The TLDR is that science requires a much faith as religion, and that people aren’t willing to take ten minutes to read more than a couple paragraphs and contemplate the fundamental nature of reality, because you know, it’s not as important as a meme…
While trust and faith aren’t perfect synonyms they are closely related: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/trust
As for math, are you familiar with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems?
This is a good explanation/interview for anyone who is not: https://youtu.be/u3GYrEOoKGk
I often see this sentiment on the internet, but I wonder what definition people who hold this view are using for “religion” to reach this conclusion. I have found that the definitions of “religion” and “faith” in use by people are so varied or vague that they are almost pointless to use. The way I define them, everyone is religious and faith is a necessity.
life presents a dilemma to me: I would like to conclusively know everything about the universe and reality before deciding what choices to make, but I do not have that luxury. I must make decisions daily with what amounts to almost no information. Faith is not an optional part of life. Some people recognize that necessity and others do not. It is merely a question of who and what you place your faith in.
Rather than use the word “religion”, I would be much more interested in asking about people’s worldviews. Wikipedia gives this description: One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical or consistent theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven.
I have boiled this down to two essential questions about the nature of life/existence/reality that can be graphed on a quadrant:
The horizontal axis is the duration of existence. The difference between a worldview with an infinite existence and a worldview with a finite existence is immeasurable. If I believe in an infinite petsonal existence, then my actions have infinite consequences which I must experience the results of. Short of infinite personal existence, I may believe that life/the universe will exist forever, but that I will personally cease to exist when I die. In this case, my actions may still have infinite consequences (for future generations) but I will not personally experience them. A purely finite/temporal worldview would mean that I believe that everything will end in the heat death of the universe or similar life ending event. In this case, it ultimately doesn’t matter what I, or anyone else does in life, everything will end the same way for everyone and all life.
The vertical axis represents the nature of our existence. Is the source of life personal or impersonal? If I believed a completely impersonal worldview, then I would believe that we are essentially just biologically pre-programmed to live our lives based on the DNA that we have been built from and that person hood/personal agency is a construct of the mind with no higher meaning. If I believed in a completely personal worldview, then I would believe that I am created by a personal being that is also interested in a personal relationship with me, and I am created as a reflection of their person hood.
These are foundational questions about the nature of reality that demand an answer. Every choice I make in my life should reflect the answers to these questions. But where are the answers?
In our current society, it seems to be accepted that science and religion are diametrically opposed and cannot co-exist. I have observed, especially on the internet, that if I espouse to be religious, then it is assumed that I believe in flying spaghetti monsters and think the earth is flat. I believe that intellectually honest people will find that they are actually in more similar circumstances than they realize. It would be foolish for me to disregard scientific observation and experimentation, but it would be equally foolish for me to disregard the limitations of those observations and experiments:
It is impossible to take a zero-trust approach with science (never trust, always verify). I don’t have access to a Large Hadron Collider to observe the Higgs boson for myself. I don’t have access to the LUX-ZEPLIN to experiment with dark matter. I don’t have access to the LIGO Lab to observe gravitational waves. I trust that these experiments are conducted correctly and that their findings are correct, but by doing so I am placing my faith in the scientists performing the experiments. I do so also knowing that complete objectivity is impossible. I have a personal bias. My own life experience and observations skew the way I see the world. I assume this is the same of other people, scientists included.
Even if I had access to all the equipment necessary, and dedicated my entire life to scientific experimentation, I would only be able to conduct a tiny fraction of experiments necessary to explore just a few of the questions about the nature of the universe. At the end of my life, I would likely have more questions about the universe than when I began.
Even if I had the time, ability, and equipment necessary to conduct all necessary experiments to explore my questions about the universe, I would be making a fundamental assumption that I am actually able to observe everything. I have no idea if there are other dimensions that I will never be able to observe or experiment with. I simply have to accept by faith that these do or do not exist.
Even if I assumed that everything is observable, and I had the capacity to conduct all necessary experiments, I would still have an impossible problem from a practical standpoint: I need to make decisions on a daily basis. I don’t have a lifetime to wait and scientifically determine the nature of the universe before I make a decision about how I want to live my life. I am living it right now. The fundamental truth about the universe matters in the decisions that I have to make right now.
