This claim is just incorrect, and I wish people would stop making it. There are plenty of people (scholars, theologians) who take a very logical, rational approach to religious dogma. You may disagree with some of their premises or find fault with their reasoning, but to claim that no one uses logic and reason in reaching their religious beliefs is just ignorance.
Now you’re changing your standard; that’s not the same thing. There is more to rationality than that which can be seen and measured—the truths of mathematics, for example.
There is a world of difference between using logic to reach a particular religious belief(very rare, in my opinion), and attempting to use logic to justify an already existing religious belief.
The problem is that nobody ever uses logic and reason to make decisions about anything. That’s what neuroscientists are discovering. Even something as simple as what kind of cereal to buy at the grocery store. We all first make a decision based on what our emotions are telling us, then we rationalize (that’s the perfect word) that decision by thinking of reasons why that choice makes good sense. It just happens too fast for us to notice it, so we think it’s the rational thought that occurs first. But by following the progress of the neural pathways in the brain, it has recently been determined that the emotional choice is always the decider.
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” -Benjamin Franklin
This oversimplification of the term rational is part of why I started this thread.
for one thing , rational is not a one size fits all. different people and different cultures, education etc all provide different context to consider as we’ve discussed up thread.
The generic “religious beliefs are not rational” is another inaccurate oversimplification that I see repeated too often. Rational isn’t just fact based cold logic. Every person’s belief system is made up of intellect and emotion. We are not Vulcans.
So what you’re saying is that we should expand the definition of the word rational to include believing in bronze age sky gods, so that people can stop pointing out the irrationality of said ridiculous beliefs.
Of course it’s irrational to hold unfalsifiable unsupported hypotheses for true, or even true-ish, until conclusively falsified. For one thing, it’s tautologically oxymoronic. For another, it’s… well, silly. Let me give you a non-religious example:
I hereby declare that Higgs bosons are not, in fact, elementary particles but made up of even tinier, weightless, invisible particles I dub Kobons. I have exactly zilch evidence for them, nor can point to anything that would suggest or support their existence - I just feel them in my heart, y’know ? And this is what I durn well believe and I expect you to respect my beliefs. You can’t disprove the kobons, either (even the Higgs is still sort of kind of iffy still, evidentially speaking, so…).
Why should you respect this assertion of mine ? Is it rational at all ? No, of course not. It’s sheer made-up bogosity. Even if I say I’m “open to new interpretations” or “willing to change my beliefs if you disprove my hypothesis” or “this is my current hypothesis, but I have others” or whatever apparently magical set of weasel words you wish me to add as a postscript, it’s **still **not a justified or rational belief to hold.
And you should jolly well call me an idiot, to believe in that “kobon” malarkey.
You can rationally act within a religious belief system. However, accepting one in the first place isn’t a rational act.
I’ll grant that if a guy straps a bomb to your neck and tells you to go to church, it would be rational to go through the motions of belief. But it doesn’t mean that it is rational to take the final step and believe, “Odin is real.”
That’s simply nonsense and you’re arguing for religion to be held to a special standard. *Because it fails so utterly when approached neutrally. *
Certainly emotion is a big part of it and advertisers obviously know it. Politicians too. But I really doubt bobody ever uses logic and reason to make decisions.
If I go to the store to buy cereal and I’m looking at cost, weight, nutritional content, then it seems it’s not all emotion.
This is bullshit. It is especially bullshit in light of all the discussions you’ve had on this very board with people who are clearly willing to acknowledge the negative effects of religion.
People who are willing to try and be onbjective aren’t saying there are few negative effects of religion. We’re just noting the fact that the topic, “Is religion more positive than negative for humanity” is so broad and has so many variables that it’s impossible to objectively measure.
You think it far far more negative than positive. We freakin get it, honest!! Others agree with you, but until someone finds a way to objectively measure it, your opinion is still just your opinion and not a fact.
Personally I’d react the same way to some religious fanatic claiming how great and wonderful religion has been to mankind. It is what is is, a man made construct with all the positive and negatives that humanity has to offer. It has been the vehicle for both good and bad. Nobody has ever measured it and chances are nobody ever will. Your continued efforts to present your opinion as objective fact are baffeling, and at this point boring.
You may not like the simplistic answer but it is essnetially correct. When you assume the existence of God you create a universal and timless perspective that we can’t possibly fathom. A being that , having created the universe, sees exactly how every piece of the puzzle, every individual, every monet and act, fits together and the end game as well.
Assuming that kind of perspective exists, how can we , lacking that perspective, declare any suffering "needless’ with absolute certainty?
We could say that for such a being , ANY suffering at all is needless, but then we are declaring that ANY suffering is contrary to the term benevolent? Is it?
What is the purpose of creation? Why are we here at all? Were we sent here? Created here? Or did we volunteer to spend one small speck of our eternity here? If we are eternal souls, then what does the “time” we spend here mean?
What if duality, the chance to experience and percieve choice, good and evil, joy and suffering is the point of this brief life experience? if that’s the purpose , could it be deemed benevolent for us to be here , no matter what our experience?
