It is a means to determine the truth, is it not? I will correct my comment to say that that statement is my belief. But the truth already exists before we know it to be true.
cmyk, you express yourself well. It certainly sounds like you made a good choice to break away from the Pentecostal Church. Maybe you are in a comfortable place for you. I can’t help but wonder if you ever explored any of the denominations between fundamentalism and non-belief. I can’t fault you if you didn’t. There are a lot of intellects in the Episcopal Church, the Unitarian Church, and others. Of course no denomination is perfect.
A large aspect IMHO is the external reinforcement received from institutionalized religion.
Take your garden variety delusion - one who suffers from it does not have a “community” telling them it is the proper way to think. Whereas one in a religion has thousands or millions of fellow believers reinforcing the belief system, and an institution formally indoctrinating the belief system. So, at some level is ceases to become a delusion in societal terms, even if does meet the criteria in purely logical terms.
Thanks. And yes, I have over my years for various things, and it actually highlighted what I already felt to be true: that this was all smoke and mirrors.
My mind has never been so open since, and I feel free to just experience this life in a very organic, common-sense manner, without having to justify my decisions using some highly interpretive, contrived and complicated, and sometimes even contradictory playbook – with magic sprinkles.
Do you think God would send his Son to earth to bring about salvation to mankind, and then fuck up the endgame; leaving behind a New Testament that actually further divides humanity into a bunch of quibbling, hating and killing clusters of “My faith is more righter than your faith!” groups?
Sounds like you are at peace with yourself and that sounds good to me…
No, I don’t think that God has fucked up the endgame. We haven’t seen the endgame. I don’t think the New Testament itself is so controversial that it now “divides humanity into a bunch of quibbling, hating and killing clusters…” It is the nature of man that divides. And a lot of that is egotism and thirst for power even though it destroys everything in its path – as in the Inquisition. (We see something similar happening on Capitol Hill today, I think.)
I’m no expert on the problems between Ireland and Northern Ireland. But I don’t think that they were actually fighting over matters of faith and questions on the New Testament, do you?
I don’t see much fighting among the denominations. There are arguments and general disrespect at times. But that’s not what you were describing. There are also denominations that work together such as the National Council of Churches and churches that encourage cross communication among religious faiths.
There are certain dominations or certain churches which may tend to be fear mongerers about Muslims now. That is born of ignorance – not of the New Testament.
There are also denominations which are a little more laid back about “knowing” and believing that they have all the answers. “Many sheep have I that are not of this fold.” You can’t beat my Sunday School class for having a good name: “Who Knows?” That’s pretty open.
I do think that the Old Testament leads to more bickering. To me it just doesn’t seem as loving a Testament. Too much hostility and smoting. There are some books that I love, but others that set my teeth of edge. Not all of my Christian education comes from the Bible anyway.
In the New Testament, St. Paul made things a little bit hard for women. But he knew he wasn’t perfect. The problem with Christians is that they are so human.
I have a lot of unanswered questions for the Cosmos that I hope to find answers to someday.
I believe that the truth will be a revelation that the metaphysical and the physical are One. I don’t believe that the metaphysical is actually “supernatural” but quite natural after all. Cloud my mind? No one would notice. I haven’t had a clear mind in years. And I never expect to see the day when scientists reach the “metaphysical” conclusion. But I see hopeful signs of it from time to time and yes, I do tend to have a bias toward those theories. (What I understand of TOE, for example.) But I don’t have vulnerable young minds to corrupt anymore in a classroom. So I’m free to speculate.
So what’s this negative energy stuff? Sounds ominous. I wish they had given it a more divine name.
I don’t believe that religion is a self-deceit. Any more than using any tool is ignorant or deceitful. It is a help to people and if they don’t use it to harm others it is a good thing for many. It comforts them in difficult situations,they have a sharing with other people. To me it is like a medication, some are helped by it if they need it and some can be harmed if they don’t. I wouldn’t give my great grand child a high blood pressure pill,but I need it to keep mine at a good level.
Belief weither it is in a person, or something else is just belief, and if used for good then it helps others as well, if used as an excuse to force others to comply to their beliefs or harm them as the( Crusades did, or as some extremei Muslims or other religions do to try to) then it is not used as it should be used.
Yes, there are many unintelligent people who believe in God or various other deities that do so for stupid reasons, but presupposing that all people who believe such are necessarily believing in something stupid, well… no wonder you can’t reconcile it. IME, many people who brand the religious as such believe that we all believe in the same sort of childish stories that most of us were taught as children. Sure, many do, but at least some of us have moved to something quite a bit different.
For instance, though I don’t celebrate Christmas myself, it would be like assuming that everyone who celebrates Christmas still believes that there’s a magical elf living at the North pole who will reward me with gifts if I’m well behaved. I think we’d be hard-pressed to find an adult who still believes that to be true, and yet we have no trouble finding adults who celebrate it, even for purely secular reasons. Sure, the numbers may be off, in that there’s more adult religious people who still believe in the stories of their youth, but the principle is the same.
And here, straight up believing that we believe in a falsehood is just insulting. Religion, or lack there of, isn’t a matter of truth or false, because its a highly experiential thing. Lest we get into a matter of universal truth, which I don’t think is relevant here, then both the religious and non-religious can, and mostly do, believe in the truth, they simply believe in the truth as we’re each able to perceive it from within our own experience.
