely had to do with an event in which the members of the tribes had a large emotional reactions. Since it is more than likely that because humans are 99.99% physically identical that all humans have what you refer to as "willpower", thus religion does not dictate anyone's life. This notion of yours is more that the people who attempt to gain power will make actions to try and make other people act in a manner they desire based on their psychological understanding of what they think those other people will do, at least dealing with politics and violence involving religion. If you fail to follow the rules of a religion, it is still the choice of the members to execute a particular punishment, and the choices of previous members if those punishments were severe. If you do not contest that, and since I have continuously acknowledged that religions can lead to violence by perhaps amplifying emotions, you would have little reason to debate me, so I can only conclude you must in some way think that religion causes some amount more of bad than good based also on your negative assertions. Religion itself doesn't cause conflict, it's people who do, albeit that religion may make a conflict more likely to happen. If you desire, I can go back and quote myself saying that I acknowledge religion can lead to violence. It seems this misunderstanding may account for previous ones. I'd like to put my mind at 100% ease of it's existence, too bad I guess. And they would be correct, religion for the most part is in fact meaningless, though I would argue that ultimately science is just as meaningless, there is nothing forcing us to investigate, and there is no component of the laws of physics that requires our knowledge of it, any value we place on it is merely arbitrary by us. However, this notion is more for if we have a scientific solution vs a belief or new evidence. Since we cannot scientifically verify the existence of the origin of all that exists, this notion may not be applicable to a religion that attempts to describe that. I will however say that it has a slight application in that it means any religion of belief of an origin is equally meaningless, therefore there is no logical reason to regard one religion more than another, which you will find many people doing anyway.

You don't have any evidence I'm wrong, you merely insist I am because you don't want entities such as the Easter bunny or Greek gods to be real despite the fact that you cannot disprove them most likely because you are already comfortable with assuming they aren't. I'm very familiar with the crusades as well as various religious wars, you are just unfamiliar with my posts. You seem to blatantly ignore the fact and logic that wars have easily happened regardless of no constant religion, which suggests that you cannot draw any direct relationship between religion and war. Religion is merely an amplifier or dampener or scapegoat, or excuse because it is based on human emotions and incorporates them. On top of this, any religion can be whatever its members collectively decide it to be, thus if a religion makes people violent, it is because its members have decided that the religion should include violence, which reflects that the problem of violence is in the nature of the members. Oh, so you defend the notion that religion isn't always bad and that it can cause equally as much good as bad? Because if not I have not seen anyone else do it, mainly negative assertions. So do scientific hypotheses at times. Some people thought color was caused by the rotation of atoms, others such as Newton though it was based on different components of light. Some people believe strings are real, some people believe they don't exist. Some people believe black holes can be wormholes, some people don't. These all create different groups, and that is not necessarily a bad thing, or a good thing. The mere formation of groups in of itself carries no inherent good or evil. No, I'm afraid I can't. I can however choose to not believe in it. Well, I didn't hear god say it, and I here no organized authority, religious or not, acknowledging that command either. It may be such that a culture would generally believe that without any further knowledge. You cannot 100% rule out that the cancer is not in some way supernatural, but you can tell them of experiments that say super natural phenomena are not directly related to having cancer, but involve cells duplicating too much. They would first however have to understand basic biology, and you cannot shove it in their face just as they would shove their beliefs in yours, otherwise you are not doing anything better. But if their definition of a god is merely a being of immense power, perhaps they wouldn't be in delusion. Perhaps the technologies of today would to them be godly. Unless it is printed within the printed text of the religion, religion does not confused things. In fact I am pretty sure confusion is a state which only living things may attain. Your notion would seem to suggest one of the points I made earlier anyway. However, the concept of the Easter bunny is passed down mainly orally, and thus we cannot pinpoint it's origin. What if there was a mutation of a humanoid into a rabbit-like creature? Or perhaps a costume and makeup from a long time ago? If someone however did believe in the Easter Bunny in a specific context as a specific form with specific limitations, your point may suffice to call them delusional. Personally I do not directly see what the bunny has to do with the resurrection of Jesus.

But can't that same power be used for good as well? It was used in many tribes to bring communities together. Religion can do either that or make good men do good things or bad men o bad things, you just only focus on the bad things. Religion can make an "evil" person try and repent or kill themselves, or it can stop someone from acting violent all together like with Buddhism, it can give someone a reason to help a community out or bring a community together in general. However, if you expose ebola to a control group it will get infected, which I pointed out a flaw in earlier. Varying levels of different religions lie in every country in the world, yet in nearly every country there is a history of violent wars as well as peace, which means the problem does not reside within religion, but in the nature of the living things that start it, which means religion cannot be the largest factor in wars and must have less of an effect than you are making it out to have.

