Is faith realistic?

[Slypork]

In this (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9236615&postcount=155) post, Der Trihs makes a couple interesting statements:
Faith makes wisdom impossible, in the areas it touches on. Faith cripples the mind. And you can't get knowledge from faith; it's empty. It has no way of giving you knowledge; it's just a guess combined with denial.

Not if you trust faith you don't. Faith is immensely arrogant. Faith denies reality, denies the arguments of others, denies everything but your egocentric fantasy of what the world is. Nothing could be more arrogant than faith.

You cannot, by definition, have an open mind on something you have faith in.

And a faith based belief is never better than any other wild guess, with the difference that the guesser will refuse to change his or her guess as the facts come in. THAT is "why not".
I realize that in this context he is talking about “faith” when it comes to belief in a deity. However, what about other definitions of faith? I have faith in my wife that she loves me and would not have an affair (be “unfaithful”). I have faith in my friends and know I can trust them to be there when I am in need just as they can count on me.

I have no proof that my wife won’t stray, just a feeling based on my experiences with her over the years. The same for my friends.

Could I misplace my faith? Sure. I’ve trusted people, put my faith in them, only to have them hurt me.

But I don’t see as many negatives and limitations to faith as Der Trihs does. I believe that my faith in my relationships makes me stronger because I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to others, to count on them and let them know they can count on me. I don’t see it as a flaw or fault but as a strength.

Is having faith, whether it is in a person, your country, your religion or your belief in the sanctity of life or whatever an unrealistic attitude? Are beliefs a negative? Should we rely only on what we can prove with logic and evidence or is it OK to trust in things that we feel?

[BrainGlutton]

I have no proof that my wife won’t stray, just a feeling based on my experiences with her over the years. The same for my friends.

You have no proof, in that sense, that the sun will rise tomorrow (as David Hume pointed out), but it's still not unreasonable to make plans based on that assumption. Faith in supernatural matters is fundamentally different.

[vivalostwages]

I believe DT was speaking solely of religious faith.
There are other types of faith, as you pointed out. Faith can also be construed as hope, trust, and being able to depend on others (or at least wanting to). We can also have faith in ourselves, as in self-confidence.
Can we be disappointed and hurt by others and crushed when we fail? Of course. But faith/hope gives us a reason to go on, to keep trying, to fall in love again, and so on.

IMHO.

[Lightnin']

I have faith in my wife that she loves me and would not have an affair (be “unfaithful”). I have faith in my friends and know I can trust them to be there when I am in need just as they can count on me.


Actually, I'd say the examples you gave aren't faith, so much as they are examples of trust. You trust in your wife and your friends because they have demonstrated themselves to be trustworthy in the past.

Faith is, in my experience, blind belief. Trust is something which is earned and demonstrated.

[MEBuckner]

"Faith", in a religious context, seems to be an awfully slipperly concept; different Christians seem to use it in very different ways. It actually seems to be the more theologically liberal believers who are fond of using "faith" to mean "substitute for evidence" ("Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.") "Well, that's just a question of faith; evidence doesn't have anything to do with it." The more "fundamentalist" believers actually are sometimes more willing to offer up evidence or arguments for why one should believe. Maybe not good arguments, but it's still better than pure fideism.

"Faith" in a non-religious context invariably winds up meaning trust or belief as a result of evidence. A man has faith in his wife based on, as the OP says, years of experience: That whole bit with her telling him she loves him, agreeing to marry him, maybe bearing his children, spending years treating him as if she loves him, giving repeated evidence of happiness at being with him, etc.

People who have "faith" that other people love them without any evidence to back it up will likely become the subjects of restraining orders.

Note that I'm talking about "evidence" here. "Proof" is something you only find in geometry textbooks. And of course evidence-based conclusions are always to some extent tentative. If you prove a geometric theorem, assuming you didn't commit any fallacies, that's that. (Someone else can come along later and prove some other conclusion based on other premises, but the original proofs still hold true and will always hold true for the premises they were based on.) Conclusions based on evidence, on the other hand, may always be subject to revision--Lots of people have had faith in other people which has turned out to be misplaced.

[kanicbird]

You have no proof, in that sense, that the sun will rise tomorrow (as David Hume pointed out), but it's still not unreasonable to make plans based on that assumption. Faith in supernatural matters is fundamentally different.

Well I'd agree that is a bit different when you include the supernatural, but assuming that some of you don't beleive in the supernatural it becomes the same. You trust in it because it has a past history that you trust. In matters of God we have a multi 1000 year record that it does work.

[Der Trihs]

In matters of God we have a multi 1000 year record that it does work.Hardly; we havre a multi thousand year history of complete failure.

To the OP : Trust in other people, or in anything else that you have evidence that lets you predict them isn't faith. Neither are opinions or desires; for example, I consider human freedom desirable, and I require neither proof nor faith for that. It's an axiom of mine; I make that assertion, and I don't particularly care if there's some moral absolute that agrees.

Faith is about making assertions for matters of fact for which you have no evidence.

[ITR champion]

In religious terms, faith is not a synonym for being swayed by feelings. It is the exact opposite: a way to avoid being at the mercy of normal human feelings.

Human beings are naturally fickle creatures, easily misled, manipulated, tricked, and distracted. If we are not careful, we are easily taken in by anybody who wants our money, our time, or our vote. Even those who pride themselves on their skepticism and reason are often tricked by sophisticated means, and they aren't even aware of it.

Faith means building a mental collection of your most important memories, lessons, and beliefs, and then holding to those things in the face of attack. A person with strong faith is not bothered by his or her short-term emotions or swayed by anyone with an argument that appears convincing at first glance.

Faith is not only an ally of wisdom. It is a necessity for wisdom. Anyone who doesn't have some faith will end up getting swept all over by the prevailing intellectual currents in their time and place, and will achieve the mental stability necessary to actually learn important things.


Actually, I'd say the examples you gave aren't faith, so much as they are examples of trust. You trust in your wife and your friends because they have demonstrated themselves to be trustworthy in the past.

Faith is, in my experience, blind belief. Trust is something which is earned and demonstrated.

Look up faith; you'll see it's the same thing as trust.

[lekatt]

I think MEBuckner covered the definition of faith. The post by DT was aimed at religion. Religious faith has helped many people cope with the problems of life. I see nothing wrong with it. There are many advantages of belonging to a religion. A few of them are discussed below.

http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showcontent.aspx?ct=483&h=53

[Voyager]

Well I'd agree that is a bit different when you include the supernatural, but assuming that some of you don't beleive in the supernatural it becomes the same. You trust in it because it has a past history that you trust. In matters of God we have a multi 1000 year record that it does work.
And the amazing thing is that it works just as well no matter which god you believe in!

Religious faith allows people to be sure that no matter what disaster happens, it is for the best, and whatever discovery is found contradicting the Bible, either the Bible actually means something non-contradictory or the discovery is wrong. To extend the marriage analogy, religious faith as applied to marriage would have you believing your wife loves you despite the fact she is out every night and none of your children look like you. Dick Martin on Laugh In had this kind of faith.

(For non-geezers out there, they had a continuing sketch where all of Martin's kids looked exactly like neighbor and best friend Dan Rowan.)

[Der Trihs]

In religious terms, faith is not a synonym for being swayed by feelings. It is the exact opposite: a way to avoid being at the mercy of normal human feelings.Of course. Faith turns you into what amounts to a preprogrammed robot, to the extent you have faith. Someone motivated by faith will ignore the welfare of himself or his family, the death and suffering of his victims, and any contradictory facts he comes across. Those are objective things; faith overrides those. Faith is the supremacy of the subjective over the objective.

Human beings are naturally fickle creatures, easily misled, manipulated, tricked, and distracted. If we are not careful, we are easily taken in by anybody who wants our money, our time, or our vote. Even those who pride themselves on their skepticism and reason are often tricked by sophisticated means, and they aren't even aware of it.

Faith means building a mental collection of your most important memories, lessons, and beliefs, and then holding to those things in the face of attack. A person with strong faith is not bothered by his or her short-term emotions or swayed by anyone with an argument that appears convincing at first glance.No, they are swayed by the FIRST person who gets to them with an appealing line of dogma; that's why there's such a focus on infecting children with religion while they are young and helpless. Faith makes sure that the truth or competing lies have less of a chance. It makes one impervious to ALL arguments and to external reality, not just short term arguments or emotions.

Faith is not only an ally of wisdom. It is a necessity for wisdom. Anyone who doesn't have some faith will end up getting swept all over by the prevailing intellectual currents in their time and place, and will achieve the mental stability necessary to actually learn important things.People can and do use their intelligence to learn, not faith. A person with faith CANNOT learn in the areas that faith touches on, because they will ignore the facts.

Faith is NOT the ally of wisdom; it's poison to it.

Look up faith; you'll see it's the same thing as trust.No, it's not. Trusting someone or something when you have evidence, and trusting/believing in something or someone without evidence are two different things. Like it or not.

[Bryan Ekers]

In matters of God we have a multi 1000 year record that it does work.I'll see your thousands and raise you a few hundred million.

[Yeticus Rex]

Faith. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith)

Example: I have faith that Der Thrihs totally misunderstands the concept of faith.

[Bryan Ekers]

I have confidence that his take, while probably more acerbic than necessary, is pretty much bang on.

[Yeticus Rex]

I have confidence that his take, while probably more acerbic than necessary, is pretty much bang on.
You're bang on when you described his method of his misunderstandings.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

I have confidence that his take, while probably more acerbic than necessary, is pretty much bang on.
Indeed. If, for example, you actually read philosophers of religion (theistic and non-theistic) on the subject of faith, what they are writing about is belief based on insufficient evidence or no evidence at all. And I'm talking people like C.S. Lewis here.

[Bryan Ekers]

You're bang on when you described his method of his misunderstandings.
I don't agree that he has a misunderstanding, just a undiplomatic method of expression.

[begbert2]

You trust in it because it has a past history that you trust. In matters of God we have a multi 1000 year record that it does work.Similarly, people have been murdering each other for millions of years. We're still around, and progressing nicely. In matters of murdering people, we have a multi 1000 year record that it works!

[kanicbird]

Similarly, people have been murdering each other for millions of years. We're still around, and progressing nicely. In matters of murdering people, we have a multi 1000 year record that it works!

Yes people also chose to follow Satan too.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Yes people also chose to follow Satan too.
I sense a no true Scotsman argument lurking in the wings here. "Oh, yeah, all those Protestants who killed tens of thousands of 'witches' during the reformation, and the Catholic Church when it carried out the Crusades, and the Protestants and Catholics going at each other in Northern Ireland, and the Muslims conquering by the sword, and the Hindu nationalists in India killing off Muslims by the trainload...they weren't really following God."

[Revenant Threshold]

Yes people also chose to follow Satan too. Did they choose that? Each and every one of those people murdered in the full knowledge that Satan existed, God existed, and that they were choosing one over the other by their actions?

If so, I imagine i'd be slightly concerned about how it is murderers somehow are more likely to understand the nature of the universe than the rest of us.

[Revenant Threshold]

Balls, missed the edit window. Anyway, I've thought a bit more and remembered that kanicbird believes you can't understand God fully without believing in him first. If you can't understand God, you can't understand Satan, either; thus since a murderer cannot also be a Christian (again under his views), then logically no murderers can have accepted Satan, because they aren't believers and thus do not understand what they'd accept.

[kanicbird]

Anyway, I've thought a bit more and remembered that kanicbird believes you can't understand God fully without believing in him first. If you can't understand God, you can't understand Satan, either; thus since a murderer cannot also be a Christian (again under his views), then logically no murderers can have accepted Satan, because they aren't believers and thus do not understand what they'd accept.

I never said that a Christian can't be a murderer, just that he was not following the leading of the Holy Spirit at the time (One possible exception - the Beast in Revelation). That sin can be forgiven however.

One does not need to know Satan to follow him, Satan is a master at deception 'he deceives the whole world' Satan is totally fine to have you believe that you are doing it entirely on your own, or that you are doing it because the god of Baal told you too, or even to make you beleive that God Himself told you to do it "when He did not"

[Revenant Threshold]

I never said that a Christian can't be a murderer, just that he was not following the leading of the Holy Spirit at the time (One possible exception - the Beast in Revelation). That sin can be forgiven however. I'm afraid this doesn't really help. In order to accept Satan's path, they need to know Satan, which requires that they know God, since Satan is pretty much always defined in terms of opposition as well as in his own right. Your adjustment means one of two options; either you are right when you say murderers must have accepted Satan, which requires that all murderers were or continue to be Christian (even I think that's silly); or you are wrong when you say they must have accepted Satan (pretty much the option i'm pushing). One does not need to know Satan to follow him, Satan is a master at deception 'he deceives the whole world' Satan is totally fine to have you believe that you are doing it entirely on your own, or that you are doing it because the god of Baal told you too, or even to make you beleive that God Himself told you to do it "when He did not" Follow him, sure, makes sense. Mistakenly. But you didn't say follow Satan, you said accept; there's a big difference between being tricked into thinking you're not doing something and actually accepting it. Deception doesn't require you know what's decieving you; acceptance, OTOH, does require you know what it is you're accepting.

[Jesticulator]

"Faith", in a religious context, seems to be an awfully slipperly conceptYes, it seems so."Faith" in a non-religious context invariably winds up meaning trust or belief as a result of evidence.Perhaps. Here are some definitions of faith:

Compact Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/faith?view=uk)
1 complete trust or confidence. 2 strong belief in a religion. 3 a system of religious belief.
Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=faith)
1 a: allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY b (1): fidelity to one's promises (2): sincerity of intentions 2 a (1): belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2): belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1): firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust 3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs <the Protestant faith>
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (http://www.bartleby.com/61/84/F0018400.html)
1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. 2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. See synonyms at belief. , trust. 3. Loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one's supporters. 4. often Faith Christianity The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will. 5. The body of dogma of a religion: the Muslim faith. 6. A set of principles or beliefs.
Note that I'm talking about "evidence" here. "Proof" is something you only find in geometry textbooks.Not quite.
Proof
Compact Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/proof?view=uk)
1 evidence establishing a fact or the truth of a statement. 2 the proving of the truth of a statement.
3 a series of stages in the resolution of a mathematical or philosophical problem.
Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=proof)
1 a: the cogency of evidence that compels acceptance by the mind of a truth or a fact b: the process or an instance of establishing the validity of a statement especially by derivation from other statements in accordance with principles of reasoning
something that induces certainty or establishes validity.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (http://www.bartleby.com/61/65/P0596500.html)
1. The evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true. 2a. The validation of a proposition by application of specified rules, as of induction or deduction, to assumptions, axioms, and sequentially derived conclusions. b. A statement or argument used in such a validation. 3a. Convincing or persuasive demonstration: was asked for proof of his identity; an employment history that was proof of her dependability. b. The state of being convinced or persuaded by consideration of evidence. 4. Determination of the quality of something by testing; trial: put one's beliefs to the proof. 5. Law The result or effect of evidence; the establishment or denial of a fact by evidence.

Conclusions based on evidence, on the other hand, may always be subject to revision--Lots of people have had faith in other people which has turned out to be misplaced.This seems to be consistent with religious faith: Lots of people have had faith in a religion which (they feel) has turned out to be misplaced, and they've changed their religious beliefs.

As for the OP, I agree with Slypork's disagreement with Der Trihs' characterization of faith, especially this:Faith is immensely arrogant. Faith denies reality, denies the arguments of others, denies everything but your egocentric fantasy of what the world is. Nothing could be more arrogant than faith.Nothing could be more arrogant, except perhaps Der Trihs ...

[kanicbird]

Follow him, sure, makes sense. Mistakenly. But you didn't say follow Satan, you said accept; there's a big difference between being tricked into thinking you're not doing something and actually accepting it. Deception doesn't require you know what's decieving you; acceptance, OTOH, does require you know what it is you're accepting.

Yes, you can be following Satan without knowingly accepting Satan as your god. Many people don't accept they are following anything but their own desires, or own moral code, which is deception, they are following a path put down by Satan.

Satan rebelled against God and chose his own path, basically God allowed Satan to be his own god. We also have such a choice, but if we chose to follow our own paths this becomes the path that Satan himself has chosen, and will lead to the same place.

Also many people claim to be lead by a 'angel of light' they think of that as God, they think they know what love of God is, are caught up in the deception and some lead others astray:

And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.
It just leads themselves and others to destruction - which would be a example of some accepting Satan as their god.

[hotflungwok]

To those of you simply throwing definitions down and expecting others to dig your argument out of them, please try a bit harder. What specifically are you trying to say? If you want to make the claim that religious faith is the same as trust, then I'm going to have to ask for the evidence that produces the trust. The sun has risen every day I've been alive, and so I have a reason to trust it will rise again. What possible reason is there to trust that even exists, much less that he will do any of the things claimed of him?

It just leads themselves and others to destruction - which would be a example of some accepting Satan as their god.
So how do you know the difference? And please don't try the 'you just know' answer we always seem to get. You've clearly said that satan is very good at deception. How do you know he can't make you feel what you think you're feeling about god?

This seems to be consistent with religious faith: Lots of people have had faith in a religion which (they feel) has turned out to be misplaced, and they've changed their religious beliefs.
Except for the evidence of course.

[Malacandra]

I sense a no true Scotsman argument lurking in the wings here. "Oh, yeah, all those Protestants who killed tens of thousands of 'witches' during the reformation, and the Catholic Church when it carried out the Crusades, and the Protestants and Catholics going at each other in Northern Ireland, and the Muslims conquering by the sword, and the Hindu nationalists in India killing off Muslims by the trainload...they weren't really following God."

You're going to have to work a little harder to make the accusation of No True Scotsmanry stick there, Soph (it's ironic that your post itself is a splendid example of Poisoning The Well) :dubious: . If a mathematician makes an error in a formal proof, he is not No True Mathematician, but he is certainly not following the laws of mathematics, any more than a witch-burner obeys Christ's command that "whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do unto them".

[Sophistry and Illusion]

You're going to have to work a little harder to make the accusation of No True Scotsmanry stick there, Soph (it's ironic that your post itself is a splendid example of Poisoning The Well) :dubious: . If a mathematician makes an error in a formal proof, he is not No True Mathematician, but he is certainly not following the laws of mathematics, any more than a witch-burner obeys Christ's command that "whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do unto them".
No, the implication of his post was that those who do evil have chosen to follow Satan, implying (further) that no evil-doer is a follower of God. That is just false, and is furthermore a no true Scotsman argument: "Well, if the person is doing evil, then that means they must not really be a follower of God." So try that one out on your pianola.

[kanicbird]

So how do you know the difference? And please don't try the 'you just know' answer we always seem to get. You've clearly said that satan is very good at deception. How do you know he can't make you feel what you think you're feeling about god?

This is very hard to answer as God is so big and works in so many ways, but I'll try to give you a subset of an answer that works for at least a few of us. The ways of Satan and his demons, once you venture into that area of the supernatural seems to lay a path for you that seems 'forced' like things around you are really bent to produce a certain outcome. Many will accept that as divine guidance, and Satan is not above using some natural pathways to his advantage either, but must 'force changes' to the time line, that is noticeable.

The leading of God is far bigger however, it's like the whole universe just was in tuned to set your path, nothing seems forced, like it was planned like that from before the universe was created for that path to be established for you. Only the one who created the universe could have done that.

[Malacandra]

No, the implication of his post was that those who do evil have chosen to follow Satan, implying (further) that no evil-doer is a follower of God. That is just false, and is furthermore a no true Scotsman argument: "Well, if the person is doing evil, then that means they must not really be a follower of God." So try that one out on your pianola.

No, of course it's not a No True Scotsman argument. An instance of that would be to say "By doing this they show themselves not to be a Christian", whereas what the previous poster said was more like "By doing this they show themselves not to be following Christ".

How long you can refrain from following Christ, and still be considered in some measure a Christian, is a matter for discussion in itself; but I presume that you wouldn't for one instant dispute that I may say that a man is breaking the laws of football, and still not be accused of calling him "no true footballer".

My pianola went sproing! and punched a pattern in the roll that read remarkably like "People who don't understand about logical fallacies shouldn't appeal to them". I suppose I'd better get it fixed.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

No, of course it's not a No True Scotsman argument. An instance of that would be to say "By doing this they show themselves not to be a Christian", whereas what the previous poster said was more like "By doing this they show themselves not to be following Christ".

How long you can refrain from following Christ, and still be considered in some measure a Christian, is a matter for discussion in itself; but I presume that you wouldn't for one instant dispute that I may say that a man is breaking the laws of football, and still not be accused of calling him "no true footballer".

My pianola went sproing! and punched a pattern in the roll that read remarkably like "People who don't understand about logical fallacies shouldn't appeal to them". I suppose I'd better get it fixed.
Whatever. The point is that a substantial portion of the murder and evil performed over the last couple of millinia has been performed by very religious people in the name of God. It is very misleading to say that such people have "chosen" to follow Satan.

[Malacandra]

Whatever. The point is that a substantial portion of the murder and evil performed over the last couple of millinia has been performed by very religious people in the name of God. It is very misleading to say that such people have "chosen" to follow Satan.

What, you mean by pointing out the very obvious ways in which they've done the exact opposite of what the object of their belief has told them to do? Yes, that must be really misleading.

("Whatever", indeed. Are you fifteen?)

[Revenant Threshold]

Yes, you can be following Satan without knowingly accepting Satan as your god. Many people don't accept they are following anything but their own desires, or own moral code, which is deception, they are following a path put down by Satan. Right. That was my argument - you suggested that people who choose to go around murdering each other have accepted Satan. But that just doesn't work, since as you now agree, they could easily just have been deceived into it.

