Is scientific discovery not one of the best (perhaps the best, perhaps the only way to gaze at the awe-inspiring beauty and complexity of creation.
Is dedicating your life to admiring and understanding more and more of God’s work not worship? Is curiosity not worship?
Don’t we all make the baseless assumption that there will be a next second, perhaps a next minute, maybe a next day, possibly a next month and a fair chance there will be a next year? Is that different from faith? We don’t know when a meteor might shatter us, or a solar flare cook the entire planet into magma, or any other thousand cosmic doomsday scenarios.
I think we all need to look at things from a good distance, lest we give too much importance to mundane details and ignore the cool enigma we have to solve.
:dubious: No, it’s curiosity. Your “admire God through his creation” philosophy has also had the historical problem that a lot of the natural world isn’t all that admirable, or outright horrifying.
No, AGAIN that’s trust, not faith. We assume that tomorrow will come, because it has in the past, many, many times. It’s not “baseless”.
But it probably won’t tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that.
Whatever enigma you are speaking of, one of the first steps in solving it is to give up religion. You won’t get any true answers from something detached from reality, as religion is. You acquire knowledge from studying reality, not making up fantasies and insisting that they are true.
I doubt that faith deals directly with a person’s relation to truth. Faith can be false in the religious sense or in just a human sense. Faith tends to help a person get through a difficult time as an example: One can believe that someone would come and help them if they fell into a pit,but the truth may be that no one will come and the person dies there. Faith is what we hope will be or is. Such as if our mate is true to us or not. We tend to believe what we want to exist so truth doesn’t enter into faith, although we may desire it to be true.
Horrifying? To whom? Humans? the particles that make us? to gravity? You can see horror in a spider slowly dismembering its prey and taking its time in eating it but only when you’re not looking through your scientist glasses. Then, it becomes fascinating. Genocide becomes fascinating. Supernovas that may obliterate trillions of lifeforms become fascinating.
Saying that trust is not faith may be a practical shortcut for everyday life matters, but when you’re talking metaphysics, saying that trust is not faith is like saying it’s turtles all the way down.
Your faith is reassuring :D.
I’m speaking about THE enigma of course. In your opinion, religion is only harmful when it gets in the way of science, yes?
What about enslaving a few million people every year and using them in human experiments? I bet you’re against it because you think it’s morally wrong and horrifying. Is that moral judgement a fantasy that you insist is true? Are you just biased because you’re human and you think you’re special?
I hypothesize that, on some level, vast numbers of scientists were driven by their search for God (hoping to find or not find is a different matter). That said, I agree completely that using religion as an excuse to say “we know everything worth knowing” is blasphemous and a bunch of hubris.
I also agree that many people are idiots incapable of comprehending anything beyond a few simplistic things and some of them are arrogant or selfish and they want to impose their asinine views by force, which is just not nice at all.
The word “faith” is a tricky one because it has multiple meanings and connotations. However, one of the more common meanings of “faith” is as a synonym for “trust.”
My own attempt at a brief as possible definition of “religion”:
A philosophy based on first principles ultimately derived either from revealed authority or personal intuition, which has been accepted as such for sufficient time as to gain legitimacy as not being deliberately crafted for the political or personal benefit of the founder (see: definition of “cult”);
A way of life and/or set of rituals based on the above.
In dictionary definitions religion is given a spiritual and a non-spiritual definition. What is a person’s religion, it can be music, sports, church, science, and any other activity a person throws himself into on a daily basis. I think this is a good definition.
First, scientists aren’t the monsters you are trying to imply; they do tend to find genocide horrible. And “fascinating” isn’t “pretty” or “admirable”. And it’s horrifying to us; the group that you are arguing with.
Wrong. Fact based beliefs are fundamentally different than baseless beliefs. The need to constantly claim otherwise is one of the destructive effects of religion.
An assumption based on knowledge and past experience isn’t faith.
:rolleyes: That tells me exactly nothing.
No, religion tends to corrupt or destroy everything it touches.
I am special, being a person. Rocks have no opinions, no desires, no awareness.
And my moral judgement is an assertion of what I believe to be desirable, based on human history, self interest, what I believe to be the interests of others, and so on. Not faith; I don’t particularly care if it’s true in some objective fashion. An assertion of desire isn’t faith either.
No doubt; I also have no doubt that it hobbled them to believe in God, and often led them to false conclusions. Scientists tend to be less religious than the general population because religion and science are fundamentally incompatible, and mental compartmentalization doesn’t always work.
And reducing people to that state is one of the major things religion does.
Except that what we have here is an obvious attempt to validate faith by pretending it’s the same as trust. An attempt to pretend that faith without evidence is just as valid, just as sensible as trust based on evidence. People start by claiming that faith is as good as trust, using the definition of faith that is a synonym for trust; then halfway through the argument they start using the definition of faith that means belief without evidence, without bothering to mention that they’ve switched.
The believers are using word games, because they have nothing real to back up their beliefs.
Well, to my mind, the “non-spiritual” definition is usually given by way of analogy, as in “sports is my religion”. The person does not (usually) literally mean that sports is a religion, only that he or she is as sincere in their following of sports as a religious person is to their religion.
Thus, I’m only focussing on the root meaning.
The problem with the usual dictionary definition is that, when it comes to that root meaning, it is usually either inadequate or pretty circular.
For example, if religion is “the service and worship of God or the supernatural”, is Buddhism a 'religion" or not? What about Taoism?
Dude, I love debating and arguing with people but it does take me an awful lot of hours to compose my posts. one to 3 hours per post is fairly common and less than 30 minutes for anything other than one liners is downright rare.
Yes, I’m that slow and I admit it. You do me a disservice when you say I’m unable to argue my position so I’ve decided not to. What happened to the benefit of the doubt? Come now, you know I have a few dozen answers left in me!
Also, I’m not thine enemy. I support laicity and religion as a personal thing and not law. Beware of extremes.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. Religion is much stronger in the poorer communities. People living a hellish life on earth are promised a paradise in heaven. It serves to control and provide a framework for the poor to stay out of the hair of the wealthy. It has an organizing and calming effect.
I think the biggest problem you’re having here is that you’re misunderstanding that when we talk about using “faith” as the knife that cuts religions away from non-religions, we are most definitely not talking about definitions of the term that are fuzzy and synonymous with trust. We are talking about cases where belief is granted in the absence of or in gross disproportion to the evidence available. Period. No other definition of the term is relevant.
That you are conflating the definitions of the term does not make you an idiot, but it does prevent you for recognizing that our answers do address the substance of your arguments. Please review with the correct definition in mind, and things should be clearer.
(And I personally don’t like that you’re ‘quoting’ his posts as “stuff”, rather than the actual text of his quotes. Besides the fact that it seems to be an effort to demean his arguments, it also makes it extremely unclear what the heck you’re talking about. I can’t even tell which post you’re pretending to respond to! So, please, as a personal favor to me, don’t do that anymore.)
Just a note that that **isn’t **what Marx meant when he used the term . A more full quote illustrates this:
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”
He didn’t mean that religion is used to control the proletariat, but that the proletariat themselves develop religion as a (temporay) palliative. Opium as a medicine, not a narcotic, from broader context. Illusory, yes, but not in the cynical way you’re implying.
