Religion/faith makes knowledge claims about things it demonstrably does not know. In that way at least (most?), it’s consistent in the claims it makes about science.
Every time science has answered life’s ancient mysteries, faith/religion has moved the goal posts. I agree with you that some questions have yet to be answered. I submit that we ought to have learned by now to accept, “We don’t yet know the answer, but we’ll keep looking”, as opposed to, “God is inscrutable and he’s hiding where we can’t find him - but trust us, he’s there.”
Here’s the difference: When science gets “scripture” wrong, it throws it out and replaces it with the corrected version. In fact, doing so is encouraged by the scientific method. Religious scripture has often been proven wrong over the years, but it seems resistant, though not entirely immune, to change.
But let’s roll with your riff for a bit… If, “All science is scripture”, and, “All scripture is inspired by God”, may we conclude that God is a poor scientist, but he’s getting better?
We even have schisms (Telemark vs Randonee, Lift vs backcountry), pilgrimages (Tuckerman Ravine, Corbet’s Couloir, Chamonix, the Hahnenkamm) and heretics (snowboarders) and holidays (any powder day).
Oh, I can totally answer the question, that’s easy. Life arises from chemicals and such interacting. Simple life arose from chemicals that randomly happened to end up interacting in patterns that caused an ongoing, self-perpetuating series of interactions. Complex life arose from variations on simple life that persisted because they had a greater tendency to self-perpetuate. In a sense all of earthly life is one giant ongoing self-perpetuating interaction - a series of dominoes that sets up more dominoes ahead of it as an incidental side effect of the ones behind them getting knocked down.
People have a hard time believing that such a complex series of self-perpetuating interactions could have come to pass “through chance” (it wasn’t pure chance, any more than the fact that things next to something on fire start burning ‘at random’) so they try to posit an intelligent agent to have done the instigating - an arsonist who goes around starting the grass around a burning tree on fire, if you will.
This incredulity of theirs doesn’t change the fact that their posited entity is both unnecessary and problematic. You simply can’t explain the initial instigation of life by claiming that something else alive instigated it - all that does is move the goalpost back. The source of the first life had to be in something not alive. Otherwise that first life wasn’t the first.
Good question. I want to reconcile that mystery and omnipresence that I grew up with with what my adult sensibilities can handle. Much like growing past believing in Santa, we go on and either teach the same stories to our own kids ( I did), knowing them to be false, but passing on what might be termed the spirit of the Santa story, after all, what harm can it do? Of course, there WAS a real St. Nick that the Santa story is based on, so it’s not completely lying. Not completely. More like embellishing.
For me, same goes for Jesus or many of the other Lords and Gods through history. They’re based on someone, somewhere, or at the very least, some aspect of human nature that someone wanted to emphasize in story form. For Jesus, all the hallmarks of mythology are there, including the superhuman feats. Gods share a lot of qualities with the superheroes of the Marvel and DC universe, and that’s probably by design. Superheroes are the kind of people we look up to and aspire to be like.
I don’t think of God as a person so much as the driving force behind the person, a kind of Force if you will. I believe there is a force of some type that does hold all life together. I don’t think it’s scientifically provable, and I don’t really care if it isn’t. It gets me through the day and the long nights, which is kind of the point of religion in the first place.
I’d be interested in hearing from others who have beliefs that are a little off the beaten path.
My beliefs are only off the beaten path in that the ‘beaten path’ in these parts is believing in bearded sky gods.
I don’t believe in the Force. I believe people don’t need the Force. I believe that people are incredible thinking entities with a capability for awareness and empathy - not psychic empathy, but sympathetic empathy. People can care about others and work with others and join together with others in friendship, family, brotherhood, and community. Not via magic, but by working together and listening to each other and understanding each other.
Compared to that, all religion sounds shallow and hollow to me. Religion posits incomprehensible alien forces and entities which are supposed to fill holes that aren’t empty and span gaps that are already crossed. I don’t need it.
Perhaps, and I say perhaps, because that does not seem appropriate for this discussion so not worth going into for the point of this discussion. Science really does not enter into this, and it jsut seems dragged into it because it’s convenient for some, not because it matters here. Much akin to the widow who looks inside for the coin she lost outside because the light is better.
Again perhaps, and again that does not address the OP’s conjecture. It’s really irrelevant, but again it may be convenient to bring up but that does not agree with the subject at hand.