There's no such thing as unknowingly accepting something. Acceptance requires knowledge of that which is accepted. Since knowledge of Satan requires knowledge of God, your suggestion that murderers accept Satan's path is only true for current or former Christian murderers. By the same reasoning, zero non-Christian murderers must have accepted Satan. It just leads themselves and others to destruction - which would be a example of some accepting Satan as their god. Nope, it wouldn't. Because there's deception; those people aren't accepting Satan because they don't know what it is they're agreeing to. Acceptance of Satan would require they know have precise knowledge of him, and hence requires precise knowledge of God, which may only be arrived at under your belief system (IIRC) through belief (and hence they are Christian) or through the temporary bestowal of the Holy Spirit.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

What, you mean by pointing out the very obvious ways in which they've done the exact opposite of what the object of their belief has told them to do? Yes, that must be really misleading.

("Whatever", indeed. Are you fifteen?)
Jesus, Mal, you're not usually this bitchy. What crawled up your ass today?

If you think that the crusaders, the reformationists, etc., etc., were doing the exact opposite of what their belief told them to do, then you need to go read some history books. I am saying that many tens of thousands of people have done great evil fully believing they were doing what God wanted them to do, and it is misleading to say that in all of these cases these people had chosen to follow Satan. No; they had chosen to follow God, and either they badly misunderstood what God wanted, or they understood what God wanted but God is an asshole.

[lekatt]

Similarly, people have been murdering each other for millions of years. We're still around, and progressing nicely. In matters of murdering people, we have a multi 1000 year record that it works!

I think what is meant is that every group, tribe, and society of people, both ancient and modern living here on this earth have believed in some kind of God and some kind of afterlife. One could conclude this belief was part of evolution to help in the survival of the individual when faced with seeming hopeless circumstances. It gave the individual hope of survival afterdeath which allowed heroic deeds to win the day. However, there is now a group of people who say this belief is no longer needed. To be replaced by something called "scientific method." It might be said to be a fork in the path of evolution. Only time will tell if this "fork" is viable or not.

[Voyager]

What, you mean by pointing out the very obvious ways in which they've done the exact opposite of what the object of their belief has told them to do? Yes, that must be really misleading.

("Whatever", indeed. Are you fifteen?)
The thing that you're both neglecting here is that the Bible consists of far more than one statement by Jesus. Is putting someone in jail a violation of the teachings of Jesus? Perhaps witch burners would have wished themselves to be purified by fire if they were satanically dominated. That the Bible is both logically and morally inconsistent means that you can't accuse those who do evil based on Biblical instructions of not following Jesus.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

The thing that you're both neglecting here is that the Bible consists of far more than one statement by Jesus. Is putting someone in jail a violation of the teachings of Jesus? Perhaps witch burners would have wished themselves to be purified by fire if they were satanically dominated. That the Bible is both logically and morally inconsistent means that you can't accuse those who do evil based on Biblical instructions of not following Jesus.
No, I completely agree with you; that is why I have been arguing (without success, apparently) that it is very misleading to say that those who do evil have chosen to forsake Jesus in favor of Satan.

[hotflungwok]

The ways of Satan and his demons, once you venture into that area of the supernatural seems to lay a path for you that seems 'forced' like things around you are really bent to produce a certain outcome. Many will accept that as divine guidance, and Satan is not above using some natural pathways to his advantage either, but must 'force changes' to the time line, that is noticeable.
And how do you know this?

The leading of God is far bigger however, it's like the whole universe just was in tuned to set your path, nothing seems forced, like it was planned like that from before the universe was created for that path to be established for you. Only the one who created the universe could have done that.
This doesn't make any sense. How do you know if something is forced or if it's the way it's established just for you? This is just another 'oh I just know' thing isn't it?

[Malacandra]

Jesus, Mal, you're not usually this bitchy. What crawled up your ass today?

Sorry. Someone, I can't remember who, told me to stick something in my pianola. Sometimes I snarl when poked with a stick. I know that's unusual round here.

If you think that the crusaders, the reformationists, etc., etc., were doing the exact opposite of what their belief told them to do, then you need to go read some history books. I am saying that many tens of thousands of people have done great evil fully believing they were doing what God wanted them to do, and it is misleading to say that in all of these cases these people had chosen to follow Satan. No; they had chosen to follow God, and either they badly misunderstood what God wanted, or they understood what God wanted but God is an asshole.

Not the opposite of what their belief told them to; the opposite of the object of their belief - Christ. I've cited an instance of what Christ said and to which they should have paid attention. If they'd built some shell of belief around that which permitted or even encouraged them to go warmongering or witch-burning, then they weren't following Christ; and I believe kanicbird may agree with me when I say that following Satan isn't something you choose to do by waking up one morning and saying "You know what, I think I'm tired of Jesus; I'll give the other guy a try today" but simply by doing what Satan would have you do. (Rhetorical "you", naturally; I'm certainly not calling you a pawn of Satan.)

[hotflungwok]

I think what is meant is that every group, tribe, and society of people, both ancient and modern living here on this earth have believed in some kind of God and some kind of afterlife. One could conclude this belief was part of evolution to help in the survival of the individual when faced with seeming hopeless circumstances.
No one couldn't.

It gave the individual hope of survival afterdeath which allowed heroic deeds to win the day. However, there is now a group of people who say this belief is no longer needed. To be replaced by something called "scientific method." It might be said to be a fork in the path of evolution. Only time will tell if this "fork" is viable or not.
It's not a fork. It's reality vs fantasy. To borrow your mistaken belief that the scientific method is believed in that way a god is believed in, you worship at the foot of scientific method every time you flip a lightswitch, turn on your car, or type something into a computer. Your computer doesn't require belief for it to function or for you to understand it's mysteries.

[cosmosdan]

when Sam Harris made his case for removing the protected status of religious beliefs I agreed and I seem to remember most of the atheists on this board strongly agreeing as well. It seem odd to me that when it comes to the subject of faith there seems to be an effort to keep "religious" faith separate from the day to day faith every human operates on. I suppose that makes it easier to ridicule and criticize. Certain aspects of faith deserve criticism but IMO if we hope to understand it better and contribute towards progress we must look at the inner mechanics of faith that we all share, believer and non believer alike.

DT uses a broad brush to paint all religious faith with the same characteristics. It's ludicrous. If he could be more specific and nuanced I'd agree with some of his points, but as it is, his exaggerated approach ruins any valid underlying truth for me.

Looking at faith as an emotional and mental phenomenon we an see that what occurs within the details of religion also occurs outside religion.

Trust. Based on experience we trust our significant other or our best friend. We are aware that it's possible they could do us wrong and life changes but we go on with "faith" based on past experiences.

When parents teach their kids about God and Jesus wouldn't you call that an example of trust? When someone has a powerful subjective experience and they translate it with the influence of those around them wouldn't that be an example of trust? People trust the good intentions and the "knowledge" of the people around them. When people hear a repeated meme from good people around them
they are inclined to accept it as true. That sounds like trust to me.


What interests and disturbs me about faith is the strength of the emotional attachment people seem to have for certain doctrine and dogma. Why does it seem to be a "must" to believe certain things. Is it just being a part of the certain group that is important? Do people need acceptance from their denomination of choice so much that they are emotionally unable to question the details? It sure seems so. Can't we see something very similar outside religion in families and other groups. I think so.

IMO it's not religion per say but the emotional need or the emotional disconnect that causes people to cling to false beliefs and deny or rationalize in spite of what the evidence suggests.

It''s important to note that faith in spiritual matters does not have to include a denial of evidence and the kind of closed mind often attributed to a fundamentalists. The classic definition in Hebrews 11

1Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.


does not have to be the kind of blind faith that denies evidence. We go forward moment to moment acting on faith about our world, our relationships with those close to us. We operate on what we believe is true even though a new experience or new evidence may alter our beliefs.

[Malacandra]

No, I completely agree with you; that is why I have been arguing (without success, apparently) that it is very misleading to say that those who do evil have chosen to forsake Jesus in favor of Satan.

Really? What did Jesus say that sounded like "Burn the witch! Burn her, I say!".

Nice clutch at that straw of "But the Bible's self-contradictory!". You could have said that yourself instead of repeating "No True Scotsman!" like it won the argument for you.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Sorry. Someone, I can't remember who, told me to stick something in my pianola. Sometimes I snarl when poked with a stick. I know that's unusual round here.
Try something out on your pianola. I stole the phrase from Wodehouse. It doesn't, as far as I know, involve sticking anything anywhere (unless you are one of those avant garde musicians).

[hotflungwok]

Not the opposite of what their belief told them to; the opposite of the object of their belief - Christ. I've cited an instance of what Christ said and to which they should have paid attention. If they'd built some shell of belief around that which permitted or even encouraged them to go warmongering or witch-burning, then they weren't following Christ; and I believe kanicbird may agree with me when I say that following Satan isn't something you choose to do by waking up one morning and saying "You know what, I think I'm tired of Jesus; I'll give the other guy a try today" but simply by doing what Satan would have you do. (Rhetorical "you", naturally; I'm certainly not calling you a pawn of Satan.)
So why were the people who lead the religion, the priests and bishops and popes who supposedly have more or clearer knowledge of the whole thing, not only not stopping them, but actively encouraging them? It wasn't just isolated incidents.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Really? What did Jesus say that sounded like "Burn the witch! Burn her, I say!".

Nice clutch at that straw of "But the Bible's self-contradictory!". You could have said that yourself instead of repeating "No True Scotsman!" like it won the argument for you.
Jesus doesn't say it, but the OT says "Suffer not a witch to live." Now, there is debate as to how much of the OT teachings are abrogated by Jesus' teaching, but clearly some Christians take the OT very much to heart.

[hotflungwok]

When parents teach their kids about God and Jesus wouldn't you call that an example of trust?
Oh course not. Trust in what? Trust that jesus will return 'soon'? Or that god will provide? Or that prayer has any effect whatsoever beyond sitting still for a few minutes? There's nothing there to trust in.

When someone has a powerful subjective experience and they translate it with the influence of those around them wouldn't that be an example of trust?
Ask Andrea Yates.

People trust the good intentions and the "knowledge" of the people around them. When people hear a repeated meme from good people around them
they are inclined to accept it as true. That sounds like trust to me.
This is quite different from actually trusting anything about god. Believing something just because 'bob believes it, and he seems like a nice guy' is most certainly not a good reason.

IMO it's not religion per say but the emotional need or the emotional disconnect that causes people to cling to false beliefs and deny or rationalize in spite of what the evidence suggests.
Yup.

It''s important to note that faith in spiritual matters does not have to include a denial of evidence and the kind of closed mind often attributed to a fundamentalists.
But somehow it usually does.

1Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
does not have to be the kind of blind faith that denies evidence. We go forward moment to moment acting on faith about our world, our relationships with those close to us. We operate on what we believe is true even though a new experience or new evidence may alter our beliefs.
That quote is practically a textbook example of blind faith. Be sure of what you hope for? Yeah.

[Malacandra]

So why were the people who lead the religion, the priests and bishops and popes who supposedly have more or clearer knowledge of the whole thing, not only not stopping them, but actively encouraging them? It wasn't just isolated incidents.

Well, just as a hypothesis, and let's not pretend I've any insight into the history, but perhaps some of the senior churchmen were more motivated by a lust for temporal power than actually doing what Jesus said? I mean, I may be completely wrong, and someone might be along to show me that, say, the Borgias had a truly astonishing theological insight, but I think we should at least toss the idea down on the table.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Well, just as a hypothesis, and let's not pretend I've any insight into the history, but perhaps some of the senior churchmen were more motivated by a lust for temporal power than actually doing what Jesus said? I mean, I may be completely wrong, and someone might be along to show me that, say, the Borgias had a truly astonishing theological insight, but I think we should at least toss the idea down on the table.
Well, I'm pretty sure that Luther was a sincere Christian and very knowledgeable about the Bible, but when he wrote "On the Jews and Their Lies" and argued that the Germans should ethnically cleanse the Jews from their land, and make sure not one trace of the Jews' existence remained behind, I think you have a clear example of someone advocating evil in the name of God, and in complete good faith. And I scarcely think this is an isolated example. Unless you are a member of Opus Dei or something, I scarcely think it is plausible to say Luther had chosen Satan over Jesus.

[Jesticulator]

To those of you simply throwing definitions down and expecting others to dig your argument out of them, please try a bit harder. What specifically are you trying to say? If you want to make the claim that religious faith is the same as trust, then I'm going to have to ask for the evidence that produces the trust. The sun has risen every day I've been alive, and so I have a reason to trust it will rise again. What possible reason is there to trust that [God] even exists, much less that he will do any of the things claimed of him?AFAICT, this thread is not about faith in God.
From the OP:I realize that in this context he is talking about “faith” when it comes to belief in a deity. However, what about other definitions of faith?I offered other definitions of faith.
Also, Der Trihs says:You cannot, by definition, have an open mind on something you have faith in.According to which definition?

From the definitions that I presented, it's clear that faith is not "immensely arrogant", and that "faith in a non-religious context" does not "invariably wind up meaning trust or belief as a result of evidence" and proof is not "something you only find in geometry textbooks."

Also, someone who claims that religious faith is the same as trust should provide evidence of that claim. If you (hotflungwok) want to ask for "evidence that produces the trust" then it's up to you to explain why evidence (or the lack of it) is relevant in equating religious faith with trust. But, as I've already pointed out, this thread did not start out as a debate about religious faith. These were the questions posed in the OP:Is having faith, whether it is in a person, your country, your religion or your belief in the sanctity of life or whatever an unrealistic attitude? Are beliefs a negative? Should we rely only on what we can prove with logic and evidence or is it OK to trust in things that we feel? What is an "unrealistic attitude"? One that is not based on reality? Is there such as a thing as an attitude that has no basis in reality?
Are beliefs a negative? I don't know how to answer this question, other than to say that we all have beliefs.
Is it OK to trust in things that we feel? Is this a moral or practical question? It seems to me that all feelings are based on some evidence, even if we aren't explicitly aware of that evidence and even if we can't present a rational argument for experiencing that feeling.

A discussion of faith/belief/evidence/feelings can be an epistemological and psychological quagmire. It seems to me that the difficulties could be reduced if we agree on the basic definitions. (Also, as I see on preview, a thread will go in whatever direction the posters take it ...)Except for the evidence of course.I don't know what your point is. Would you like me to present definitions for evidence? :dubious:

[Triskadecamus]

     The biggest stumbling block in theology is the necessary assumption that mine is right, and yours is wrong. That single intellectual step invokes an assumption of authority, no matter whether my theology is based on direct revelation, or textual interpretation, or authoritarianism. What we tell others to believe is our theology. The real message of your theology, and mine is what we do, not what we say.

     Trying to convince you is evidence that I am not seeking to give you faith. Providing you with evidence leads you away from faith, and gives you nothing but logical argument. If I wanted to prove something, I would certainly avoid invoking the concept of faith. On the other hand, if I have faith, I might simply choose to offer you love, and hope that you will find faith from that.

Tris
--------------------------------
"We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." ~ Abigail Adams, 1774 ~

[lekatt]

No one couldn't.


It's not a fork. It's reality vs fantasy. To borrow your mistaken belief that the scientific method is believed in that way a god is believed in, you worship at the foot of scientific method every time you flip a lightswitch, turn on your car, or type something into a computer. Your computer doesn't require belief for it to function or for you to understand it's mysteries.

Now in another thread a "God spot" in the brain was discussed, didn't the brain evolve, so how can you say with any certainty that belief in God and the afterlife was not part of evolution. I don't think you can say that honestly. If we are created by our brain (body) then this belief must be evolutionary.

[Revenant Threshold]

Now in another thread a "God spot" in the brain was discussed, didn't the brain evolve, so how can you say with any certainty that belief in God and the afterlife was not part of evolution. I believe you mean to put "god" rather than "God" in both of those instances. I don't believe people have suggested that there is a part of the brain that is connected to that specific god only.

[Zedfoil]

I thought I read somewhere that in Islam, faith requires proof.

[hotflungwok]

Now in another thread a "God spot" in the brain was discussed, didn't the brain evolve, so how can you say with any certainty that belief in God and the afterlife was not part of evolution. I don't think you can say that honestly. If we are created by our brain (body) then this belief must be evolutionary.
Because it isn't always god that fits in the 'god spot'. There are many people around the world who have no need whatsoever to believe in any form of a god, and they're doing just fine. If humans had a need for belief in god, the way have a need for oxygen or sunlight, then those people would not be doing well. God just happened to be the easiest thing for a bunch of primitive ignorant humans to put there. It's no longer necessary.

[hotflungwok]

Well, just as a hypothesis, and let's not pretend I've any insight into the history, but perhaps some of the senior churchmen were more motivated by a lust for temporal power than actually doing what Jesus said? I mean, I may be completely wrong, and someone might be along to show me that, say, the Borgias had a truly astonishing theological insight, but I think we should at least toss the idea down on the table.
So how do you tell the difference between someone doing what's really in the book and someone just making it up? How do you know god doesn't want all the $group slaughtered and their children dashed on rocks, etc? Why is your interpretation of the stuff in the book any better then theirs? What gives you the right to say that they're wrong and you're right?

Sounds like arrogance to me.

[lekatt]

when Sam Harris made his case for removing the protected status of religious beliefs I agreed and I seem to remember most of the atheists on this board strongly agreeing as well. It seem odd to me that when it comes to the subject of faith there seems to be an effort to keep "religious" faith separate from the day to day faith every human operates on. I suppose that makes it easier to ridicule and criticize. Certain aspects of faith deserve criticism but IMO if we hope to understand it better and contribute towards progress we must look at the inner mechanics of faith that we all share, believer and non believer alike.

DT uses a broad brush to paint all religious faith with the same characteristics. It's ludicrous. If he could be more specific and nuanced I'd agree with some of his points, but as it is, his exaggerated approach ruins any valid underlying truth for me.

Looking at faith as an emotional and mental phenomenon we an see that what occurs within the details of religion also occurs outside religion.

Trust. Based on experience we trust our significant other or our best friend. We are aware that it's possible they could do us wrong and life changes but we go on with "faith" based on past experiences.

When parents teach their kids about God and Jesus wouldn't you call that an example of trust? When someone has a powerful subjective experience and they translate it with the influence of those around them wouldn't that be an example of trust? People trust the good intentions and the "knowledge" of the people around them. When people hear a repeated meme from good people around them
they are inclined to accept it as true. That sounds like trust to me.


What interests and disturbs me about faith is the strength of the emotional attachment people seem to have for certain doctrine and dogma. Why does it seem to be a "must" to believe certain things. Is it just being a part of the certain group that is important? Do people need acceptance from their denomination of choice so much that they are emotionally unable to question the details? It sure seems so. Can't we see something very similar outside religion in families and other groups. I think so.

IMO it's not religion per say but the emotional need or the emotional disconnect that causes people to cling to false beliefs and deny or rationalize in spite of what the evidence suggests.

It''s important to note that faith in spiritual matters does not have to include a denial of evidence and the kind of closed mind often attributed to a fundamentalists. The classic definition in Hebrews 11

does not have to be the kind of blind faith that denies evidence. We go forward moment to moment acting on faith about our world, our relationships with those close to us. We operate on what we believe is true even though a new experience or new evidence may alter our beliefs.

It is common for beliefs to have strong emotional attachments. There are very strong emotional attachments being displayed in this thread in the name of science. A very strong belief that science is reason and religion is folly. Why shouldn't those who believe in religion feel as strongly about their faith and scientists do about science. There is a lot of talk about blind faith, but to spiritual people there is no blind faith. The distrust is building between those scientists who wish to deny religion its rightful place and those religionists who wish to deny science its rightful place. Science will never replace nor destroy religion, ala Richard Dawkins, so how about learning to live in peace with each other.

I believe the elections next year will be greatly influence by the rift. Probably not in the manner favorable to science.

[hotflungwok]

From the definitions that I presented, it's clear that faith is not "immensely arrogant", and that "faith in a non-religious context" does not "invariably wind up meaning trust or belief as a result of evidence" and proof is not "something you only find in geometry textbooks."
If you bothered to read DT's post you could see that it does in fact refer to religious faith. The OP does want to talk about different kinds of faith, but eveything that DT said has to do with the religious variety. And yes it is important to distinguish between the two, because religious faith tends to be let off the hook when it comes to evidence and reality without any clear reason.

If you (hotflungwok) want to ask for "evidence that produces the trust" then it's up to you to explain why evidence (or the lack of it) is relevant in equating religious faith with trust.
It's relevant because there's no reason it isn't. Religious faith is like other faith but for some reason it's ok to 'just believe', and not have any real evidence behind it. There is no reason to give it this pass, religious faith should have the same standard of evidence every other kind of faith is supposed to have.

It seems to me that all feelings are based on some evidence, even if we aren't explicitly aware of that evidence and even if we can't present a rational argument for experiencing that feeling.
Feelings are based on evidence? Huh?

[hotflungwok]

It is common for beliefs to have strong emotional attachments. There are very strong emotional attachments being displayed in this thread in the name of science. A very strong belief that science is reason and religion is folly. Why shouldn't those who believe in religion feel as strongly about their faith and scientists do about science.
Equating religious belief with trust in science is a mistake. The two are very different. You do not have faith that your computer is going to send your message across the internet, you trust that it will. However, since religion does not produce any actual results, you have to have faith in it.

There is a lot of talk about blind faith, but to spiritual people there is no blind faith.
Hence the label 'blind'.

The distrust is building between those scientists who wish to deny religion its rightful place and those religionists who wish to deny science its rightful place.
Religion's rightful place is alongside all of mankind's other mistaken beliefs. People who distrust science are free to never benefit from it again, but since peope like light & heat & food I don't think they're going to do anything anytime soon.

Science will never replace nor destroy religion, ala Richard Dawkins, so how about learning to live in peace with each other.
Science will exist in peace with religion when religion stops insiting that it has anything to do with reality.

