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How do you refute nature's beauty?

I fancy myself a person of nature. I like to stop and take in the beauty of the scenery. I like to close my eyes and listen to the liveliness of the flora and fauna around me. I can't help but feel a sense of bewilderment and wonder at how beautiful and breathtaking nature truly is. Take, for example, bioluminescence. You see it in movies all the time and every time we remark about how cool or spectacular it is thinking it's only something out of science fiction. But it's not. Bioluminescense is a very real thing here on Earth and it's amazing. My question is; how can we go about changing the stereotypical idea of it being "God's Creation" and perceive as something of natural phenomenon?

lck1256 5 July 1
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13 comments

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The best way I’ve found is honestly just staying humble and being patient with people. Religion pushed me away by how “this is the right way to think” it was and that’s no way to seriously convince others to believe what we believe. Just my opinion.

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The best way I’ve found is honestly just staying humble and being patient with people. Religion pushed me away by how “this is the right way to think” it was and that’s no way to seriously convince others to believe what we believe. Just my opinion.

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To answer your titular question, how do you refute nature's beauty? First I go out to the mountains and rivers of my home town and I find a placid, stunning spot on a moderate evening, right about sunset. I bask in the glory of the painted skies and shimmering water for a few moments, take a deep breath, and with a satisfied sigh I begin:

YOU'RE NOT THAT FUCKING HOT MOTHER NATURE! Yeah you heard me. I've seen more picturesque bounty in a stock frame. My disabled cousin does macaroni portraits on his off days that would shut your shit down. You can act like you're all that, supplying life and beauty to all known organisms like a pretentious brown noser, but at the end of your elliptical orbit, you're still a hoser, paintin the same poppy fibonacci fractals as ever, with your played out box of electromagnetic spectrum crayons, to an audience of apes that can't percieve 4/1000ths of it. Real original, get a life.

To your serious question, no idea but Penn Jillette tells a hilarious story that he n his wife were exiting a building behind another fella who looked up, basked at a sunset and said to no one in particular "how can anyone look at that n say theres no god?"

From behind him on both sides he just heard a man n woman agree in unison: "theres no god!" ? Only answer I can think of is keep bein those voices and enjoying the beauty sans guilt. Itll take generations but people will come around at their own pace.

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I have spent half my life or so out of doors. often in very rural or wilderness areas. I love nature and see myself as another part of it, as are we all.
However I have no illusions about nature; it will freeze me, drown me, starve me, infest me, infect me, burn me, and feed upon me in any and all ways possible.
I love nature, but it's a sidewinder, beautiful and deadly.

99.9% of nature is lethal to humans, our ecosystem Earth protects our fragility, and even on Earth Nature can be lethal just to be around. Try any ocean without a boat.
Or go here and see for yourself . . .This is Danakil Desert, from 19 C to 40 C (60 in winter, 104+ in Summer) temps, no rain, pools of battery acid . . . Google Earth that and it is easy to see no entity was looking out for human survival.
All 52,879 mi² of it

We forget that it is the struggle with Nature that has made life possible. We are a part of this Nature and it can teach or destroy at an instant. Our planet exists to help us survive or destroy our way of life. Are we paying attention?

@dalefvictor "Our planet exists to help us survive or destroy our way of life."
Our planet exists to help us, Really? Is it a novelty given to us as a teaching tool?

I do not think the planet exist FOR us at all. Rather I think we are intelligent primates, apes with technology.

And No, we are not paying attention. We are in denial, unable to imagine the consequences of what we do as we do it. We can intellectually model the idea, but it is far too massive a cascade for us to actually imagine, so we fall back into reality denial.

Slajov makes this point better than I

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Because there are scientific, factual reasons all these things exist. Natural order was here long before mankind and his need for an invisible force ever existed. There were jungles and mountains, sunrises and sunsets, long before there was humankind. Much of our species is just unable to accept the idea that something like us didn’t create the world we live in.

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If there is respect for Mother Nature, why should it matter what others' perceptions are? Sounds like a control issue?

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"God's creation" is just a label we apply, it is totally invented by man, it has no equivalent in the natural world. You can just drop it from your thinking, when you realise that neither the idea of God nor his creating anything make much sense.

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Eh, let them have their religious ideas, as long as they don't impose them on me. I tend towards pantheism anyway....and for some, their lives would fall apart without the crutch of religious belief.

Orbit Level 7 July 2, 2018
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Science, Education, and, unfortunately, Time. Religion isn't just a belief about science. For the believers, religion has its tendrils in social life, work life, life history, family history, etc. The religious stand to lose or up-end much more than their beliefs when considering accepting science/evolution. So, it's more about TIME, with education and science being taught early. As for your topic sentence, do you mean, how do we confront a believer that nature's beauty isn't from God? My answer: You don't. Science, Education, and Time. You'll find precious few people who are over 20 who have any inclination to willingly entertain changing their opinion on religion (present company on this website excluded). However, if you want a fun answer to the whole refuting thing... if you don't cherish your relationship with that person, you might point out how self-aggrandizing and masturbatory their worldview is...that a magical being made all of this beauty and wonder for them alone to enjoy, and that the person insists they were made in the image of a god. With luck, that'll leave them sputtering and incoherent (and as mad as a hornet, who, we all know was actually just feeling that it or its nest was being threatened). ; )

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Refute nature's beauty? and you jump to "God's Creation"? - - This video does a great job answering your question.

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It is based in Science and not Theology. Your mixing Oil with Water. Whomever God is or where he came from has nothing to add to this at all. Science has much more official documented research than religion can ever begin to muster. Anyone can be "Religious" but not all want to take the time to understand or study "Science"

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After several thousand years, I think it might not possible. In the USA, things seem to be moving backward right now. Time will tell.

The dumbing down of America is being fed by the rich, the rabid right, the religionists, the greedy, the haters, everyone who refuses to deal with facts that do not support their own agenda. Sadly, it seems to be succeeding How can you make people deal with reality, face facts, quit believing lies?

@RedRiverRogue "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink"

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Iowa?

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