Again getting on your preaching soapbox. And this is what is meant by atheist preaching or evangelism. And when you boil it down it is mainly Christianity that is this faith, as the claims you make is mostly claims that refer to the religion of Christianity, so that is what you appear to use as your religion.
Again your christian religion, not atheism, shows here - though you may consider it Anti-Christianity. Scripture is ‘wrong’ at times no problem. Paul admits to this, giving commands he admits is not of God. Scriptures are not a ‘here it is’ type of thing, but each is and has a specific purpose, this includes science, progress and setbacks, discovery and dismissal of the old when it no longer serves.
As I see it God is a master, we are the poor scientists, but with help and guidance we are learning what God wants to reveal.
It teaches our children that we aren’t to be trusted? It teaches our children that belief in the supernatural isn’t a terrible idea? It’s fundamentally a lie?
You seem to be clinging to stories from your childhood that you know aren’t true. Why? How does this help you in any meaningful way?
This is like saying that there is a real New York, therefore The Avengers was just “embellishing”.
Now this is a definition of god that sorta makes sense. I’m not sure how you could establish it as a real thing, but it does make some sense.
Well, it’s a different concept of god, certainly, but I’m still not entirely sure what was actually meant.
Read one way, it seems to imply that there’s a nonsentient force connecting all living organisms - something like radio, or the electromagnetic field, or perhaps gravity. Injecting some woo, it would be a strata via which things like telepathy, empathy, or other psychic messages could be conveyed from one person to another. Absent the woo, it’s, well, radio, the electromagnetic field, or perhaps gravity. But supernatural maybe!
Read another way it suggests that humans don’t have individual minds and we are all puppets of a single hivemind entity that is using us as bizarre people puppets in a horrific puppet show. I suspect this isn’t what was meant, but it really comes down to the effect this “force” is supposed to have on is. Does it impact us, control us, communicate with us? Does it have a mind of its own? Is it a hive mind? Does it see us all like neurons, necessary elements of the collective whole but individually unremarkable and replaceable? Or is it just a medium, with no mind of its own, postulated as just giving us another method of communicating and connecting besides the tools we already have: eyes, voice, touch, twitter?
I mean, it’s certainly more coherent than the average god conception, but one could clarify it further. Though (full disclosure) I would only be doing so for abstract entertainment, because I don’t think people need either psychic shortwave radios or spectral puppetmasters.
Have you ever wondered what it is within you that’s able to communicate with what it is inside other people? I think it’s kind of like that. You know, like the ghost in the machine. The you in your mind. Your actual self. Your essence. And not a hive mentality so much as a collective. Social media is not a bad analogy, where people share their collective wisdom. I think that’s more like what God is. Life. We’re never not with Life, since we’re alive, and so we’re never not with God. I know this will be too flakey for some people, but I really believe the concept has merit.
Actually, I haven’t wondered that, because I only communicate with people via ordinary methods - seeing them, hearing them, talking to them, making physical expressions and gestures for them to see. (Others might say “touching them” and “being touched”, but I never touch anybody.) I am not not a psychic and do not communicate using telepathy. (And if I was a psychic, I’d rather be a telekinetic. And not a wimp telekinetic either - I wanna toss cars around with my mind.)
Humanity has long dreamed of being wirelessly connected to each other. But we’re not. Fortunately we don’t need to be - humanity has a lot of skill at communicating with each other. (Though a lot less communicating through text or online. That’s not how humanity has developed.)
But in any case it’s good that we’re clearer on your vision for your redefinition of the word “God” - you envision a telekinetic web of connections, which may/may not also include a persistent store of information (such that I can suddenly just know my great-grandfather’s underwear size - no living person remembers, but Life™ and Pepperidge Farm do). This telekinetic web is not opt-in; everyone is connected whether they like it or not, and thus no human ever has secrets from one another. Sitting where you are, right now, you know exactly who I am and what I’m thinking of this instant.
Okay, sorry. I have a hard time resisting the temptation to chase down implications of things. But does your idea of god have awareness and sentience? I mean, you liken it to social media, and you just know that Facebook has both achieved self-awareness and is plotting humanity’s destruction. Such a thing could theoretically happen to a telekinetic web too, particularly if it had persistent memory.
You mean when you’re dead? No, I think there is still life within you, as your energy changes into something else. In my world view, you are never without life, technically.