[cosmosdan]

Oh course not. Trust in what? Trust that jesus will return 'soon'? Or that god will provide? Or that prayer has any effect whatsoever beyond sitting still for a few minutes? There's nothing there to trust in.
I was referring to trusting other people and our trust in them lending credibility to what they tell us is true. There are thousands of examples outside of religion as well.

Ask Andrea Yates.
great example. Somebody legally insane.

This is quite different from actually trusting anything about god. Believing something just because 'bob believes it, and he seems like a nice guy' is most certainly not a good reason.
And yet human beings, believers and non believers, do this all the time, which is my point about the mechanics of faith.



But somehow it usually does.
And you say this because you have examined the evidence carefully and found it to be true? Or could it be an assumption influenced by your own distaste for religion in general. Something you hold to be true for reasons other than evidence. Let's see, what might we call that?


That quote is practically a textbook example of blind faith. Be sure of what you hope for? Yeah.
I think it's unfortunate that certain people interpret this in a way that makes it very difficult for them to question dogma they have accepted. They interpret it as a lack of faith to question what they have been taught by someone else as God's will. It's also unfortunate that non believers see this as what you just described. Neither has to be true for this statement.
There are many examples of this type of faith outside of religion. How do martial artists learn to do things that seem almost impossible. to most people. They have to approach it from a a surety. Motivational speakers teaching people to believe in themselves and visualize their goals as already accomplished.

We can and do act with surety and certainty when making daily decisions as well as with hope. We act in faith that certain behavior will yield favorable results until new experiences and information that we gather every day refines and changes our beliefs. Sometimes the change is extremely subtle. Sometimes profound.

[nd_n8]

I was once told by a pentacostal minister "Athiests have a tremendous amount of faith. Much more than any believer alive. To look at the wonders of the universe, to see the things we can see and imagine the things we cannot see. To see the intricate balance and construct of all things. To view the miracle of life, in all forms great and small and still think that there could not possibly be any thoughtfullness behind any of it requires more faith than I will ever have."

My position is that "Faith" in religion and "Faith" in God are two different things (often intersecting and coexisting but distinctly different). Do I have faith in God? Absolutely. Does that mean I automatically reject concepts like evolution? Absolutely not. The Big Bang? I see no reason to reject this. Young Earth? Absolute rubbish, somebody got something mixed up in translation from oral to written history or something allegorical was miscommunicated as literal or something. None of these and other theories and postulates conflict with my concept of and faith in my Creator. I have faith that something much larger than any of us can imagine created us. How He did it is His business, but I see value in studying that business.

Now "Faith" in Religion? Blindly following religious dogma? No, I do not have, nor have I ever really had this. Religion, belief systems, congregations, dogma etc. are all "Man Made" and thus are fallable. I do choose to study beliefs and practices, and adhere to a set of beliefs and practices, but I do not put much faith in the things men say about them.

As for "Faith" in Satan, or blind belief in an underlying evil out to turn the attention of man away from the adoration of God, I do not believe this is required. If one says that someone does not have to believe in God in order for God to believe in them then it must also follow that someone does not have to believe in Satan for Satan to believe in them. And, If my faith in God is well placed, and the final scripture plays out literally instead of figuratively, Satan will perform that which he is prophisized to perform thus Satan, going about his business of turning the attention of man, is actually performing the Lord's work and fufilling his purpose anyway. This harkens back to the wonderful days of Job where Satan and God were all buddy buddy and Satan worked for the Lord in a more directly understandable manner. Nothing in scripture convinces me that this relationship changed.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

I was once told by a pentacostal minister "Athiests have a tremendous amount of faith. Much more than any believer alive. To look at the wonders of the universe, to see the things we can see and imagine the things we cannot see. To see the intricate balance and construct of all things. To view the miracle of life, in all forms great and small and still think that there could not possibly be any thoughtfullness behind any of it requires more faith than I will ever have."
Yeah, either faith or an actual layman's understanding of physical cosmology. One or the other.

[nd_n8]

<snip>
And you say this because you have examined the evidence carefully and found it to be true? Or could it be an assumption influenced by your own distaste for religion in general. Something you hold to be true for reasons other than evidence. Let's see, what might we call that?
<snip>
Hmmm... Yes, I wonder what that would be called.

:D

[nd_n8]

Yeah, either faith or an actual layman's understanding of physical cosmology. One or the other.
So, do you have a layman's understanding of the physical properties of that which comprises an electron? Or an empirical explanation of the mechanics of a graviton? Something replicable by application of the scientific method perhaps?

Or do you merely have some level of faith that such things exist in the first place? A level of faith that is not based on evidence and provability but on mathematics and observation of effects instead of direct observation and identification of the properties of the cause?

[hotflungwok]

I was referring to trusting other people and our trust in them lending credibility to what they tell us is true. There are thousands of examples outside of religion as well.
And yet human beings, believers and non believers, do this all the time, which is my point about the mechanics of faith.
So you trust everything a person says, or do you have some criteria for believing them sometimes and not others? You trust people you consider to be experts on a subject. Someone who has experience, learning, etc. Do you trust your friend if he says there's an elephant on the roof? Why not? He's your friend, he's trustworthy isn't he?

So who do you trust to tell you that there's an all powerful invisible being in the sky? Who has expertise on that?

great example. Somebody legally insane.
She shared a powerful subjective experience, the only criteria I remember reading. I certainly wouldn't trust someone purely on that basis.

And you say this because you have examined the evidence carefully and found it to be true? Or could it be an assumption influenced by your own distaste for religion in general. Something you hold to be true for reasons other than evidence. Let's see, what might we call that?
Yes, I have examined religious faith to a large extent, and found that it usually includes a denial of evidence and/or a closed mind. This of course would not be something I hold true for reasons other than evidence, I have plenty of evidence for my conclusions.

I think it's unfortunate that certain people interpret this in a way that makes it very difficult for them to question dogma they have accepted. They interpret it as a lack of faith to question what they have been taught by someone else as God's will. It's also unfortunate that non believers see this as what you just described. Neither has to be true for this statement.
It doesn't have to be true, and I won't say it's 100% true, but from what I've seen it tends to be true. It's one thing to hope, it's quite another to insist that what you're hoping is true.

There are many examples of this type of faith outside of religion. How do martial artists learn to do things that seem almost impossible. to most people. They have to approach it from a a surety. Motivational speakers teaching people to believe in themselves and visualize their goals as already accomplished.
What? I've taken martial arts, and (at one point in the past) could do things that might seem impossible to other people. I was able to do these things after being shown how, and practicing them myself. I only needed faith in myself, my own ability to learn and my body, I didn't need to have some of kind of faith that something my master showed me was real.

We can and do act with surety and certainty when making daily decisions as well as with hope. We act in faith that certain behavior will yield favorable results until new experiences and information that we gather every day refines and changes our beliefs. Sometimes the change is extremely subtle. Sometimes profound.
But we have these beliefs because we have evidence of them. We think the sun will rise because it has risen every single day so far. We have no proof it will rise tommorrow, but I don't see anyone voting against it. What are you basing your trust in when you have faith in god?

[Jesticulator]

Religious faith is like other faith but for some reason it's ok to 'just believe', and not have any real evidence behind it. So, you're saying that it's okay to have faith as long as there is "real evidence behind it"? Is that what your saying?Feelings are based on evidence? Huh?Pick a feeling: excitement, suspicion, anger. Are they not all based on something that you somehow perceived? Why are you excited? Because you have evidence that you won the lottery. Why are you suspicious? Because you have evidence your friend is lying to you. Why are you angry? Because you have evidence that your friend claimed your prize and is keeping the money.

I'm using evidence in a general sense: A thing or things helpful in forming a conclusion or judgment. Something indicative; an outward sign. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (http://www.bartleby.com/61/48/E0254800.html)

[Sophistry and Illusion]

So, do you have a layman's understanding of the physical properties of that which comprises an electron? Or an empirical explanation of the mechanics of a graviton? Something replicable by application of the scientific method perhaps?
One doesn't need to know all that to know that there are non-supernatural explanations for the existence of and order in the universe. Surely you don't ask your pastor friend to know everything about Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Jewish and Roman history, etc., etc., etc. before he can have an informed opinion about Christianity.

Or do you merely have some level of faith that such things exist in the first place? A level of faith that is not based on evidence and provability but on mathematics and observation of effects instead of direct observation and identification of the properties of the cause?
This drives me nuts when people say this. I know facts about electrons not because I have performed the experiment myself, but because a bazillion other people have and I have their testimony that the electron has such and such properties. It is called the epistemic division of labor, and it is a feature of any society more complex than a single hermit living in isolation. My knowledge of certain claims is derivative from the knowledge of others. There is no correlate in religion--you can't say, "Well, I know God exists, because even though I haven't done the experiments, his existence has been repeatedly proved through intersubjectively verifiable, repeatable experiments." There is a difference between faith and testimony of those who possess genuine scientific evidence.

[cosmosdan]

If you bothered to read DT's post you could see that it does in fact refer to religious faith. The OP does want to talk about different kinds of faith, but eveything that DT said has to do with the religious variety. And yes it is important to distinguish between the two, because religious faith tends to be let off the hook when it comes to evidence and reality without any clear reason.
If the point is to remove the protected status of religious belief systems then we must be willing to look at belief systems and faith as human experiences that we all participate in. IMO keeping religious faith as a separate category and remaining unwilling to look at the mechanics of faith that occur in all people is the opposite of, and just as incorrect, as giving it a protected unquestionable status.
My experience on the SDMB has been that atheists in their arguments very often resort to some belief without evidence that they hold. It seems that you just did that unless you're going to present the evidence to back up your assertion.

This is not to excuse the outrageous claims that some believers make or the actions that spring from unsubstantiated beliefs. The point is to put all belief systems, religious or otherwise, on even footing in order to promote understanding. {and to fight ignorance of course}

It's relevant because there's no reason it isn't. Religious faith is like other faith but for some reason it's ok to 'just believe', and not have any real evidence behind it. There is no reason to give it this pass, religious faith should have the same standard of evidence every other kind of faith is supposed to have.

That's okay for the aspects of religion that can be objectively examined. It's important to note that much of religion, spirituality, and belief systems in general, is not about what can be objectively examined. It's like having apple standards for oranges. It just doesn't work. We must look at the subjective part of our humanity. How value systems , our belief systems arise and flourish. How our judgment calls translate into actions that affect others.

[nd_n8]

One doesn't need to know all that to know that there are non-supernatural explanations for the existence of and order in the universe. Surely you don't ask your pastor friend to know everything about Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Jewish and Roman history, etc., etc., etc. before he can have an informed opinion about Christianity.I didn't ask about everything, I only asked about two very specific things, things that are widely discussed in both the academic and layman's world of physics. I don't imagine that any cleric from any tradition would get very far if he did not understand two fairly familiar things about that tradition (or at the very least understand how to find out about those two things and point the accolite in the right direction).
This drives me nuts when people say this. I know facts about electrons not because I have performed the experiment myself, but because a bazillion other people have and I have their testimony that the electron has such and such properties. It is called the epistemic division of labor, and it is a feature of any society more complex than a single hermit living in isolation. My knowledge of certain claims is derivative from the knowledge of others.I suspect it is the tiny man with the steering wheel in your pants that is driving your nuts, but I digress.

Please do not misunderstand me, I am not accusing you of being an experimental physicist. I am mearly asking if you indeed know facts about electrons or do you know facts about the effects of electrons? What have the bazillion people come up with for the constructional makeup of an electron? Are any of their opinions based on hypothesis and conjecture? Are there any other opinions based on those hypothetical opinions that can only be held as valid because they fill in the blanks on some mathematical matrix? Do any of these opinions ever serve to fill in the blanks on two conflicting mathematical matrices?. There is no correlate in religion--you can't say, "Well, I know God exists, because even though I haven't done the experiments, his existence has been repeatedly proved through intersubjectively verifiable, repeatable experiments." There is a difference between faith and testimony of those who possess genuine scientific evidence You trust in it because it has a past history that you trust. In matters of God we have a multi 1000 year record that it does work. I can't say the existence of God can be proven. In fact, I firmly believe that the existance of God cannot be proven. Proof is tangable, observable, replicable. These things are all manifestations of the physical. The nature of God rests in the spiritual. These things are intangable, unobservable and most likely nonreplicable. Kind of like a bozon. Why should one account for the testimony of those who possess genuine scientific evidence and discount those who profess a genuine spiritual experience?

Faith absolutely exists outside of the realm of religion and is intregal in science. It also exists as the cornerstone within the realm of religion. I see no reason, other than personal preference or narcissistic pride that the two should be exclusive.

[Jesticulator]

This drives me nuts when people say this. I know facts about electrons not because I have performed the experiment myself, but because a bazillion other people have and I have their testimony that the electron has such and such properties. It is called the epistemic division of labor, and it is a feature of any society more complex than a single hermit living in isolation. My knowledge of certain claims is derivative from the knowledge of others. There is no correlate in religion --It seems to me that there is a correlate in religion: People who appear to be trustworthy tell me that God exists. Almost everyone I know agrees with this conclusion. It seems that, in many ways, the government agrees with this conclusion. If I then believe in God, how is my "knowledge of certain claims" not "derivative from the knowledge of others"? Also, why must his existence be "repeatedly proved through intersubjectively verifiable, repeatable experiments"?

(FWIW, I do not believe in God, so I disagree with most of the people that I know.)

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Why should one account for the testimony of those who possess genuine scientific evidence and discount those who profess a genuine spiritual experience?
Well, because religious experience is contradictory among different experiencers, not intersubjectively verifiable, not repeatable, etc. Religious experience might be that way as a result of God's nature, but whatever the reason is, it entirely undercuts the ability for religious experience to justify religious belief. To say otherwise is, IMO, to arrogantly elevate your experience above that of others who have had contradictory experiences, and to ignore the features of normal non-supernatural experience which makes it justification-conferring.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

It seems to me that there is a correlate in religion: People who appear to be trustworthy tell me that God exists. Almost everyone I know agrees with this conclusion. It seems that, in many ways, the government agrees with this conclusion. If I then believe in God, how is my "knowledge of certain claims" not "derivative from the knowledge of others"? Also, why must his existence be "repeatedly proved through intersubjectively verifiable, repeatable experiments"?

(FWIW, I do not believe in God, so I disagree with most of the people that I know.)
The difference is that the people who tell me electrons have a negative charge have evidence for this claim--repeatable, intersubjectively available evidence, which is precisely the kind of evidence which is unavailable to the religious person, as I argued in my last post. Whether the person is trustworthy is only part of the story: the quality of their evidence also matters. And this is what is lacking in the religious case.

As for why God's existence must be proved by repeatable, intersubjective evidence, I think the onus is on the religious believer to argue why evidence which is in principle unavailable to others should carry any weight at all. You can't just define 'evidence' however you want; that is unacceptable epistemic permissiveness.

[kanicbird]

There's no such thing as unknowingly accepting something. Acceptance requires knowledge of that which is accepted. Since knowledge of Satan requires knowledge of God, your suggestion that murderers accept Satan's path is only true for current or former Christian murderers. By the same reasoning, zero non-Christian murderers must have accepted Satan.

There is strong scriptural support that people who know the true God and chose another path will have a far worse fate then those who don't know God at all. But this does not mean that you can have Satan (or one of his forms or demons) as your god and never know the real God. I would WAG that many people who chose to worship Satan directly don't really know who God really is.

Because there's deception; those people aren't accepting Satan because they don't know what it is they're agreeing to. Acceptance of Satan would require they know have precise knowledge of him, and hence requires precise knowledge of God, which may only be arrived at under your belief system (IIRC) through belief (and hence they are Christian) or through the temporary bestowal of the Holy Spirit.

There is a far worse fate for those who know God, actually receiving the Holy Spirit and using the power of God, then abandoning Him is quite possibly the only sin that can not be pardoned - and may cast one into 'outer darkenss' - which is though to be worse then Hell and the Lake of Fire.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

There is strong scriptural support that people who know the true God and chose another path will have a far worse fate then those who don't know God at all. But this does not mean that you can have Satan (or one of his forms or demons) as your god and never know the real God. I would WAG that many people who chose to worship Satan directly don't really know who God really is.

There is a far worse fate for those who know God, actually receiving the Holy Spirit and using the power of God, then abandoning Him is quite possibly the only sin that can not be pardoned - and may cast one into 'outer darkenss' - which is though to be worse then Hell and the Lake of Fire.
I guess I'm hosed, then. I was saved; now I'm an atheist. Outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, here I come!

[nd_n8]

Well, because religious experience is contradictory among different experiencers, not intersubjectively verifiable, not repeatable, etc. Religious experience might be that way as a result of God's nature, but whatever the reason is, it entirely undercuts the ability for religious experience to justify religious belief. To say otherwise is, IMO, to arrogantly elevate your experience above that of others who have had contradictory experiences, and to ignore the features of normal non-supernatural experience which makes it justification-conferring.
There are only two points of this post that I disagree with. First, because some religious experiences is contradictory among different experiencers should not be used to imply that all religious experiences are contradictory. Nor should this be used to postulate that the different experiencers must view the experience the same regardless of circumstance whether cultural, educational, geographical etc. From without the constrictions of a particular dogmatic system it is easy enough to see the similaritys between various traditions. If one filters out the pridefullness in the professors of these traditions (as mentioned previously) underlying themes start to form. I personally wish that more "Religions" would focus on these commonalities than venerate the differences but, again I digress.

The other is that by accepting a supernatural explaination one automatically shuts off the possibility of any logical explaination. I suppose I have been guilty of this kind of bias in the past buy assuming that once the logical explaination has been taken to its limit there is no more room for the spiritual and vice versa. I have changed belief to encompass both explainations. Although I still hold a bias for the metaphysical I do not automatically reject the physical or the notion that what is unexplainable today may be grade school physics tomorrow.

[cosmosdan]

So you trust everything a person says, or do you have some criteria for believing them sometimes and not others? You trust people you consider to be experts on a subject. Someone who has experience, learning, etc. Do you trust your friend if he says there's an elephant on the roof? Why not? He's your friend, he's trustworthy isn't he?

So who do you trust to tell you that there's an all powerful invisible being in the sky? Who has expertise on that? Of course we don't trust everything someone says. Certainly a lot of what we come to assume is true are things told or taught to us by others that we haven't taken the time to test and verify. We learn as we go how much trust we should place in what others present as true. People have varying levels of skepticism which may be based on their experiences or their personality. We know some people are more trusting than others. We also know that even so called experts can be wrong so while we may be likely to believe what they tell us we are also open to new information. We learn that we can safely operate on certain assumptions until that new information comes along.

If one friend told me there was an elephant on the roof I wouldn't believe it. If a dozen or more told me I'd certainly check it out. The god meme is pretty powerful and usually encountered at a young age in our culture. Something completely objective like your example can be easily checked out. The concept of God is connected to a lot of subjective issues. Our sense of purpose and living a meaningful life among other things. Faith as per the OP is not just about the purely objective.


She shared a powerful subjective experience, the only criteria I remember reading. I certainly wouldn't trust someone purely on that basis.
Most people wouldn't. I doubt that was the only criteria for her either. The extreme example didn't add anything.

Yes, I have examined religious faith to a large extent, and found that it usually includes a denial of evidence and/or a closed mind. This of course would not be something I hold true for reasons other than evidence, I have plenty of evidence for my conclusions. Since you used the term usually I take that to mean more often than not, or more than 50%. Right? You say you have plenty of evidence. Perhaps you'd share some here. I'm not saying you're not correct. There are a lot of closed minds out there and I know plenty of believers deny the available evidence. However, if you're going to casually throw out terms like usually then perhaps you'd support it.


It doesn't have to be true, and I won't say it's 100% true, but from what I've seen it tends to be true. It's one thing to hope, it's quite another to insist that what you're hoping is true.
I agree with this. The absolutism of religious beliefs really bothers me. The need some people have for their beliefs to be really true, and more true, than others causes a lot of problems. But even that aspect of faith can be found outside of religion regarding other things. Nationalism can be that way.


What? I've taken martial arts, and (at one point in the past) could do things that might seem impossible to other people. I was able to do these things after being shown how, and practicing them myself. I only needed faith in myself, my own ability to learn and my body, I didn't need to have some of kind of faith that something my master showed me was real.
Isn't part of the training to visualize yourself doing something you previously couldn't do. You have faith that with effort you can accomplish something. My point is we go forward based on that kind of faith. We have faith that certain effort will yield certain results even though we've never done those things before. Isn't that a form of faith? Isn't that being sure of what we hope for? Certain of things unseen?

But we have these beliefs because we have evidence of them. We think the sun will rise because it has risen every single day so far. We have no proof it will rise tomorrow, but I don't see anyone voting against it. What are you basing your trust in when you have faith in god?
For a lot of people it's trust in what others have taught them. I've never been to Australia but I still accept that it's there. For many it's also based on an interpretation of certain profound subjective experiences. A strong feeling if you will, but still, it's their experience and they will interpret it within the boundaries of their own experiences, culture, and influences. It's the same thing others do within their own belief system.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Nor should this be used to postulate that the different experiencers must view the experience the same regardless of circumstance whether cultural, educational, geographical etc.
But this is exactly the crux of the issue. Electrons have the same charge whether you are American, Chinese, or Russian. Why should the religious person be allowed to say, "Oh, your perception of God will change depending on the culture you belong to"? It seems like the religious apologist is always trying to change the rules for himself: "You have to explain where the universe came from, but I don't have to explain where God came from; scientific disagreement undermines scientific justification, but religious disagreement doesn't undermine religious justification" etc. etc. etc. It all relies on special pleading. Too often, they just refuse to play on a level playing field.

[kanicbird]

I guess I'm hosed, then. I was saved; now I'm an atheist. Outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, here I come!

