Hendrik Boom:
But i have noticed that, true or false, a lot of people are helped by belief in God. So the scientific question becomes, what is it that actually helps them if God does not exist??
Well, I have found that critical thinking is the most important thing for consciousness. If you start intentionally limiting your thoughts, you lose the freedom of mind.
Believing in religion is like buying Apple's iPhone. Sure, it's shiny, it has apps, you may feel good about yourself. But most people don't understand how much they sacrifice by using it. Like downloading apps not from Apple Store or not be constantly surveilled.
So you don't know if he exists, but you hate the idea of religion.
Religion is the cause of most homophobia and transphobia in the world. LGBT people get executed by ISIS, get imprisoned by Chechens and get discriminated in most of the world.
Trump has said that he considers passing a "religious freedom" law that will allow businesses to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.
I don't care what mad thoughts religious people have in their minds but when they open their mouth and let these thoughts outside, they become my enemies.
zap:
I would say the act of trying to be a good person and being faithful to him for the goodness he gives you is more important than always obeying especially if your heart is far from him. That's just my thought.
So God is a he? Why not she? Why do you think God has gender at all? Being a transgender woman really made me understand how men get so much for free and are treated as superior gender. This made me a radical feminist.
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
now run that as a universe for a bit. what you find is that there will be emergent intelligent behaviour - entropy *will* be beaten - *not* because it was *deliberately designed in* but because of the *evolutionary process*.
Exactly. I've been making bots for Team Fortress 2 and after stopping development I wanted to take reusable code into separate library. So I've started thinking what code is useful for a general purpose AI and after several years of brainstorming the most fundamental learning algorithm I have come to the conclusion that it is random mutations and natural selection.
If we make our AI explore randomly in algorithmic space, given enough time, it will solve any solvable problem. Sure, this is the most inefficient algorithm, but it is universal.