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10th December 2018, 05:00 AM | #201 |
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10th December 2018, 05:18 AM | #202 |
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It is amazing what people will believe. Part of it is familiarity I think. If you are told your whole life that some guy rose from the dead (and not in a zombie movie) you're just so used to it that your sense of incredulity has been drained.
On the question of life after death, there is some crossover. There are religious people who don't believe all the dogma, and people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious who, for example, don't believe in Jesus's superpowers but do believe in life after death. |
10th December 2018, 05:46 AM | #203 |
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10th December 2018, 09:00 AM | #204 |
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Improved living conditions are very different from "fashion". And increasing science does conflict with religion. There is evidence that people who learn science, the sciences of nature in particular, tend to become irreligious, first and foremost the biologists. People who don't benefit from science at all are more likely to remain religious. The science that you don't know doesn't conflict with your religion ... much ... However, the generations that witnessed the difference that vaccines made didn't need any scientific insight to find out that modern medicine actually delivers when prayers don't. Things like that change the world view even of people who are more or less excluded from real learning by a stupid educational system based on competition rather than on the intention to educate everybody properly. So the trend is that poor people remain uneducated and religious, and the well-to-do lose the need for the opium of the people as well as the ignorance that also helped make people religious in the past. It's no wonder that the Jehovah's Witnesses are suspicious of education beyond high school ... |
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/dann "Stupidity renders itself invisible by assuming very large proportions. Completely unreasonable claims are irrefutable. Ni-en-leh pointed out that a philosopher might get into trouble by claiming that two times two makes five, but he does not risk much by claiming that two times two makes shoe polish." B. Brecht "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions." K. Marx |
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10th December 2018, 09:18 AM | #205 |
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People discard old exploded knowledge and beliefs all the time. It doesn't have much to do with familiarity if it doesn't serve any purpose. In church people seem to fulfill a need to belong - in particular in a competitive society like the USA. In Denmark, people tend to join secularized voluntary associations instead. (Danish atheists have come up with "godless Thursdays," but I don't really see the point: I'm godless all week and don't feel the need to confirm it.) |
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/dann "Stupidity renders itself invisible by assuming very large proportions. Completely unreasonable claims are irrefutable. Ni-en-leh pointed out that a philosopher might get into trouble by claiming that two times two makes five, but he does not risk much by claiming that two times two makes shoe polish." B. Brecht "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions." K. Marx |
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10th December 2018, 09:46 AM | #206 |
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I may have told this anecdote before, but in case I haven't: In the mid-1990s I was in Louisiana with a group English teachers from Denmark. We spent the first week in Shreveport at the Centenary College, which was associated with Aarhus Universitet, and for this reason, some of their teachers had spent several months in Aarhus, so they knew all about the relaxed Danish attitude to religion. One of them, a Southern Baptist, told us that we might think that we understood the U.S. American attitude to religion, but warned us that we probably didn't. She was in the process of selling her house and told us that one prospective buyer, an elderly man, had said that he was interested in buying it, but he would go home and discuss it with God. Then she said, "You think that it's just a saying. What you don't understand is that this is actually what he does." And she was right, of course: The idea was totally alien to us! |
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/dann "Stupidity renders itself invisible by assuming very large proportions. Completely unreasonable claims are irrefutable. Ni-en-leh pointed out that a philosopher might get into trouble by claiming that two times two makes five, but he does not risk much by claiming that two times two makes shoe polish." B. Brecht "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions." K. Marx |
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10th December 2018, 10:46 AM | #207 |
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Suffering is not a punishment not a fruit of sin, it is a gift of God. He allows us to share in His suffering and to make up for the sins of the world. -Mother Teresa If I had a pet panda I would name it Snowflake. |
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10th December 2018, 10:47 AM | #208 |
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I don't necessarily disagree, but let me note that what you are describing is not what I meant by "increasing science leads to increasing conflict with religion", the meaning of which I described elsewhere: specific scientific advancements resulting in disproving specific dogma. That a secular education and a general mood that science advances generally 'disprove' religion generally is a separate and worthy question. Anyway, good discussion!
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10th December 2018, 10:56 AM | #209 |
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You can't paint all Christians with such a broad brush. For the Catholics it is not symbolic, but actual body and blood. Transubstantiation has got to be one of the weirdest concepts in religion and I find that most Catholics have very little grasp on it.
