Rather than say religion is ignorance, I could picture saying it’s the result of ignorance - humans didn’t know what caused earthquakes and eclipses and diseases so they made up elaborate fictions to try to explain them.
If dumping the fictions (because we know better now) means losing the religion… fine by me.
The best thing is that dumping the fiction doesn’t mean losing the religion. “Jesus died to free us from sin” works perfectly well (as an article of faith) without needing to rely on an actual physical resurrection, much less on walking on water or multiplying bread and fish.
“Original Sin” can simply be expressed as a consequence of knowledge. Sharks kill only because they have no way not to…but we know the harm and hurt and sorrow that is brought by murder. So, for us, it’s a “sin” – without needing to say it’s due to the fall of Adam and Eve.
The rules of morality that are closely aligned with secular/humanist morality work perfectly well, whether ordained by God or by society…and the rules of morality that are solely religious-based – don’t eat pork, don’t use the name of the Lord in coarse conversation, etc. – are perfectly fine as individual choices. Don’t want to eat pork? Nobody’s gonna make you.
What do you call FECTs? They put forth knowledge, experimentation and evidence that is clearly distorted, or downright wrong, to support their ridiculous belief that we are living on an ice-crusted pizza, under a spotlight, under a little dome of LEDs. Is that not (aggressive) ignorance? Or is it some other thing?
If you believe specific metaphysical tenets and principles to be true based on, um, I guess based on what happened after you had that ayahuasca ale with dinner, and make no concerted effort to determine whether or not it was merely a brainsick fantasy of a morbid cobweb spinner, I was say that, yes, that is a form of ignorance. “Ignorance”.
Growing up in a majority Christian nation means this makes sense to you. Tell someone they should worship Jesus because he died for their sins, and he might say, why should I? Because someone made it up years after the event? Why not worship Joe the barber who just kicked it?
The resurrection supposedly made Jesus special. If not resurrection, he was just another failed Messiah, one who didn’t last as long as average.
If the supposedly factual parts of the Bible had turned out to be true, that might be an excellent argument for the faith parts being true also. Given that they are not true, why should anyone consider the faith parts to be nothing more than baseless assertions also?
To repeat myself, if it is built into us by God, God can’t expect a lot of thanks for absolving us of it. If someone shoots you up with a disease, you gonna worship him for giving you the cure after you kiss his ass? If you shout yourself up with it, that is totally different.
You seem to be forgetting the religious based rules that they do want to enforce on us. Like not being gay and wanting to get married. In the old days, like not working on Sunday.
If you can devise rules by ethics, who cares if religions agree. But once you give them any sort of special authority you can’t complain about them enforcing rules not based on decent ethical arguments. God is of course the ultimate source of moral authority. In their view, arguing with God supported by an ethics book won’t get you very far.
If you are Jewish, however, it might fly. Arguing with God is part of our culture.
No worries there; I’ll never forget nor forgive the religious tyranny of the past. From the Inquisition to mere (?) blue laws, religious coercion has been an ugly fact of life. (And, of course, not limited to Christianity by any means. When that guy was stoned to death for gathering firewood on the Sabbath, religious tyranny was seen in its ugliest form.)
My main point was that religious faith can be celebrated as harmlessly as our favoring a beloved sports team or rock band. I can cheer for the Colts, without stoning those who rock for the Raiders. Religious faith, when enjoyed at that level, is not a bad thing. Also, religious faith does not depend on “facts.” Too many hyper-fundamentalists try to pretend that the fact of evolution would “disprove” their faith, but that’s just silly. They’re building their own obstacles!
You are treating religious faith as a very amorphous concept. No one has generic religious faith - they believe in something specific. Deists meet your criteria quite well. There faith is harmless. I may disagree with them, but it is on the level of disagreeing about what flavor of ice cream is the best.
But many religions are universal, and have grown powerful by claiming they have an exclusive lock on the truth of God. They are the ones will tell you that you are going to hell by not following them. Our Constitution - as interpreted by the courts - says that they cannot legally enforce their opinion of what God wants. You see how well they like that idea.
The Fundamentalists worry that if every part of the Bible which is not obviously a parable or story is not true, then they don’t know what parts are true and which aren’t. Quite reasonable. In one thread I asked moderate believers to explain how they decided this, and the only person who answered turned out to be a deist. So it seems to be a tough question.
So god’s an Oriental?
Well, God, I guess, for certain definitions of Oriental, given his birthplace, if that counts.
CMC fnord!
I suppose god doesn’t look Asian because when he crossed the ocean he became disoriented.
Results-for-Anglican-Clergy-Survey-08092014.pdf
For a good insight into a mainstream religious mindset, read through the results of this survey of Anglican clergy in the UK.
For shits and giggles, start with the last question and work your way up through the data, where early on it comes out that 6% of their bishops answered “I am not sure ‘God’ is more than a human construct.”
The part dealing with brute level ignorance, however, is a little further up with the question, “Although several of these are probably important to you, which of the following would you say you MOST rely on for guidance as you live your life and make decisions? Please select one only” to which over half of the clergy’s responses either “God,” “The Bible,” or “The Church past and present,” whereas only a third of them responded “Own conscience, judgement, reason and/or intuition,” and almost none responded “Science”.
