Religious faith is not good

I vote for I don't know what.

Spiritual experiences or experience otherwise is the pragmatic definer of abrahamic religions or any religion for that matter. You can say that a fox must meet such and such a criteria to be a fox and still have no idea what it is to be a fox.

You talk about agreeing to interpretation of experiences. If you do not attain the state of mind that fosters certain experiences you interpret from a lack of experience, not necessarily superior experience.

They are defined culturally and esoterically.
I speak for the esoteric understanding that transcends but includes all religions. I think your take on religion is primitive or simplistic which surprises me considering all the things you say. At least in trying to limit terms to a certain perspective we are not seeking understanding at large.

'Religious faith is not good" is a thoroughly prejudicial viewpoint as you are conceiving and arguing for it. That is, religion, broadly speaking, is no more cause for ignorance than a lack of curiosity or sincerity. You can religious and studious at the same time.

Another way to state what I have said is, I am conceived by something preceding myself and I conceive as I was conceived. It is an observation that is accessible to anyone regardless of affiliation.

It is your terminology that forces you into the same arguments time and again.

 

thedope:

:-D

Verily, my fullsome words seemeth to clutter thy conception and not only the tongue of thee. lol

Ok, fine, I'll decline the refined wine of the bygone and add hair to your ears instead with my up-to-date english. -- Life is of the instant, of the universe. The instant is always new, not patterned in large ( or small ) part.

 

But most experts classify Buddhism as a religion, and some of its variants have devils and boddhisattvas. Where does the goddess Kwan yin fit in? And Hinduism is suspect? Hare Krsihna! Hare Rama! (Not to mention Kali).

So imagine a society where people (at least the governing group) had the idea that religion was a dangerous superstition that should be suppressed in favor of a secular ideology based on a "scientific" understanding of history. Would that be a religion? Would it be scary? Would it be "sane"? There are such societies, you know.

Funny. I participate weekly in three different Christian fellowship groups, and none of us have "unquestioned" belief in anything. The same thing could be said of most Progressive Christians who comprise the "mainline" Protestant denominations--a dwindling minority, but not that small. There are more of us than atheists and agnostics, and its quality that counts!

So what do you think about string theory and M theory?

 

I believe that it is the chauvinism of some religions- ie, my God is the only God, or the best God, or the true God, or the most powerful God- that causes many of the troubles usually just blamed on religion per se.

I have some very close friends who are Uniting Church lay preachers. They are sensible, sane, rational and fun people. I don't know, but I suspect that they are uncomfortable with the idea of their God being the only God.

No-one owns God. As much as anything, the faith that you espouse is as a result of the place of your birth and the religious inclination of your family.

 

Repeat after me, I see only the past and I expect the future to be like the past.
We are genetically sequenced.

 

I am addressing your premises as you state them. If you allow that religions, abrahamic or other, are defined both culturally and esoterically then it is inconsistent to say that they are defined exclusively by particular doctrine.
Arguments extended from this position then are straw man.

 

If you were to be magnanimous in your assessment you might notice that ignorance in any form is the author of suffering.

 

Gods versus supernatural beings. Is that a difference worth fussing about? Do most practicing Hindus regard their gods as mere personifications of certain cosmic notions? As a matter of fact, a number of Christian thinkers, like Marcus Borg and process theologians, are panentheists (not a misspelling) who emphasize God's immanence as well as transcendance and view God as metaphorical.

That was then and this is now. The regimes I had in mind were the Marxist-Leninist ones in North Korea, China and Cuba.

Yes I do. Every day, and twice on Sunday! I assume that much of what I believe is wrong--possibly all of it--but I do the best I can on the basis of a working hypothesis, backed by certain facts, such as the integrated complexity of the universe, conscious, intelligent life, and the teachings and example of Jesus, as do other Progressive Christians I hang with--not proof but enough to bet our lives on, pending further information.

Yes, I hope so. But I think you might have misunderstood my point. I think Progressive Christians are also a misunderstood minority, in a country that thinks all Christians are like Catholics and Evangelicals. When local Evangelicals tried to define "family" in a way that kept single mothers and gays from qualifying for YMCA membership, one of my groups stood up to them. I'm proud of that!

