You were trained to believe that mystical beliefs are loopy, and that is why you believe that. Whatever believe system a child is raised up in they will believe is truth. That includes religion, science, nationality, culture, etc. It is our beliefs that cause us to distrust others, to even hate others. The best position is to get above all belief systems into understanding the nature of them. Then maybe we can live in peace with one another. It is best to cure your own ignorance before you try to cure the ignorance of your brother.
This is rarely true. Not many people are skeptical. Pretty much everyone I know who is either an atheist or a skeptic (and there’s certainly a lot of non-overlap) had either religious parents or indifferent parents. Very very few parents instill their children with a sense of critical thinking or skepticism.
People grow up and some develop the ability to view things critically. Most atheists you’ll meet can describe a point in their childhood when they stopped, thought about it, and said “wtf, really? come on, world!” and became atheists.
Atheists either became that way on their own or simply weren’t instilled with a belief system. (Generally.)
“Class, today we’re going to teach you…nothing!”
-ten minutes pass-
“Right, that’s boring, let’s study math instead.”
My parents made me go to church.
My parents were religious.
Not much of that took in my case.
Especially if you believe that you have access to THE TRUTH, and that it sets you apart from all those others who have mere “belief systems.”
Now that I’ve cured your ignorance about how at least some atheists came to be, I am sure that you will stop repeating this demonstrable ignorance on your part.
Unless of course you are practicing deliberate ignorance, in which case I expect that you will ignore this correction, as you have ignored so many others over the years.
Nice try, but… no. I grew up Catholic and remained faithful until around high school. Part of what caused that shift was learning about the nature of other belief systems, and realizing that one way we might live in peace is to discard mystical thinking and live in the real world.
However, I was trained to be polite and that has stuck with me. You might try it the next time you feel the need to be needlessly condescending.
NM
Nearly all of the posters said they grew up in religious homes, some were made to go to church. The same is true with me. Then they started to question their beliefs and hopefully did some reading and studying as to the foundations of those beliefs. During this period of questioning they became convince that religious doctrine was not what they want to believe. Same with me. So they embraced science and most now feel that science has the answers missing in religion. Same with me. But then something happened to me that made me question all of my beliefs. Both the positive and the negative ones. I came to another conclusion, that all belief systems are full of contradictions, and opinions. So I decided to believe only what I have personally experienced. That relegated most of my former belief systems to the garbage can. I then could understand what Socrates meant when he said “true wisdom is realizing you know nothing.”
Now, it is very good you are polite with those that don’t agree with you. It will save you a lot of grief. As for being condescending, I am not, I am just thinking differently than most do. Sometimes it may seem to be that way, but is never meant that way.
So basically what I am saying is to go further with your questioning and studying. Make all your beliefs without contradictions, and if there seems to be no solid answer to the question, then accept that without forming opinions or theories.
Religious people try to argue that science is just another “belief system”. It’s not. Nothing in science is based on faith. Everything has objective evidence to back it up. So it’s not just a matter of people making a choice between belief in science or religion. The choice is whether you’re going to believe in something despite having no evidence that it’s true. If you decide yes then you can decide what you want to believe in - Christianity, Islam, Scientology, magic, ghosts, unicorns, whatever. If you decide no then you have to start looking at reality and going only where the evidence takes you - that’s science.
Doubt it. I certainly didn’t choose to substitute science for answers lacking in religion. I’ve just recognized that the scientific method is useful for understanding the world. But it has its limitations.
So being that you favor science, you only accept experimental results you have replicated for yourself?
Wow, it’s amazing how that’s almost exactly like condescension the way you put it.
Communications is a two-way street. If it seems that way to listeners, it just might be so in fact.
Basically what I’m saying is that you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about, but enjoy viewing yourself as having transcended the thought processes of others. And how ironic - that’s one of the problems with religion.
Liz is a real person, a kind and wonderful person that I know tangentially and for whom I have enormous respect. one time–one time–on another messageboard, when folks were talking about their religious beliefs, she described her utter horror in her belief that I and others are going to hell for not accepting Jesus. She hates that this is (in her opinion) true, and she feels helpless about it, knowing that preaching at us would do zero good.
Were it not for that one thread, I would never have suspected that she held such an awful belief.
So no, Liz wouldn’t drive you nuts. I’m not sure if that’s relevant, but her beliefs, and her approaches to them, are very interesting to me.
That said, her belief isn’t that my atheism jeopardizes my soul; her belief is that my atheism will send me to hell. As far as I can tell, that’s a statement with a binary truth value: either my atheism will send me to hell, or it won’t. Saying that it’s true for her but not for me is incoherent: do I end up in hell or not? And let’s not try to escape through equivocation: let’s stipulate that she, like many folks with similar beliefs, believes that hell is a physical location, and that I disagree on my eventual location in that place.
I think there is a point where religious beliefs become ridiculous but that’s going to vary from person to person.
I have a great friend who has a lot of disdain for Christianity and organized religion but he’ll casually talk about his house being haunted and be dead serious.
I allow a lot of leeway for culture , family and group influence, but at some point your mind has to question and reject certain things. One problem I see is people get scared that by rejecting one aspect of their belief system the whole thing will crumble , or afraid that by not accepting everything they will be rejected by their group.
