Ah, thank you, I get it. But I don’t think I agree with your response Lilairen, I thought scotandrsn’s response made sense inasmuch as beliefs held by one or many people can be equally invalid and unsound. Sure, they --and especially the originating myths-- are worthy of attention from multiple points of view, but their veracity remains, epistemologically speaking, lacking.
Technically that goes for all unsupported beliefs, of course. That’s why we call religion belief or faith, among other things. Or am I off track here?
At no time did I ever describe my hypothetical interpretation of Thor as the truly held beliefs of any living person.
You chose to step forward with your own interpretation which you ascribe to current worshippers.
Frankly, I don’t find either of our descriptions of Thor to be in the least bit relevant to any real understanding of the world, which was the point of my initial post in the first place.
Tell you what, Lilairen , let’s let the Asatru speak for themselves, shall we?
A Google search on the term brought up a page on ReligiousTolerance.org, which linked to The Troth, described as the largest Asatru group in North America.
I will link to the page with their description of Thor, since they explicitly request that no one copy and paste without permission.
I see no reference to “cosmogenic” entities, but references to a red-bearded man who rides a wagon drawn by two goats.
And I realize now, I should have been including my standard sig line thoughout this trhead.
I think scotandrsn’s best point got lost in the Great Thor Debate of '04. Belief in god/gods is NOT a sign that a person is un-intelligent in all aspects of their life. To me, it only means they do not think rationally in the specific case of religious belief. For various reasons, many intelligent, rational people can not jump over that “short wall” when it comes to god. It doesn’t automatically invallidate every accomplishment or idea they’ve ever had.
Every case for religious belief I have ever heard boils down to “I just believe it”. And, to me, that’s okay. But what I don’t understand is how those same believer’s can reject other spiritual/supernatural/paranormal ideas and events that are grounded in the same “I just believe it” mindset.
To understand whether religious people are intelligent, we should challenge one of the fundamental assumptions of modern philosophy. ABSOLUTE TRUTH DOES NOT EXIST
Does Truth Exist?
If we assume that truth exists, it follows that we should seek it.
Humility would tell us that we might not have found it yet.
That would help us be patient and tolerant with other who are searching for it, religious or otherwise, but not limit us from sharing what we have found.
If we assume truth doesn’t exist, then why seek it?
In the name of tolerance, we would take offense at anyone trying to share their truth to us.
We must assume that anyone who claims to have access to truth must be an intolerant fool, and limit us from sharing what we have learned in order to respect other’s beliefs.
Is it the clash of these opposing philosophies that makes us question the intelligence of people who uphold the opposite assumption?
Which equates to believing in your laughable concoction of a brain-damaged rube who thinks that Thor is all about thunder and providing “comfort in a dark, thundery world” and childishly insisting that even people who are not members of those kindred should convert, how?
(You were not intending to characterise actual worshippers of Thor, yes; this was obvious, as you strongly implied that such did not exist. However, if your hypothetical friend were to be a genuine worshipper of Thor, I would expect that person to actually behave and believe like a genuine worshipper of Thor, not like a cheap plastic Christian loony knock-off made in a third world sweatshop. You can’t just swap out names and have the examples work; the behaviours link strongly to specific names, and if you don’t know what behaviours do exist in parallel, you derail your entire argument by looking silly.)
There are plenty of failure states of modern pagan religions, perpetuated (among other causes) by people who refuse to think or take their mythologies too seriously. They don’t tend to resemble Christian lobotomised literalism. The loonies are ridiculous enough on their own terms without trying to equate them; equating them is entirely too likely to break down when someone goes, “Damn right that’s ridiculous, a follower of the Aesir going on about security and comfort. That’s as funny as those white-lighters who think that Kali would never hurt anyone.”
I hope no one does, but sometimes it seems that way, especially when everything must be politically correct to the point of being silly. Maybe “One World Religion” advocates live this way.
I am a Christian, but to be so these days is to go against the grain, because strong political groups demand everyone to celebrate their beliefs (or to pretend to), even when to do so requires doublethink. If a moral value is true, will it always be true?
Lilairen, is your point, beneath the unnecessary and distracting invective, that some Thor believers are “better” in some qualitative measure than others? Who decides who is behaving and believing “like a genuine worshipper of Thor, not like a cheap plastic Christian loony knock-off made in a third world sweatshop”?