If we are eternal souls who are in no real danger from anything that happens here, why can’t the experience, only momentarily, from our limited perspective percieved as suffereing, actually be benevolent?
Not enough data to answer the question/question too vague. (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore, (F)ail ?
I’d believe my girl if she told me the reason she didn’t bring back peanut putter from the store is that they were out of peanut butter. She might be bullshitting me, but it’s a credible, sensible line. I’ve experienced that before.
OTOH I wouldn’t believe her if she told me she couldn’t get to the peanut butter shelf because there was an evil flaming unicorn in the way (or rather, I might believe her, but I wouldn’t believe there really was one. My GF can be a little… odd at times :))
Now, you might be angling for “ah AH ! But you haven’t experienced the Higgs boson before !”. And you’re right, I haven’t. But then again, the eggheads who’re excited about it don’t want me to change my life around because of the Higgs fukken boson, or to give them money, nor do they prattle on about how their life was saved by the Higgs boson and I should really accept it as my personal fundamental particle and saviour, either.
Besides, I’m confident that, should I actually ask them to show me the Higgs boson, they could whip out a large collider and let me have a butcher’s. Just like, should I doubt my girlfriend, I could always go to the store to check the peanut butter aisle.
But the defining point of articles of faith is that you can’t see them, nobody can or has ! Some jokers even go on about how it’s even better and more marvelous because you can’t see or prove it and it transcends the whatchamacallit, supercedes the thingamabob and so forth (and you sound like a loony when you talk about it). I ain’t been impressed.
In other words, you are still demanding that a special standard be applied to religion and completely ignoring the fact that if we can’t judge religion, then there isn’t much we can judge. Sexism? Racism? Slavery? Genocide? Nazism? Communism? We can’t judge any of those as bad or good, if we actually take your reasoning seriously. I can’t prove scientifically that Nazism was bad, after all.
An argument that makes a good, indifferent or evil god utterly indistinguishable from each other; and an argument that almost no one actually believes. This is just an argument people bring up to defend God from criticism; but as soon as the skeptics stop talking, suddenly every knows just what God likes, just what he wants, and whether or not what he wants is good.
It’s also a viewpoint that lends itself to the most psychopathic of behavior, as Lobohan points out.
Yes. And that’s not “faith as trust”, that’s not faith at all. Faith is by definition baseless.
The testability standard does set a limit even when most people take the information on trust. First, because some people will test it - while I might not have the science background to test some fact, I know that other scientists in the same field will testing the fact as part of their research and unless you believe in conspiracies, you can count on those other scientists expose any errors. Second, the more extreme a claim, the more likely people are to test it. Look how many people began testing the supposed cold fusion system as soon as it was publicized - dozens of other labs began trying to reproduce the results and their inability to do so quickly discredited the claim.
So if somebody states a fact that it testable and nobody steps forward to challenge that fact, it’s rational to assume that fact has stood up to testing.
Oh, I understand it alright. In college I took a Theory of Knowledge class, which was made considerably less interesting by a few students who were extreme skeptics. In fact I did my paper on Keynes’ first book, which used probability to address the “we can’t know for sure” problem. So I’m very sensitive about the improper use of “proof.”
But everything considered by science rests on unproven axioms. When we make observations we are assuming that they mean something. When we communicate with other people we are assuming that the image they build from our writing or speech matches our image in some way. All unproven. So, while I agree that empiricism is unproven, I say that this observation isn’t very interesting, and not just because empiricism seems to work.
I can think of a few - is this what you mean? For instance, that the universe is one big perfect simulation can’t be determined empirically. That there is a god who makes every sparrow fall, but does it invisibly and seemingly according to natural law is another example. But by definition neither of these things can make any difference at all.
And, since we’re talking rationality here, I’d contend that living ones life as if one of these things was true is irrational. Religions, by the way, do think god visibly interferes, so they are not covered by my second example.
When I was growing up in the '50s and early '60s sexism had a far more pervasive influence on society than religion did. And if I had lived in the south, racism would have also.
Sure, today we see these things as purely negative, but back then some men actually believed it was a positive not to stress women with too much knowledge, and that wives staying at home made society run better.
Even today the arguments against the new atheists in respectable publications seem to center around the supposed good effects of religion (and that our type of believer isn’t a fundamentalist) than around trying to demonstrate that any type of god exists. That is like a sexist refusing to consider arguments that women are as good as (or better than) men in various ways, and concentrating instead on the benefits to society of pretending that they aren’t.
We don’t posit that such a being exists - the believers do. Trying to get believers to nail down the characteristics of their deity is usually pretty tricky, at least for liberal believers. It is easy for those believing in Biblical inerrancy.
I think in the absence of data, it’s fine and rational to believe whatever you want, whether it’s a best guess (logic) or best wish (optimism) as long as you aren’t hurting yourself or others. You may be technically agnostic to whatever the undetermined issue is, but you still have to act upon some sort of mental test model.
It’s when you believe something despite overwhelming contradictory data that you are irrational.
So it’s fine to believe in the ephemeral aspects of your religion, but silly to believe in the parts that contradict clearly established physical facts.