I doubt it, I don't think a Spirit filled believer (and one who has 'used' the power of God) can become a atheist - they are already aware of the power of God flowing thought themselves. They can deny God and follow other gods and be lost, but they would not be able to deny there is a God IMHO. Believers can be saved without experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit, or for that matter possibly not receiving Him as a indwelling at all. Either of these cases could exempt one from Outer Darkness.

[nd_n8]

But this is exactly the crux of the issue. Electrons have the same charge whether you are American, Chinese, or Russian. Why should the religious person be allowed to say, "Oh, your perception of God will change depending on the culture you belong to"? It seems like the religious apologist is always trying to change the rules for himself: "You have to explain where the universe came from, but I don't have to explain where God came from; scientific disagreement undermines scientific justification, but religious disagreement doesn't undermine religious justification" etc. etc. etc. It all relies on special pleading. Too often, they just refuse to play on a level playing field.Agreed. Science leveled the playing field cross culturally long ago. If it had not then we would still be trying to figure out when the Chinese moon probe launched by compairing the Chinese calendar with the Gregorian. Regardless of background, when discussing scientific issues, most even partially educated pundits will know the difference between a kilogram and two some odd pounds.

It's not the same with religion. Christianity, Judiasm and Islam are all three based on the same original set of traditions and laws. They all three have the same roots and the same cast of charactors. They differ radically in their belief of these charactors but the roots remain the same.

The dogma of religion favors the church and it's leaders. Sometimes it throws a bone to the faithful but most of the time it simply requires the fathful to stand on a ledge of faith on their own.

Before one can level the playing field between science and religion then an agreement must be made defining terms on both sides and while science has such definitions ready I seriously doubt that religion will ever achieve such a state.

[Voyager]

If the point is to remove the protected status of religious belief systems then we must be willing to look at belief systems and faith as human experiences that we all participate in. IMO keeping religious faith as a separate category and remaining unwilling to look at the mechanics of faith that occur in all people is the opposite of, and just as incorrect, as giving it a protected unquestionable status.

I agree that we shouldn't split faith into religious and non-religious types. What we're actually doing here is discussing two types of faith - faith amenable to changing based on evidence, and that which is not. I've already given the example of the two types related to faith in a spouse. Even religious faith can be conditional. The Dalai Lama's seems to be changeable based on evidence, as is that of Reform Judaism. We might push things back to faith that God exists in some way, so defined as to be unfalsifiable - once we do that, the two types of faith collapse into one. This kind of believer would say that he would stop believing in god given evidence against, but the god he believes in is so defined that it is not possible to provide evidence against him. It doesn't have to be god - faith in theistic evolution is the same.

[Revenant Threshold]

There is strong scriptural support that people who know the true God and chose another path will have a far worse fate then those who don't know God at all. But this does not mean that you can have Satan (or one of his forms or demons) as your god and never know the real God. I would WAG that many people who chose to worship Satan directly don't really know who God really is. I would say the opposite; you'd have to know God to know Satan. He's defined considerably by his opposition to God. You can't know what it is he stands for and is/was without knowing what it is God stands for and is. They might think they worship Satan; they might have a particular set of characteristics in mind. But they can't know him unless they know God. Logically only Christian or ex-Christian people can truly accept Satan under your view.

Think of it this way, since it works in reverse too; your own belief in God, providing you with knowledge of him, would not necessarily give you knowledge of Satan if the two aren't connected in that way. By that argument you have not necessarily rejected Satan, since knowledge of one doesn't also mean and require knowledge of the other. Either the two must be defined through knowledge of the other, as i've suggested, or you cannot guarantee that any Christian has truly rejected Satan, since they don't automatically know what they're rejecting. There is a far worse fate for those who know God, actually receiving the Holy Spirit and using the power of God, then abandoning Him is quite possibly the only sin that can not be pardoned - and may cast one into 'outer darkenss' - which is though to be worse then Hell and the Lake of Fire. This actually raises a rather more disturbing issue. There's another way someone could come by knowledge of Satan and God without believing; through the gift of temporary indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Now, this logically means that in all cases of people who have truly accepted Satan without having been a Christian beforehand, they would not have been able to accept without that gift, since they have no other way to know Satan. The gift of the Holy Spirit is given by God alone; thus, we may lay the blame for them accepting Satan at God's feet, since without his gift no non-Christians could accept him. Each non-Christian that accepts Satan does so because God has directly intervened to allow them to.

[hotflungwok]

So, you're saying that it's okay to have faith as long as there is "real evidence behind it"? Is that what your saying?
Faith meaning trust, yes of course.

Pick a feeling: excitement, suspicion, anger. Are they not all based on something that you somehow perceived? Why are you excited? Because you have evidence that you won the lottery. Why are you suspicious? Because you have evidence your friend is lying to you. Why are you angry? Because you have evidence that your friend claimed your prize and is keeping the money.
But feelings are not a decision, they are a reaction. You don't think about the situation and then decide there is enough evidence to become angry. Feelings are specifically emotional and non-logical. Beliefs are not reactions, and are subject to thought and evaluation.

[hotflungwok]

If the point is to remove the protected status of religious belief systems then we must be willing to look at belief systems and faith as human experiences that we all participate in. IMO keeping religious faith as a separate category and remaining unwilling to look at the mechanics of faith that occur in all people is the opposite of, and just as incorrect, as giving it a protected unquestionable status.
Shrug, you want to look at the mechanics, fine. Just as long as we get rid of the 'okayness' of religious beliefs. You believe what? Oh, well, its your religious belief, I guess I have to respect it, no matter how wacky it is.

That's okay for the aspects of religion that can be objectively examined. It's important to note that much of religion, spirituality, and belief systems in general, is not about what can be objectively examined. It's like having apple standards for oranges. It just doesn't work. We must look at the subjective part of our humanity. How value systems , our belief systems arise and flourish. How our judgment calls translate into actions that affect others.
This is a cop out. You can look at these things, but not these over here, they're 'special'. Subjective experiences can be looked at with the same tools we use to look at everything else, and if we find there is no validation for them, can be rejected just like everything else. Because of the way the human mind works, subjective things have to examined even more carefully.

[lekatt]

The biggest stumbling block in theology is the necessary assumption that mine is right, and yours is wrong. That single intellectual step invokes an assumption of authority, no matter whether my theology is based on direct revelation, or textual interpretation, or authoritarianism. What we tell others to believe is our theology. The real message of your theology, and mine is what we do, not what we say.

Trying to convince you is evidence that I am not seeking to give you faith. Providing you with evidence leads you away from faith, and gives you nothing but logical argument. If I wanted to prove something, I would certainly avoid invoking the concept of faith. On the other hand, if I have faith, I might simply choose to offer you love, and hope that you will find faith from that.

Tris
--------------------------------
"We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." ~ Abigail Adams, 1774 ~


Well said, best to just offer love and hope it will catch on.

[lekatt]

Because it isn't always god that fits in the 'god spot'. There are many people around the world who have no need whatsoever to believe in any form of a god, and they're doing just fine. If humans had a need for belief in god, the way have a need for oxygen or sunlight, then those people would not be doing well. God just happened to be the easiest thing for a bunch of primitive ignorant humans to put there. It's no longer necessary.

You are making value judgements of something you can't possible know anything about.

[cosmosdan]

I agree that we shouldn't split faith into religious and non-religious types. What we're actually doing here is discussing two types of faith - faith amenable to changing based on evidence, and that which is not. I've already given the example of the two types related to faith in a spouse. Even religious faith can be conditional. The Dalai Lama's seems to be changeable based on evidence, as is that of Reform Judaism. We might push things back to faith that God exists in some way, so defined as to be unfalsifiable - once we do that, the two types of faith collapse into one. This kind of believer would say that he would stop believing in god given evidence against, but the god he believes in is so defined that it is not possible to provide evidence against him. It doesn't have to be god - faith in theistic evolution is the same.

I'm all for that type of discussion. IMO it's a much more useful. For me the term god represents something not clearly defined concerning consciousness and the possibility of a transcendent other that we are still exploring. On a more practical sense it represents our relationship with each other and how we make progress in that sense. Faith, in that case, is the belief that we will continue to progress as we pursue what we hold to be true and valuable.

Many people on both sides of the god question hold beliefs that they stubbornly cling to in spite of evidence. I'd like to understand what the emotional need is to cling to those and how best to encourage people to honestly examine available evidence and not feel that it's necessary to be combative over differences that don't seem to impact our day to day welfare. It intrigues me to observe what a strong emotional hold tradition has on people.

[hotflungwok]

The god meme is pretty powerful and usually encountered at a young age in our culture. Something completely objective like your example can be easily checked out.
That would be because children are taught religion as fact from an early age. They don't have the decision making ability to differentiate between fact and belief yet, especially when it comes to their parents. Believing something from childhood can have a very powerful effect on a person, even if that thing is later shown to be wrong.

The concept of God is connected to a lot of subjective issues. Our sense of purpose and living a meaningful life among other things. Faith as per the OP is not just about the purely objective.
Until god is shown to be otherwise, it is purely subjective.

Since you used the term usually I take that to mean more often than not, or more than 50%. Right? You say you have plenty of evidence. Perhaps you'd share some here. I'm not saying you're not correct. There are a lot of closed minds out there and I know plenty of believers deny the available evidence. However, if you're going to casually throw out terms like usually then perhaps you'd support it.
Just take a look at the polls. What percentage of (American) adults believe there angels around us?

I agree with this. The absolutism of religious beliefs really bothers me. The need some people have for their beliefs to be really true, and more true, than others causes a lot of problems. But even that aspect of faith can be found outside of religion regarding other things. Nationalism can be that way.
But nationalism doesn't have the protection religion does. You're supposed to respect a person's religious beliefs, regardless of how nutty they sound. The same isn't true of nationalism.

Isn't part of the training to visualize yourself doing something you previously couldn't do. You have faith that with effort you can accomplish something. My point is we go forward based on that kind of faith. We have faith that certain effort will yield certain results even though we've never done those things before. Isn't that a form of faith? Isn't that being sure of what we hope for? Certain of things unseen?
You're jumping around. The faith you're talking about in this example is trust, until you start saying things like 'certain of things unseen'. I had seen my master, and others, perform these things. I had the evidence that other people can do it, and these people had shown me how to do it, and so I didn't need to rely on unseen things and hopes. I had evidence. Religious belief does not.

For a lot of people it's trust in what others have taught them. I've never been to Australia but I still accept that it's there.
But do you base day to day decisions on the uncertain existance of Australia? Because people most certainly base important life events around the much more uncertain existance of god.

For many it's also based on an interpretation of certain profound subjective experiences. A strong feeling if you will, but still, it's their experience and they will interpret it within the boundaries of their own experiences, culture, and influences. It's the same thing others do within their own belief system.
Again, ask Andrea Yates. She had a profound subjective experience. Oh, but shes insane. How do you know you're sane? How do you know the strong feeling you have is good and should be listened to and another is bad and should be ignored? Yes its an extreme example, but it holds: subjective experience can be questionable. It is subject to all manner of interpretation and bias and other things that can distort it. It is not replacement for objective evidence.

[lekatt]

Equating religious belief with trust in science is a mistake. The two are very different. You do not have faith that your computer is going to send your message across the internet, you trust that it will. However, since religion does not produce any actual results, you have to have faith in it.


Hence the label 'blind'.


Religion's rightful place is alongside all of mankind's other mistaken beliefs. People who distrust science are free to never benefit from it again, but since peope like light & heat & food I don't think they're going to do anything anytime soon.


Science will exist in peace with religion when religion stops insiting that it has anything to do with reality.

Your post is prejudiced, your opinion only is not reality.

[hotflungwok]

You are making value judgements of something you can't possible know anything about.
Did you actually read what I wrote, or are you filling in the other side of the argument yourself? If you have an objection to a point I made, give a counter argument. This is just vague handwaving.

[hotflungwok]

Your post is prejudiced, your opinion only is not reality.
Gosh, I should copy this response down as it seems to fit so often.

Did you actually read what I wrote, or are you filling in the other side of the argument yourself? If you have an objection to a point I made, give a counter argument. This is just vague handwaving.

[lekatt]

I guess I'm hosed, then. I was saved; now I'm an atheist. Outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, here I come!

I wouldn't count on it. :dubious:

[Der Trihs]

I think what is meant is that every group, tribe, and society of people, both ancient and modern living here on this earth have believed in some kind of God and some kind of afterlife.Wrong. Not all societies believe in God; God is a relatively recent fiction on the scale of humanity's existence, only a few thousand years old. And plenty of societies have not believed in an afterlife.

One could conclude this belief was part of evolution to help in the survival of the individual when faced with seeming hopeless circumstances. It gave the individual hope of survival afterdeath which allowed heroic deeds to win the day. However, there is now a group of people who say this belief is no longer needed. To be replaced by something called "scientific method." It might be said to be a fork in the path of evolution. Only time will tell if this "fork" is viable or not.Evolution doesn't "care" about the survival of individuals, only about passing on genes. I expect that the reason religion has been so evolutionarily successful is via the mass murder and mass rape of non-religious tribes in prehistory. That kind of malice is typical of religion, and effective at both destroying rival beliefs and spreading whatever "religious genes" there may be.

Not the opposite of what their belief told them to; the opposite of the object of their belief - Christ. I've cited an instance of what Christ said and to which they should have paid attention. If they'd built some shell of belief around that which permitted or even encouraged them to go warmongering or witch-burning, then they weren't following Christ; He also said "I come not to bring peace, but a sword". It's easy enough to interpret Christ as calling for the death and oppression of unbelievers. Not that it matters, since Christ is almost irrelevant to Christianity.

when Sam Harris made his case for removing the protected status of religious beliefs I agreed and I seem to remember most of the atheists on this board strongly agreeing as well. It seem odd to me that when it comes to the subject of faith there seems to be an effort to keep "religious" faith separate from the day to day faith every human operates on. I suppose that makes it easier to ridicule and criticize. Of course, which is why the religious constantly and dishonestly try to pretend there's an equivalence between faith in something with no evidence, and trust in something that does have evidence. As hotflungwok pointed out, religious faith is put in a special category, which lets it slide on it's complete lack of evidence. That category is not valid; it's ONLY purpose is to let religion off the hook.

DT uses a broad brush to paint all religious faith with the same characteristics. It's ludicrous. If he could be more specific and nuanced I'd agree with some of his points, but as it is, his exaggerated approach ruins any valid underlying truth for me. I doubt you'd ever agree no matter what I said. And I lump them all together because all religious belief is the same; empty, based on nothing.

When parents teach their kids about God and Jesus wouldn't you call that an example of trust? When someone has a powerful subjective experience and they translate it with the influence of those around them wouldn't that be an example of trust? People trust the good intentions and the "knowledge" of the people around them. When people hear a repeated meme from good people around them they are inclined to accept it as true. That sounds like trust to me. It's trust on the part of the kids, because they are kid; ignorant, trusting towards their parents and incapable of knowing better. It's misplaced trust, however. And teaching your children lies is disgusting.

The trust of children is little different from the faith of adults, which is why both are so easily exploited and so often destructive.

It''s important to note that faith in spiritual matters does not have to include a denial of evidence and the kind of closed mind often attributed to a fundamentalists.Of course it does; that is what religious faith is. Fundamentalists are just that way about more things, is all.

Now in another thread a "God spot" in the brain was discussed, didn't the brain evolve, so how can you say with any certainty that belief in God and the afterlife was not part of evolution. I don't think you can say that honestly. If we are created by our brain (body) then this belief must be evolutionary.So ? Evolution is imperfect by nature; most of it's experiments end in death. Just because a belief may have evolutionary reasons behind it doesn't make it right, or a good idea.
There are very strong emotional attachments being displayed in this thread in the name of science. A very strong belief that science is reason and religion is folly. Why shouldn't those who believe in religion feel as strongly about their faith and scientists do about science. Because science has proven it's validity again and again. Religion never has.

There is a lot of talk about blind faith, but to spiritual people there is no blind faith. No, they have nothing BUT blind faith.

The distrust is building between those scientists who wish to deny religion its rightful place and those religionists who wish to deny science its rightful place. Science will never replace nor destroy religion, ala Richard Dawkins, so how about learning to live in peace with each other. Because religion is an all consuming, all destroying cancer that is incapable of letting anything else live in peace. And the rightful place of religion is in history books and the trash heap of discarded bad ideas.

Ask Andrea Yatesgreat example. Somebody legally insane. Driven insane by her religion in no small part, by following her faith. Of course, religion IS insane, so insane behavior is to be expected from it's followers.

So, do you have a layman's understanding of the physical properties of that which comprises an electron? Or an empirical explanation of the mechanics of a graviton? Something replicable by application of the scientific method perhaps?

Or do you merely have some level of faith that such things exist in the first place? A level of faith that is not based on evidence and provability but on mathematics and observation of effects instead of direct observation and identification of the properties of the cause?No, I have trust in the people who have studied such things, performed experiments on them, proposed and tested theories about about them. And proven their reliability again and again. Not at all the same as faith in people's unsupported word, a word which contradicts the equally unsupported word of millions of other believers.

So, you're saying that it's okay to have faith as long as there is "real evidence behind it"? Is that what your saying?If there's evidence behind it, it's not faith.

Are any of their opinions based on hypothesis and conjecture? Are there any other opinions based on those hypothetical opinions that can only be held as valid because they fill in the blanks on some mathematical matrix? Do any of these opinions ever serve to fill in the blanks on two conflicting mathematical matrices?. Yes, and those are hypothesises that happen to fit what indirect evidence we have, not proven facts. Neither I nor the scientists who propose them have faith in them; they are merely a useful assumption, to either be verified or discarded when and if more evidence come in. And as said, the evidence for such things is the same for everyone. That's nothing to do with faith.

[lekatt]

Gosh, I should copy this response down as it seems to fit so often.

Did you actually read what I wrote, or are you filling in the other side of the argument yourself? If you have an objection to a point I made, give a counter argument. This is just vague handwaving.


You seem to be repeating yourself?
There are no arguments to opinion.

[hotflungwok]

You seem to be repeating yourself?
There are no arguments to opinion.
Yes, it seems I need to, and it really seemed to be the only appropriate response to the dismissive handwaving you used as an argument.

[kanicbird]

I would say the opposite; you'd have to know God to know Satan. He's defined considerably by his opposition to God. You can't know what it is he stands for and is/was without knowing what it is God stands for and is.

I'm not sure I agree that to know one you will know the other. Even if Satan is defined considerably by his opposition to God, that doesn't mean you have to even know that.

Also about the false religion 'gods' Satan has created you don't have to know Satan nor the demon who animates the false god, but you get to know the fictional god as real.

But they can't know him unless they know God. Logically only Christian or ex-Christian people can truly accept Satan under your view.

It would give them a leg up in knowing Satan but I don't think it's required, unless you want the person to see the deception also.

By that argument you have not necessarily rejected Satan, since knowledge of one doesn't also mean and require knowledge of the other. Either the two must be defined through knowledge of the other, as i've suggested, or you cannot guarantee that any Christian has truly rejected Satan, since they don't automatically know what they're rejecting.

Your entire post here (not just this last except) is a bit hard to follow, but I'll try to go on, please feel free to clarify as you see fit. In my experience of believers, each is given a set of tasks by God for the advancement of His kingdom and to bring Him glory. To accomplish these goals God lets us use His power through His Holy Spirit. The Spirit Himself decides what gifts (including knowledge) a believer will receive, some believers will have very little to do with spiritual warfare, and never really develop a good understanding of who Satan is, others will actually meet the devil himself in combat in their Christian walk and understand him very much.

through the gift of temporary indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This is in OT scriptures, it is speculation that this still goes on, but it is possible IMHO.

I think what you are getting at here is that if someone experienced the gifts/power of the Holy Spirit for a temporary indwelling to serve a purpose then, never knowing Jesus, decides to follow Satan (In any of his forms) would be unfairly cast into Outer Darkness instead of the seemingly nicer Hell. Is this the jist of it?

Each non-Christian that accepts Satan does so because God has directly intervened to allow them to.

Well everything that happens does so because God allowed it, but it's also a free will issue.

[Jesticulator]

The difference is that the people who tell me electrons have a negative charge have evidence for this claim--repeatable, intersubjectively available evidence, which is precisely the kind of evidence which is unavailable to the religious person, as I argued in my last post. Whether the person is trustworthy is only part of the story: the quality of their evidence also matters. And this is what is lacking in the religious case.So who determines which "quality of evidence" is appropriate or acceptable?As for why God's existence must be proved by repeatable, intersubjective evidence, I think the onus is on the religious believer to argue why evidence which is in principle unavailable to others should carry any weight at all. Which evidence presented by religious believers is "in principle unavailable to others"? Would you accept evidence that is "in principle" available to others? You can't just define 'evidence' however you wantWho is doing that?that is unacceptable epistemic permissiveness.You just made a claim. Must your claim "be proved by repeatable, intersubjective evidence"?

[cosmosdan]

That would be because children are taught religion as fact from an early age. They don't have the decision making ability to differentiate between fact and belief yet, especially when it comes to their parents. Believing something from childhood can have a very powerful effect on a person, even if that thing is later shown to be wrong. It isn't just children. People come to believe as adults as well.


Until god is shown to be otherwise, it is purely subjective.
Well there ya go. Then there is no need to judge god belief with an objective evidence standard.

Just take a look at the polls. What percentage of (American) adults believe there angels around us? I don't know. I asked you for some evidence to support your statement. I'd point out that there's a difference between believing something for which we have no objective evidence, and believing something that contradicts objective evidence we do have. I'd also point out that I'd like to see how those polls are phrased before I give them much credence. How the question is worded is important to what meaning we can derive from a poll.