This is a Thunder God after all, mythically speaking he was brash, mighty, and rather brutal if memory serves. Interpretations based on a character of such mythic and heroic proportion could have quite some latitude in a modern society. I’ve met a few pagans myself and (although I am ignorant in such matters) I don’t know of any grand unified belief in Thor that would make one a good or bad worshipper; that sort of thing is hard enough to determine in regards to the more established (and more scrutable) religions.
It doesn’t. I simply decided that, rather than having either of us espouse what constitutes a current belief in an ancient Norse Thunder God, it would help to simply go to the source.
I took your pagan connections at your word. I am sure the ones you have talked to described Thor as you stated in your initial post. But, on the largest NA Asatru group’s website, and in candid discussions with an objective observer, they don’t speak in ridiculously rationalized abstractions, either of the variety I described OR that which you described. When it comes to putting a public face on their religion, they want you to believe that they believe that Ol’ Redhead is up in Asgard swinging his hammer around, and to take or leave the faith on those grounds.
Yes, well, point made and taken, already.
My intent was to pull the debate into abstract territory, without bringing up the tired example of the Invisible Pink Unicorn. There are so many Christians and hardcore anti-Christian atheists here, that discussions of Christianity tend to get personal and emotional very quickly in these threads, losing all objective usefulness and turning into mutual nut-kicking exercises.
Recalling my friend’s remark to the JWs, I thought I’d present what I thought to be an absurd belief system as a way of discussing the issues I wished to bring up.
As soon as I saw your first post, I realized I shoulda known better, and stuck with the tried and true IPU.
And yet, after some reflection, I engaged you. After all, I thought, as a non-participant in any of these belief systems, an agnostic who was raised without any concept of religion at all, what looks sillier: a) to engage in a serious discussion of Thor the Thunder God, part of the Asgard pantheon (and risk, in the eyes of many here, driving another nail into the coffin of the reputation of my adopted state), or b) to show my hand earlier, and claim that serious discussion of polytheism including Thor, the hammer-swinger who fights dwarfs and giants, is irrelevant and ridiculous, and we SHOULD be discussing a monotheistic deity who sacrificed his demigod son who was really just an aspect of Himself?
Frankly, I found your post intriguing, the idea of people actually still drawing from these old myths. But as far as how they wish to present themselves to the world, as my links show, they don’t subscribe to my abstractions OR yours. So, if we really wish to show respect for the religion as it exists (which I assume is why you posted in the first place), then, to whatever extent any futher discussion of Thor might be relevant to this thread, it should be discussed on the level at which the worshippers themselves present it.
Not according to the idea of Logical Positivism. We can only build a model that explains what we observe of the world. to whatever extent the model fits and accurately predicts what we observe later, the model may be accepted as the closest to the truth we are likely to get.
This would then be the only branch of your thought process to follow.
As a subscriber to the logical positivist view, the most accurately refined model becomes the goal, rather than an absolute. And why not try to attain that? What else are we going to do?
This doesn’t follow for me, necessarily. We should only take offense at a model, presented as completely refined, that fails to describe the observed world. We would also tend to favor models without undemonstrable properties as being more elegant.
When models of the world exist that lack undemonstrable properites or untestable questions, and someone insists on an alternate model where a great deal can never be tested, we must assume that either they have not examined the problem thoroughly (due to inability or laziness), or have some vested interest in an inferior model. One must be suspicious of either their intellectual capabilities or their ethics. Since the latter involves ascribing evil tendencies to a person, the objective, compassionate listener tends to favor the assessment that more likely suggests an affliction.
I agree that the goal is the most accurate model possible. Now the question becomes, is it intelligent to believe that in the real universe, undemonstrable properties could exist?
Could something exist outside the space-time we inhabit? Is it intelligent to believe so?
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosphy”- William Shakespeare
As more and more of the universe that we once thought required a faith-based explanation comes under the heading of testable questions, it seems to become less and less reasonable to think that faith is required to explain anything.
There are those who believe that at some base level, we will eventually reach a point where we simply can not piece together any more answers other than “someone or something simply willed it to be this way”. This belief has been around a long time, and scientific types refer to it as the “god of the gaps” philosophy. Trouble with it is, the gaps in which the god is allowed to exist keep getting smaller.
