And I know I should leave this alone, but if there is/was a creator, who/what created him/her/it? Why is a creatorless creator more appealing than a creatorless universe?
Or is it just turtles all the way down? (Sorry, was that more appropriate for the “classics of literature” discussion in GD?)
That was 1209, and had nothing to do with Islam – it was said during the crusade against the (according to the Catholic Church) heretical Cathars of France.
This, more or less (with some exceptions).
I do take my faith seriously, and I hope that I hold the beliefs I do for more reason than that they’re just the beliefs with which I was raised.
And that means that I have to think that some faiths, even other Christian faiths, contain propositions about metaphysical reality that are mistaken.
Certainly my faith allows for the truth of some other faiths. We are taught that the Jewish people do indeed have a unique relationship with God, which continues to this day. We do believe that Muslims worship the same God we do, although their understanding of the nature of God and His revelation is flawed. We believe that Hindus and Buddhists and animists and atheists and everyone who sincerely seeks truth is, at least, sincere, and may indeed even find some degree of truth, although they do not have the knowledge of revealed truth that we have. And we believe that other Christian faiths share with us an understanding of the nature of God and man and the world, even if our understanding is more complete.
We (at least those who are of the same faith as me) don’t think of God and the universe in the same way. There is no need to bind God by time – time is merely an artifact of the physical universe. It’s a mistake to apply any concept of time to God, which means that, for us, the question “who/what created God” is meaningless.
And, in any event, many non-religious people seem to think that the main point of religion is to explain creation. It isn’t. The main point of religion is salvation.
So you consider any religious claims of direct communication with God illegitimate by definition? I do, but I’m an atheist. I’m not talking of specific claims which can be disproven, but of the more general case.
And Sam is a human being so all references to Sam are references to the same person.
Person A thinks a grad student created the universe. Person B thinks it was a supernatural entity who never gets involved. Person C thinks God did it right before creating Adam and Steve. Person D thinks the universe is a drop of snot from God’s nose.
Tell these people that they are talking about the same god and they will ecumenically say “bulllllll shit.”
May I submit this is an example of God belief having so little reason and evidence behind it that holders of the belief are unwilling to say anything useful about their God at all. Maybe we can call it the Emperor’s New God - each person looking at it sees something different, so it takes a child to say that there is nothing there at all.
Yup. It’s bad enough when you combine this need for certainty with basic in-group out-group dynamics. This gives you unyielding bigotry. But when your religious beliefs require you to fight your enemy, even if that means throwing your own life away, then violence is inevitable.
If a rich charismatic man promised to give a bunch of young, broke, politically powerless men millions of dollars to wage war against an enemy, who here would quibble at the notion that this man was catalyzing violence? But is this not what religion does? I see people trying to win the favor of a rich charismatic man called God (or Allah) in the hopes of earning millions of dollars.
And therein lies problems. Salvation from what and why?
Honestly, if religion was just about explaining creation, I wouldn’t much care about it.
Well, salvation of one’s soul. If you don’t believe in a soul, it won’t make much sense to you – I grant you that.
Being saved means one’s soul, after death, is in the presence of God, in direct communion with God. The absence of salvation means that one’s soul is not with God.
What that means, well, we don’t necessarily know. Some believe in Hell. Some are annihilationists, meaning they believe that the soul of those not saved ceases to exist at death. Some believe in Hell, but also believe in universal salvation, meaning that all are saved, except perhaps those who choose not to be saved (like Lucifer, perhaps).
I’m an agnostic Deist. My interest in religions is from a cultural viewpoint, I don’t consider any one religion more or less valid than another. They all have aspects that I find horrid, and they all have aspects that I find beautiful. Well, most of them.
[QUOTE=Steven Weinberg]
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
[/QUOTE]
No words will express how I feel about the issue better than those.
It’s not my non-belief in souls that is the issue.
This is my issue. Why is religious faith while alive a prequisite for being with God in the afterlife? Why wouldn’t being with God be an unconditional given, independent of our beliefs?
The pursuit of salvation is exactly what I think is dangerous about religion. When people (especially emotionally unstable ones) are encouraged to chase a glorious prize that awaits them in heaven, they are liable to do anything. Not even the fear of death is enough to slow them down.
It might be a given. Certainly faith in God, as defined by the Christian faith, or even the Catholic faith, is not a prerequisite for salvation, according to my church. As I said above, some believe in universal salvation, and my church does not deny this possibility.