God belief doesn’t alarm me or seem ridiculous. Believeing that people have to accpet Jesus as Lord or they will go to hell does. Believeing the Bible is literally the word of God does. I find those beliefs harmful in thier untruthiness.
Believeing the world is actually only 6000 years old, that the Left Behind books are accurate, is ridiculous.
No. When religious beliefs become flat out ridiculous, there is no point.
Ideally, true…in practice, utter bollocks.
Almost every scientific fact that any given person* knows, is something that they took someone else’s word for.
So they get their beliefs from teachers & books, rather than from observation & experimentation.
Not significantly different from having priests & bibles in general, except there’s *usually *much less of the “you should behave as I say” bits.
*excluding professional scientists in their field of expertise, obviously.
I have told many a person that the second a religion suggests dying and/or killing for it, get a new religion.
I’ve never been to Australia, so I’m only taking the word of other people that it exists. Therefore it’s on the exact same level of faith vs knowledge as the idea that god created the earth in 6 days?
That position is absurd. No one can personally redo every experiment ever done to confirm all of science works. But we know that the people who did these experiments recorded their results and shared them with us. We know this as much as we know Australia exists. Sure, it could all be a gigantic, huge, cruel, pointless hoax that persisted through billions of people and hundreds of years. I’d say a 50/50 chance of that at least!
It’s not faith to trust that an expert in a field knows something you don’t. Science derives from objective, repeatable results - every experiment or observation that we learn something from is subject to repeated testing and peer review. By the time it’s made it to the stage of public knowledge, it’s well known and secure. The people performing the experience and observations have seen the proof first hand, and anyone who’s interested in that particular topic can do the legwork themselves to repeat it.
Religious faith, on the other hand, shares none of that. Your priest doesn’t have special knowledge because he performed an experiment or observation first hand and he’s relaying it to you - nor does the priests that came before him or anyone up the chain. At no point was the knowledge that was passed along actually ever obtained by observation or proved by evidence. You can’t independently perform experiments or observations to confirm that what the priest is telling you is true.
No, this is an absurd comparison and you are just an apologist for ignorance for even thinking it was a valid point.
Depends on how you define “faith”.
Personally, I would define it as “belief in excess of that merited by the evidence.” So, what is the evidence, and what is the level of belief merited by it? With regard to religion, past a certain age they usually don’t cite “my mommy told me so” as evidence; they instead prefere to cite personal experiences of extremely dubious evidentiary value. Compare science - we cite books and professors, and claim they can be trusted because there is evidence that (in most cases) science books that enter the public sphere have been written and/or reviewed by professional scientists in their field of expertise, and therefore the presence of information in such a book is reasonable evidence that it’s true.
Alternatively you could define “faith” as “hasn’t replicated every test with their own hands”, but I don’t feel that that matches common usage. The closest it gets is when theistic folks are trying to make crappy false equivalences between the evidentiary value of expert reporting and subjective good feelings; but I don’t accept that that’s either a good argument or a good basis for deducing the proper meaning of the word.
The cut off point is beyond the point you discuss. It is totally different way of thinking, ways the world generally does it’s best to prevent. Of Jesus it was said that he is raving mad, in my own journey with the Lord, I have found that that is to be expected.
That’s not true.
A person might get the information first hand from other people but if he’s smart he’ll find out where they got their information. If you trace a scientific fact back to its source at some point you’ll arrive at an observable piece of physical reality. If you trace a religious belief back to its source you’ll arrive at a point where you’re told you have to believe it on faith because there’s no objective evidence.
Now if you really want to get down to the basics, you can simply eliminate all other people from the loop. You can go out and obtain your own facts and develop your own scientific conclusions from them. And it’ll be the same as everyone else’s science because science is objective. You can’t do that with religion.
I suspect that most anyone who has ever taken a high school or college chemistry or physics or biology course knows certain things to be true because they have actually performed scientific experiments in the lab … and they all get the same results … and those results are predicted by most all scientists.
I think that is “significantly different” from the priests and bibles Sunday school method, wherein each different church predicts different results for the same actions … and, so far as I am aware, none of them provide actual hands-on experiments in a laboratory where cause and effect can be observed and measured.
:smack:
Oh, God, no. There’s a difference between:
a) believing something based on the best available facts, while being willing to change that belief upon discovery of new data
and
b) believing the factuality of something that was, as far as can be determined, intended to be a parable from the start.
You may not have been to Australia, but I’m sure you’ve seen quite a few not-so-easily-faked pictures, you’ve probably been to zoos & seen animals from that continent, you’ve almost certainly met people who are either from there, or have been there, etc. And if you did travel there, you would either find your belief vindicated or vanquished (my money’s on the former, btw.)
Remarkably few people are ever going to have (or, at least, be aware of having) direct dealings with electron tunneling or time dilation, however.
And here we get to the crux of the problem. Lots of people are anything but smart. And despite the pipe-dreams of evangelistic atheists, religion has no monopoly on them.
Only in relatively good circumstances, I’m afraid. Experiments can have bad results for any number of reasons, faulty premises can linger for years hidden by Occam’s Razor, simplifications used to introduce a concept to students can become unquestionable “facts.”
Science is much better at rooting out those problems than religion is…but laughably, when religions do self-correct, it gets pointed out as “proof” of their falsehood. Lose-lose.