Certainly there may be undemonstrable properties in the universe. It would be folly to assume, without proof, that they are not there. That’s not the same as proving they are required by the best model.
We know very little of the nature of intelligence, far less than would be required to declare what can or can not be accomplished without its intervention.
Most definitely. I refer you to Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell, which gives an excellent layman’s introduction to p-branes.
No, my point is that not all religions are the same, and when they start rusting out or growing mold or doing whatever stupid things they do, they don’t do it in the same ways. Literalism is only a common failing of Religions of the Book, for example; it is not common among modern pagan faiths. Where it does happen, it tends to be in the corners of the community generally dismissed as ‘fluffy’ by the rest, who tend to spout off about ancient peaceful matriarchies that were disrupted by male gods (this doesn’t resemble Biblical literalism much aside from making false claims of fact, as the text taken literally is Margaret Mead rather than a religious text).
The neopagan witchcraft religions’ best known failure points (aside from the ‘six million dead in the Burning Times’ variety) are a lack of research and thought, white-light-ism, and certain forms of syncretic tendencies best summed up as “ooh, that’s cool, I’ll believe that too!” Oh, and some occasional anti-scientific tendencies. The reconstructionist religions’ (Asatru is one of these, as is my own religion) failure points are the traditionalist/adaptationalist split – one side tends to fail by refusing to attest anything that isn’t backed up in lore and archaeology three times or some such; the other tends to fail by making things up and claiming them as historically accurate – and occasional tendencies towards racism (most well-known among the Asatru, but I’ve seen two different and mutually exclusive varieties in my own religion and I wouldn’t be surprised if the other reconstructions had that issue).
A claimed heathen who behaves like a Christian literalist breaks my suspension of disbelief; the religions don’t break down in the presence of raving lunacy in the same way, because not only the construction of faith is different but the structural mindset. It is likely to fail in an exaggeration of one of its central tenets – relationship with the Aesir and Vanir, blot and sumbel on the major holy days, honor and interaction with the ancestors, and the nature of reconstruction (these are called the Four Bedposts of Asatru – Google will pull them up in more detail, including standard caveats; the top hit on the Four Bedposts seems to be the website of someone I know, actually) – rather than on a tenet from another faith.
Yes; this is sidelong of my point about mythical literalism.
Hm. Here, this may be illustrative; it’s a moderately recent thread on a message board. I don’t believe that there are any Asatru participating in the thread, but there are people from a wide variety of other religious traditions, including various reconstructionists.
The thread, presuming the link works, is titled “How many gods does it take to pull the sun?” and is asking about how folks, especially hard polytheists of a reconstruction bent, reconcile the number of deities that are supposed to embody the sun and the fact that the sun is a star, not a flaming chariot or glowing ball of dung or other mythological image. The responses there are what I consider typical – and illustrate the attitude that the stories provide information about the nature of the gods rather than literally describe the world.
In the temple where I’m studying at the moment, one of the classwork assignments was to take a myth (two were suggested, and acceptable translations provided) and break it down in analysis mode: the question was “What does this myth reveal about the gods and their influence in the world?”, more or less. The events of the story are taken as the methodology for conveying truth, and working to resolve that truth is the central concern of response to myth. (I expect that this particular temple is much more explicit about this process than others and may be more so than other religions; the general attitude of the myths being not dissimilar to parables, allegories, and other things where the truth is the layer under, though, is very widespread among modern pagans.)
I would be surprised if generally accessible websites were to be discussing the cosmogenic attitude about mythology in general, honestly; it’s the sort of thing that tends to come up when talking shop rather than when making formal presentations to the world. Discussion about what the stories really mean is much more a two in the morning sitting around the fire thing or a classroom thing than something that’s important to tell other people about the faith – most of the pagan religions are more orthopraxic than orthodoxic. In other words, knowing what to do is essential; belief is sort of a cross between a swap meet (“Hey, that’s a cool interpretation, I may try that one for a bit!”) and a mostly-friendly political argument (“You’ve gotta be kidding me. I don’t have a clue where you got that from” – the one of these I know of in Germanic heathen circles is interpretation of the role of Loki, though that doesn’t tend to be ‘mostly friendly’).
Does that address your concern about how the members present themselves?