Look, folks, putting aside conscience, judgement, reason, intuition and science for religion when making life decisions is just plain ignorance writ large. And these are people who’s job – quite literally – is to guide people in making life decisions.
Of course they don’t rely on science for guidance as they live their life and make their decisions. Who has time to set up all those test tubes and microscopes and Bunsen burners?
So go ask a scientist for help in making your life decisions. People turn to the clergy when they want a religious perspective.
When it is mentioned that a particular sect or segment does not go extremes when following their beliefs, it makes me wonder if that is by choice, or by outside public pressure and/or the law.
Agreement right down the line. Religion is a very amorphous idea, from abstract deism right down to “Jesus talked to me this morning.” I know several people whom Jesus talks to, and, frankly, they scare me. I also know people who would like to enshrine their faith in secular law, such as compulsory prayer in schools. They scare me more.
On the other hand, I know lots of people who quietly and politely believe in Jesus, and who also believe strongly in the separation of church and state. They don’t scare me at all.
I don’t see why there is anything to wonder about. The Catholic Church has believed in the same Bible and the same magisterium since it was founded. And when it was less constrained by secular law, it oversaw the torturing and execution of people even for thought crimes — e.g., just for saying that any of its doctrine was wrong. Of course, they justified this by saying that heretics were murderers, because they led other people away from salvation.
Some people like to think that could never happen again, that human nature has changed since the Dark Ages, but it is happening today in the fundamentalist Islamic regimes. And if anyone thinks that Christian nations are different, there are people still living who were adults when Nazi Germany showed us how thin the veil is between tolerance and persecution.
I’ve been lurking on this website for a while now, content to just read through the various boards of TSD and broaden my horizon of human opinion and thought.
So, I guess, I could say congratulations for being the thread that finally pushed me over the edge to register and make a post.
Up until just recently, for nearly a decade of my life - from puberty to young adulthood - I was an avowed atheist, quite strict in my anti-religious beliefs, and sometimes even outright militant, hostile to people of the faith in general as I’d believe you would say that you are.
I didn’t have any single spiritual moment of awakening, or revelation, and I didn’t awaken one morning out of a dream where God spoke to me and provided me with existence of the Divine. My feelings on God, religion, higher powers, and all that good stuff have been something that I’ve been struggling with for the past few years; you can’t imagine how stressful it was for a hardcore atheist to suddenly begin to feel religious, especially when it ran counter to all of the beliefs that I had held dear for the past decade.
Eventually, though, I “converted”. It wasn’t a single event, as I mentioned, and I don’t consider myself a “born again Christian” or any of that trite nonsense. It was just something I eventually acquiesced to as I continued to think about things. I won’t go into great detail, since my specific beliefs are tertiary to the conversation at hand, but I do consider myself “religious” rather than “spiritual” as I follow theologies lain out over the past two thousand years by people far more educated and knowledgeable in these matters than I am.
The reason I bring all of this up, though, is because I want to emphasize the fact that - believe me - I know where you’re coming from. I’ve believed for a large part of my mature life that religion is a joke, is a detriment to humanity, and I’ve believed at some points that it should be outright banned for the good of us all.
I’m not saying that you’ll “grow out” of your beliefs, or that you’re just “in a phase” or whatever nonsense somebody else might tell you. Everybody’s course through their (anti)theological beliefs is their own, and where you’ll be in ten years is just as much of a mystery to me as where I’ll be in ten years.
What I am trying to say, instead, is that there are plenty of people who believe themselves to be just as rational and logical as yourself, and who are yet religious, with myself counted amongst that number. I will make an assumption here that you believe a rational religious person to be an oxymoron, a paradox, that religion is inherently anti-rational; I cannot blame you for having such a belief, as many certain religious beliefs held by many certain religious denominations and believers are anti-rational. “God put dinosaur bones in the dirt to test our faith in the Scripture!” A completely anti-rational belief, one of sadly very many such anti-rational religious beliefs, and one that I vehemently disagree with. But religion as a whole isn’t necessarily composed of nonsense like that, and can follow very rational and logical guidelines in terms of understanding the world and our place in it.
However, all such silliness of that sort aside, I’m certain that you believe that the very act of believing in a higher power is anti-rational. As you say, there is no definitive, empirical, physical evidence of a higher power existing. So what’s the difference between believing in God and believing in little green men from Mars?
Little green men from Mars are, intrinsically, a part of our physical, rational universe. If you want to believe in little green men from Mars that probe your anus on a nightly basis, that would be an anti-rational belief unless you can provide physical evidence of physical little green men from physical Mars existing in our physical universe to physically probe your physical anus on a physically nightly basis.
