Well, we all believe in Hegel.
Believing in Hegel is internally contradictory.
I’ve done quite a bit of reading about what’s known historically about Jesus, and I have to say it was a significant part of my becoming an atheist.
A lot of what I’ve read points to the idea that Jesus may not have been a historical figure. People have tried for more than a century to establish that he was real person and failed. A lot of the historical cites used to show that he was a real person, Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Thallius, Lucien, and even the Talmud are either too vague to be able to draw a conclusion or have been shown to be forgeries. Just about everything I read about the gospels said that they were written long after Jesus’ death, sometime very long after. Not only that, but many more than just the canonical gospels were written, and the those were chosen by little more than a popularity contest. There were many messianic cults at the time, with lots of claimed divinity and miraculous power. Paul doesn’t seemed to have known much about Jesus himself, and from his writings it looks like he regards Jesus as little more than a divine being.
I can’t say one way or another if Jesus was real, and I honestly don’t care. Jeshua was a common name at the time. What really gets me is how easily people accept all the supernatural events. With nothing more to go on than the tales his followers wrote down, which is more likely: this guy could raise the dead and transmute matter, or his followers exaggerated or misinterpreted things for their own benefit?
It was hearing that sort of reasoning that first led me on my path to theism.
That depends on if there is a God who Loves us or not. Surly if there is a God who Loves us then the above is certainly possible, as those things would be trivial to Him.
If there is no God then we are trapped in this world, and will eventually die. A pointless meaningless existence. If there is a God who Loves us, would not He provide a way out of this trap? Jesus says it directly “I am the way”, which is a result of His Love for us.
You might ask that if there is a god who loves us, why would he create a shitty existence for so many. Your opinion of life on Earth without a god being a “pointless meaningless existence” is simply not true. We each make our own point and our own meaning in our lives. This is accomplished by each of us, every day, and is not dependent on a god.
But such meaning is ultimately arbitrary. Those who are more spiritual are not looking to create meaning, they are looking for created meaning. Also, making our own meaning to our lives and there being a more cosmic spiritual meaning are not mutually exclusive concepts. The popular sentiment is - ’ There must be more than this’ or otherwise, more than what we can personally create.
I dunno know about the rest of you guys, but darn near everything makes me doubt my faith.
Arbitrary. That’s precisely my point. What one person might consider meaningful is not what the next guy might consider meaningful. It doesn’t matter what a christian thinks is meaningful if it doesn’t make sense to me. Hell…the interpretation of meaningful isn’t even universally agreed upon within christianity. Nor is the opinion of what the heaven experience actually is.
If there IS an afterlife, what are the activities performed there that would make that existence more meaningful than this one? And will there be mutual agreement on that once you pass through the pearly gates?
What, reasoning that occurred in two different stages of my life?
I was raised Catholic. I was taught that all of it was fact. When I first started reading that Jesus may not have existed, it floored me. How could he not have existed? They taught me all this stuff, of course he exists. As I read more I found that it wasn’t so cut and dried, along with a lot of other stuff they taught me, including the existence of god. No one, anywhere, had any real evidence of the existence of god. That one blew my mind.
Now, I realize that it doesn’t matter if there was a historical person named Jesus. What matters is the stuff that was attributed to him. There were lots of people named Jeshua, you could just go back and pick one. But how can you prove he did all those things? Or that he was god? Or that Mary was impregnated by god? All we have to go on are really old texts written by his followers, not the best basis for believing something so unbelievable.
OK then, all you have to do is prove there’s a god. Go for it.
Are you saying you can only get meaning out of life if some invisible being in the sky loves you? Really? Why can’t you look around you and find some meaning to your life here? Or maybe realize that there is no deeper meaning to life and just get on with it? It’s things like this that make me pity the religious.
I think there’s a slight semantic difference here between our usage of ‘meaning’. I am not talking about meaning as a matter of taste, I am talking about meaning as a matter of truth. A truth that there is an afterlife (using your example) may be part of the meaning of existence, your own personal opinion on whether that means much to you is irrelevant to that actual truth.
To expand upon this, part of the purpose of existence could be to end up in a heaven where you experience infinite, unending joy (I don’t think the actual activities are relevant for this to be considered a possible truth) or otherwise end up in a hell where you experience infinite, unending pain. Whether either place is particularly meaningful from your point of view has no bearing on the truth of their existence (if, of course, they existed).
