Quote from: tvbcof on April 22, 2018, 08:01:56 PM

Quote from: BADecker on April 19, 2018, 09:27:11 PM

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As I have explained over and over, the reasons why God does what He does with us, are based on the amount of faith we have in Him or against Him. This includes the faith we have before we are conceived. This means that God's judgments are righteous, because He is doing what we ask in our faith. (One of the weaknesses of science is that it has no clear way to measure the spirit, soul and faith.)
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On the contrary, I would say that one of the problems with religion is that it has no clear way to measure the 'spirit, soul and faith' relative to what is possible in publicly known science at this point. 'Science' can pick a face out of the human mind...sort of. The religious flocks are VERY prone to follow leaders like Hagee, Robertson, Baker. (Not to pick on Christians, but it is the culture I know the most about.)

If you think about it, what we pretty much know about the state of technology today, and what the technocrats are promising (with a good deal of hype) in the future with their AI and their 'singularity' and what-not is on par with what at least the Abrahamic religions consider to be true. That is, and all-seeing entity who you cannot hide from, which will judge a person based on their past actions, and an infinite after-life.

As a 'pure Atheist' (and a systems analyst) I'm currently at least playing with the idea, if not favoring it, that it would make sense to employ the modern 'god-lite' technologies on anyone who wishes to be in an elected leadership position. Probably voluntarily would work fine. Basically, if someone wanted to run for a political office, they could take a sophisticated test to find out such things as whether they are more loyal to a greater Israel than they are to the constitution of the United States. If they don't want to take the test, fine, but they would be at a disadvantage to those who would willingly do so.

The point isn't the measuring of religious things. The point is the lack of ability of science to measure a lot of things that scientists believe. This places science into the same basic category as religion.

What are people healed by when they are healed? I can see at least 3 basic possibilities:
1. Science or nutrition that does something;
2. Placebo and placebo-like effect;
3. Something from outside of either of the above that has enough sentience and power to do the healing.

Science is simply the observation and measurement in many cases. In a few cases (relatively), it is duplication of something observed and measured. We know it might work if we duplicate it in science fashion, but there is nothing that we understand enough of the fundamentals of, to say for certain that we know why it works the way it does. We just aren't that deeply in tune with the operation of physics and nature, yet.

Cool