You can consider something unlikely, but unless there is strong physical evidence against it, then someone wouldn't be in a delusion for believing it. You can't just declare something like the Easter bunny is impossible, you need to have evidence or why it is so unlikely, and even then if there is still evidence for it to cancel out evidence against it, you may as well be back to where you started. Things like this may happen all the time in science like with string theory, but I don't see many string theorists getting called delusional despite the complete lack of any evidence for strings. Emotions of violence are not roots of religion, they are roots of humanity, so considering many religious people are nice or that no religion has to be any particular thing and that any religion can be whatever its members want to be, and those members at some times choose it to be violent, then the problems are not rooted in religion, but in human nature itself. There is also the fact that nearly every country in the world has had its shares of wars, and since religion is varying but the acts of violence are constant (based on the technology available), it must be that war does not have a directly proportional relationship to religion, sometimes non at all, just human feelings like insecurity, the notion that one group is an enemy or friend because of how similar or different they are, who has what resources, lust for power, ect. As I said before, religion can be used to amplify these emotions, or used as some excuse to do something, and the only reason that religion does is because of the fact that the old religions come from humanity's own feelings and emotions, and thus religion itself is not the cause of a war. If I write an idea for a religion down and send it on a rocket to Pluto, I'm not going to start spontaneously seeing wars on Pluto because there's no living things there to interpret it, which just further proves my point.

What if Thor did exist but not in the way we thought? Possibly an advanced alien that people would mistake for a god, which just goes to show we can speculate all we want and never prove/disprove it.

But the chances of those stars being arranged so that they can form a cube or box is astronomical. Once again, take high school math, even algebra one, learn what Cartesian coordinates are. I don't need to know the exact location of something in order for 3 different axis of 3 dimensional space to exist, as I said before and showed in the picture I posted, any object can be described with points of some kind of x,y,z coordinates, it doesn't matter if you know what the numbers are, all that matters is you acknowledge they are some relative distance along each axis. After you do that, you may or may no be able to find the location of another object. Compared to your method, this is a lot simpler because I can find how far away the moon is merely using one distance and two angles on Earth as I showed before, whereas you require 6 points. Your 6 points in no way substitute the existence of 3-D axis in 3-D space. As I showed in a picture in an earlier post, they are merely extensions of it.

You cannot derive everything of an an entire entity merely from a single unit you may use to measure it. We "can" measure one foot of a line and break it down, and we can do that with any other unit of length, and so what? We still don't know how long the line is and we can't physically divide it "infinitely". Technically, a line is infinitely long, but that length is so long we can't physically measure it. Why can't a similar property be true for time?

Well there's plenty of people who do believe in alien UFOs, I just thought you were one of them based on other topics. Such types of wars ultimately happen regardless of religion. We see proof of this when we see that nearly every country in the world has had it's share of wars. Since the religious belief itself and its influence is not a constant factor for every country yet we still see numerous wars in nearly every country, it cannot be the root cause of all those wars in the same way that you cannot make an equation from a collection of totally random points in a range of greater than 1u. Religion is merely mixed up in human feelings which may or may not amplify wars. You should try talking to a religious person who's just an average person. Most religious people are just "average" people, statistically speaking, there is nothing particularly cynical about religion in general, as I said before it is a lifestyle choice that may be adapted by something as simple as environment or life experiences. There is no definite drive for religion, any member can contribute uniquely to it or alter it, which we have seen happen by seeing changes in religion over time. There are plenty of people who didn't like the crusades and wars, both atheistic and religious people alike. Any religion can be whatever its members collectively decide it to be. You can question religion all you want, and you do not have to take it seriously, but by nature if it cannot be disproved then it cannot be proven to be a delusion of someone.

IF that was the only thing that constituted a religion, you'd be right, but the wiki articles states more than that doesn't it? In many ways, religion is organized, has structures, beliefs of an origin or something that constitutes the physical world, or something that causes events to happen.

Just because you put a box around something doesn't mean you know where it is, any location of your six points can be proven to be an extension of mere extension of using 3 different axis. Or you can take high school math and learn about graphs. And I "can" find a location using simple triangulation, doesn't mean I always will. Any line you draw in your 6 coordinate system is merely using 3 dimensional coordinates already defined, it is the only way they can accurately describe 3D objects in three dimensional space. A big problem with your scenario is "how do you know those 6 positions in the first place"? If you can randomly assume some distance in your six point system why can't I assume some random distance to get exact numbers using simple triangulation? As I stated before your method does not substitute 3-D topology, it uses 3 different axis twice. On to of all of that, I placed a box around a pebble. Find the location of it. You can't? Well make up a distance then. But wait, if you make up a distance how do you know your results are right?

Ok? I can say sin(theta)=y/z, in what way does finding the location of an object change the topology of existence? Once again, I can describe each of your apparently treasured 6 points with three unique (x,y,z) points. By drawing 3 intersecting lines you merely prove the geometry of 3 dimensions to identify the points using triangulation. This 6 points do not use 6 different axis of location to describe relative locations from each other, they only use 3. And what if you and the planet are both still? I did not say it was an invalid way to find the location of an object, I stated that your method does not substitute 3 dimensional topology. On top of that, merely drawing lines between the 6 points does not give you all the information to find distances. Without a known distance, you can only state mathematical relationships of the distances. This is the extent of your method http://www.mediafire.com/?39vs5994mn1eis4