Or to use an analogy. I may not think bread is particularly important or interesting. But to someone who is starving, it could save their life.
I’m not sure I follow you. If you can’t know something, how can you determine if it’s a truth? Isn’t that the very definition of faith? So you can have faith that there is a god or a hereafter, but that faith is not a truth. It might turn out that it’s a truth, but no one can definitively say that a hereafter exists. I think in the secular sense, “truth” and “meaning” can be interchangeable because we each apply meaning as we see fit. However, when talking about the existence of a god or heaven, the use of the word “truth” is presumptuous.
I can only speak to my experiences as a Mormon growing up in Utah, but I think the very history you mention is a part of it. Every single day, I see reminders of the people who converted and fought for their faith–the people who left their homes and their families–the people who gave up everything they had to move to Salt Lake City, the new Zion–the people who built the Temple with granite they dug out of the mountains by hand. For one thing, I can see the Temple sparkling in the sun every day. Every night, I drive by the Joseph Smith Memorial building. Every day, on my way to work, I pass the Eagle Gate and the Beehive Houes (Brigham Young’s home). My grandfather’s violin is in the museum at Temple Square. That’s powerful stuff. It’s a real, direct connection to a heritage that people literally died for (Haun’s Mill Massacre, the Extermination Order,etc).
Not every Mormon has that connection, obviously. People who grew up in the Church but lived in California (or anywhere else lol) are probably going to have a slightly different relationship to it than people who live in Utah (note: Not better or worse just slightly different). But this history is easily accessible to anybody who wants to experience it.
Now, as for the fact that the DNA/science doesn’t support the BoM stories–well, it doesn’t matter. I mean, there’s pretty strong evidence that Jesus (the person) never existed either, but most people, even atheists, will say “Well, I believe a guy called Jesus had some good ideas.” Moses probably didn’t write the first five books in the Old Testament, but so what? That’s not enough to change anybody’s mind. There’s no scientific evidence for a great number of things, and even evidence that directly contradicts major stories in the Bible (for example, Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt) and believers don’t seem to care one way or the other. Why should Mormons be any different?
My sister is a very, very intelligent person. She’s currently a Masters candidate at BYU. She goes to church every Sunday, she does her Temple work, she prays, she reads her scriptures and pays her tithing. She has problems with some of the church’s stances (she’s not an anti-gay bigot, for example), but she believes that the church offers a doorway to a great, profound truth. For her, all of the reasons to doubt the church aren’t powerful enough to overwhelm the peace and comfort she receives from going through the traditions and rituals the church requires to communicate with God.
Yes, it has occurred to me that I’ve traveled throught the stereotypical ‘loss of faith’ story, only in the opposite direction. At times people who hear that I’m a Christian accuse me of blindly following authorities or being unwilling to question my childhood beliefs. That always raises an ironic chuckle from me.
But more generally I question how useful that stereotypical narrative is. Many (Richard Dawkins in the The God Delusion for instance) pin religious belief on children blindly following adults. But how does that account for so many prominent apologists who started out as atheists or agnostics but became Christians after examining the evidence? G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Anne Lamont, Josh McDowell, E. F. Schumacher, Ravi Zaccharias, and Lee Strobel, just to name a few.
Let me try to explain my experiences more clearly. I was born to and raised by atheists. Most of what I heard and read on religious topics in my youth was geared towards convincing me that religion was a joke. That includes what I heard from parents and other relatives, teachers, textbooks, the media, and professors. It would, of course, be inaccurate to say that every single thing I heard came from an atheist perspective, or that I never encountered a Christian argument before that time. But what I did hear seemed sappy and superficial, and seemed to fit in with the narrative that Christians didn’t have an intellectual leg to stand on. So I was a militant atheist throughout my youth. For a specific timeline, I’d say that lasted to age twenty, in my junior year of college.
Starting about then, I began to notice the first few cracks in my belief system. I noticed that many of the left-wing anti-religious professors at my school did not really uphold the high intellectual standards that they claimed to hold, and that many of the arguments used against Christianity were invalid. I also noticed that a lot of the best people I knew (i.e. politest, most tolerant, and most charitable) were deeply religious. All of this happened slowly, so that in fact I didn’t even notice it was happening. In retrospect I would say that over a period of several years, roughly ages 20 to 23, I became willing to accept a vague system of belief that might be called deist or pantheist. I accepted that there might be something out there that created the world and that people might have some kind of spirit, but I still rejected all the doctrines of any established religion.
