Religious faith is not good

No defense necessary, not to me. I agree and already know where you're coming from!!

 

I too agree with your premise thus far.

 

If religious faith envelopes every aspect of your life - that is unhealthy.
It can lead to - at best - intolerance, and at worst, fanaticism, and possibly violence.

Thankfully, for the vast majority of people, it does not envelope every aspect of their life.
It is one aspect amongst many.
I personally do not waste any part of my life wondering: "What would ____ say?"
I can appreciate the colossal waste of time and energy it does take up, though.

Given the current debacle regarding http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19678412 I can see how this seems to be true:
...eats away at the present day rational structure of the modern world by undermining our thought processes and making us unable to differentiate between sound and unsound reasoning.

Thankfully 7 billion people are not like that.

 

Ok.

 

All religious faiths have their plus and negatives.

I don't believe its the religions that are bad. I think its those who are too closed minded within those religions that are bad.

 

I had thought about how prevalent stoney faced 100% adherence to religion there is in this world.
While there are, indeed, a vast amount of religious people, they are not all strict adherents to it, and most can departmentalise.
The vast majority have other things in their lives to contend with other than their religion: money, family, work, health etc.

The vast majority don't:

...take great offense to anyone that dares to criticize them.
...actively promote their beliefs, and condemn those who don't agree.
...and, nowadays, most don't: torture non-believers, and burn them alive.

I do appreciate some are not liberal and tolerant. That's a shame.
But if people did not move frwd then wouldn't we be in the dark ages still?
Perhaps faith has informed societies renaisance!

The fact somebody has faith, doesn't automatically make them of unsound mind, and not open to reason in many aspects of life, imho.

I do accept that with out religion the world would be a very different place, and who knows what it would look/be like!
Perhaps stem cell research would have created aqua men/women or made us all 8ft giants able to live for 300 years.
Abortion would be used as birth control by all, and we'd all be having sex with family members.
What an amazing society that would be

In all seriousness, it does make my mind bend that faith is such a ingrained part of our lives - whether we believe or not.
It does make my mind bend we have partisan politics.
I'd really like if it (religion/politics) was not such a big part of peoples lives.
It would be awesome.
There must be some reason that it is, though.
There must be a fundemental reason the world hasn't woken up one morning and thought: why on earth believe all of this crap, seriously.
It must add some structure to our world, surely.
It must make us sane.
I'm not sure.

 

It's fortunate that pure rationality is impossible, because it is also undesirable.

 

western religions have no sense of proportion.

what i would call "western" religions, what are sometimes called aramaic religions, or abrihamic religions; judaism, christianity and islam, deliberately misrepresent naturalness. in order to support their claim of the superiority of unnaturalness.

none of which has the least to do with the actual existence or non-existence of any unseen thing.

unity is a fine and wonderful thing.
in many ways it is like love, which is to say, infinitely superior to the lack there of. but not, i fear, "ALL you need".

unity is a fine and wonderful solution. unfortunately, it is a wonderful solution to the wrong problem.

money and money based economics is also. as is violent force and the threat of violent force. nor is there any truth that one or the other or some combination of these, are the limits of human capacity, even statistically, or in total.

it is one of those things, everyone knows, that is wrong. just like the lie, that unnaturalness in inherently superior to naturalness, replacing the truth, that imagination is not only superior to the lack of it, but the only thing, that made the rise of sapience possible.

their biggest problem though, is their complete lack of any sense of proportion.

there is stil one other, and that is the paradox of chastity. the claim that it is the cause of peace, when in fact, it is the cause elevated levels of ambient aggressiveness which make warfare possible.
paradox of course, because the lack of it creates a population problem, which also results in motivations for conflict.

all of these problems have their root in the claim of the superiority of unnaturalness. a claim advanced solely to justify, the completely material robbery and desecration of otherwise peaceful cultures, susceptible only to such attack, for reasons of completely material greed.

this is the history of "conquest" which the western study of history praises as virtue and points to as if it were a matter of pride, denying utterly, that conquest is simply the other surface of the same coin of invasion.

in the physical world, infrastructure is a good thing, it is the artery as it were, of what is often inaccurately referred to as civilization. it is even claimed as another justification for invasion and conquest, when the reality is, that violent conflict destroys infrastructure, deliberately targeting it, as it does also civilian lives.

western religions preach honesty, while practicing these extremes of dishonesty,

they motivate the desire for peace, that much may be true, but they do so by at the same time creating the conditions, which are the only reason, peace of any kind, has ever not existed.

that being said, i would point out however, that name brand beliefs, either of the west or of the east, are not the spectrum of faith. it is perfectly possible instead, to be kind to the mostly harmless little spirits the wiser of our ancestors loved and appreciated.

 

Religions have much more profound negative sides.

 

more like misrepresented and misunderstood. nothing that has been called that ever has been. i wouldn't call anything impossible, just extremely unlikely. infallibility of anything, falling into the same category.

 

I think that faith has a certain beauty when it is done silently and without arrogance.

Religion should really be about breaking free of the ego and discovering something greater than oneself.

Unfortunately people take ego right into their religion.

 

I must admit, I dont automatically see that as a bad thing. The present day 'structure' (If indeed it can be called that) is pretty fucked up.


I'm also not sure I agree that religious faith is the cause of all (or most) of the worlds problems. Thats a very simplistic, catch-all type of claim. It seems to me that everyone believes things that arent true, its when people start adopting an 'us and them' type of tribal attitude that problems arise.