Unfortunately, sometimes that is true. Faith can certainly go wrong.
If you believe the path to salvation is an open question, then doesn’t that contradict what you said earlier about the “main point” of religion?
Not trying to play gotcha ya; just trying to reconcile these two positions.
No, there’s no contradiction. I don’t know who is saved and who is not. My faith tells me I cannot know, with the exception of those few who have been canonized (i.e., officially recognized as saved) by the Church.
The main point of religion is salvation. It is the central question – religion tells us why we were created, in the words of the old Baltimore Catechism:
No, the main point of your religion is salvation. It is not a concept in many other religions. Your implication here is that other faiths are not even religions. I’m sure you’ll back away from this position now that it is called to your attention, but it seems it is your default based on your training.
Salvation is the odd belief that God made everyone sinners by default and that the only way to expunge this sin is not by atoning but through Jesus. Not at all what I believed back when I believed in God and not at all what I got taught.
That’s the very root of the evil of Christianity. If other religions don’t offer salvation, then almost any action to get the adherents of other religions saved is justified.
Including torture. Including kidnapping Jewish children to save them. It is the very antithesis of live and let live.
Your language is stronger than is called for here, but you’re right. I should amend that to say that salvation is the point of the various Christian denominations, and (perhaps) some other faiths as well.
“[T]he evil of Christianity”? So far, this thread has managed to avoid most of the usual nastiness that always comes up in discussions of religion. You’ve managed to change that.
I think you do not understand the idea of salvation. The Christian faith, and the Catholic faith, do not justify torture and kidnapping, no matter what some Christians may have done in the past.
I think a lot of time, it’s people who have been hurt in some way by a religious person or organization. I had a friend who was a vocal atheist, and I could never figure out why it mattered to him so much. But later I learned he had dealt with a very traumatic situation that was partially facilitated by a church.
I didn’t grow up with religion, and I’ve never lived in a particularly religious place. To me, it’s kind of like sports— something I’m not in to, but other people are. But I think it’s a really different experience for people who have had to deal with the challenge of changing beliefs, family drama, etc. It’s like the difference between someone who underwent a bitter divorce, and someone who was always single.
nothing is more grossly naie and indeed not different from the religious belief than that.
the record of the ostentisble rationalistic and athiestic ideologies of the various marxist movements shows very well the idea that ‘religion’ can be held accountable for principal bad things is falsified.
indeed the athiestic movements have proven more efficient, more murderous on large scale than any religious movement.
I do not attribute this wildly to either the athiests or to athiems
But the idea of some here that somehow without relgion (whic the signs of come with the first signs of the intelligence in the humans), bad things are removed is really only a reshaping of the ‘belief’ into another statement.
So you consider any religious claims of direct communication with God illegitimate by definition? I do, but I’m an atheist. I’m not talking of specific claims which can be disproven, but of the more general case.
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I’ve had direct communication with God myself.
Or, to be more precise, I believe that to be the case. I could, of course, be delusional. When you think you’ve been directly spoken to by God and handed some explicit answers to explicit questions, that’s a particularly important time for you to proceed with an awareness that you might be wrong.
The way I figure it, if I’m not wrong about that, then the content itself, having come from God, will explain things to people; it will do so without me first having to get everyone to agree that God told me these things. I mean, either it shines of its own accord or it doesn’t, if you catch my drift. Besides, if you first impress upon everyone that you have a message from God (and therefore it’s Very Important and It Is The Truth) and you succeed in convinging them of that part, that in no way raises the likelihood that they will comprehend the content of the message. People will tend to chant and sing the words they believe God to have said the way a cluster of 7 year olds will sing nonsense ditties, or with the obediently mindless reverence with which a fledgling cook reads a recipe out of a recipe book, not questioning, not seeking to understand. I don’t know why, but I’ve seen it for myself in profusion. Putting a stage with bunting and a big spotlight on the message and hollering out “God said this, folks” seems to obscure the message, not highlight it.
So no, I don’t regard as illegitimate any religion that includes claims that God directly communicated this or that to these people or those people. It becomes illegitimate when it fails to add “or so we think; we of course might be wrong, the prophet might be a charlatan or a lunatic, what do you think?” and instead says “you have to beleive this and believe it with a certainty; it is totally knowable because it came from God”.