If everyone is crazy, then the word is meaningless.
I don’t think that’s true, because if it were true, people would switch religions a lot more than they do. As it is, most people stay in the religion they were brought up in, and, for those who do change religions, from what I can see, it’s generally fairly difficult for them…or at least it’s something they take seriously. Religious belief may be silly, and I think, in a lot of ways, it is, but in spite of that, it’s not a casual thing. People take their religious beliefs a lot more seriously than their soft drink choices.
Now, you’d better not be saying that Pepsi is as good as Coke. It’s a cheap imitation, a heresy of the worst kind. To say that those heretical schismatics over at Pepsi Co are not committing the gravest of sins is something I wouldn’t repeat too loudly if I were you.
Also, once someone has decided “Pepsi or Coke”, they pretty much stick to that one drink. Brand loyalty for the two companies is ridiculously high. While people certainly change soft drink preferences more than religion, it’s not some willy-nilly choice every time they go to the supermarket.
Of course, no one likes an Apopstate.
Sitting here with a bottle of Coke next to me, I agree with you. But, except apparently for mswas, switching soft drink choices doesn’t tend to have the same psychic cost that switching religions does.
Well, here’s my personal case study: I grew up with no religious training and in early adulthood was a fundamentalist atheist not unlike our pal Der Trihs. Subsequently, I gradually developed an interest in spiritual and philosophical matters, for no particular reason I can identify. I think all of us can agree that there are times we feel a certain sense of contentment, “oneness with the universe”, awe and wonder at the complexity of the universe, gratitude to be alive, etc…and then there are other times we stay pissed off for a week because someone was rude to us on a message board. I became curious if there might be practices I could adopt that would increase the percentage of time I spent in the first state, in a way analogous to the way that physical exercise improves physical fitness. So, I was really looking for things to DO, not things to BELIEVE. After browsing around for a while, I came to investigate Judaism, which seemed to be working well for some friends of mine. I started to experiment with some Jewish practices and found that they did seem to work for me in terms of improving my sense of well-being in some very subtle and subjective, yet (to me) significant way. After some research convinced me that there were plausible and mainstream schools of Jewish thought that did not hold beliefs I would find abhorrent (such as, for instance, homophobia, denial of the validity of scientific discoveries, or the exclusive claim to religious truth), I decided to take the plunge.
My case may be unusual, but I think it illustrates a source of a lot of the rancor that comes up in these discussions. Most people become or remain religious due to the subjective positive experiences that they have had with religious practices, or perhaps due to the desire to find a psychological framework to explain subjective “spiritual” experiences that they have had outside of the context of “religion”. Many atheists seem to assume that people become religious because they find the theological arguments of some particular religion logically compelling, and since to a neutral observer none of them are in fact remotely logically compelling, this strikes them as troubling and irrational behavior. Those atheists who have adopted the philosophical tenet (which itself cannot be logically proven) that nobody should ever believe anything that cannot be logically proven find this particularly disturbing.
Hope somebody finds this helpful…cannot promise that I will have time to check back in with this thread.
I don’t think you can prove anything absolutely, but you can use reason to determine which thoughts are consistent and congruous. For instance, it can’t be proven that hating black people is bad, but it is inconsistent logically to say you support diversity and to discriminate at the same time. That is an extreme example, but it illustrates my point.
I don’t fault anyone for their beliefs, but I will call them on their hypocrisy in a heartbeat.
With this line of thinking, I adopt the view that everything works on probability and inference of how useful beliefs are. For instance, while I can not prove anything 100% to be true, I can infer that a ball, if dropped, probably will fall, because 1) all past experience has led to the belief that, given the same circumstances, the ball will fall and 2) it is useful to accept gravity, as I can use that belief as a stepping stone for other beliefs (like flying planes) which provably work.
I also believe that we should not hold to be true beliefs for which there is no evidence that can be externally verified. For this reason, I can’t believe that there is a creator of the universe for the same reason that I won’t believe someone crashed into my car because god made them do it–it’s simply not practical to suspend all my knowledge of human behavior whenever convenient. I don’t trust in the human ability to differentiate between belief systems based entirely on how comfortable they are.
I think you have to pick one form of belief and stick to it. If you believe can believe in something through faith, then then you should believe everything as an act of faith. Christian Existentialism is the belief set I most often point to as something I think is great for those with the capacity and willingness to act on faith.
Remember, this is not a personal attack on anyone. I just enjoy debate.
I don’t have personal experience but I can pass on what my mom says. She was brought up United Church of Christ but spent time in Catholic church as a teen and was converted at 14. She says she felt something while sitting in a Catholic church that she didn’t feel in other churches. It was enough for her.