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Suffering is not a punishment not a fruit of sin, it is a gift of God. He allows us to share in His suffering and to make up for the sins of the world. -Mother Teresa If I had a pet panda I would name it Snowflake. |
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10th December 2018, 11:09 AM | #210 |
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"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" -Mark Twain "Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all" -Rosencrantz, on Hamlet |
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10th December 2018, 11:15 AM | #211 |
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"Okay so I did the math. A communion wafer is about 10 grams. An average adult is about 150 lbs. So that's about 6,800 wafers to make up one Jesus. You get one wafer every Sunday so it would take you 6,800 weeks, so playing by the rules it would take about 520 years of Communion to get one full Jesus..."
*Priest from behind the curtain interrupts me* "Like I told you last week... kinda weird, not really a sin." |
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10th December 2018, 11:23 AM | #212 |
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I was goping to watch this thread from the sidelines, but then we got this:
I see.
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History for Atheists - New Atheism and Myths About History |
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10th December 2018, 11:36 AM | #213 |
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10th December 2018, 11:38 AM | #214 |
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No it's magic cannibalism which is totally different.
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"If everyone in the room says water is wet and I say it's dry that makes me smart because at least I'm thinking for myself!" - The Proudly Wrong. |
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10th December 2018, 12:47 PM | #215 |
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This is probably the most pathetic responding post you have made thus far, and the bar has been set very low. You will gain more respect if you just admit your mistake and move on, rather than go on in this manner. Making up stuff about what I am implying, without anything to back it up, just to round the post off. Yes good one. |
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10th December 2018, 12:48 PM | #216 |
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"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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10th December 2018, 01:01 PM | #217 |
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Thinking is a faith hazard. |
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10th December 2018, 01:02 PM | #218 |
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I don't think I ever really believed Christianity, but I never completely lost the concept of God, either. The above statement can still give me goosebumps, and I don't try to reason my way out of that reaction. Sure, it's probably readily explained by human beings developing some kind of adaptive sense of reciprocity. There's still something "sacred" about it. But then some guys think they're doing sacred acts when they live-stream snuff films of someone's head being chopped off. It's so subjective. I think, surely these people aren't getting it right?
Skepticism seemed like my default, but it didn't leads me to atheism. It led to being irreligious, because all these god beliefs could not possibly be true. The above example is extreme, but even just different strains of Christianity had such divergent claims. I couldn't envision how resurrection, for example, was supposed to work. I dated a guy on match.com who said he knew he'd see his late wife in heaven, which I felt was going to be pretty awkward for him if he'd hooked up with someone else on the Internet. He seemed like a normal guy, nice guy, rational etc. and it took me aback to realize he literally believed it. My own nebulous beliefs probably require their own cognitive dissonance, but not as much as an actual religion would. |
10th December 2018, 01:08 PM | #219 |
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For specific items, yes, of course. You can't both think thunder is Thor's chariot AND that it is a meteorological phenomenon. But that is not the point. The point in the OP, which was what I responded to, was whether you can both maintain a religious stance and work with science. And of course you can. Just don't apply religion to falsifiable phenomenon, and vice versa.
So, the two may be counterpoints, but they are not mutually exclusive. Most human's lives are full of counterpoints. Hans |
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10th December 2018, 01:09 PM | #220 |
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Suffering is not a punishment not a fruit of sin, it is a gift of God. He allows us to share in His suffering and to make up for the sins of the world. -Mother Teresa If I had a pet panda I would name it Snowflake. |
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10th December 2018, 01:09 PM | #221 |
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Hi GDon. Thanks for the kind reply and question. (Hard to keep up with the thread here). Some of the major tension has arisen from recognizing how skeptical I am of other religions (or even other Christian groups who profess and express their faith very differently than I do). I've realized that I was not applying similar critical thinking about my own faith and community. For example I've long been skeptical of TV faith healers, but enthusiastically and expectantly prayed for members of my own community. For me, those are still different on many levels, but when someone from my community started acting a speaking a lot like someone on TV, it triggered some tension. Similarly, I've appreciated hearing leaders speak/preach about passages from the bible they find particularly uplifting or challenging in a positive way, but when a recent young leader got up to preach and mimicked the tone, intonation, and content of the more experienced leaders, it struck me as very ingenuous. But it also made me aware of times I had done the same sort of thing, parroting someone else's "lessons" or "insights" without much critical thought, and that created some tension for me as well. I feel tension now when people start sentences with "God says ..." or "I believe the word of God for you is ...", whereas I welcomed that sort of talk (from certain people) in the past. I feel tension regarding the exclusivity of certain claims and language too. For example, "salvation is through Christ". If by that someone means "if you repeat this prayer after me you will go to heaven when you die" (as per my upbringing), I can't accept that. However, if someone means, "Jesus' example was one of compassion and selflessness that was ahead of its time, and through which we have a chance to perceive and pursue something divine", I still have faith for that.