Do you believe there are, or could be angels among us? is a different question from "Are you absolutely certain there are angels among us?" I'd like to think most people would answer no to the second question because they'd be honest enough to realize they weren't certain. I could be wrong though.


But nationalism doesn't have the protection religion does. You're supposed to respect a person's religious beliefs, regardless of how nutty they sound. The same isn't true of nationalism.

My point was that religion shouldn't have protected status, but in order to look at it from the same standard we shouldn't have a separate category for "religious" belief. Looking at belief systems in general we'll see that the details change but the internal mechanics of a belief system and faith is pretty much the same for believer and non believer.

You're jumping around. The faith you're talking about in this example is trust, until you start saying things like 'certain of things unseen'. I had seen my master, and others, perform these things. I had the evidence that other people can do it, and these people had shown me how to do it, and so I didn't need to rely on unseen things and hopes. I had evidence. Religious belief does not. It still required faith for you to believe you could do it. Your accomplishing something you'd never done before was the thing not seen. You had a support system of others who made you believe. Most believers have the same thing. They don't expect to see God. They expect to feel god and most would tell you they have. That feeling and the interpretation of it's meaning is supported by others around them.


But do you base day to day decisions on the uncertain existance of Australia? Because people most certainly base important life events around the much more uncertain existance of god. And have for hundreds of years with both positive and negative results. Still, mankind continues. You may believe religion is more bad than good but so far nobody has established that to be true. I'd even be more specific and say that people base their day to day on what they perceive to be right or wrong, meaningful or not, and their beliefs about god do influence that but are not the only influence.


Again, ask Andrea Yates. She had a profound subjective experience. Oh, but shes insane. How do you know you're sane? How do you know the strong feeling you have is good and should be listened to and another is bad and should be ignored? Yes its an extreme example, but it holds: subjective experience can be questionable. It is subject to all manner of interpretation and bias and other things that can distort it. It is not replacement for objective evidence.
Of course it isn't. I'm not suggesting any such thing. The fact is no human I know of bases their life and their day to day choices on what is solely objective. Our value system is pretty subjective. Sometimes people react to feelings like anger and resentment, but also to feelings of love and compassion. That holds true for all humans. We all have subjective experiences and must interpret what they mean and how they will affect our choices.

That's why I say , let's look at belief systems for all people without the false assumption that religious ones are automatically inferior. There hasn't been enough evidence offered to show that true.

[begbert2]

So who determines which "quality of evidence" is appropriate or acceptable? Which evidence presented by religious believers is "in principle unavailable to others"?This is an excellent question, and here is the answer: evidence is acceptable to the degree that it is supported by other evidence, including historical tendencies, and damaged in significantly higher proportion by evidence that contradicts it unless/until that evidence is discredited by other evidence. (Also note that internal contradictions and failures to deliver on proimises are very strong evidence against.)

In short terms, that means that if 10 sources tell you that Australia exists, and 1 source tells you it doesn't, the descrediting source should still be given enough weight to be looked into, to look for more evidence confirming or denying.

Of course, about 99.999% of the relevent evidence supports that there's an austrailia. (More than that if you're actually in Austrailia.)

Now, religion. A person who is raised in a religion that does not contradict itself and is 100% surrounded by people who believe in it and who has all things happen as described by the religion happen (prayers answered, mountains moved, etc.) is entirely correct in believing in their religion, even if it happens to be wrong. With that level of evidence, they're justified in their belief.

Most people I know don't actually live in such a world, so they invent it themselves to the best of their ability by ignoring evidence around them and the flaws of their own apologetics. This sort of belief is not so justified.

[cosmosdan]

This is an excellent question, and here is the answer: evidence is acceptable to the degree that it is supported by other evidence, including historical tendencies, and damaged in significantly higher proportion by evidence that contradicts it unless/until that evidence is discredited by other evidence. (Also note that internal contradictions and failures to deliver on proimises are very strong evidence against.)

In short terms, that means that if 10 sources tell you that Australia exists, and 1 source tells you it doesn't, the descrediting source should still be given enough weight to be looked into, to look for more evidence confirming or denying.

Of course, about 99.999% of the relevent evidence supports that there's an austrailia. (More than that if you're actually in Austrailia.)

Now, religion. A person who is raised in a religion that does not contradict itself and is 100% surrounded by people who believe in it and who has all things happen as described by the religion happen (prayers answered, mountains moved, etc.) is entirely correct in believing in their religion, even if it happens to be wrong. With that level of evidence, they're justified in their belief.

Most people I know don't actually live in such a world, so they invent it themselves to the best of their ability by ignoring evidence around them and the flaws of their own apologetics. This sort of belief is not so justified.

I think that's an excellent question as well. I appreciate your answer. The problem I see is that only a small portion of religious belief is of the objective type that can be verified or discarded by examining hard evidence.
The other thing to consider is the level of importance given to certain beliefs. There are many things we accept as true because our life operates smoothly and to our liking while we believe them. There is no reason to seriously question or seek to verify certain beliefs. We accept things all the time without making an effort to verify. Usually there must be some reason to call beliefs into question.

[ManiacMan]

I don't really see the difference between someone who has faith and someone who doesn't. Person A has faith in God based on...faith. Person B has faith (in a way) that there is no God. Both people can be thrown for a loop if something happens that debunks their own individual faith that God does or doesn't exist which causes them to do a 180.

In the end I think it's something that isn't truly answered until a person stops sucking air for good.

[Jesticulator]

This is an excellent question, and here is the answer: evidence is acceptable to the degree that it is supported by other evidence, including historical tendencies, and damaged in significantly higher proportion by evidence that contradicts it unless/until that evidence is discredited by other evidence. (Also note that internal contradictions and failures to deliver on proimises are very strong evidence against.)Perhaps it was an excellent question but you didn't answer it.

The question was not "How is the acceptability of evidence determined?"
The question was: "So who determines which 'quality of evidence' is appropriate or acceptable?" and it was in reference to this quote:The difference is that the people who tell me electrons have a negative charge have evidence for this claim--repeatable, intersubjectively available evidence, which is precisely the kind of evidence which is unavailable to the religious person, as I argued in my last post. Whether the person is trustworthy is only part of the story: the quality of their evidence also matters. And this is what is lacking in the religious case.There was a claim about "the quality of evidence" but no explanation of how the "quality" is determined. And, since the post referred to "the people who tell me ...", I asked for who determines which 'quality of evidence' is appropriate or acceptable.

You have not answered the question that I asked. Please try again.

Thanks.

[Der Trihs]

It isn't just children. People come to believe as adults as well. Very, very rarely. As a rule, only children are gullible enough to buy into a religion. That's why the religious make such a point of infecting children; adults are resistant.

That's why I say , let's look at belief systems for all people without the false assumption that religious ones are automatically inferior. There hasn't been enough evidence offered to show that true.Thousands of years of failure and zero evidence aren't enough ? What would be ? The answer of course, is nothing; the religious are irrational, and beyond reasoning with.

And of course religious belief systems are pretty much automatically inferior; that's WHY they are religious. If you have evidence for something, or if you are willing and able to defend it as a simple opinion or a matter of taste, you will say so and not label it religion. Beliefs get labelled religious only when they are indefensible.

I don't really see the difference between someone who has faith and someone who doesn't. Person A has faith in God based on...faith. Person B has faith (in a way) that there is no God. Both people can be thrown for a loop if something happens that debunks their own individual faith that God does or doesn't exist which causes them to do a 180.Except that there has never, ever been any evidence for anything but the "There is no God" side. And disbelief is the logical default; that's how we treat everything else but religion.

In the end I think it's something that isn't truly answered until a person stops sucking air for good.That won't make any difference. Even in the highly unlikely event that there's an afterlife, that still doesn't give you any more reason to believe in a God.

[cosmosdan]

Very, very rarely. As a rule, only children are gullible enough to buy into a religion. That's why the religious make such a point of infecting children; adults are resistant.

You just made that up out of zero evidence didn't you? I can think of at least two dopers who became believers as adults. I'd be interested in hearing from others. My guess is don't have a shred of evidence to support this "very very rare" blather.

[Der Trihs]

You just made that up out of zero evidence didn't you? I can think of at least two dopers who became believers as adults.Simply an observation of the obvious; which you've just underlined. Two out of how many ?

[MEBuckner]

It''s important to note that faith in spiritual matters does not have to include a denial of evidence and the kind of closed mind often attributed to a fundamentalists. The classic definition in Hebrews 11
1Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.
does not have to be the kind of blind faith that denies evidence. We go forward moment to moment acting on faith about our world, our relationships with those close to us. We operate on what we believe is true even though a new experience or new evidence may alter our beliefs.
Trying to convince you is evidence that I am not seeking to give you faith. Providing you with evidence leads you away from faith, and gives you nothing but logical argument. If I wanted to prove something, I would certainly avoid invoking the concept of faith. On the other hand, if I have faith, I might simply choose to offer you love, and hope that you will find faith from that.
That second quote is an excellent example of what I was referring to earlier: Defining "faith" (religious faith) as something entirely apart from, and even opposed to, evidence, argument, or "proof", is not the hallmark of "closed-minded fundamentalists", but rather of liberal religionists. (I'm pretty sure Triskadecamus is far from being a fundamentalist of any sort.) "Fundamentalists" (theological conservatives) are far more likely to offer up arguments or evidence for the beliefs ("the empty tomb", the Argument from Design, lists of fulfilled prophecies from Scripture, etc.) In my opinion, those arguments are invariably flawed, and the evidence presented is insufficient, inaccurate, wouldn't prove the conclusion even if it were accurate, and so on. Nonetheless, it's often the case that and atheists seem to have a kind of common ground with "fundamentalists" that's lacking with liberal believers. We can get in there and parse scripture, toss historical and scientific and linguistic cites at each other, look for flaws in each other's logic.

On the other hand, with the liberal believer, you often get the attitude (as referenced above) that religious belief is something which is totally apart from any kind of attempt at argument, reasoned discussion, or evidence. "It's just a matter of faith." It seems perhaps harsh to call this "closed minded", but with this of thinking, religion hardly belongs in Great Debates at all--all religious beliefs would wind up in IMHO or even MPSIMS. If we accept this view of "faith", there can be no argument, just a series of assertions.

This is not to say "fundamentalists" cannot be "close-minded"; in fact I think there are many mechanisms used by theologically conservative believers to rationalize or hand-wave away various objections to or problems with their belief systems; nonetheless, they're still on the same playing field as the atheist arguing against religion. Arguments are met with counter-arguments; counter-arguments are objected to and rebutted; the objections and rebuttals are met with further counter-rebuttals, and so on. And I suppose it's at least possible in theory for someone to simply say "I have faith"--in the strong sense of faith--"that there is no God." The atheist analogue of the liberal believer.

It might be argued that if a liberal believer is only making an assertion about what he believes, rather than trying to convert anyone else by fire and sword, or even reason and apologetics, then his conviction (even if it's one I don't share) is harmless. The point I think Sam Harris was making about this sort of faith being dangerous is that, by definition, it is not subject to any sort of rational or empircal argument. As long as we're talking about liberal believers having faith in compassion and love it doesn't seem like a problem--the religious liberal asserts compassion and love as a matter of faith; secular humanists discuss rationalist ethics and the evolutionary roots of morality and utilitarianism or whatever the case may be to come to the essentially the same conclusions.

But what about the non-liberal religious believer? What do we do when someone uses the same language of faith as something which totally transcends and is even opposed to evidence or logical argument, not in the service of compassion and love, but to justify imposing the perfect law of God by fire and sword and hijacked airliners? If faith is beyond evidence or logical argument, then how do we avoid concluding that the faith of the liberal Christian who preaches compassion and love, and the faith of Mohammed Atta, are equally valid? This is why faith--in the strong sense of the word, not some variety of "trust based on evidence, experience, argument, or reason" (however misplaced I may find that trust to be)--is arguably dangerous.

[cosmosdan]

Simply an observation of the obvious; which you've just underlined. Two out of how many ?

Two I could think of with very little effort. I don't know how many believers are on this board. I doubt you do either. It's not obvious at all but I take your answer to mean that you don't have anything to support your assertion. I'm not surprised.

It's probably true that more believers were taught to believe as children but that's not the same as "very very rare" Someone who rails so often about logic and evidence should be more careful about throwing out unsupported assertions like that.

[cosmosdan]

It might be argued that if a liberal believer is only making an assertion about what he believes, rather than trying to convert anyone else by fire and sword, or even reason and apologetics, then his conviction (even if it's one I don't share) is harmless. The point I think Sam Harris was making about this sort of faith being dangerous is that, by definition, it is not subject to any sort of rational or empircal argument. As long as we're talking about liberal believers having faith in compassion and love it doesn't seem like a problem--the religious liberal asserts compassion and love as a matter of faith; secular humanists discuss rationalist ethics and the evolutionary roots of morality and utilitarianism or whatever the case may be to come to the essentially the same conclusions.

But what about the non-liberal religious believer? What do we do when someone uses the same language of faith as something which totally transcends and is even opposed to evidence or logical argument, not in the service of compassion and love, but to justify imposing the perfect law of God by fire and sword and hijacked airliners? If faith is beyond evidence or logical argument, then how do we avoid concluding that the faith of the liberal Christian who preaches compassion and love, and the faith of Mohammed Atta, are equally valid? This is why faith--in the strong sense of the word, not some variety of "trust based on evidence, experience, argument, or reason" (however misplaced I may find that trust to be)--is arguably dangerous.

We can react and challenge the actions of anyone as part of the human race when their actions , whatever the motivation, affect others. We can make assertions based on what objective evidence we have and through education try to dispel certain myths. We can engage and challenge each other to examine our belief systems in a civil manner.

IMO we can respect anyone's right to worship as they choose and to follow whatever path they choose but we still have to hold them entirely and personally responsible for their actions. We must make that clear in our system of justice as a race of beings. However, until we can truly stand for justice and equality for all people without all the political and economic manipulation that denies justice and equality for so many we will have to deal with the consequences.

It's not so much that I have to hold someone else's belief system as acceptable and valid. It's more that I have to have some respect for their right to choose it and pursue it, because I want that right for myself.

[nd_n8]

Very, very rarely. As a rule, only children are gullible enough to buy into a religion. That's why the religious make such a point of infecting children; adults are resistant.Please offer a cite for this "rule".

Thousands of years of failure and zero evidence aren't enough ? What would be ? The answer of course, is nothing; the religious are irrational, and beyond reasoning with.I don't really understand your use of the term "failure". Please provide the standard with which you are measuring the success and/or failure of belief systems. Specific examples of which failure applys to which belief system would also be helpful

And of course religious belief systems are pretty much automatically inferior; that's WHY they are religious. Do you have anything other than conjecture and speculation to back this up? Something that does not fall across the same lines of "Black people are pretty much automatically inferior" or "Jews are pretty much automatically inferior". Something nice and concrete please.

If you have evidence for something, or if you are willing and able to defend it as a simple opinion or a matter of taste, you will say so and not label it religion. Beliefs get labelled religious only when they are indefensible.I'm not sure I follow you here either. Why would one lable an opinion as not religion? What would be the difference between an opinion and a personal belief?

Except that there has never, ever been any evidence for anything but the "There is no God" side. And disbelief is the logical default; that's how we treat everything else but religion.Please offer a cite for any evidence, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, that posits "There is no God". Please also avoid evidence that implys that "No God is required" because, while this may or may not provide that God is not necessary, it does not necessarily stand to reason that "There is no God". Please only provide a direct cite to the non-existance of God.

That won't make any difference. Even in the highly unlikely event that there's an afterlife, that still doesn't give you any more reason to believe in a God.Ahhh... but what if, in your highly unlikely event that there's and afterlife, the even more highly unlikely event that God stands before you and smiles. Would this give you a reason? The fatality arguement is a very solid one as it thus far eludes proof one way or the other. If you have a cite or proof that it does provide evidence one way or the other I would like to read it.

Here is a nice essay on the subject of the subjucation of faith and the onus of skepticism (http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth11.html). I offer this as enhancement to my arguement, not as a cite or proof of anything.

I also hold that in this situation, where the initial challenge was "Is Faith Realistic" that the onus is clearly on the skeptic's side. There has been much opinion and muck flying about, I am simply requesting some citation to back up these claims.

[Der Trihs]

I don't really understand your use of the term "failure". Please provide the standard with which you are measuring the success and/or failure of belief systems. Specific examples of which failure applys to which belief system would also be helpfulThe failure to be right. About anything. Whenever religion makes a statement that can actually be checked, it turns out to be wrong. We weren't created a few thousand years ago ( or at all ),the world isn't flat, there wasn't a worldwide flood, and so on.

Do you have anything other than conjecture and speculation to back this up? Something that does not fall across the same lines of "Black people are pretty much automatically inferior" or "Jews are pretty much automatically inferior". Something nice and concrete please.As I just said; the fact that religion always turns out to be wrong, or with zero evidence. And don't try to compare racial bigotry with the disapproval of people who are wrong.

I'm not sure I follow you here either. Why would one lable an opinion as not religion? What would be the difference between an opinion and a personal belief?An opinion is just an opinion; something personal. A religion makes claims of fact; that there is a God, say. Not the same thing at all.

Please offer a cite for any evidence, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, that posits "There is no God". Please also avoid evidence that implys that "No God is required" because, while this may or may not provide that God is not necessary, it does not necessarily stand to reason that "There is no God". Please only provide a direct cite to the non-existance of God.The wide variety of physical laws that God would violate is evidence against it's existence. And "No God is required" IS evidence that there is no God, just as the lack of a need for invisible goblins to explain anything is evidence against the existence of invisible goblins. That's the same standard we apply to everything but religion.

Ahhh... but what if, in your highly unlikely event that there's and afterlife, the even more highly unlikely event that God stands before you and smiles. Would this give you a reason? No. Why would I believe that it was God ? God is such an utterly silly idea - or outright impossible, in the case of most versions - that anything else would be more plausible. And any number of beings more likely to exist than God could provide false evidence that I couldn't possibly see through. Or I could be alive and crazy, which is also more believable than God. This was all discussed to death in the other thread.

I also hold that in this situation, where the initial challenge was "Is Faith Realistic" that the onus is clearly on the skeptic's side. Garbage. The onus is always on the person who claims something exists. ESPECIALLY when that something violates known physical laws, and when there's no evidence whatsoever for it. You are simply trying to give religion a privileged status; no doubt because you know that without such status it would be laughed at.

I'm afraid I don't have the time to do a web search for the rest of your demands. Not that it matters since I'm sure you'll ignore anything I or anyone find.

[cosmosdan]

Perhaps it was an excellent question but you didn't answer it.

The question was not "How is the acceptability of evidence determined?"
The question was: "So who determines which 'quality of evidence' is appropriate or acceptable?" and it was in reference to this quote:There was a claim about "the quality of evidence" but no explanation of how the "quality" is determined. And, since the post referred to "the people who tell me ...", I asked for who determines which 'quality of evidence' is appropriate or acceptable.

You have not answered the question that I asked. Please try again.

Thanks.

Personally I think the individual must determine for themselves what the evidence of their own experience means for them. Religion and the spiritual life is subjective for the most part. Beliefs are held by tradition more than any physical evidence.

A person may have some powerful experience and depending on the influences around them , they may be told, "It's Jesus" or "It's Allah" or it's just your emotions. Ultimately they must decide what the experience means to them and if it has any value. That also means they must take personal responsibility for whatever actions spring from their interpretation.

IMO because I want the right for myself to interpret and determine the meaning of my own experience , I have a certain moral obligation to support that right for others as well. I do reserve the right to react and interact when their actions affect me, the same as I expect them to react when my actions affect them.

I'll add that if we value truth and personal growth over tradition we will honestly examine objective evidence that relates to our religious beliefs.

[nd_n8]

As I just said; the fact that religion always turns out to be wrong, or with zero evidence. And don't try to compare racial bigotry with the disapproval of people who are wrong.Bigotry is bigotry no matter how you flavor it. How is persecution of Jews because of their beliefs not bigotry?

Garbage. The onus is always on the person who claims something exists. ESPECIALLY when that something violates known physical laws, and when there's no evidence whatsoever for it. You are simply trying to give religion a privileged status; no doubt because you know that without such status it would be laughed at.Ummm... No. The burdon of proof lies in the prosecution. In other words the person making the claim. In this thread the claim made (I believe by you as a division of another topic) is that:Faith makes wisdom impossible, in the areas it touches on. Faith cripples the mind. And you can't get knowledge from faith; it's empty. It has no way of giving you knowledge; it's just a guess combined with denial.

Not if you trust faith you don't. Faith is immensely arrogant. Faith denies reality, denies the arguments of others, denies everything but your egocentric fantasy of what the world is. Nothing could be more arrogant than faith.

You cannot, by definition, have an open mind on something you have faith in.

And a faith based belief is never better than any other wild guess, with the difference that the guesser will refuse to change his or her guess as the facts come in. THAT is "why not".Therefore, as the person making the claim you have the responsibility to back it up.

I'm afraid I don't have the time to do a web search for the rest of your demands. Not that it matters since I'm sure you'll ignore anything I or anyone find.That's ok, take your time, this post isn't going anywhere anytime soon, we'll still be here tomorrow or the next day if need be.

When come back bring cites ...and pie.

Oh, and read this (http://www.robertsrules.org/), especially the part about "Remarks must be courteous in language and deportment - avoid all personalities, never allude to others by name or to motives!" and try to keep personal attacks and baseless insinuations out of it please.

[Jesticulator]

Personally I think the individual must determine for themselves what the evidence of their own experience means for them. Religion and the spiritual life is subjective for the most part. Beliefs are held by tradition more than any physical evidence. That's an interesting observation. It could be the main reason that I am not a theist: There were few (if any) traditions in my family.