It was really by encountering Chesterton in the Spring of '06 that I became able to take Christianity seriously. He convinced me of three things. First, an educated and intellectual person can believe in the supernatural and the miraculous. Second, there are credible reasons to believe the Bible. Third, there are logical justifications for what mainstream Christians believe and do.
So in the summer of '06 I started attending church for the first time. I began speaking with a minister and attending Bible study. I also read works by other Christian authors like Lewis, Schumacher, and Thomas Merton. They made me more intellectually comfortable with Christian doctrine, and also helped out simply because their experiences had so much in common with my experiences.
So in finality, I did not convert because I found that atheist arguments were flawed. Rather, learning that atheist arguments were flawed lead me to begin looking at Christian beliefs. Once I did, I found the arguments that Christians made to be convincing.
I have never asserted that people who refuse to recognize Christ are “dumb”, nor do I know anyone who has. By contrast, the reverse claim that Christians are dumb is made many times per day on this message board alone.
And that makes perfect sense. Christian doctrine is a positive claim about certain people and events. If Christians have merely been suckered into believing a guy who never existed and a bunch of stuff that never happened, then it does demonstrate a lack of smarts, at least relating to the particular topic. By contrast, if Christ really is the son of God, failing to recognize that could simply be a matter of being uninformed.
Put another way, if Christian doctrine is false, than a great deal of Christian activity is a total waste of time. Secular activity, on the other hand, would not become a waste of time just because Christian doctrine was true.
Look at some examples:
-Issac Newton, the most influential scientist in history, really did spend much of his life attempting to decode hidden meanings from obscure Bible passages.
-John Wesley, founder of Methodism and the most important 18th century advocate against slavery, really did advocate spiritual practices such as fasting, day-long prayer devotionals, and the Eucharist, specifically because he believed that they helped focus the mind on Christ.
-Mother Teresa, one of the most widely respected people alive during her time, really was a member of Opus Dei and a firm believer in all the doctrines of the Catholic Church. She even practiced mild self-torture as a means of penance.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., really did instruct his followers to engage in religious rituals of self-purification as a necessary part of their activism against segregation.
So if you believe there’s nothing whatever to the religious claims of the Bible, don’t you have to ask, “What’s up with all that?”
I was raised in Kentucky, supposedly the heart of the Bible Belt. I can say this much about my upbringing: my parents had absolutely no religious books or any materials in the house and they never spoke to me at all about religious questions and issues, other than to occasionally warn me away from certain people and positions. I went to public school, so of course my teachers were never allowed to present any religious material at all, even if it was balanced out by other viewpoints. When I got to college (Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Ca.) many of my professors did directly and aggressively promote atheism.
This is precisely one of the issues on where the “cracks” occurred. So many atheist sources simply acted as if no one had ever tackled the issue of Christianity among other religions. When I began reading and studying for myself, I learned that many Christian authors had tackled that issue at length with convincing arguments.
a) Evidence in the sense of empirical quantifiable or boolean data and repeatable experiments, etc, would be massively irrelevant. Nothing in my religion makes any central or axiomatic assertions about physical reality.
b) I am supposed to question it all the time, entertain alternative or contradictory possibilities to see if they explain things better. That is a core component of my belief system.
c) Despite being (as most people are) inclined to cling to a model that has worked for me for a pretty long period of time, I would hope that to the extent that my perspective ceases to make sense of life for me, and an alternative or contradictory (or even just elaborations with minor modifications) set of concepts becomes available to me, I would embrace the latter and begin thinking and believing in those terms.
I don’t think they’re dumb. I think they’re deluded. They feel a void missing in their life, and religion seems to fill that void.
There are actually some pretty smart people who’ve fallen for the Nigerian Scam. People who are smart enough to get professional degrees see a misspelled email from a stranger offering them a chance to get millions of bucks, and they actually believe it. They so desperately want to have a lot of money that they’ll believe anything to get it.
Religion is just like a Nigerian Scam. “Eternal Life?! And all I have to do is believe in Jesus? Isaac Newton and other ‘smart people’ believed it? Ok, that settles it!”
If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
The psychological phenomenon of religious belief certainly is interesting and worthy of study, but it doesn’t lend any credibility to doctrine. If I understand your point, couldn’t the same one be made about other religions that have a distinctly different doctrine?