This is such poor reasoning from someone who was otherwise brilliant. Whatever anyone’s thoughts on the existence of God or gods are, belief certainly screwed with Pascal’s ability to reason.
Even with Thudlow’s expansion it doesn’t work for me. It still amounts to lip service in my view.
Somewhat along the same lines is William James’s essay “The Will To Believe,” which might or might not work better for you.
Perhaps a bit of hyperbole on my part. But I think even what we know we don’t know about concepts like quantum physics, dark mater, gravity, and so on tells us that there is a lot more to how things work than what we currently understand.
Also keeping in mind, most people don’t actually understand basic science and physics.
You understand that virtually all commemorations are held on the same date year after year, right? Or at least within a few days if it’s held on a Sunday, say. Name me another commemorative day that has a month variance from one year to the next.
It doesn’t matter. That’s just an arbitrary convention. The calendar year itself is a constructed convention. There’s no rule of natural law that commemorations are more or less historical based on how closely they adhere to the calendar date of a past event.
One could decide to commemorate a historical event every 200 days, or every 500 days. Or alternate between 200 and 500 days. That wouldn’t make the commemorations less historical, even if most other feasts were not done that way.
Hanukkah, Passover, Ramadan, certainly a few others.
And for much the same reason. They are based on a calendar other than the Gregorian calendar.
If that were true, shouldn’t easter fall at the same time relative to Passover every year
"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.
"To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.
“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The believe he has specifically tasked them to police blasphemy and apostasy so as to prevent their spread, and will make them account for why did they not do their job. Same reason “christians” elsewhere in the West get bent out of shape about secular education or other people’s sexuality.
Lunar New Year, as well, right?
Yes, Easter is the Sunday after Nisan 15 (that is the first day of Passover, a fixed date).
Sounds right. Those were just off the top of my head. I’m sure if I went down a rabbit hole and researched, I could find a number of observances that do not line up with the Gregorian calendar.
The solstice is something that requires a bit of effort to determine, a full moon is much more obvious. For cultures that grew up in areas where yearly seasonal variations in weather was not as extreme as further northern latitudes, basing the calendar on the moon makes more sense.
Ah, having looked it up, Easter doesn’t take into account the hebrew calendar leap month which throws it out of synch by a month occassionally. But it generally does fall within passover.
Yep. There’s a lot of edge cases because Christians are basically running their own versions (because of course Christians can’t even agree among themselves) of the Jewish calendar. I guess we’re lucky we still all agree on the days of the week.
Say two people wake up in a room with no windows, and have no recollection of who or where they are. After a while, they begin to think that the room is not all there is and there must be something outside the room.
Making that assumption (that there is likely something outside their room) is reasonable, but if they make the leap to “outside this room there is a person called Bob and he got together with Mary and Jack and created this room and put us here”, without any such evidence inside the room, then that’s a leap too far, I think.
Couple that with the possibility that one of the two in the room believes the above story about Bob, but the other believes that “a giant frog with human head created this room and put us here”, and the two start fighting because they think the other is crazy/sacriligious for believing the story they believe in, and you have what I believe to be what’s happening in our world today.
Namely, there is likely something beyond what we see, but postulating specific creation & god myths and events happening in the supernatural realm (like Aphrodite springing from Zeus’ head, or Ganesha’s head being replaced with an elephant’s head, etc), and then fighting wars and killing people who don’t believe this, is unreasonable.
No argument with that last clause. But then, fighting wars and killing people over just about anything that people have fought and killed over is unreasonable.
Other than that, I think you’d have to add something to the analogy to make it closer to the way things actually are—maybe there’s a book or notebook in the room, in which someone has written a description of the time Bob visited the room and talked to the people who were living in it. Maybe one of the people in the room claims to be able to hear voices through the walls.
I’ve been watching this thread and remained silent til now. ATHENA sprung from Zeus’ head. Aprhrodite rose up in a cloud of sea foam after Cronus’ scrotum was cut off by Zeus and fell into the oceean
Similar here. I stopped going to church at 15, mainly because we moved again and didn’t bother finding another church. I’m now a pantheist and agnostic toward a supreme being.
[coughs politely]
Uranus’, by Cronus.
[/coughs politely]
D’oh! Thanks for the correction. I had forgotten which one it was.
That seems much more realistic and something reasonable for people to believe in 