But, as an adult now, I see an amazing amount of wilful ignorance that leads to (what I think are) silly superstitions. For me, religion is similar to astrology: Hey, if it works for you, fine. But don't tell me that it will change my life, or that it offers the fundamental principles for explaining physical events.I'll add that if we value truth and personal growth over tradition we will honestly examine objective evidence that relates to our religious beliefs.I agree. I think, though, that it is difficult (impossible?) to examine evidence in a way that is inconsistent with our worldview, making it unlikely that we will recognize the "non-truth" portion of our beliefs. (Of course, I am part of "we" ... ;) )

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Perhaps it was an excellent question but you didn't answer it.

The question was not "How is the acceptability of evidence determined?"
The question was: "So who determines which 'quality of evidence' is appropriate or acceptable?" and it was in reference to this quote:There was a claim about "the quality of evidence" but no explanation of how the "quality" is determined. And, since the post referred to "the people who tell me ...", I asked for who determines which 'quality of evidence' is appropriate or acceptable.

You have not answered the question that I asked. Please try again.

Thanks.
It's not a question of 'who' decides that the evidence is good or bad; this very question indicates a relativist or subjectivist mindset. The evidence is itself good or bad. For example, 99.99% of people who get advanced degrees in fields related to evolution and are hence in a good position to evaluate the quality of the evidence believe that the evidence overwhelmingly supports evolutionary theory. That is a good (though not infallible) indicator that the evidence is pretty solid.

If you can show me a correlate in religion, I would be happy to discuss it. And by correlate, I don't mean ignorant masses of people who know nothing about the philosophical and theological problems of the existence of God and say, "Hey, a rainbow; I'll bet God made that!"

[Sophistry and Illusion]

I wouldn't count on it. :dubious:
Are you thinking Hell is a safer bet for me? :p

[cosmosdan]

That's an interesting observation. It could be the main reason that I am not a theist: There were few (if any) traditions in my family.

But, as an adult now, I see an amazing amount of wilful ignorance that leads to (what I think are) silly superstitions. For me, religion is similar to astrology: Hey, if it works for you, fine. But don't tell me that it will change my life, or that it offers the fundamental principles for explaining physical events
The traditions have a deep hold and a strong support system. They seem to think since so many people who are Christian believe X then X must be true and evidence to the contrary is just wrong. IMO we can approach the beliefs that we have ample physical evidence for and gradually those traditional myths will lose their hold.

IMO the very subjective nature of beliefs means people should hold them as provisional. as in "This works for me for now, but I can't really say what's true or right for everybody else" It seems painfully obvious to me that nobody has the market cornered on divine truth if there even is such a thing.

.I agree. I think, though, that it is difficult (impossible?) to examine evidence in a way that is inconsistent with our worldview, making it unlikely that we will recognize the "non-truth" portion of our beliefs. (Of course, I am part of "we" ... ;) ) I agree we have a strong tendency to do that. I think it depends on what we value. If we place a high value on learning and growing , on discerning the truth from tradition, then we are more likely to be open to learn. If we are reluctant to learn because that causes changes we don't like, then we face the results of that as well.

[Jesticulator]

It's not a question of 'who' decides that the evidence is good or bad; this very question indicates a relativist or subjectivist mindset. The evidence is itself good or bad.Huh? So, somehow the evidence itself tells us whether it is good or bad, with no human intervention?
But then you say:For example, 99.99% of people who ...Who cares what "people" say, right? The evidence speaks for itself. And, why are you making up percentages as part of your argument?

How about this: "99.99% of people who get advanced degrees in theology and are hence in a good position to evaluate the quality of the evidence believe that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the value of religious faith. That is a good (though not infallible) indicator that the evidence is pretty solid."If you can show me a correlate in religion, I would be happy to discuss it. And by correlate, I don't mean ignorant masses of people who know nothing about the philosophical and theological problems of the existence of God and say, "Hey, a rainbow; I'll bet God made that!"Well, I've already brought up graduates of theology. Here's some info from Harvard Divinity School (http://www.hds.harvard.edu/history.html):The curriculum of the Divinity School is designed to address the challenges that confront religious communities when commitment is considered in a global context. Perhaps the most critical of those challenges is the contemporary crisis in religious meaning and authority. This crisis strikes at the very heart of religious commitment and is central to a theological education that struggles to understand, evaluate, criticize, and then to affirm and act out of particular traditions.and Oxford Faculty of Theology (http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/postgraduate/caz/theo.shtml):The purpose of the Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree is to offer extensive postgraduate education in Theology for very able students, including a significant element of scholarly research and writing which may contribute towards a future research degree.
Also, do you think that the content of The Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/index.html) was compiled by "ignorant masses of people"?

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Huh? So, somehow the evidence itself tells us whether it is good or bad, with no human intervention?
But then you say:Who cares what "people" say, right? The evidence speaks for itself. And, why are you making up percentages as part of your argument?
Well, the evidence is good or it's not good. But, as I said before, the layman's best indicator of whether evidence is good or bad is what the experts say about the evidence. That's where the people enter into it. If I were an evolutionary biologist, I could appeal directly to the evidence, rather than to the consensus in the field. But I'm not, so I have to appeal to consensus of experts--people.

How about this: "99.99% of people who get advanced degrees in theology and are hence in a good position to evaluate the quality of the evidence believe that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the value of religious faith. That is a good (though not infallible) indicator that the evidence is pretty solid."Well, I've already brought up graduates of theology. Here's some info from Harvard Divinity School (http://www.hds.harvard.edu/history.html):and Oxford Faculty of Theology (http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/postgraduate/caz/theo.shtml):
Also, do you think that the content of The Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/index.html) was compiled by "ignorant masses of people"?
But what I asked you is if there is any correlate, on the religious side, of the type of evidence that exists on the scientific side. I have already complained that religious types, by fiat, lay out a different (and substantially more lax) set of rules that for some reason they are allowed to play by. I call bullshit. If these people at these divinity schools are not basing their conclusions on evidence, then it doesn't matter what they think.

That's the difference between the scientific example I cited, and the religious example you cited. Stated in an oversimplified way, but a way that still conveys a fundamental truth, scientific consensus results from evidence, whereas religious consensus results from indoctrination. You still haven't given me a religious correlate for scientific evidence. Nor, I suspect, can such a correlate be given.

[Jesticulator]

But what I asked you is if there is any correlate, on the religious side, of the type of evidence that exists on the scientific side.
...
You still haven't given me a religious correlate for scientific evidence. Nor, I suspect, can such a correlate be given.Okay, you continue to use the word correlate and I've gone along with you so far. But, it seems to me that you are using the word in a way that is different from the dictionary definitions.

correlate
Compact Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/correlate?view=uk)
each of two or more related or complementary things.

Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=correlate)
1 : either of two things so related that one directly implies or is complementary to the other (as husband and wife)
2 : a phenomenon that accompanies another phenomenon, is usually parallel to it, and is related in some way to it <precise electrical correlates of conscious thinking in the human brain — Bayard Webster>

Encarta® World English Dictionary (http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?refid=1861600501)
1. complementary thing: something that shares mutual or complementary properties with something else

What do you mean by "correlate"?
I think we agree that science and religion are different. But your questions suggest that you think they should be identical, and, if not, then religion is useless.

Is that what you're saying?

[Revenant Threshold]

I'm not sure I agree that to know one you will know the other. Even if Satan is defined considerably by his opposition to God, that doesn't mean you have to even know that. But then surely you're not truly worshipping Satan? You're worshipping something you think is Satan, but isn't. It's like worshipping an orange under the mistaken impression it's Satan; he might get power from the fact you're not worshipping God, but you're still not actually worshipping of accepting the true person.Also about the false religion 'gods' Satan has created you don't have to know Satan nor the demon who animates the false god, but you get to know the fictional god as real. Right, you end up accepting the facade god, not him. It would give them a leg up in knowing Satan but I don't think it's required, unless you want the person to see the deception also. I think you need to know of the deception in order to truly accept it. If you don't know of it, then you've only accepted the deception; seeing the real Satan is needed in order to truly accept him. At least, under my definition of acceptance.Your entire post here (not just this last except) is a bit hard to follow, but I'll try to go on, please feel free to clarify as you see fit. In my experience of believers, each is given a set of tasks by God for the advancement of His kingdom and to bring Him glory. To accomplish these goals God lets us use His power through His Holy Spirit. The Spirit Himself decides what gifts (including knowledge) a believer will receive, some believers will have very little to do with spiritual warfare, and never really develop a good understanding of who Satan is, others will actually meet the devil himself in combat in their Christian walk and understand him very much. Yes, apologies, I looked back on it and I wasn't being very clear.

My points were basically this;
- You believe that in order to truly know God, you need to believe in him, or you can gain knowledge through bestowal of the Holy Spirit.
- I suggest that in order to truly know Satan, you need to know God.
- Thus, anyone who truly accepts Satan must have been either;
[A Christian at some point (so they have knowledge of God
[Given the gift of the Holy Spirit temporarily.

Therefore, all people who truly accept Satan must either have been Christians at some point (and so no non-Christians truly accept Satan, though they may accept facsimilies); unless they've specifically been gifted with the Holy Spirit.This is in OT scriptures, it is speculation that this still goes on, but it is possible IMHO.

I think what you are getting at here is that if someone experienced the gifts/power of the Holy Spirit for a temporary indwelling to serve a purpose then, never knowing Jesus, decides to follow Satan (In any of his forms) would be unfairly cast into Outer Darkness instead of the seemingly nicer Hell. Is this the jist of it? Not really. I'm not familiar with what you mean by the Outer Darkness... do you mean nonexistence? I'm not certain i'd call that worse than Hell. Well everything that happens does so because God allowed it, but it's also a free will issue. Actually, it isn't. If God (or the Holy Spirit itself) was inclined to give of itself in that manner in order to comply with free will, then logically everyone would be with the Holy Spirit. That they aren't shows it's not a basic matter of free will, and so the gift is being given for alternate reasons. Since without that gift, no non-Christians could truly accept Satan, it seems like someone's got something against us.

[Voyager]

Well, the evidence is good or it's not good. But, as I said before, the layman's best indicator of whether evidence is good or bad is what the experts say about the evidence. That's where the people enter into it. If I were an evolutionary biologist, I could appeal directly to the evidence, rather than to the consensus in the field. But I'm not, so I have to appeal to consensus of experts--people.

Saying that evidence is good or not good is overly simplistic. Some evidence is very clear, but much is uncertain. If someone digs up a bone, there can be legitimate disputes about what species that bone came from. Evidence must fit into a wider context. If it doesn't, then it is suspect unless confirming evidence is found. The demonstration that Piltdown man was a forgery didn't shake up archeology because it didn't fit into other fossils, and was more or less ignored.

So the answer to who decides if evidence is good or not is the scientific consensus. For religion we have a problem, since faith requires that evidence fit into the dogma, not that the dogma be based on evidence.



That's the difference between the scientific example I cited, and the religious example you cited. Stated in an oversimplified way, but a way that still conveys a fundamental truth, scientific consensus results from evidence, whereas religious consensus results from indoctrination. You still haven't given me a religious correlate for scientific evidence. Nor, I suspect, can such a correlate be given.
Even worse, there is no global consensus on religion the way there is on science. If the charge of an electron were measured differently depending on what country you lived in, or what school you got your PhD from, we'd have a big problem. Splinter groups in science exist, but they're an indication that the truth has not been found yet on a topic - see string theory. Science typically moves to consensus, like cosmology moved to the Big Bang theory. After thousands of years religion is more splintered than ever, and that seems to indicate that there is no there there. Call theology philosophy, which does not claim to be able to discover final truths, fine. But the claim that theology can discover truths has been pretty well falsified by now.

[begbert2]

Perhaps it was an excellent question but you didn't answer it.

The question was not "How is the acceptability of evidence determined?"
The question was: "So who determines which 'quality of evidence' is appropriate or acceptable?" and it was in reference to this quote:

There was a claim about "the quality of evidence" but no explanation of how the "quality" is determined. And, since the post referred to "the people who tell me ...", I asked for who determines which 'quality of evidence' is appropriate or acceptable.

You have not answered the question that I asked. Please try again.

Thanks.Who determines which quality of evidence it acceptable? The person who's accepting it, of course. Not that the "who" is that significant a matter, since really, everyone assesses evidence at one time or another. A more germaine question is, 'What would be a good way for a person to assess the quality of evidence, if they were interested discerning in the truth?', which more closely approximates what I answered.

Of course, I know a lot of people who clearly have less interest in discerning the truth than in propping up their own feel-good preconceptions, and they of course have a different method of assessing their evidence. It's not a good one for discerning truth, of course, but that's not its intent.

[kanicbird]

But then surely you're not truly worshipping Satan? You're worshipping something you think is Satan, but isn't. It's like worshipping an orange under the mistaken impression it's Satan; he might get power from the fact you're not worshipping God, but you're still not actually worshipping of accepting the true person.

I would agree with that, except a nitpic that worshiping Satan does not give him power as most would think of the word, but could open up a foothold for Satan to posses oneself.

I think you need to know of the deception in order to truly accept it. If you don't know of it, then you've only accepted the deception; seeing the real Satan is needed in order to truly accept him. At least, under my definition of acceptance.

OK I'll agree with it

Therefore, all people who truly accept Satan must either have been Christians at some point (and so no non-Christians truly accept Satan, though they may accept facsimilies); unless they've specifically been gifted with the Holy Spirit.

Yes I'd agree with this in general.

Not really. I'm not familiar with what you mean by the Outer Darkness... do you mean nonexistence? I'm not certain i'd call that worse than Hell.

No one really knows, but it is assumed to be worse then Hell. If you are interested it is sometimes though of eternal torment with no contact with another entity forever, as opposed to Hell where one will be accompanied by fellow souls, demons and fallen angels. Basically cast outside the universe where no light exists. Perhaps one will be assigned a couple of demons to actual perform the torment, that you may or may not be able to perceive.

Actually, it isn't. If God (or the Holy Spirit itself) was inclined to give of itself in that manner in order to comply with free will, then logically everyone would be with the Holy Spirit. That they aren't shows it's not a basic matter of free will, and so the gift is being given for alternate reasons.

God sets limits on what we, and for that matter Satan, can do. These limits can be seen in Job for one. God allows us to make choices, yes God does know what choices we will make (again free will vs. predestination - I think you accepted that these two can coexist in previous threads). The gifts of the Holy Spirit allow us to hear God in which paths He wants us to take, and also opens paths that we wouldn't be able to travel or see.

[Jesticulator]

Who determines which quality of evidence it acceptable? The person who's accepting it, of course. Not that the "who" is that significant a matter, since really, everyone assesses evidence at one time or another. Okay. So, when you said this:In short terms, that means that if 10 sources tell you that Australia exists, and 1 source tells you it doesn't, the descrediting source should still be given enough weight to be looked into, to look for more evidence confirming or denying.

Of course, about 99.999% of the relevent evidence supports that there's an austrailia. (More than that if you're actually in Austrailia.)you were talking about "sources" that just appeared on their own, without human intervention, right? And, you are equating these "non-personal" sources with "evidence", right?
Okay. A more germaine question is, 'What would be a good way for a person to assess the quality of evidence, if they were interested discerning in the truth?', which more closely approximates what I answered.Is it a question about Germaine Greer, because she was born in Australia? Or is it germane to the discussion? :p

Anyway, you think, then, that you answerd the gist of my question with this:evidence is acceptable to the degree that it is supported by other evidence, including historical tendencies, and damaged in significantly higher proportion by evidence that contradicts it unless/until that evidence is discredited by other evidence. (Also note that internal contradictions and failures to deliver on proimises are very strong evidence against.)Interesting. Please provide evidence that your statements are correct.Of course, I know a lot of people who clearly have less interest in discerning the truth than in propping up their own feel-good preconceptions, and they of course have a different method of assessing their evidence. Your method, though, does not involve any attempt to feel good, right? You unemotionally examine all evidence, first to determine whether it is relevant and then to determine whether it is acceptable.
How do you feel about that?

[Jesticulator]

So the answer to who decides if evidence is good or not is the scientific consensus. What does "the scientific consensus" say about your statement? Do scientists use science to determine the method of evaluating evidence?For religion we have a problem, since faith requires that evidence fit into the dogma, not that the dogma be based on evidence.Why does that mean that "we have a problem"?Even worse, there is no global consensus on religion the way there is on science. So? Is there global consensus on politics, philosophy, and the arts? Are you suggesting that there should be?But the claim that theology can discover truths has been pretty well falsified by now.Falsified? Pretty well? Who did it? What is the global consensus on this issue? Where can I read about it? Or should I just accept your claim as the final truth?

[Sophistry and Illusion]

What do you mean by "correlate"?
I think we agree that science and religion are different. But your questions suggest that you think they should be identical, and, if not, then religion is useless.

Is that what you're saying?
I am saying that in science, there is evidence (although I admit to Voyager's charge that I oversimplify the status of evidence), and if you don't have evidence for your theory, then you are, and should be, ignored. Science is evidence-driven, because evidence is by definition an indication that such-and-such a theory is true.

What I'm arguing is two-fold. First, I am arguing that there is no similar indicator in religion--no factor that reliably indicates, in a way that can be replicated by others, that a particular religious doctrine is likely to be true. And the second point I am making is that too many advocates of religion practice special pleading, making ad hoc exemptions for themselves that allow them to believe something is true without being able to present anything that would indicate or tend to show that what they believe is in fact true.

Science isn't a special type of discipline; it is merely a sophisticated extension of our ordinary practice of using evidence and reason to try to come up with hypotheses to explain the world we live in. Religion isn't trying to set itself apart from science; it is trying to set itself apart from every other truth-seeking practice exercised by humans. That is an unacceptable case of special pleading.

[Revenant Threshold]

I would agree with that, except a nitpic that worshiping Satan does not give him power as most would think of the word, but could open up a foothold for Satan to posses oneself. Fair dos.Yes I'd agree with this in general. That was all my original point was, so, thanks. :) No one really knows, but it is assumed to be worse then Hell. If you are interested it is sometimes though of eternal torment with no contact with another entity forever, as opposed to Hell where one will be accompanied by fellow souls, demons and fallen angels. Basically cast outside the universe where no light exists. Perhaps one will be assigned a couple of demons to actual perform the torment, that you may or may not be able to perceive. Ah. Honestly i'd not heard of the concept before; are there any sites or books you could point me at that I could have a look at? It is an interesting topic. And yes, I think i'd agree that does sound worse than Hell, but then i'm a people person. ;) God sets limits on what we, and for that matter Satan, can do. These limits can be seen in Job for one. God allows us to make choices, yes God does know what choices we will make (again free will vs. predestination - I think you accepted that these two can coexist in previous threads). The gifts of the Holy Spirit allow us to hear God in which paths He wants us to take, and also opens paths that we wouldn't be able to travel or see. I have accepted that, your memory is accurate. The problem as I see it in this case is that by removing those limits in these cases, God's creating the opportunities. I mean, if free will and the abilities/vision granted by the Holy Spirit were that important to him, surely he'd make them avaliable to us in general all the time? IOW, if he wants us to have those options, we shouldn't just have them at certain times. He doesn't want us to have the option of flying any time we wish, so we don't have wings; there are some options he clearly doesn't want us to have open, at least permanently. Yet he's willing to give that option in cases where the people in question will choose to accept Satan, as opposed to times when they won't. It just seems like he wants that to happen, since he's actually intervening to create that option at the time it will be abused. If he didn't want the person in question to accept Satan, he wouldn't offer it - or at least, he would offer it at another time.

[begbert2]

Okay. So, when you said this:you were talking about "sources" that just appeared on their own, without human intervention, right? And, you are equating these "non-personal" sources with "evidence", right?
Okay.Sure, I'm talking about rocks and trees and fossils and natural laws like gravity. Of course, I'm also talking about books and videos. And personal testimony. And every other kind of evidence out there. All of it. Where could you have possibly gotten the idea that assessment of evidence was limited to natural evidence?

I'm equating "evidence" with "evidence". Tricky, I know.

Is it a question about Germaine Greer, because she was born in Australia? Or is it germane to the discussion? :p Ha, ha.

Anyway, you think, then, that you answerd the gist of my question with this:Interesting. Please provide evidence that your statements are correct.You have a computer, right? It works, right? The method by which it was developed relied utterly on the methods of assessing evidence described by my statements. If your computer exists, then that is evidence for my statements.

Your method, though, does not involve any attempt to feel good, right? You unemotionally examine all evidence, first to determine whether it is relevant and then to determine whether it is acceptable.
How do you feel about that?I don't do anything unemotionally; I'm a creature with emotions like everyone else. However I have enough of an ability to think clearly to at least attempt to discover the truth about things without resorting to choosing the conclusions I like first and then very carefully limiting my thinking in order not to disturb my pleasant imaginings.

And I feel that trying to base opinions on evidence is good, since it results in not making stupid, dangerous mistakes so much maybe. Is that a problem?

[Voyager]

What does "the scientific consensus" say about your statement? Do scientists use science to determine the method of evaluating evidence?

Of course they do. And math, of course. When you collect data, you just don't accept it - you apply statistical tests to determine how reliable it is, which means what is the probability that your results are due to chance. And of course since I was just stating how science is done, the scientific consensus supports me.

To anticipate your next question, why should we think the scientific consensus is correct? Because this method successfully predicts what we will see in nature, and, creating falsifiable hypotheses, has been very successful where success is not guaranteed.

Why does that mean that "we have a problem"?


Because ignoring or distorting evidence according to dogma does not lead to falsifiable hypotheses, and, worse, does lead us into thinks like GW II.

So? Is there global consensus on politics, philosophy, and the arts? Are you suggesting that there should be?

Are any of these things science? Political science might make some testable predictions, but politics - never.


