Some people think that testing their beliefs are equal to knocking them though, which is far from factual. If I believe that the moon is made of green cheese, and someone shows me how I may be holding a false belief, that is not knocking my belief.
Fear is far from a pigeon hole. It's a motivator that has been motivating people to create belief systems for ages, including human sacrifice and genocide. It deserves a serious investigation. But of course there are other things besides fear that motivate leading to the same erroneous conclusions. True for sure.
Knowledge has conditions. If those conditions are not met, then no knowledge (see my time post above). When we get to a point where we cannot fulfill those conditions, then we simply stop asking questions because to keep asking them would be fruitless, as far as gaining knowledge is concerned.
The realm of unanswerable questions is the realm of religion, or pure speculation. Also, the Big Bang theory is not popular because it is "fashionable" but rather because the evidence warrants that belief. The Big Bang, when stripped, simply means "When time began, that is, when a measurement was possible for humans." All science is a degree of measuring. You can't measure what is outside of time because all "things" are in time--they have duration, solid objects and concepts--they have a beginning and an end.
The chicken and the egg problem is not one of science. What happened before the big bang is something other than space and time oriented and thus outside the realm of science (It's that pesky necessary condition thing again.) The problem is actually thus a religious one, for those interested in asking such questions. It's the same question as, "What created God" ad infinitum and naseum.
Have you ever heard of the "Noble Eightfold Path?" It rivals the Ten Cs in substance. There are secular reasons for living in relative peace also. The problem with religious systems of ethics is that they don't tell us why to act in such a way, whereas secular systems do. That is, The Ten Cs (as an example) are based on command and obedience, whereas secular systems are built around reason and explanation. Yes, we give the Ten C's explanations, but originally, they came with no instructions.
I'm not "knocking" anything here, just pointing out some ideas and yes truths, logical, scientific, and religious, those being the necessary conditions of all knowledge, science and evidence, religious systems vs secular/rational and their concomitant differences.
Of course we're all free to belief whatever we want. But the question I always ask myself is this: Are my beliefs warranted, or are they not?" remembering that if I had lived 2, 000 years ago, I most likely would have believed in rain gods.
I think that as one gets a little older, it becomes less the norm to knock peoples´ beliefs.
This might or might not be mocked or put into the fear pìgeonhole; I don´t think it should. I´d be the first to say that all religions of which I know anything about - not that many, to be sure - owe more to man than to God. The problem lies more in the realms of science and the chicken-and-egg process. You can reduce everything backwards to the fashionable Big Bang theory but you still have to go the next step and ask what before that? And to say nothing answers nothing.
Come to think about it, the deeper into the known bits of life around us that research goes, the more complicated it all seems to be, making the random swim out of the swamp not the easy first leap it might have been, which is not an attempt to deny that the swamp might well have been home once upon a time, just that there was a lot more to it than an extra twitch of the tail onto the hard.
In the end, none of us knows what much of it is about; the Ten Cs offer us the best set of common rules for co-existence that I´ve personally met up with and if the rest of the world were to follow them, I´m sure we´d all be better off, regardless of colour, race or anything much else. So much good the world´s clerics, with their platforms, could do were they to forget ego and the power struggle for peoples´minds and hearts...
Don´t you just love photography?
Rob C
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