I used to agree with you totally, I even read a lot of Dawkins books. But lately, I find my atheism evolving into a slightly less judgemental and severe agnosticism.

 

This one^

This is a pretty broad generalization about faith. I don't think it's logical to say that most of the trouble in the world is caused by people believing irrational things. I would go so far as to say that most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting only for their own pleasure and not caring about anyone else.

That's not to say that there aren't problems caused by irrational following of ideas simply because they're contained withing a religious doctrine. There are. The route of the problem lies in excess faith in the petty stipulations of religions which have largely been sculpted through history by the greed of the people in charge. It doesn't lie in faith itself.

A person who is truly faithful in a higher power needs not be a person who is indoctrinated within a particular religion and its specific stipulations, ready to follow any word in the book simply because it's written there. Real faith has very little to do with this. Real faith is not a concept which can be explained in logical terms, much like love. It's a feeling that washes through you and overwhelms you and makes you completely sure. There's no need to prove logically what you feel to anyone.

This is the confounding variable in the discussion for those who don't feel or understand real faith, and it's the reason that people who are bounded strictly in rational thought scoff at the idea of faith, because it can't be proven to them in numbers and words. Another grave mistake of the strictly rational mind is that along with the necessity of falsifiability in research there comes a tendency to dismiss any idea which is not falsifiable in experimentation as being automatically false.

The truth is however, is that some things, indeed most things probably, go way over our heads. There's absolutely no reason to think that the human mind is the ultimate force of understanding, capable of reducing all the cosmos to simple formulas and theorems. In fact I find it much easier to believe that existence is not entirely understandable. Nothing can be absolutely proven.

I firmly believe that the best a person can do in a quest for understanding is to open their mind to all ideas and all perspectives and all experience. The greatest downfall I've seen in some of the most intelligent people I know is that they are completely sure of themselves on all matters.

My point in all of this is, don't dismiss the idea of faith because of the practice. People will ruin everything in practice. That's human nature. Look at the bright side of things and in that way assimilate all ideas as best you can to form a deeper and more meaningful understanding of everything.

 

I believe you've misunderstood some of what I said. Falsifiability is not the act of falsifying something, it's an underlying idea in the scientific method that says that a study doesn't have scientific merit unless it's made in such a way as to make it possible to prove the hypothesis wrong. This is the basis upon which all science is built, and it's necessary in order to draw conclusions from experimentation.

The problem is that since no experiment which is not falsifiable is acceptable for drawing an accurate scientific conclusion, the assumption becomes that all things which cannot be put into a falsifiable experiment to be proven logically must be false. This assumption is not correct.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

The things you referenced as faith(sun rising etc..) are what I was talking about as information which can be proven through a falsifiable experiment. There needs be no faith when something can be proven scientifically. Faith as I understand it is a conclusion drawn from a place which is not based in science and logical reasoning. It's based in personal experience. Faith is not transferred from person to person, it must be experienced personally for it to truly exist.

You say that you don't mean to scoff at religion, but you use the worst example of faith as your main definition. That in itself shows me that you seem to have a general dismissive attitude towards all things religious. Certainly it's ridiculous for people to squabble over whose god is the right one. The people who are caught up in this kind of pointless argument are not the ones with true faith which comes from within. These are the people who were brought up to believe that their religion is absolute and superior to all others.

You cannot define something by it's least worthy example and expect to prove any point against it. To make any generalization about faith you must look to the people with true faith. The people who know and feel god, not because they were told to or because they read a book, but because they cannot help it, because it overtakes them and removes all doubt; this is the person you must look to. In this person you don't see any direct affront to logic reasoning. Indeed the tendency is more towards a desperate attempt to define in logical terms that feeling of god, and in time an acceptance that regardless of the availability of terms in which to define the feeling, it does exist and it can never be taken away, no matter how hard people may try to.

I don't mean to try to persuade you to believe in god. I would only want that you could open your mind to the possibility that those people who speak from the heart about feeling or experiencing god, and thus having the utmost faith in it, are not simply lying to you because they want you to convert to their religion or because they revel in being obviously irrational. I find it much easier to assume that a person with real faith in their own idea of god has that faith for a good reason, even though they may not be able to explain it accurately using the english language.

If you assume that all things must be able to be proven logically then you limit your understanding of everything to that which is measurable with tools and units, and in common conventions. Surely for practical matters, this is the important type of understanding. To even think on philosophical matters, however, one must adopt a much broader means of measure which encompasses the realm of thought and spirit. In this attempt to understand, we surpass what is feasible for human conventions to define. If a person feels a certain thing, there's no need for him to prove that he feels it, and clearly there is no way.

Not a person in the world could scientifically prove that love exists. We can examine brain patterns and biological factors in people who we consider to feel love by some qualitative measure, but to prove the existence of love goes beyond science. That said, you'd have a hard time trying to convince a person who has felt true love that it doesn't exist. Just like you would have a hard time convincing someone who hasn't felt it that it does exist, or explaining it to them.

Faith works in the very same way. It must be felt, not defined. Thus it operates on a level which is not falsifiable, and people assume that it is a useless idea because of that. What I would like to express is that to dismiss this idea of faith right off the bat because it's not based in science is to close yourself off to it, and to deprive yourself of the valuable insight, knowledge, and experience which can come with it.