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10th December 2018, 01:28 PM | #222 |
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@ attempt5001 - Would you still believe in your particular god if there was no New Testament with it’s stories of Jesus? In other words, is your Jesus belief necessary for your God belief?
ETA - If you believe Jesus is God materially revealed, would you still believe in your God if you didn't believe it had revealed itself materially as Jesus? (hope that's not too convoluted to follow ) |
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10th December 2018, 01:29 PM | #223 |
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hi Egg (fun name). Thanks for the welcome. Thinking more about miracles is definitely on my "to do" list. Even a lot of the things we can now explore scientifically seem pretty miraculous to me to be honest, though ynot will correctly point out that this is a conflict of terms, and others will likely contend that depends on one's perspective (much to the former's frustration). When you mention the incompatibility of miracles and justice, do you mean "how could a just God perform a miracle to, for example, save one person's life, while remaining inactive while another dies"? If I understand you well, I can relate to that challenge. I think faith necessitates letting go of the demand to understand everything, but that's still a hard one.
As for my background, I grew up in a tired, but pleasant old Anglican church in a small town, but changed over to a more lively group in my late teens. Sort of a non-denominational group, quite adherent to the bible, but if you surveyed the members you'd get a broad spectrum of literal/methaphorical interpretations of scripture. Even the leadership was fairly adaptive (by religious standards), although they maintain a literal interpretation of things like miracles and Christian religion being the "one true faith". Speaking in tongues and prophecy are common occurrences in the Sunday meetings and the music is loud and upbeat if that's helpful for context. |
10th December 2018, 01:40 PM | #224 |
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Hi kellyb. Really appreciate your honest and open post and I can definitely identify with pretty much all of what you have experienced (and are still experiencing), right down to the quote from Matthew 25. It's helpful and encouraging to hear it. I feel like I've swung the faith pendulum pretty far away from faith over the last few years and I do find it settling somewhere more in-between for me than what you describe, but I am still evaluating "neural networks" (very apt) and the resulting psychology as I work things through.
If you don't mind me asking, did you have friends/family you could talk about this with? Was it difficult? Thanks again for your post. |
10th December 2018, 02:05 PM | #225 |
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Paranormal/supernatural beliefs are knowledge placebos. Rumours of a god’s existence have been greatly exaggerated. Make beliefs truths and you get make-believe truths. |
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10th December 2018, 02:14 PM | #226 |
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Hi P.J.,
Okay, I'll give it a shot and will try to keep up with the discussion, though I'm struggling a bit already. I believe that the biblical accounts of Jesus life are more than works of fiction (or deliberate attempts to deceive) and that they chronicled teachings and examples that the world would do well to emulate. I think they highlight a universal human tension between a desire to be selfless, and an inclination to be selfish. I also think the people who saw and lived with Jesus tried to chronicle those events and could honestly not explain how he did what he did, and so attributed miracles to him as a result. As such, I believe that Jesus was an indicator that humans are more than the sum of their biological parts, and that he allowed us to see our potential to realize that more. Not sure if that's quite what you were looking for (fairly nebulous I know), but a starting point for more discussion maybe. Cheers! |
10th December 2018, 02:25 PM | #227 |
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Hi ynot. I definitely follow (and appreciate) the question. Am considering it as I type here. ... It's hard for me to "picture" God outside of the context of Jesus, so the thought exercise is a little disorienting. I'm trying to consider whether just seeing people being loving, compassionate, kind ... to each other would be enough to lead me to believe in God. I'll think about it further, but I think those things, coupled with the accounts of Jesus lead me to believe in God, whereas either one without the other might be insufficient.
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10th December 2018, 03:24 PM | #228 |
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Thanks. I guess if you believe your Jesus is a material version of your immaterial God then I can see it kinda making some sense (at a very loooong stretch ). Not sure if it’s correct, but I’ve assumed you were born and indoctrinated into your religious beliefs, so I guess we’re talking about you being in a position of questioning and retaining those beliefs rather than how they were first formed. In the process I trust (have faith ) that you have the intellectual honesty do so without wearing rose-tinted glasses.