God, or any other higher power, would not be a part of our physical and rational universe, by their very definitions. This means that it would be literally impossible to provide physical or rational evidence of a higher power existing, as they exist outside of the laws and rules of our physicality and rationality - thus, a “higher power”, unbound by the same things that we are. Anybody that attempts to prove the existence of God or a higher power through physical or rational evidence is on a fool’s errand, since it would be like trying to prove the existence of apples by examining oranges. If you see a religious person attempting to provide physical or rational evidence of the existence of God or another higher power, this is, indeed, an anti-rational act.
But, what’s my point? I’ve been rambling on for paragraphs and paragraphs, but what am I trying to say here?
The leap to faith is an action that exists outside of physical, logical norms of rationality and anti-rationality; where-as rationality and anti-rationality exist on one scale, faith and lack of faith exist on an entirely different, completely unrelated scale. While one may logically examine the consequences that proclaiming an axiom of faith or an axiom of lack of faith results in, one may not attempt to logically prove or disprove either axiom, since axioms, by their nature, exist outside of the realm of “proof” and “disproof”.
tl;dr read some kierkegaard, maybe some augustine or aquinas if you think you can stomach reading catholic theologians
I can agree with you…a little. Religious faith is like preferences in cuisine or art or music: you never “rationally” sit down and “consider” that you like vanilla more than chocolate. It just sorta happens to you.
But I also have to disagree with you…a lot. Religious belief doesn’t get the same exemption from criticism that personal preferences in flavors does, because religions make concrete statements about the real world.
If religions strictly limited themselves to non-rational statements – “The creator of All That Is loves us as individuals” – then, okay, yeah, the statements are operationally nonsensical and thus neither threatening nor interesting. But religions build physical churches, and raise funds, and preach sermons regarding human enterprises, and make laws about what you can and cannot do. Some of them say, “Evolution is false.” Some of them say, “It’s a sin to be gay.” Some of them even say, “Kill that man, for he has spoken the holy name with disrespect.”
Until religions cease to trespass upon the real world, they do not get the same free pass that your preferences in music do.
Not all religions do. I feel like that’s a large part of the issue here. Some of us are taking what one religion does or what a lot of religions do as what all religions do, which is and in itself, ironically enough, a non-rational conclusion to come to.
"All X are Y.
Some X are Z.
Therefore, all X are Z."
The logic just doesn’t follow.
Like my set of religious beliefs, for example?
I fail to see what the issue is behind a group of religiously similar people constructing a building to congregate and come together to celebrate and discuss their religious beliefs, or behind a group of religiously similar people raising funds to facilitate their religious community, or behind a group of people listening to one religiously similar person express their specific religious beliefs.
Some religions are Z. Not all religions are Z, and certainly not my own set of religious beliefs. So, please, don’t group my own religious beliefs in with the people who say “Evolution is false.”, “It’s a sin to be gay.”, and “Kill that man, for he has spoken the holy name with disrespect.” They may be religious, they may be people of faith, but that doesn’t mean that I relate to them apart from both of us believing in a higher power, even a specific higher power, and I certainly don’t advocate them, or condone their words and their actions.
My religious beliefs do not trespass upon the real world - even if the religious beliefs of others in fact do so - so I would hope that mine, at least, get “the same free pass” that my tastes in music do.
If any religious person of any religious persuasion attempts to tell you or any other person that they need to live their life by the teachings of their own particular religion, especially if it’s by coercion or force or violence, then that is something I neither advocate or condone, and is something that I would stop from happening, if it was within my power.
If I am willing to offer you that respect - being willing to defend you from violent religious zealots if such an option was at hand - then I would hope that you would offer me the respect of not denigrating my own personal, private religious beliefs, or the personal, communal religious beliefs of my congregation, even if you disagree, even vehemently disagree, with said religious beliefs.
I think the existence of religion is inevitable since there would always be unknown/unchartered things that are out of humans’ reach. Religion somehow fills that gap and makes sense of it.
Not everyone will buy a particular religion’s interpretation, of course. But when it comes to the questions concerning life, death, afterlife, why “good” people suffer and “evil” people prevail, etc, many would feel desperate for a "valid” explanation. And that’s when religions would inevitably step in…
Yes, he was speaking in general; not absolutes, and he said some of them say… I do think it would be difficult for anyone to speak without ever making any concrete statements whatsoever about their religion though. Obviously it’s safer for them to keep it in the metaphysical realm. But curious, did you make your conversion without relying on anything concrete?
Not necessarily, but the devil is often in the details. Going from say, a deist, onto a more personal god that intervenes on humans behalf if one would just have enough faith, pray hard enough about it, fast upon it, praise his name and flatter such a being enough, that it actually steps in on their behalf is irrational. The bible is filled with such stories. Some have rationalized much of the stories away by saying they are not literally true, while I suppose still retaining or hoping certain aspects are literally true, with an afterlife being one.
So can philosophy, and may have better explanations of filling that gap when science can’t. Religion, not so much. Many leave because they became better philosophers than theologians, the problem of evil, e.g., has had many leave the pews. And if their new philosophy doesn’t get them, the science still very well might.
Rover and Miss Brain Problems, welcome to the Dope. Religion seems to bring out more dopers than any other topic. 
Sure. It’s only sad how very, very small a minority you belong to.