But they are also not empircally grounded, nor seem to have much prospect of becoming so. So why don't you think they're dangerous? It's dogmatism that matters. Not all religions are dogmatic. It would be hard to describe Marcus Borg, Bishop Spong or Robin Meyers as dogmatic. Now the atheist "Four Horsemen"--Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris seem to be pretty dogmatic. Carl Sagan and Michael Schermer--not so much.

 

Would you then, cede the point that religious faith is not good? You seem to clearly acknowledge the fact that you're only speaking in regards to certain aspects of religions and certain actions which may be caused by them. I don't think it's difficult to see that problems don't arise from faith, but from often misguided or misinterpreted dogmatic traditions. Surely you must see that while these two ideas are related, they are not one in the same, and to say that faith is not good really has no logical basis without implying a stereotype upon all people of faith, many of whom you would have no personal qualms with for their own practice of faith.

 

thedope:

I won't. I see the present too, and I love belonging to the future.

People are not posthumous.

 

When I think of the bible, the Vedas, Upanishads, Torah, and Quran, I see them all as guides to living your life. If you wish to live according to the guidelines of one of them or something else, then do it and be true to it. Most people, even myself in the past, pick and choose whatever is convenient for themselves, and throw the rest by the wayside. However, they will point their fingers at everyone else, and that is what bothers me.

A chair is a chair. Any other way you use it is not the proper way to use it. Christianity is Christianity, but everyone seems to have their own interpretation, which wouldn't be bad if it was actually based on study and intelligence. Instead they wear religion around like it is some kind of crown, as if they were elevated to religious royalty and now everyone must accept their version. Too caught up in titles and their own self-importance.

I was raised as a Christian, but they drove me away with their lack of understanding of their own book and the culture from which it came. Islam was no better. I can't be one of the chosen ones, they most likely wouldn't accept me. I could go on and on, but it's useless. It's all been said before I am quite sure.

 

Religious faith can't be defined as simply the reason why people do what religions say. Indeed I would assert that the reason people follow religion so strictly stems from their upbringing and conditioning to a certain way of thinking. Sure, you can call believing in a religion because you're brought up to believe it faith, it is, but in doing so you misrepresent faith by ignoring the truly faithful. Those who, of their own accord, come to feel and believe in their own interpretation of god. Again it seems that you're trying to use the worst case of a particular trait to generalize over the entire population of people who embody that trait.

I've rarely met anyone who takes any harmful or negative action as a direct result of their faith in god, or religion. I don't deny that there are those people, and a great number there of, but I can't believe that they represent the majority of the faithful. In my experience faith is a source of joy, happiness, beauty, and inspiration to do good for your fellow humans. I don't mean to say that one must be faithful to exhibit these qualities. I'm simply stating my observation of the people I know who truly have faith, and my own experience of it.

 

Having nothing to do with hummus and more to do with the fact that it takes time for light to travel to your location from wherever. We exist in an instant that is constantly renewed. Nothing happens in the past. Nothing happens in the future.

If we could see the space between photons it would appear as though the universe were winking on and off. Because this oscillation happens so quickly it appears a continuous unbroken scene. We supply continuity from a pool of probability. We fashion each moment anew using an established pattern, the next moment modeled on the previous with slight alterations. The world we see together is an agreement to have it so.

When you see a table you see parameters that were established long ago and that information was filed into memory that makes the basis for future selection. We do not see the table in real time as it is, we see it as we remember it. We do not notice day to day that it's color changes due to photo degradation. We do not notice from moment to moment the, dust fall.
If you were to be absent from the premises for a day and the table burned up you would have no idea the current disposition of the table. The energy that constituted table still exists but we cannot see it because it is no longer consistent in form with the established pattern.

 

Two points: Science relies on a number of postulates that are assumed rather than proven. Some of those I think most of us would accept, but they are assumptions nonetheless. We'll put aside the obvious: that there is an objective world out there that we're studying, and that the results we get back aren't the work of a mischievous spirit having fun. Science excludes the supernatural and purpose from its explanations, not because it's disproved them, but because it seems necessary to do so in order to make headway. I'd say it is the job of science to offer naturalistic explanations of phenomena. But that can limit a full understanding of the meaning of a phenomenon. Science also tends to be reductionist, which again is okay as long as scientists or their admirers remember that it's only a methodological assumption, not necessarily a true picture of reality. There is certainly a sense in which our interactions can be explained by molecular motion, neurons firing, etc., but to say that we're "nothing but" that goes beyond the bounds of legitimate scientific inference. For a particularly flagrant example, see the atheist physicist Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality, who thinks all human relations can be meaningfully reduced to his own discipline, physics. Consider trying to explain a pool game without including purpose.