I realise that your purpose is to evaluate and not necessarily to abandon, but I’ve been amazed how long it takes some to abandon their god belief (10 years plus in some cases). Another thing that has amazed me is that even when some stop believing in their god they’re still frighten as hell by the prospect of going to a hell. A form of reverse cognitive dissonance, the residual power of strong belief, or an irrational phobia? ETA – I guess another question that follows from my previous is – If there was no bible at all, would you still believe? I guess this question is purely rhetorical as it’s impossible to say what might have happened in different circumstances. These are the types of questions I would ask myself if I was in your position however. |
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Paranormal/supernatural beliefs are knowledge placebos. Rumours of a god’s existence have been greatly exaggerated. Make beliefs truths and you get make-believe truths. |
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10th December 2018, 03:40 PM | #229 |
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No, I just posted a lot here. https://www.ex-christian.net/
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"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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10th December 2018, 04:27 PM | #230 |
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10th December 2018, 05:42 PM | #231 |
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I've quoted two posts here because I found your other answer really interesting. While I appreciate keeping up must be getting difficult I hope you can take solace in the fact that so many people are finding your posts so interesting! Maybe you could roll up responses to several people into one to save time?
Reading what you've written what strikes me is you seem to be describing a society and a moral philosophy rather than anything unequivocally 'theistic', leaving aside that we're talking about religious figures and the Bible, the fact that you respond well to people who are sincere or to well chosen and appropriate passages, and badly to insincere people and "cookie cutter quotations" seems pretty reasonable to me! Similarly -:
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As far as everything thus far goes everything seems sensible and basically part and parcel of being a well intentioned part of a well functioning social group. My follow on question (if I may) would really focus on a few words-: When you prayed for sick members of your community did you/do you believe that the prayers could lead to a supernatural cure or did you see it as a way for the community to express their support for that person? Do you believe in a literal Heaven? When you say "something divine" and "humans are more than the sum of their biological parts" do you mean something supernatural, or as I'd interpret it in most contexts, our ability to form social groups and societies based on mutual benefit rather than naked self interest? |
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10th December 2018, 06:03 PM | #232 |
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Paranormal/supernatural beliefs are knowledge placebos. Rumours of a god’s existence have been greatly exaggerated. Make beliefs truths and you get make-believe truths. |
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10th December 2018, 06:39 PM | #233 |
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I've noticed (not from you, per se) that even a lot of non-believers really want Jesus to be the nice guy that we were all taught he was/is. For example, it is frequently mentioned that Jesus is not quoted as having said anything about homosexuality. And surely he would have, if it displeases him/God as much as we are told.
A closer reading of the new testament lead me to say "maybe not so perfectly nice as all that". For example, Jesus apparently had no problemo with the number of people who would be going to hell for their non-belief. There are other examples, if you read the gospels with a critical eye, rather than letting them just wash over you. |
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10th December 2018, 06:58 PM | #234 |
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Thinking in terms of miracles as defined as breaking the natural order in a physical way (as opposed to wonder). So, yep, the kind of thinking of the lone survivor of a plane crash or something preventing them getting on that plane. But I think that extends to the general idea of God blessing some people - the wealthy person saying "I'm so blessed" or the winner of a football match - it may sound like humility in that they're not ascribing it to their own work/ability, but actually they're suggesting they are favoured by a god who can and does act in the world, blessing some and not others. And doesn't it then follow that those who are disadvantaged in life somehow deserve their fate?
Similarly, the genie kind of god that grants prayers like wishes if only you just pray enough, believe the right things or repent in the right way. In terms of what this actually looks like in the real world, it all really looks pretty arbitrary. And maybe the position of faith that God knows and sees a far bigger picture is as valid a response as rejecting such concepts of God as not reflecting love and justice.
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"That's the thing with eggs: It's all about chicks and getting laid." - Wuschel "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg" - Samuel Butler “When arguing with a stone an egg is always wrong” - African proverb “A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked” - Bernard Meltzer |
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10th December 2018, 07:34 PM | #235 |
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By far, the easiest person to fool is yourself and I think the best advice a critical thinker gave to me was always have the presents of mind to say "I don't know", rather than believe something on bad or no evidence.
So instead of trying to find good reasons for an existing belief you may hold but admit to not (currently) having enough evidence, try to drop the belief and say I Don't Know, then take the claim and investigate and see if the evidence warrants belief, and if it doesn't then you stick with I Don't Know. |
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10th December 2018, 09:06 PM | #236 |
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"There but for the grace of God go I" is a particularly peculiar example of this. Like, too bad God's grace didn't apply to the poor schmuck you're comparing yourself to.