Falsified? Pretty well? Who did it? What is the global consensus on this issue? Where can I read about it? Or should I just accept your claim as the final truth?
Read your Bible. Has Jesus come back? Was there a flood? Are demons responsible for our ills? Can we see the four corners of the world from any mountain? Since I don't feel like going through the Bible listing all failed predictions, why don't you give me some examples of worldwide testable and verified hypotheses of religion on the order of, say, relativity? Religion was in effective charge for about 1500 years. Did it make progress? Did it converge to an answer?

Say Joseph Smith had been a scientist, and had made the same types of claims in the realm of science as he did in the realm of religion. Do you think there would be a Smithian faction of science today? Not likely. Either discovered evidence would support him, and we'd all be Smithians, or it would falsify his hypothesis, and almost none of us would be. (Might be a few crackpots out there.) The issue would be settled because there is a way of settling such things in science, unlike in religion.

[Jesticulator]

Of course they do. And math, of course. When you collect data, you just don't accept it - you apply statistical tests to determine how reliable it is, which means what is the probability that your results are due to chance. And of course since I was just stating how science is done, the scientific consensus supports me.Well, I see that you don't understand that the methods of science are not based on science but on a particular epistemology. Consider this: Was Karl Popper a scientist or a philosopher? Also, does science tell scientists which math to use, which data to collect, and what the standards of reliability are?

If you can't appreciate the difference between science and the philosophy of science then there is no further point to this discussion. (Your irrelevant comments about GW II, "your" Bible, Jesus, and Joseph Smith provide further evidence that a discussion with you in this thread is a waste of time.)

[Jesticulator]

What I'm arguing is two-fold. First, I am arguing that there is no similar indicator in religion--no factor that reliably indicates, in a way that can be replicated by others, that a particular religious doctrine is likely to be true. And the second point I am making is that too many advocates of religion practice special pleading, making ad hoc exemptions for themselves that allow them to believe something is true without being able to present anything that would indicate or tend to show that what they believe is in fact true.I agree. :) Science isn't a special type of discipline; it is merely a sophisticated extension of our ordinary practice of using evidence and reason to try to come up with hypotheses to explain the world we live in.But how much of your knowledge of the world did you formulate using this "sophisticated extension"? Are all of your "truths" scientific? Is there no place in your world for "non-scientific" knowledge?Religion isn't trying to set itself apart from science; it is trying to set itself apart from every other truth-seeking practice exercised by humans. That is an unacceptable case of special pleading.Perhaps you can provide some evidence that religion is trying to do this. Thanks.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

I agree. :) But how much of your knowledge of the world did you formulate using this "sophisticated extension"? Are all of your "truths" scientific? Is there no place in your world for "non-scientific" knowledge?
Most of my knowledge is non-scientific. But my point is that it is based on evidence, or on the testimony of those who have evidence.

Perhaps you can provide some evidence that religion is trying to do this. Thanks.
Well, anyone who believes that religious truths can be known on the basis of faith alone is doing this. Anyone who believes that personal mystical experience, not verifiable by others, justifies religious belief is doing this. The only people who aren't doing this are people who actually do the science and try to argue that the best explanatory hypothesis for certain features of the universe is that the universe has an intelligent designer. I think they are wrong (and I think this because I have actually studied the arguments, and qualify as a quasi-expert), but at least they are not setting up a double standard for themselves. Well, except for the obvious double standard whereby they demand that a complex universe demands an intelligent cause, but a complex God doesn't. But like I said, special pleading is second nature to these people.

[cosmosdan]

That's the difference between the scientific example I cited, and the religious example you cited. Stated in an oversimplified way, but a way that still conveys a fundamental truth, scientific consensus results from evidence, whereas religious consensus results from indoctrination. You still haven't given me a religious correlate for scientific evidence. Nor, I suspect, can such a correlate be given.


Nor should one be expected. You're comparing to very different things and asking for one to be examined by the same standards of the other. It's an unreasonable and unproductive expectation.

You can reasonably expect objective evidence to be examined when religious beliefs are talking about things that can be examined scientifically but many beliefs are not, and cannot be examined that way. There's no reason to expect some correlation to scientific evidence for those beliefs.

[Jesticulator]

Most of my knowledge is non-scientific. But my point is that it is based on evidence, or on the testimony of those who have evidence.But, you have (justified) faith (or trust) only in that testimony that you've determined is trustworthy, right? How is this different from religious believers?Well, anyone who believes that religious truths can be known on the basis of faith alone is doing this. I've never met someone who believed that religious truths can be known on the basis of faith alone . Do you have an example?The only people who aren't doing this are people who actually do the science and try to argue that the best explanatory hypothesis for certain features of the universe is that the universe has an intelligent designer.The "only people"? (You enjoy using absolutes, don't you?) According to your logic, all experts in theology who don't do the science believe that religious truths can be known on the basis of faith alone. Do you have any evidence to back up such a sweeping claim?But like I said, special pleading is second nature to these people.And, because you said it (and you repeated it), it must be true.

Thanks for the insight.

[cosmosdan]

What I'm arguing is two-fold. First, I am arguing that there is no similar indicator in religion--no factor that reliably indicates, in a way that can be replicated by others, that a particular religious doctrine is likely to be true. And the second point I am making is that too many advocates of religion practice special pleading, making ad hoc exemptions for themselves that allow them to believe something is true without being able to present anything that would indicate or tend to show that what they believe is in fact true.

I'd agree that often when religion deals with issues that can be examined objectively they ignore the evidence available. It's important to remember that the key points of religion are subjective and/or unfalsifiable.

Science isn't a special type of discipline; it is merely a sophisticated extension of our ordinary practice of using evidence and reason to try to come up with hypotheses to explain the world we live in. Religion isn't trying to set itself apart from science; it is trying to set itself apart from every other truth-seeking practice exercised by humans. That is an unacceptable case of special pleading.

Admittedly religion often places tradition over truth, or assumes their traditions are the truth. Still, I can't agree with your statement here, especially when it comes to the inner spiritual aspect of religion. What does science tell us about seeking the truth about love for our fellow man, or justice, or other such intangibles.

[ManiacMan]

Except that there has never, ever been any evidence for anything but the "There is no God" side. And disbelief is the logical default; that's how we treat everything else but religion.

What "evidence" do you present for the "there is no God side"???

And what about people who experience things that offer no explanation other than the divine? You would probably say that there is some sort of scientific explanation for whatever miracle a person experienced, but who gives a rat's ass because you aren't the one who experienced it...that's my point. Nothing you can say will convince a person who experienced first-hand something they call "miracle" that it wasn't a miracle. And since your brain completely rejects religion and God, you might try and say that the person who experienced a miracle is just nuts. That's why I said earlier that if you were to experience a miracle it would throw you for a loop and quite possible cause you to do a 180. That's because you have your faith that God does not exist...

You are completely discounting all the people who have experienced something in their lives that can only be described as...Divine. I don't think it's ethical of you to discount their faith that God exists because in their minds they simply believe...even more so for people who have experienced a miracle first hand.

I think it's much easier to think of examples that prove that God exists, and much harder to think of things that prove God does not exist. But maybe that's just me...since I believe in God.

[JohnnieEnigma]

Your philosophy of life, or belief system/values may have faith as a core. So in that case, it would be realistic. Realistic for you, at least. Not necessarily for those who do not share your values...

Anyway, I kind of like what this guy (http://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/GODB4.HTM) has to say. :)

[monavis]

Everything we know, believe or were taught about God we learned from some human in a sense we are not believeing in God or what God wants, but what some human has told us.All that is written about God is written by humans. So our beliefs are really a faith in that human.

Some people are helped by their beliefs , and some use their beliefs as an excuse to harm others. As I read this message board I can see that for some a belief is a necessity to help them in life, some do not.

I have been trying to learn the meaning of the word God and I find there are as many meanings to some people as there are people in the world.

Some people are very sensitive about their beliefs and are upset if others do not agree with them. I think this is a sign that their belief is not a strong one and they fear losing the faith. Some try to use their faith to control the minds of others. I cannot see where any one person or religion has the only truth.

Monavis

[kanicbird]

Ah. Honestly i'd not heard of the concept before; are there any sites or books you could point me at that I could have a look at? It is an interesting topic. And yes, I think i'd agree that does sound worse than Hell, but then i'm a people person

Not much is in scriptures about outer darkness, but it seems like it is reserved for those who are called by God and for whatever reason don't fully heed the call or don't do anything with their gifts. It is in Mathew 8:12, 22:13, and 25:30.

Beyond that degrees of Hell which may help in understanding is in some apocphical <sp> books, I beleive the Book of Enoch does go a bit into the afterlife of the condemned. You can also check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_darkness for Wiki's take on it.

Another source of information is revelation, some people have visited Hell and has seen outer darkness, this is not a good source of information for a non-believer as discernment of the Holy Spirit really needs to be employed in such matters.

If he didn't want the person in question to accept Satan, he wouldn't offer it - or at least, he would offer it at another time.

The sin that started it all is that if you eat of this fruit you will become 'as God'. Basically we become our own god, and that's where people are at birth, they are their own entity and fully responsible for themselves and the results of their actions, including defending their 'godhood' against other forces which wish to dominate them and subdue them (satanic forces). God has to allow us choices to make if we are really to be our own god. We have to be able to set our own path.

Yes there are limits set, possibly to prevent us from quickly self destructing, possibly to limit the interaction of satanic forces and us, as if they were given more access to us they may be able to quickly dominate us and it would be hell on earth literally - though they have quite a bit of influence already. Those limits allow us time to explore and chose our god without being quickly overcome by the enemy.

As for the paths, God has one path and God is one, those who are not Spirit filled can't know that path is God's path and may not see it at all, those who are still has to chose to follow that single path. Missing that path at any time is called sin, which basically means to miss the mark - any sin means we are not on that one path, and have missed the standard of God, and are now on our own path, and on our own (Jesus changed this part).

As us being our own god we are subject to the influence of other 'gods' with their own agenda, and place ourselves into bondage to these gods - which is giving up our 'godhood', through deception Satan may convince some to follow him to lead others to the same place.

[hotflungwok]

And what about people who experience things that offer no explanation other than the divine?
They haven't bothered to look for one. Just because you can't explain it doesn't mean it doesn't have an explanation. You have to have a reason to leap for a divine explanation, not being able to find a natural one is not a good reason.

You would probably say that there is some sort of scientific explanation for whatever miracle a person experienced, but who gives a rat's ass because you aren't the one who experienced it...that's my point. Nothing you can say will convince a person who experienced first-hand something they call "miracle" that it wasn't a miracle.
How about evidence? Subjective experience is subject to all kinds of distortions from the human mind. People who say things like 'This is what I think happened and nothing can convince me otherwise' are rejecting actual evidence for subjective irrationality. And quite frankly, scare me.

And since your brain completely rejects religion and God, you might try and say that the person who experienced a miracle is just nuts. That's why I said earlier that if you were to experience a miracle it would throw you for a loop and quite possible cause you to do a 180.
How do you know that? I've experienced stuff I didn't understand immediately, and I certainly didn't reach right for the supernatural non-explanations. One of the distortions I mentioned earlier is expectation bias. A person who views everything through the lens of religion is going to go for the religious explanation first, and generally not bother with reality if they don't have to. You want to call something a miracle, you better have evidence to back this claim up, not just a lack of ready explanation.

That's because you have your faith that God does not exist...
Sigh, for the trillionth time, athiests do not have fatih there is no god. Really.

You are completely discounting all the people who have experienced something in their lives that can only be described as...Divine. I don't think it's ethical of you to discount their faith that God exists because in their minds they simply believe...even more so for people who have experienced a miracle first hand.
But they don't just believe in their minds. They try to get others to believe, they indoctrinate their children, they try to get theirs beliefs taught in school, etc. You can have an experience and call it whatever you want. Until you can back your intepretation up with some actual evidence, thats all it is: an interpretation. When everyone has the exact same interpretation for these 'divine' events, then maybe we won't dismiss it out of hand.

I think it's much easier to think of examples that prove that God exists, and much harder to think of things that prove God does not exist. But maybe that's just me...since I believe in God.
So, give me an example that proves god exists. And I like it to be an actual example, and not an argument from ignorance, or any of the other 100s of failed examples that have been used in the past.

[nd_n8]

There are people who claim that there is no "soul" because there is no evidence for a "soul" to exist. There is no reason for a "soul" to exist. The argument follows that no evidence and no motive equates to non-existence.

But where is the consciousness in the human body? Where is it located? My thoughts come from my mind so it is possible that consciousness is there. But if the physical aspects of the mind become damaged do I necessarily lose that which makes me "me"? If the mass of the brain were removed and replaced into a new form would my consciousness go along with it? I assume memory would go along as would physical ability but would that new form be "me"? Would I still be "aware"?

Horrendous as this sounds, such a scenario could be tested with current technology. Science could take a dog, teach it several tricks, anchor within it several programmed behaviors and that dog would have a solid and documented set of memories. The same dog could spend time with a set of humans. Each human could interact with the animal and document their perception of the animal's "personality", that which makes that dog "that" dog. Once all of this data are collected, remove the dog's brain and place it into a different dog. The different dog would require quite a bit of medication and therapy but could survive. Would the memories transfer? Would the personality transfer? Would both be lost to the procedure and a completely new entity created?

Many philosophers have argued for and against the concept of a "soul". As far as I know the argument is still unsettled. These exact same arguments can be applied to the question for the existence of God. There is no evidence for "God" to exist. There is no reason for "God" to exist. It follows then that "God" does not exist.

This is a ”Negative Proof Fallacy” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_proof). No matter which side of the argument is taken, this fallacy persists.

For those who have faith, for those who have experienced "miracles" or have been filled with the "Holy Spirit", those who may not have experienced either of these directly but have either observed or been informed of these phenomenon and approached this information in a non-judgmental and open minded way the "fact" that there is no evidence for does not lead to the assumption that this means all evidence is against .

As to the OP question of “Is Faith Realistic?” faith seems certainly “real” in that it exists or is perceived to exist. Looking up the Wiki entry on Realism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic) shows that things could be real on a wide variety of levels.

The more pressing question is “Are beliefs negative?”. This could be approached in a number of ways but, to me at least, the underlying theme to this post and the thread in general is “Is Religious Faith Good or Evil”. This depends on a lot of things really. Are the terms “Good” and “Evil” to be described Descriptive ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive#Descriptive_approaches) (as they relate to individuals or individual behavior) or Normative (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative) (as they relate to a standard of society in general)? Even when this is decided, the concept of Good and Evil is still subjective. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_and_evil) Who the good guys are and who the bad guys are really depends on which side of the fence you are standing on.

The actions of Andrea Yates ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Yates) might be viewed as Evil by some, but could also be argued as Good by others (even though such an agruement would fly in the face of what a majority of people would understand as common sense). Religion might be viewed by some as providing nothing but failure, but this is also subjective. Did the efforts of Jim Jones ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_jones) and his most dedicated followers succeed or fail? They wanted a Utopia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown), free from government and social rules and regulations, where they could make their own rules and be totally free. Today they are not subject to any rule or regulation other than their own, simply because they are all dead. They achieved their goal so was it a success? They are all dead so was it a failure? These things are all subjective.

These are the standards and definitions that must be agreed upon by concensus before the debate of whether "Faith" is good or bad can commence. I posit that these standards are, by definition, ubiquitious and will therefore a concensus will not follow.

It is all only good or bad if you think it is good or bad. As simple as that.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Nor should one be expected. You're comparing to very different things and asking for one to be examined by the same standards of the other. It's an unreasonable and unproductive expectation.

You can reasonably expect objective evidence to be examined when religious beliefs are talking about things that can be examined scientifically but many beliefs are not, and cannot be examined that way. There's no reason to expect some correlation to scientific evidence for those beliefs.
No, we are not dealing with different things. We are dealing with belief. The goal of belief is truth. The norm governing belief is whether it is based on evidence. That is the case in all of our truth-seeking practices. But religion, to the extent that it relies on faith, wants to exempt itself from this requirement. At the risk of being boringly repititious, this is an ad hoc exemption and merely a case of special pleading on the part of religion. Why should religious belief get to be judged as different, and be exempt from the standards that govern other sorts of belief?

[Sophistry and Illusion]

But, you have (justified) faith (or trust) only in that testimony that you've determined is trustworthy, right? How is this different from religious believers?I've never met someone who believed that religious truths can be known on the basis of faith alone . Do you have an example?The "only people"? (You enjoy using absolutes, don't you?) According to your logic, all experts in theology who don't do the science believe that religious truths can be known on the basis of faith alone. Do you have any evidence to back up such a sweeping claim?And, because you said it (and you repeated it), it must be true.

Thanks for the insight.
You still don't get the difference between trusting scientific experts who can, independently of each other, replicate each others results, and religious 'experts' who can do no such thing. Fine. I won't try to explain the difference to you any more.

It is true that some theologians pursue another alternative--they believe that the existence of God can be known a priori. But it is safe to say that rationalism quit being a viable epistemic theory many moons ago. And having studied the a priori arguments for God's existence, I can say with some confidence that they are no good. And this is the overwhelming consensus of philosophers who have studied these arguments.

You don't have to take my word that religious belief usually involves special pleading. I gave you examples of moves commonly made by believer. If you have read even a handful of threads on religion in GD, you will have seen all of these moves made. And they are all cases of special pleading.

[kanicbird]

The different dog would require quite a bit of medication and therapy but could survive. Would the memories transfer? Would the personality transfer? Would both be lost to the procedure and a completely new entity created?

I don't think we could do a canine brain transplant, but we can do and have done human heart transplants where the memories of the donor are somehow in the receiver.


According to this study of patients who have received transplanted organs, particularly hearts, it is not uncommon for memories, behaviours, preferences and habits associated with the donor to be transferred to the recipient.
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/CellularMemories.html

[Sophistry and Illusion]

What does science tell us about seeking the truth about love for our fellow man, or justice, or other such intangibles.
Science tells us nothing about these things, because these are normative assertions and not the proper province of science. But that doesn't at all mean that there must be a God. Not that you would think that.

[hotflungwok]

There are people who claim that there is no "soul" because there is no evidence for a "soul" to exist. There is no reason for a "soul" to exist. The argument follows that no evidence and no motive equates to non-existence.
We have no reason to believe that a soul exists, and no lack of explanation that a soul explanation fits. There is no reason to assert that a soul doesn't exist, because there is absolutely no evidence for its existance.

But where is the consciousness in the human body? Where is it located? My thoughts come from my mind so it is possible that consciousness is there. But if the physical aspects of the mind become damaged do I necessarily lose that which makes me "me"? If the mass of the brain were removed and replaced into a new form would my consciousness go along with it? I assume memory would go along as would physical ability but would that new form be "me"? Would I still be "aware"?
Yes, if the physcial aspects of your brain change you change. Drugs, damage, anything that physically changes your brain can change you. This is quite well documented, if not perfectly understood by medical science. You are arguing from ignorance.

Many philosophers have argued for and against the concept of a "soul". As far as I know the argument is still unsettled. These exact same arguments can be applied to the question for the existence of God. There is no evidence for "God" to exist. There is no reason for "God" to exist. It follows then that "God" does not exist.

This is a ”Negative Proof Fallacy” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_proof). No matter which side of the argument is taken, this fallacy persists.
Wrong. The assertion that god doesn't exist doesn't need to be made, as god has never been shown to exist in first place. An athiest does not need to say god doesn't exist, they don't have to, because there is no evidence of god in the first place.

For those who have faith, for those who have experienced "miracles" or have been filled with the "Holy Spirit", those who may not have experienced either of these directly but have either observed or been informed of these phenomenon and approached this information in a non-judgmental and open minded way the "fact" that there is no evidence for does not lead to the assumption that this means all evidence is against .
If there is no evidence for and there is any evidence against, then all evidence is against.

These are the standards and definitions that must be agreed upon by concensus before the debate of whether "Faith" is good or bad can commence. I posit that these standards are, by definition, ubiquitious and will therefore a concensus will not follow.

It is all only good or bad if you think it is good or bad. As simple as that.
Of course. All religion is purely subjective. Everyone has a different idea of what is good/bad even within a supposed rigid moral structure.

[nd_n8]

These are the standards and definitions that must be agreed upon by concensus before the debate of whether "Faith" is good or bad can commence. I posit that these standards are, by definition, ubiquitious and will therefore a concensus will not follow.

It is all only good or bad if you think it is good or bad. As simple as that.
Aparantly a solid grasp of the standards of grammer, spelling and the importance of the preview post will also not follow. Oops :smack:

[nd_n8]

We have no reason to believe that a soul exists, and no lack of explanation that a soul explanation fits. There is no reason to assert that a soul doesn't exist, because there is absolutely no evidence for its existance.
This again is a Negative Proof Fallacy. If existance is posited then, regardless of where the burdon of proof lies, the concept exists. Proving it does not exist due to the fact that there is no evidence of something that does not claim to have physical properties in the first place does not prove that it does not exist. An example would be the extra dimentions proposed by M-Theory. Their physical properties are not detectable and the hypothisis that they exist is purely mathematical but there is no direct evidence that they do not exist.

Yes, if the physcial aspects of your brain change you change. Drugs, damage, anything that physically changes your brain can change you. This is quite well documented, if not perfectly understood by medical science. You are arguing from ignorance.
Just because an event "can" change you does not mean that the event "will" or necessarily "has to" change you. And even if the event causes a significant change that does not mean that the person is a completely different individual in the end. There are no absolutes here or elsewhere.