This is why faith is a necessity. I look around, and I see that I am just one of over seven billion people on this Earth, and that Earth is just one of eight planets orbiting our Sun, and that our Sun is just one of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, a galaxy that is so vast, even travelling at the impossible speed of light, would take me thousands of lifetimes to traverse, and that galaxy is just one of possibly trillions of galaxies in what is just the observable universe. One thing is for sure. I am very small, in every sense of the word. To sit here, and read this paragraph again, and then think that I really know-it-all would make me one of the most arrogant beings in the universe. I know very little, and I live by faith.
I respectfully disagree with that consensus.
Her legal name was Bradley Manning when she was charged and tried: https://web.archive.org/web/20110726100828/http://www.haguejusticeportal.net/eCache/DEF/12/444.html
When referring to legal proceedings it only makes sense to use someone’s legal name during those proceedings. Court documents do not get retroactively updated when someone changes their name.
Ultimately, what is disrespectful to Chelsea Manning is entirely determined by Chelsea Manning not the Lemmy Community, Military Community, Trans Community, or any other group.
Nobody gets to be offended for me, and I am the sole determiner of what is respectful and disrespectful to me.
No where did I say we shouldn’t be working towards better.
No, but you immediately dismissed my S and A tier objectives as fantasy and objectives that shouldn’t even be talked about. If you dismiss an objective as fantasy you aren’t going to work towards it. If I tell myself it is impossible for me to run a sub-3 hour marathon, then I am not going to put the effort in to train for it and I will certainly never achieve it, but if I believe it is possible, I will work towards it, and even though I’ll probably never achieve it, I might get close and be much happier with the results than never having tried.
Laws have to reflect reality though and not an ideal that can either never be achieved
This is the same flawed logic that I pointed out is being used in the gun violence “debate”. A country with no gun violence is an unachievable ideal that doesn’t reflect reality, so we shouldn’t try to restrict who has access to guns. You don’t see the parallel flawed logic there?
I was trying to find a common platitude that people on opposite sides of this issue could work towards, albiet for very different reasons.
Do we agree that unwanted pregnancies are an undesirable thing?
Do we agree that abortions are a direct result of #1?
Do we agree that abortions are an undesirable thing? If not from a moral stance, then at least in the way having an appendectomy is an undesirable thing?
If we agree on these things, then can we agree to work towards things that achieve the desired end state where abortion is legal but completely un-utilized?
I would have the exact same objective for homicide. I would love to have a country where homicide is legal but there are no homicides. Obviously that sounds ridiculous and completely unrealistic. What is the point? The point is that I want a country where nobody is murdered because nobody wants to murder anyone, not because they are afraid of legal punishment. Legal deterrence only goes so far. I am 100% confident I could murder someone and face no legal consequences, so what effect does the law have on my decision making?
This is what I have come to realize with abortion: I hate abortion, but what does changing the law really change? I don’t want mothers who only birth their babies because they are afraid of going to jail. I want mothers who love their children, both before and after birth. I don’t want women to find themselves in incredibly difficult situations with an unwanted pregnancy. But changing the law isn’t going to change anyone’s heart, and that is ultimately what I care about.
So basically you are saying that abortions are a fact of life…
Glad to know that a country where women don’t have unwanted pregnancies is a pure fantasy, so it isn’t an objective that anyone should work towards.
Let’s not try to reduce the maternal mortality rate so that women don’t have to make the horrible choice between living and having an abortion
Let’s not have safe, effective, and available contraception so that women don’t get pregnant on accident
Let’s not try to eliminate rape so that women aren’t forcibly impregnated
No, a country with legal abortions that are unwanted isn’t achievable so we shouldn’t try to work towards it. Just like we will never eliminate gun violence, so why bother even trying to work towards it…
My point is that memes like this use religion as a strawman because they don’t actually want to discuss the foundational concepts expressed by the meme. Which is what I addressed, in my admittedly very lenghy, response.