VS and the religious element

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Fellgnome, Nov 10, 2014.

  1. Ronin Oni

    So religion is Magic?

    About sums it up.

    Feelings and experiences are just chemical reactions in your brain. That's literally it. We try to put significance on them and coincidences because our thought of self importance demands it, but it's just wishful thinking.

    Logically I can see this and cannot refute this.

    Internally emotionally, I can't really accept that of course.
  2. Rovertoo

    This is why people go to religion. Not because they are in denial of something (though some possibly are), but because their own experiences with their thoughts, or their feelings, or their interactions with the world give them personal drive and evidence that the scientific observations don't capture the whole picture. They feel that there is more to the universe than what studies have shown or can show. It's an addendum to science, not a detractor. For example most people feel that, despite knowing that according to studies and diagrams they are nothing more than chemical reactions, they still have some kind of special consciousness or soul or something that is not provable but more cosmically important than molecules knocking about in their heads. It's nothing more than a feeling and an opinion, but it's not something that can be easily ignored.

    And not everything unprovable is magic. To stick with the somewhat silly thread topic, the VS may be religious about their Vanu aliens because they have reason to believe that Vanu in it's wisdom selected them to ascend and evolve beyond what humanity was capable of. As brutish, unenlightened NC or TR, we have no way to prove that that's the case or not (only by shooting them, maybe), and VS grunts have to take it on faith that they are the chosen people and everything their technology is doing for them is according to the will of the Vanu aliens. And who knows, maybe they're right, and the Vanu aliens really did leave their technology as a gift to the next species to discover it, hoping to catapult them into the next stage in evolution?
  3. Fellgnome

    But science suggests pretty strongly that much of this is just fear of death/survival instinct though. Humans give these things special meaning because it's in their nature to value their individual self.

    An interesting book on the subject:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death


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  4. Rovertoo

    Having not read the book myself, that idea is little more than another unprovable hypothesis, with the same kind of leap of faith or assumption that many people make taking the opposite view. That our desire to have a soul comes from our lack of it is little more than a postulate that falls into the same problem as other studies into things of that nature: They can't have any kind of control group, to record whether or not they're wrong. They can only interpret their data to their liking instead of having yes or no answers.
  5. Brahma2

    "By science be purged!"
    - A Vanu battlecry
  6. Paragon Exile

    Name one TR and NC higher-up that has said something that flat-out counters what their faction supposedly stands for. The best you'll get is a story about Waterson killing his elected leader, and Mattherson founding the New Conglomerate to circumvent TR socialist rules.

    No, and neither do I. The Vanu Sovereignty scientists seem to think that the aliens ascended or moved on, when it is possible their inventions destroyed them.

    Nothing in the lore suggests the VS worship the Vanu, they simply revere them and the technology they left as a futuristic cargo cult.

    TR is pretty much irredeemable.

    Their security measures (lol) that were supposed to go away after planetfall were still in place 200 years later, and it is heavily implied they are a military junta posing as a republic.
  7. Badname707

    Nope, that's actually a fact. Einstein believed in a god. Another, perhaps more fitting example, is Tesla. Tesla's 'religious' leanings went far further than Einstein's, and dipped far further into occultism than most people know. Perhaps you should ask yourself who is struggling with wishful thinking.
  8. Fellgnome

    It's only unprovable on the other side: We can't prove souls exist, thus we can't prove they don't exist. That's not a problem, really.

    What can potentially be proved is the links between these desires and the physical human brain. Which there's some evidence for although it's not 100% conclusive. (God Gene and stuff like that). Of course the brain is the most complicated/least understood part of the human body still.
  9. Badname707

    A thing doesn't need to be a 'god' in the traditional sense to be worshipped. This would be particularly true among scientists.
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  10. Badname707

    Not to mention the mechanism behind consciousness remains entirely without explanation, except to say that it is (probably) the result of many individual units communicating with each other.
  11. Fellgnome

    *Golden Retriever :p

    Labs have the shorter coat.

    I also am dogsitting for family right now ... and their dog is a golden retriever, snoring quite loudly in her bed next to me as I type this. Probably doing complex theoretical physics in her dreams.

    My dog is also a clever little guy:

    [IMG]

    You can tell he's a thinker from those eyes.

    <3
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  12. Ronin Oni

    I meant Einstein had wishful thinking.

    I don't struggle from wishful thinking... I suffer from no delusions of fantasy.

    Any worship is inane.

    Nothing is worthy of "worship"
  13. TriumphantJelly

    Not entirely, consciousness is a balance between integration and chaos: If one section of a solid moves, the rest moves with it: Too much integration. If one molecule of hydrogen moves, it simply pings off into another part of whatever it is part of; Too little integration.

    There is an article explaining this much better than myself in New Scientist called something like "Solid, Liquid, Gas, You" or similiar.

    So while the mechanisms are as you say unproven, they are as you say probably something much more like we think they are, than a god programming little morals into our minds, sitting on a cloud, communicating through an ancient text formulated of myths.

    Faith/Science: The way you are comparing the two is a little bit like somone correcting another because they said "was" instead of "were": You're picking at the exact meaning of the words rather than the concepts. Whilst you could be considered correct, the faith that we're talking about is faith in facts found through logical processes of elimination and experimentation, not the blind faith in God. The two are most certainly different forms of faith, if not kinds.
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  14. ColonelChingles

    But I wouldn't have been able to make the laboratory pun if it was a Golden Retriever... :(

    There's an awesome NOVA TV episode on animal intelligence and it's well worth a watch if you can spare an hour. :D

    Or if you only have 4 minutes, this video shows that some monkeys can have more developed moral systems than many humans:

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  15. Badname707

    Haha, well Einstein believed in determinism, so until randomness is disproven, there may be truth to that. However, I think it's unfair, without knowing his personal beliefs towards god, to be outright dismissal towards it. Spinoza's conception of god, to which Einstein subscribed to, with exception to the assertion that the universe does occur deterministically, is not at all incompatible with modern science. That was basically the point.

    That's neither the point of the statement, nor anything we're arguing about.
  16. Badname707

    That goes without saying. Science is incontrovertible, so far as we're able to conceive. However, just like our conception of science is not fixed, neither must our conception of anything else be fixed. All truth, for it to be true, must adapt to what is.

    Obviously the faith of scientists, scientists who believe in science, at least, would be of the first and not the second. That was the point.
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  17. Fellgnome

    :(

    I've seen the NOVA episode already actually(assuming this is the one with the Border Collie), I'm a bit of a dog enthusiast so I've seen quite a few documentaries related to/including them. I hadn't seen the monkey one though.
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  18. Shellana

    Can you prove that using science, or do I take that as a statement of your personal faith?
  19. Ronin Oni

    I can offer as much proof as anyone claiming otherwise.

    The onus isn't on me to prove that there isn't something else. I don't have to prove the lack of something. Indeed that is impossible.

    If someone wants to prove there is a god or afterlife, the onus is on them to provide proof of it's existence.

    I'm agnostic for not having proof otherwise, but would accept proof were it given. In practice I'm atheist because I've yet to hear a singular solid argument or see a single shred of evidence to support anyones claim.
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  20. Shellana

    "Science is the only supreme" is actually a self refuting statement, but apparently I have to spell that out explicity for you.

    "Science is the only supreme" cannot be proven by science.
    If "Science is the only supreme", then only statements that can be proven by science are true.
    Logically, your statement is true when false, and false when true. That makes it self refuting.
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