Second, there are many kinds of questions that science tends not to address, because they don't lend themselves readily to the rigorous methods of science. Pending scientific results, what methods should ordinary people use to make their way in the world? Flip coins? Or take a chance on beliefs that seem plausible on the basis of the less than scientific evidence at hand. I say the latter.

But I agree that "blind faith" is bad, if that means being blind to logical inconsistencies and contradictory facts, and distrusting science and reason. Religions that are contrary to science and reason are bad. Religions that are open to both, however, aren't harmful and may do lots of good in promoting community service and ethical behavior. What religions are those? I think most mainline Protestant religions, among others. They may pay lip service to creeds, but in practice I think they're pretty open to re-interpreting them in keeping with new information.

So you're saying that the people praying to Kwan Yin or Krishna understand that these are just representations of natural forces. I find that hard to believe. In Buddhist temples I've visited in the Orient, I've been impressed by the time and devotion which worshipers pay to elaborate rituals and prayers in front of images to the Buddha. This might just be a way of focusing their minds on the dharma, but my observation is that for many it's a way of getting good karma, which amounts to little more than luck.

Pretty much the same things that Kwan yin and Krishna are metaphors of, only maybe more singular.

Progressive Christianity is a movement among Christians who distinguish themselves from evangelicals and traditional Christians, on the one hand, and liberal Chrisitans, on the other, the former being too concerned with biblical literalism, the latter being too ambivalent and wishywashy on issues of social justice. It's a very loose movement, that would include clerics like Bishop Spong and Robin Meyers, theologians like Marcus Borg and the Jesus Seminar, philosophers like Eric Reitan. When I say that I'm a Christian I mean that I try to base my life on what I regard as the core teachings and example of Jesus, especially unconditional love and acceptance of all humans, especially society's rejects. I agree with the Jesus Seminar that Jesus didn't say or do over 85% of the things the Bible says he said and did, but the rest is more than enough to go on. We reject biblical literalism, and think it misses the point. As Borg says: "The Bible should be taken seriously, but not literally." The Bible is not the "Word of God' but rather the words of men trying to understand the mystery that is God. We tend to use the historical-metaphorical approach to scripture that was pioneered by Origen in the Third Century. Thus, the sordid history of genocide, slavery, and homophobia detailed in the Pentateuch is something to be attributed to men, and not to be emulated. God is Love. The agape principle rules. That's the part we take seriously. We tend not to believe that the Bible should be treated as a science textbook. The Creation story in Genesis is an allegory. We tend to accept current scientific consensus on such matters as evolution and the Big Bang. We tend to reject the notion that being a Christian is about belief in unbelievable doctrines taken literally, like the virgin birth and the Trinity--beliefs that were forged by politics after the church was co-opted by Constantine. Like Saint Justin Martyr, we think that non-Christians can get to heaven if they're good. In fact, I think that heaven and hell are conditions we experience here on earth rather than places we go to when we die. So I would say that we have faith in the tenets we consider to be Christian. But a we certainly don't demand "proof" of them. We don't demand the impossible.

Did I say that you stated what your religious beliefs (or lack thereof) are? I don't recall doing so. Yes, the writers I mentioned are all Christians. "Proof" is something no religion can claim. I'd never claim to have proof for my beliefs. I think it's good enough that they aren't contrary to science, reason and available evidence, that I have substantial evidence for them, and that I'm willing to take the consequences of holding them. I think the Christian writers I mentioned would say the same.

Science is dogma free, but alas the same can't always be said of scientists, especially when they get involved in issues outside the scope of their disciplines. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are scientists, and also militant atheists who show not a trace of open-mindedness on the subject. That, in my book, is dogmatic. Dawkins, especially, is also pretty aggressive when it comes to anyone within his field who challenges orthodoxy on such matters as the process of evolution. For example, he had a cow when fellow evolutionist and atheist, E.O. Wilson, dared to propose, on the basis of his research, a model of human evolutionary development that incorporated the band and kin, instead of purely kin, as units for natural selection. Heresy, pure and simple!

Amen! and thanks for your apology on long quotes, but I have no standing to complain.

 

We are The Borg, Resistance is Futile..