At least three posters fell back on the old chestnut “Science tells us how, religion tells us why.”
Assuming that there is a “Why” to be answered is to assume that somewhere, somehow, there is a grand, deliberate design for everything.
What science suggests with each new explanation (and there are many in this world whose expressed opinions suggest they think science exists solely to do this deliberately) is:
There may ultimately not be a separate answer to “Why?”
There may only be what and how, and the beauty of the design may arise from these aspects alone, without a plan.
At this point the religious (of every stripe, apparently, if your linked threead is to be taken as an example) fall back on emotional arguments that amount to “If believing in a higher entity that is more or less consciously in charge of everything is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”
Really, why is that?
Does the fact that the rose may have acquired its look and smell completely by chance make it any less a thing of beauty? Does the fact that a slightly different set of circumstances might have meant there would be no roses at all not make them that much more precious?
The more we find out about the universe, the more we may find out that the only goodness in it is what we choose or not to bring with us. The more our understanding of the mechanics of the Universe suggest this, the further religion shrinks away.
It is a hard thought to swallow indeed. But full understanding may require this abandonment of the concept of overarching purpose. Is it any wonder that those who look forward question the capabilites of the minds of those who choose to remain behind?
I think that individual people may well have a need to develop a system of why things are the way they are; the need for an answer to ‘why’ falls at a number of levels – fact, intent, and constructed social meaning are the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.
Many people are satisfied with the factual whys, such as evolutionary development. Of the people who aren’t satisfied with those, some reject them (you get these in the young-earth creationist types, for example), and some say, “Yes, but what else?” Some of those feel a need to posit a direct creative force, say, and that things are the way they are because of the influence of that force. Others feel a need for a system of organisation to determine why they are there in the sense of how to arrange their life and react to the world.
Religious beliefs can fall into all of these categories. The “why” that leads to the development of a system of response does not necessarily demand that what’s being responded to is some sort of deliberate design; the deliberate design falls in the construction of the correct response.
Personally, I don’t see that in many people. I see people finding the structures that work for them as either means to interpret the world around them, many of which are religious in nature, or using the structures that are most effective towards finding their goals. The reason people keep their religions is that those religions work for what they want; you may not want the same things they do, or you may have other tools that work for your purposes in getting what they use religious tools for. But your example as someone who prefers a different toolset in no way refutes those people who are happy with the tools they have.
In similar discussions you can come across people debating what the nature of the gods is, among other things. (I’m in the ‘it doesn’t matter’ camp, myself.) Or people who think that the gods are in charge of the universe vs. people who don’t. Or so on. You don’t just get these in pagan circles, but that’s the area I’m most familiar with.
Only if you think that the purpose of religion is fact; I don’t know many people who do. Most of them consider religion to be dealing with the realm of meaning, which has very little to do with fact. This is getting back to the whats and the whys, though I don’t tend to phrase it that way.
For example: Many people think it good to give their partners flowers; this is a custom which contains a certain meaning. It isn’t an objective fact that flowers are a good gift to give one’s partner – I, for example, don’t care for being given flowers; it might even be said that I actively dislike it. The event of being given flowers is the same in both cases – but the meaning, the why underlying the response, differs.
It’s that level of “why” that I see most people looking to address in their religion, on some level. Religious seekers tend to have a huge variety of desires – more ritual or less ritual is one of the common ones; diversity in images of the divine is one of the major draws for paganism; language for articulating a particular deeply-held set of beliefs about the nature or organisation of the world is a biggie for me; some people are after particular sorts of interactions with the divine, if they believe in it; a system that supports that person’s perceived weaknesses or makes use of their strengths; so on.
Having a system that supports a particular structure of thought can be a very useful thing. First of all, it provides the primate social urges with a community of like thinkers. Secondly, it’s a form of group problem-solving; rather than having to work out how one wants to react to certain issues on one’s own, one has a pool of resources grounded in a similar context that one can use or compare and discard as appropriate. The big one for me was finding a set of vocabulary terms for specific concepts that I hadn’t been able to usefully articulate before, which made thinking through the issues of meaning and interaction significantly easier for me to do.
I’m pretty sure that community, pooled labour, and jargon are driving forces in all forms of subcultural development.