Wrong. The assertion that god doesn't exist doesn't need to be made, as god has never been shown to exist in first place. An athiest does not need to say god doesn't exist, they don't have to, because there is no evidence of god in the first place.
Again this is the Negative Proof Fallacy. That the assertion has ever been made that God exists grants a foundation to the debate. Again, without assigning onus, just because there is no evidence of the existance of something that does not have physical properties that does not prove that that something does not exist. A good example is the Pink Unicorn Theory. While this theory does not match my personal beliefs I do understand that it is equally logical and probable in terms of any other established thiestic theory.
If there is no evidence for and there is any evidence against, then all evidence is against.
This trys to skate around the Negative Proof Fallacy but fails due to one significant point: There is no a priori evidence against.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

According to this study of patients who have received transplanted organs, particularly hearts, it is not uncommon for memories, behaviours, preferences and habits associated with the donor to be transferred to the recipient.

http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/CellularMemories.html
I think you need to find a less biased source. From Nexus Magazine's homepage:
NEXUS is an international bi-monthly alternative news magazine, covering the fields of: Health Alternatives; Suppressed Science; Earth's Ancient Past; UFOs & the Unexplained; and Government Cover-Ups.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

This trys to skate around the Negative Proof Fallacy but fails due to one significant point: There is no a priori evidence against.
Why does the evidence against God have to be a priori? Just as there are a posteriori arguments for God's existence (e.g., the cosmological and teleological arguments), there are a posteriori arguments against God's existence (the argument from evil, Dawkins' ultimate 747 argument, etc.).

[hotflungwok]

This again is a Negative Proof Fallacy. If existance is posited then, regardless of where the burdon of proof lies, the concept exists. Proving it does not exist due to the fact that there is no evidence of something that does not claim to have physical properties in the first place does not prove that it does not exist. An example would be the extra dimentions proposed by M-Theory. Their physical properties are not detectable and the hypothisis that they exist is purely mathematical but there is no direct evidence that they do not exist.
It doesn't matter if the concept exists, I am not asserting that souls do not exist. I do not assert that god does not exist either. I don't need to, there's no more actual reason to think god exists than to think santa claus exists. I am open to the idea that god may exist, but since we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever for that contention, I feel free to dismiss the idea out of hand. I'm not going to say 'god doesnt exist, never has, never will, etc.' I don't need to. Since we have no reason to believe god exists in the first place, no believing in him should be the default position.

Just because an event "can" change you does not mean that the event "will" or necessarily "has to" change you. And even if the event causes a significant change that does not mean that the person is a completely different individual in the end. There are no absolutes here or elsewhere.
Of course not, why are you talking about absolutes? I claimed that things like drugs and brain damage can change the things you claim makes a person a person. This is well documented in medical science.

Again this is the Negative Proof Fallacy. That the assertion has ever been made that God exists grants a foundation to the debate. Again, without assigning onus, just because there is no evidence of the existance of something that does not have physical properties that does not prove that that something does not exist. A good example is the Pink Unicorn Theory. While this theory does not match my personal beliefs I do understand that it is equally logical and probable in terms of any other established thiestic theory.
Wrong. I am not asserting that god doesn't exist. The onus of proof is not on me. I freely admit that should proper evidence be presented showing that god existed, I would acknowledge god's existance. But none has, ever, so I can dismiss the idea. If something is just an idea, and has absolutely no evidence to back it up, then non-belief should be the default position. Once again, I am not asserting that god does not exist.

This trys to skate around the Negative Proof Fallacy but fails due to one significant point: There is no a priori evidence against.
Of course there is. This is an argument from ignorance. Just because you don't of any doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Given the definitions of god put forth by the major religions, if you can't find a reason against god existing then you aren't looking. It depends on what you're going to take as 'fact' about god, which conveniently changes from person to person, but there are all kinds of contradictions, violations of the laws of physics, and outright silliness in the thing called god.

[nd_n8]

Why does the evidence against God have to be a priori? Just as there are a posteriori arguments for God's existence (e.g., the cosmological and teleological arguments), there are a posteriori arguments against God's existence (the argument from evil, Dawkins' ultimate 747 argument, etc.).
I would argue that a posteriori arguments don't hold water on either side. The Argument from Evil is relative only from a universal definition of Evil. Without a universal definition this argument falls apart logically. Dawkins restated the 747 argument from Hoyle in defence to the Teleological arguments. The 747 argument can be answered with: "Why yes, the odds are exactly the same, yet casuality allowed one to happen and the other to not happen (not yet anyway)."

My position reflects Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria without his inherent agnosticism. My belief structure is a priori based on my perception of a series of personal events. A posteriori arguements (again, from either side of the issue) may serve to counter the point they were conceived to counter but do nothing towards addressing the parent issue.

[Voyager]

Well, I see that you don't understand that the methods of science are not based on science but on a particular epistemology. Consider this: Was Karl Popper a scientist or a philosopher? Also, does science tell scientists which math to use, which data to collect, and what the standards of reliability are?

If you can't appreciate the difference between science and the philosophy of science then there is no further point to this discussion. (Your irrelevant comments about GW II, "your" Bible, Jesus, and Joseph Smith provide further evidence that a discussion with you in this thread is a waste of time.)
Popper was most definitely a philosopher - but he does have a point, even if it is a bit simplistic. Does science tell scientists what math to use? No, no more than it tells them what hypotheses to come up with. You search around for mathematical methods that work for a particular problem. One of the biggest stumbling blocks in Einstein's work on relativity was finding the right math to help analyze the problem. Who tells you which tools to use when fixing a car? You pick the one that does the job most effectively, and people invent new ones to make things more efficient.

Which data to collect? That's a continuing discussion. Sampling theory tells us how much data to collect, and tells us that we can't collect biased data, but which data depends on what's available. If you do it wrong your paper will get rejected. Standards of reliability are a convention. p <= 0.05 is not written in stone, you can compute p for anything. It's just an indicator of how strong the results are.

Might I ask what direct experience you have in this area? I studied science and philosophy in college, btw. As for the Biblical stuff, do you not understand my point?

[Voyager]

This again is a Negative Proof Fallacy. If existance is posited then, regardless of where the burdon of proof lies, the concept exists. Proving it does not exist due to the fact that there is no evidence of something that does not claim to have physical properties in the first place does not prove that it does not exist. An example would be the extra dimentions proposed by M-Theory. Their physical properties are not detectable and the hypothisis that they exist is purely mathematical but there is no direct evidence that they do not exist.

You are confusing a statement of knowledge about souls and god with a statement of belief. You are correct that it would be fallacious to say with knowledge that god and the soul do not exist, and few atheists do this. However, given what we know, the lack of evidence for the soul and evidence against, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that we don't believe in these things, so long as we're open to changing our opinion if more evidence shows up.

For M-theory, I've read that the extra dimensions are theoretically detectable, since I believe gravity can leak between them. We are not capable of doing the experiments yet. If they were theoretically undetectable, any hypothesis using them would be worthless.

[Voyager]

You still don't get the difference between trusting scientific experts who can, independently of each other, replicate each others results, and religious 'experts' who can do no such thing. Fine. I won't try to explain the difference to you any more.

More than that, anything claimed in a scientific paper has to be traceable back to original data. People keep lab notebooks, in pen, and scandals have involved people changing data in their notebooks. Things from others are traced through references, but data in the paper should be able to be found directly. Replication is important to ensure that results are not due to chance or error.

Imagine a paper giving a theory whose basic information was recorded 40 - 60 years after the experiment were done. it would get rejected so fast it would be returned before it was sent. So I agree with you - imagine how much stronger the case for religion would be if there were documentation from the time of the events.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

I would argue that a posteriori arguments don't hold water on either side. The Argument from Evil is relative only from a universal definition of Evil. Without a universal definition this argument falls apart logically. Dawkins restated the 747 argument from Hoyle in defence to the Teleological arguments. The 747 argument can be answered with: "Why yes, the odds are exactly the same, yet casuality allowed one to happen and the other to not happen (not yet anyway)."
But the argument from evil gets to help itself to a universal definition of evil--the one provided by the theist. One way of looking at the argument from evil is as a way of showing that theism is internally inconsistent. If you accept the theistic definition of God, and if you accept the theistic definition of good and evil (as defined by God's nature/commandments/whatever), then the existence of evil in the world introduces a contradiction: you can't have evil and this definition of God and this definition of evil (which, again, is provided by the theist, not the atheist).
As for Dawkins' 747 argument, I think you are badly misrepresenting it. His point is that order can only arise slowly and piecemeal. We have at least a partial account of how order can arise slowly and piecemeal in the universe through naturalistic processes; the theist has no such account of how God can have arisen. (And for the theist to refuse to provide one is another case of special pleading.)

My position reflects Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria without his inherent agnosticism. My belief structure is a priori based on my perception of a series of personal events. A posteriori arguements (again, from either side of the issue) may serve to counter the point they were conceived to counter but do nothing towards addressing the parent issue.
Non-overlapping magisteria is the biggest case of special pleading ever. Never in a thousand years did any theist ever suggest that religion was not in the business of making factual assertions whose consequences could be observed in the natural world. And theists have only been driven to this position by the triumph of science and the failure of religion. So suddenly some theists say, "That's okay; religion is a different magisterium where we don't need evidence or anything, or empirical verification." Bullshit. Special pleading.

[Sophistry and Illusion]

Replication is important to ensure that results are not due to chance or error.
I think this is a very important point--scientists are in general not very impressed by a single study which seems to demonstrate a given conclusion. As a general rule, they wait for the result to be independently replicated. The ability of scientific results to be independently replicated by separate observers is one of the most powerful arguments we have for accepting scientific authority. And since there is not anything even remotely analogous on the part of religion, I think it is a grave misrepresentation of the facts to try to draw parallels between scientific and religious epistemology.

[cosmosdan]

No, we are not dealing with different things. We are dealing with belief. The goal of belief is truth. The norm governing belief is whether it is based on evidence. That is the case in all of our truth-seeking practices. But religion, to the extent that it relies on faith, wants to exempt itself from this requirement. At the risk of being boringly repititious, this is an ad hoc exemption and merely a case of special pleading on the part of religion. Why should religious belief get to be judged as different, and be exempt from the standards that govern other sorts of belief?

Well okay then. I've always thought that was the correlation between science and the true spiritual journey. Both seek the truth. Science deals with our physical world while the spiritual journey deals with the inner person.

Organized religions do have a lot of beliefs that are grounded in the physical world and it seems reasonable that those should be examined by the same standard of evidence as anything else. The Bible itself says
John 4:24
God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.

So the priority should be to promote truth rather than tradition. That's fine when dealing with the facets of religion and spirituality that rest within the physical world but when it comes to the inner person and the true spiritual journey science doesn't even apply. As you note yourself.


Science tells us nothing about these things, because these are normative assertions and not the proper province of science. But that doesn't at all mean that there must be a God. Not that you would think that.

You are correct, that doesn't mean there God exists, however, if God communes with us spirituality, through the inner person, then it is out of the province of science and there's no sense in demanding scientific evidence that God exists.

Other than a few traditions people's relationship with God is about the inner journey and the search for truth about ourselves and our relationship to our world and each other. That's fairly obvious in the words of Jesus in the NT.

So, the question becomes can we deal with the physical beliefs separately from the the questions of love for our fellow man, justice, equality, etc. Can the Sermon on the Mount be separated from the mythology and leave religion viable and meaningful. I think so. I think Voyager has helped show how.

[cosmosdan]

I agree that we shouldn't split faith into religious and non-religious types. What we're actually doing here is discussing two types of faith - faith amenable to changing based on evidence, and that which is not. I've already given the example of the two types related to faith in a spouse. Even religious faith can be conditional. The Dalai Lama's seems to be changeable based on evidence, as is that of Reform Judaism. We might push things back to faith that God exists in some way, so defined as to be unfalsifiable - once we do that, the two types of faith collapse into one. This kind of believer would say that he would stop believing in god given evidence against, but the god he believes in is so defined that it is not possible to provide evidence against him. It doesn't have to be god - faith in theistic evolution is the same.

I think you hit on something important here. I've been saying for months that many of those who agree with Sam Harris that religious beliefs should not have a special protected status and should be examined in the same way as other beliefs were not really doing so, because they still categorized beliefs as religious beliefs and faith as religious faith. My observation has been that a lot of the same internal mechanics for a belief system occurred within believers and non believers.
We all seem to apply faith in dealing with day to day life. I don't see how we can live our lives without it. We all seem to cling to some beliefs for emotional reasons rather than purely logical and evidence based. So, do we say, it's wide open , believe whatever you want, it's your right as a human being, or do we try and find a way to evaluate belief systems in some way where we are trying to judge them equally.

For one I think we can talk about belief systems as a shared universal experience. We all have one. We can explore where they come from, how they develop, and how they can change and improve.

From there we can look at the details of belief and separate those beliefs that have objective evidence from those that are more subjective. We an also examine emotional attachment to tradition or simply concepts and how that affects a belief system. As you point out, is a belief system , or faith, able to change and grow based on new evidence and experience? It seems far healthier to me if they can.
So, is the "all religion is a bunch of superstitious crapolla" meme, any more useful than the "all you heathens will burn in hell" meme. Neither strikes me as very useful if we are trying to fight ignorance and progress.

By speaking of belief systems we can look at all religions and even the non religious from an equal playing field. We can apply the same standards to all.

What do you think?

[Voyager]

By speaking of belief systems we can look at all religions and even the non religious from an equal playing field. We can apply the same standards to all.

What do you think?
I totally agree with you. In fact, this gives an explanation of the Communism as religion problem. It isn't a religion so much as an example of the non-changeable belief system much like evangelical religions. Same for political philosophies that get implemented, fall on their faces, then get defended by their proponents who say the experiment failed because the philosophy was not followed exactly.

We can also distinguish between a "real" atheist (one I feel sympathy for) versus someone like a child in the Soviet Union who is an atheist through indoctrination. Someone who is an atheist based on faith alone is just as dumb as the worst fundamentalist. The typical theist canard about atheism being based on faith (which is rarely true) comes from a lack of understanding of the alternative, being belief based on evidence. I'm not saying that people can have different beliefs based on analysis of the same evidence, but that the problem is lack of analysis at all.

[VarlosZ]

Faith makes wisdom impossible, in the areas it touches on. Faith cripples the mind. And you can't get knowledge from faith; it's empty. It has no way of giving you knowledge; it's just a guess combined with denial. . .

. . . You cannot, by definition, have an open mind on something you have faith in.
What an unappealing tautology. I'm sure it's more fun to argue against the least charitable understanding of "faith" possible, but that fun comes at the expense of the people who read DT's posts. Those who disagree with them are annoyed. Both those who agree and disagree, I've found, tend to get bogged down in a nasty semantic argument without realizing it (though there are plenty of exceptions, of course).

Anyway, the point is that there are other conceptions of faith besides the one that makes Der Trihs so angry. Some are completely opposed to his preferred conception. Example:

Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

[cosmosdan]

What an unappealing tautology. I'm sure it's more fun to argue against the least charitable understanding of "faith" possible, but that fun comes at the expense of the people who read DT's posts. Those who disagree with them are annoyed. Both those who agree and disagree, I've found, tend to get bogged down in a nasty semantic argument without realizing it (though there are plenty of exceptions, of course).

Anyway, the point is that there are other conceptions of faith besides the one that makes Der Trihs so angry. Some are completely opposed to his preferred conception. Example:

Originally Posted by Alan Watts
Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

That's a great quote that I will save. Thanks for posting it. It's interesting that he describes the fanatics {who speak loudest about their great faith} as having no faith at all. Being open to the truth as faith. what a great concept.

That's my conclusion about the classic definition in Heb 11:1

Our certainty and surety is not in a detail of belief we already hold , but our faith is that by acting on what we believe is true , with a desire to learn more and be open to more, we progress. We have faith that we can and will grow and discover.


btw I find I don't get bogged down by DT because when he starts spewing his brand of atheist fundamentalism I just stop responding.

[cosmosdan]

I totally agree with you. In fact, this gives an explanation of the Communism as religion problem. It isn't a religion so much as an example of the non-changeable belief system much like evangelical religions. Same for political philosophies that get implemented, fall on their faces, then get defended by their proponents who say the experiment failed because the philosophy was not followed exactly.

We can also distinguish between a "real" atheist (one I feel sympathy for) versus someone like a child in the Soviet Union who is an atheist through indoctrination. Someone who is an atheist based on faith alone is just as dumb as the worst fundamentalist. The typical theist canard about atheism being based on faith (which is rarely true) comes from a lack of understanding of the alternative, being belief based on evidence. I'm not saying that people can have different beliefs based on analysis of the same evidence, but that the problem is lack of analysis at all.

Right!

Extreme patriotism that has to separate us {the good guys} from them {the bad guys} without an honest heartfelt examination of the evidence comes to mind as well, or even partisan politics where we have more allegiance to the party than we have to honesty or integrity in serving the public.

I've talked to lots of more traditional Christians who retreat to "well I just have faith" when their beliefs feel threatened and I've often asked. " faith in what in particular? Is it faith born of a sincere examination of the beliefs, or is it faith in a tradition created by men?"

[cosmosdan]

Right!

Extreme patriotism that has to separate us {the good guys} from them {the bad guys} without an honest heartfelt examination of the evidence comes to mind as well, or even partisan politics where we have more allegiance to the party than we have to honesty or integrity in serving the public.

I've talked to lots of more traditional Christians who retreat to "well I just have faith" when their beliefs feel threatened and I've often asked. " faith in what in particular? Is it faith born of a sincere examination of the beliefs, or is it faith in a tradition created by men?"


Somewhere in there we need to discuss the emotional attachment to beliefs. Christians and other believers need to realize that a strong feeling is sometimes a strong personal feeling rather than the Holy Spirit speaking to you. They need to understand that challenging them to examine their beliefs is not attacking God , Jesus , or them personally.

Non believers IMO need to realize that a lack of religious belief doesn't make their argument or their belief system better and more reasonable by default. They also cling to certain concepts for emotional reasons.

I think the belief systems approach for everyone can be more useful in breaking down walls and creating understanding.

Thanks for your input. You've been instrumental in helping me sort this out. :)

[monavis]

Not much is in scriptures about outer darkness, but it seems like it is reserved for those who are called by God and for whatever reason don't fully heed the call or don't do anything with their gifts. It is in Mathew 8:12, 22:13, and 25:30.

Beyond that degrees of Hell which may help in understanding is in some apocphical <sp> books, I beleive the Book of Enoch does go a bit into the afterlife of the condemned. You can also check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_darkness for Wiki's take on it.

Another source of information is revelation, some people have visited Hell and has seen outer darkness, this is not a good source of information for a non-believer as discernment of the Holy Spirit really needs to be employed in such matters.


The sin that started it all is that if you eat of this fruit you will become 'as God'. Basically we become our own god, and that's where people are at birth, they are their own entity and fully responsible for themselves and the results of their actions, including defending their 'godhood' against other forces which wish to dominate them and subdue them (satanic forces). God has to allow us choices to make if we are really to be our own god. We have to be able to set our own path.

Yes there are limits set, possibly to prevent us from quickly self destructing, possibly to limit the interaction of satanic forces and us, as if they were given more access to us they may be able to quickly dominate us and it would be hell on earth literally - though they have quite a bit of influence already. Those limits allow us time to explore and chose our god without being quickly overcome by the enemy.

As for the paths, God has one path and God is one, those who are not Spirit filled can't know that path is God's path and may not see it at all, those who are still has to chose to follow that single path. Missing that path at any time is called sin, which basically means to miss the mark - any sin means we are not on that one path, and have missed the standard of God, and are now on our own path, and on our own (Jesus changed this part).

As us being our own god we are subject to the influence of other 'gods' with their own agenda, and place ourselves into bondage to these gods - which is giving up our 'godhood', through deception Satan may convince some to follow him to lead others to the same place.

When the Psalmist said "know there fore that you are Gods" It was really Satan inspiring him? And when Jesus used this psalm when accused of Blasphmey because he called God his father, was he inspired by Satan?

Monavis

[nd_n8]

When the Psalmist said "know there fore that you are Gods" It was really Satan inspiring him? And when Jesus used this psalm when accused of Blasphmey because he called God his father, was he inspired by Satan?

Monavis
No.

As I read it, when Asaph [sic] wrote that god said "You are gods" he was indirectly refering to the responsibility placed on man as a result of the original sin. Because we chose to become as gods by eating the fruit we must take on the responsibility and accountability of gods, however since we are men we will still die like men. When Jesus used this quote to defend himself it comes off in the same context. Not as Jesus bragging but as Him explaining that we all have the responsibility of gods in the bodies of men.

As this responsibility was taken by man voluntarily (albiet after the influence of the Great Judge) and as an act of free will, we all share the responsibility of others unto our death. Reference to this responsibility is not Satanically charged but is instead a reinforcement of previous scripture.

Or at least that's how I take it, YMMV.

[monavis]

No.

As I read it, when Asaph [sic] wrote that god said "You are gods" he was indirectly refering to the responsibility placed on man as a result of the original sin. Because we chose to become as gods by eating the fruit we must take on the responsibility and accountability of gods, however since we are men we will still die like men. When Jesus used this quote to defend himself it comes off in the same context. Not as Jesus bragging but as Him explaining that we all have the responsibility of gods in the bodies of men.

As this responsibility was taken by man voluntarily (albiet after the influence of the Great Judge) and as an act of free will, we all share the responsibility of others unto our death. Reference to this responsibility is not Satanically charged but is instead a reinforcement of previous scripture.

Or at least that's how I take it, YMMV.

Jesus was said to have conqured death, so no one should die. Adam and Eve were told now they knew the difference between good and evil they must die, nothing was said or implied about the death of a soul. When one dies there is no life in it's body, (just as any other animal, so a soul is not necessary and death is the same for plants and animals as well as humans. Their bodies return to the atoms etc. of which they were composed of when their life was passed on from their parents.

Jesus always said my father and yours,he made no distinction that he was different than any other human if he really existed and the word were really His own not some other writer.

monavis