People probably mean well when they say these things though. It's just another way of saying, "I was lucky." |
10th December 2018, 09:12 PM | #237 |
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attempt5001,
Here is a piece of plywood lying on the ground. The length represents theism/non-theism, the width is knowledge/non-knowledge, (gnosticism/agnosticism). Let's make strong theism the far end of the plywood. Strong atheism is one at the near end. (A strong atheist says "I see evidence that god doesn't exist," and a non-strong one says "I don't see evidence that god does exist.") Gnosticism is on the left edge of the plywood; agnosticism on the right edge. In between are degrees of knowledge. We can place people in varying locations on the surface of the plywood, depending on their belief/faith/certainty. The two men I mentioned in a previous post are both gnostic theists, standing at the far left corner. They each have a strongly held belief in their (version of) Christianity and they each KNOW it is correct -- and that the other's version is wrong. You have begun to move from that corner of the plywood; you need to measure the distance of that movement, and not be afraid of the journey. Honest doubt and honest questioning can't be wrong, no matter what a religion or its adherents say. Incidentally, to answer a question that you asked about those incidents, I told each of them that I would not discuss religion and would not accept their proselytizing. I had to reiterate that multiple times. The one who is still my friend will forget now and again, and I'll say, "You're doing it again!" He laughs, and stops doing it. |
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Over we go.... |
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10th December 2018, 09:22 PM | #238 |
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It's a nuance on a knife's edge, Minoosh.
Some people are inspired to help others because they recognise that it could just have easily been them in that position or even that some divine power has put you in such a position where it's your duty to help those less fortunate. But also tempting to reason that if they're being punished then you're upsetting the balance of things or opposing divine will to lessen that punishment. |
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"That's the thing with eggs: It's all about chicks and getting laid." - Wuschel "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg" - Samuel Butler “When arguing with a stone an egg is always wrong” - African proverb “A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked” - Bernard Meltzer |
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11th December 2018, 12:49 AM | #239 |
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Thank you for your kind response. I don't know if I'm talking to O'Neill1 or an alias. I guess it's the real O'Neill because he gets really angry because I told him I don't like his blog. I don't like it. What can you do? You should endure the criticism with more stoicism.
I don't consider you an atheist. I use the traditional sense of the word: an atheist is one who claims that gods do not exist. I would call you an agnostic: neither affirm nor deny. From what I've seen, you prefer the Internet terminology, according to which an atheist is the one who does not believe in God; that is, he is not defined by what he affirms or denies, but by what he believes. Something more confusing. Okay, but then you would be an agnostic atheist, as you call them. It seems that what bothers you about atheists or Gnostic atheists, new atheists or whatever you want to call them, is that they are "aggressive" in matters of religion. They don't limit themselves to a passive-defensive attitude. So, if you attack atheists with arguments similar to theists, you run the risk of being confused with one of them. That's why, among other things, I don't like your blog. Okay, maybe "link" wasn't the right word. I meant that Copernicus did not directly confront the Catholic hierarchy and the scholastic --he even use some Aristotelian concepts to calm the church-- because he took care not to disturb them too much by delaying the publication of his work on the solar system until he was about to die. Luther's attacks are not there to reassure. He benefited from a time when the attitude of the Catholic Church was a little more tolerant than it later was. It happened with Galileo as well. But already at the time of his death the harsh persecution that was to come later was expected, which caused Osiander --perhaps-- to publish a conciliatory prologue saying that heliocentrism was a mere speculative hypothesis. What it was not. I hope that in your demystifying eagerness you don't want to "demystify" also by denying that Copernicanism was persecuted from the 16th century onwards. Or that the church's attitude face to heliocentrism was criminal. By the way, the position of second Humanism in front of the Church was more less disturbing that the Nuova Scienza, you know. Gibbon and Sagan don't look very impressive to me as a bible on Hipatia. I haven't read much about this woman, but I would recommend Maria Dzielska: Hypatia of Alexandria, which you can find at Archive.org. It is not a very well known book -in Spain at least-, but it is seriously documented and relatively recent. You will find it "demystifying" for sure. However, even if you demystify the Volterian version of Hypatia, you cannot deny that she was an enlightened woman barbarously murdered by the most savage Christian fundamentalism. Indeed, atheism has its myths, like any other way of thinking. The problem with obsessing over them, as seems to be your case, is that you leave intact the myths of the other side that are far worse. Amenábar’s film you quote -Agora- was historically unsustainable and ideologically weak on some points, but its defence of freedom of thought against intolerance seems to me rather more sympathetic than religious intransigence. Isn't it the same for you? |
11th December 2018, 01:28 AM | #240 |
Thinker
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 142
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What? I've been posting here on and off under this profile for almost a decade. Why would this be an "alias"? You have some very strange and irrational ideas about many things.
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Why do people like you think they can bluff and bluster their way through this stuff?
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History for Atheists - New Atheism and Myths About History |
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