Religion is irrational, but so is non-religion. Again, it’s not a matter of rationality, its a matter of experience. Sure, we can try to rationalize our experiences, and for the most part we can succeed, but there are still some aspects of the human equation that either we, at least not currently, can fully rationalize. If anything, I think a belief that we are fully capable of rationalizing all aspects of the human condition as we currently stand is probably a much closer to self-deceit than some level of acceptance of irrationality.
That’s not to say that religion is inherently and completely irrational either. I actually spend a large amount of time attempting to understand and connect my various experiences and work toward a larger, complete picture. But part of the problem is that our circumstances color our perspectives and color our experiences which makes them more difficult to connect.
Regardless, there are many things out there that we don’t understand very well or at all. To fundamentally reject things that we don’t understand is, in my view, as bad as seeing glimpses of them and filling in the gaps with all kinds of other bizarre explanations. Chances are the truth lies somewhere in between. Either way, you’ll do better in understand religion and the religious if you don’t attempt to do so with the assumption that it’s flat out wrong; certainly most religious people believe at least as strongly, justly or not, that they are right.
Well this assumes that there is no God and people are just falling for religion. So we will leave out spirituality or personally knowing God.
People who are into religion enter into a community or even corporate structure where there is a high priest at the top, called by various names, and people in high positions and then the general congregation. It is a club of sorts of people that follow a similar code and form a brotherhood (and sisterhood), which the interactions that they get and the community does given them a advantage and comfort of being part of a group.
That level of comfort, and wanting to be a member of something has advantages, we are not made to be alone, we are a social being, and in many ways even a slave in a like group is better off then someone stranded and on their own.
So it may be a mark of subconscious intelligence, in that the brain decides it needs community and perhaps allow false beliefs that tend to reinforce that goal.
This statement: “but it’s too difficult to accept something so irrational.” leaves wide open to a person just not being able to understand something and just dismissing it and is the basis for many prejudice and discrimination issues worldwide. It shows a closed mind a ‘if I can’t understand it, though many people claim to, it must be wrong.’ On that basis I state your initial premise is very much in question.
But religion’s foundation is a bunch of dogma. If you can shut your brain off before you get to the questions you’d have about anything else at all the requires the sort of veracity you’re going to set the way you go about living your life, and influencing the decisions you make, than I think it is more profoundly self-deceitful.
Base your thoughts and actions on your own wisdom, not someone else’s. Life is organic; not some arbitrary set of codes and rituals that must be performed to satisfy yourself, justify your actions or to alleviate your fears. Is everyone really that lost? That desperate?
Nonsense. Religion makes any number of claims of fact, all of which when tested have proven to be false.
More nonsense. All you are doing is demanding that everyone else pretend that your fantasies are equally as valid as verified facts. And I note that you are carefully avoiding actually specifying what “aspects of the human experience” we can’t “fully rationalize”.
Eliminating the latter means that you eliminate religion entirely. Once you get rid of the bizarre made up parts, there’s nothing left. And rejecting religion has nothing to do with rejecting things we don’t understand; on the contrary, admitting that such things exist is contrary to religion. It’s religion that claims false knowledge rather than admit the unknown exists. If humans were more prone to admitting “we don’t know” instead of just making things up and demanding that everyone else believes, then religion would never have existed.
No. First, “chances are” that virtually everything claimed by every religion on the planet is flat out wrong, as it has always been throughout history. Religion has a track record of massive and systematic failure when it comes to being right; it’s worse than wild guessing. You’re just trying to pull the old fake-reasonable rhetorical trick of insisting that the middle option is always the true one, no matter how well supported one side is and how blatantly wrong the other is.
And understanding religion *requires *that you realize that it is indeed wrong; that in large part it is about being wrong. One of the main purposes of religion is to serve as a means of demanding false respect for ideas and practices that are evil, baseless or outright contradicted by the facts or by logic; beliefs that are none of those things can support themselves and don’t need the “religion” label to survive. Beliefs that are right are almost never religious, because they don’t need to be; religion is about wrong ideas. Religion is about defending lies and delusions and malice and tyranny and bigotry; about demanding that people respect what you are doing and saying no matter how stupid or evil it is because it is a religion and we are supposed to respect religion no matter how stupid and horrible it is.
I agree, people should use their own brains, but if it helps them to escape a tragic situation, or a belief helps them get through rough times or become a better person, that is their business as long as they don’t try to force it on me, or others, by trying to make every one think and believe as they do. Those people are not sincere in their beliefs and need others to back them up, so they seek out others who agree with them.
I believe the purpose of Religion was meant to help people get along together in a civil way, it is not used that way today in many circumstances, many use religion for political reasons, (or as the Pharisees in the OT to make them selves look good or better than others).
The one thing great our founding fathers did, was to make church and state separate, to protect the state from religion, and religion from the state. It also protects the minority from the majority,the religious right would have everyone believe and be forced to live as they do. And should be grateful the majority in this country is not extreme Islamists!!
A not-too-old (1979) but now-classic SF story by George R.R. Martin, “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” is based on the idea that humans need this kind of deception to make their existence endurable. There is a secret society of in-the-know persons called the Liars who invent religions for the purpose. (But how do the Liars make their own existence endurable, with no comforting self-delusions? That’s never explained.)
Wouldn’t it be much easier(and logical) for you to show one that wasn’t? Quick win for you if you do. I mean, he could make up a list to the best of his ability, but you could come up with some obscure reference and claim his list didn’t include all claims of fact and is therefore invalid.