It is a wonder to me when anyone promotes a single method for constructing meaning. I have and use several, myself, depending on what’s appropriate to the situation; several of them are religious, several of them are not. My bafflement is the same whether the person I run into is a Christian proselytiser who thinks that all thought should always go through a fundamentalist filter, or someone who thinks that all thought should go through a nonreligious filter; given my experience that different situations are better-processed with different systems, system monocultures seem horribly inefficient to me.
Of course, in my religious filter I’d express the same thought by noting that nonexistence is referred to mythologically as ‘before there were two things’, which tends to equate diversity and variety with reality, and nonexistence with the absence of contrast or alternative.
I tend to think that the overarching purpose of people really does come down to constructing meaning from things – people make patterns, and respond to them. I don’t have any opinion on whether some god put that there, whether evolution put that there, or whether it’s a happenstance; it’s just something I’ve observed about people. I tend to think that some of the patterns people come up with are neat, and some of them are beautiful, and some of them are horrible, and some of them are bugfuck nuts; I select the patterns I prefer on the basis of aesthetic and utility to me, and while I’m willing to be convinced about other criteria for selecting patterns, the fact that other people think that my tastes and purposes are quaint, silly, or asinine has not yet done so.
As you have said, science is progressively eliminating the need to believe in a god to explain the universe, and even religious feelings
But, do people first come to God because they are trying to find the truth about the universe? Some are following the footsteps of religious people they admire. Some are battling feelings of guilt. Others have lost control of their lives, and need help. Others need friendship, or direction, or purpose. I suspect most religious people aren’t truly connected to God, but simply enjoy the emotions that accompany believing in a god, gods, or a religion.
Yet, I think some people enjoy more than just religion, but a relationship with a being other than themselves. The problem is that in all honesty they could be making it all up. Faced with the apparent contradiction between experience and science, what is one to do? Many deny science, trusting their feelings. Others deny faith, trusting their minds. Is there intelligence in seeking middle ground?
I am very curious about the universe, and seek to know more and more about it. I am also very curious about God, and seek to know more and more about him. I do not hope to understand either perfectly. But God is more real to me, because of my relationship with him.
Of course, this requires faith, because I haven’t seen him physically. Many ‘coincidences’ though, have through the years bolstered my faith. Call it self-delusion, but I have found it to be very real. The fruit of this is that inexplicably these qualities have begun to sprout up in me: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.
If I didn’t find it real, I would very quickly abandon my faith, for it would be worthless.
OK, so it took 9 days, but in the end it was this post in this thread that really solidified what bugged about your post.
It’s 500 years too late.
Back then, the only thing that resembled science was the “natural philosophy” school mainly based mainly on the writings of Aristotle. It was basically, as you say, just another set of jargon, etc. that appealed to certain people’s sensibilities. And since no one actually knew anything, what did it matter which philosophy you adhered to?
Enter Galileo. He realized that some of the things that Aristotle said, such as how unequal weights will fall with proportionally unequal speeds, could be demonstrated physically. Or, as H.G. Wells put it in The Outline of History:
(N.B. The Pisa story is now believed to be apocryphal as the specific means by which Galileo falsified Aristotle’s conjecture)
What Galileo did in the grand scheme of things that turned Natural Philosophy into Science was popularize the concept of the destruction of orthodoxy.
It does not matter how many people believe anything for however long. If it can be shown to be false, then everything based upon the false statement(s) deserves nothing better than the trash heap. And once a castle in the air, no matter how ornate or seemingly well-constructed, collapses for lack of a foundation, to claim that it still stands as tall and gleaming as ever points to an cognitive disconnect that I believe is the source of the concepts put forth in the OP of this thread.
Science and the various religions all have ornately constructed views of the way the universe works. What renders the scientific view more intellectually rigourous to its adherents is that we are comfortable with the idea that great chunks of it can be washed away with a single demonstration, and yet we are confident that the foundation will stand.
No, I don’t assume they are stupid. I assume they are human, full of human foibles and emotive weaknesses. I also think the Institution of Marriage is a ridiculous anarchonism, but I would never expect anyone else to conform to what I think or consider them fools for trying it out. It’s a nice fantasy, just like religion. All part of the wonderous, imaginary Matrix of abstractions we have created for ourselves to live by. To me, it’s mostly meaningless structure.
I see lots of flaws.
Other people sometimes do not.
That’s fine with me.