Does anyone actually believe in all that stuff? If so, why? Or is why the wrong question? If so, why?
I am serious by the way, not taking the piss.
I’m sure religion can be useful (ethics, the certainty of absolute morals etc). It can be reassuring. And it can try to answer the ultimate questions of where it all came from (without answering where that came from, of course). But this by no means makes it true.
So why your faith? Where did it come from? And so what of all the others? Are they wrong, factually incorrect, incomplete, abominations or what?
Does anyone actually believe that religions and their texts are anything other than the works of man? If so, what about the different versions - Hebrew, Greek, Latin, King James Bible? These languages express things quite differently. Does God speak Greek? Or just Hebrew? Do you believe human religions are an approximation to a greater truth, or what? Or does god have a spiritual machine code which gets translated into human languages? Is this machine code maths or physics?
As far as I’m concerned, “I was brought up that way” is a non-answer. Which leaves revelation (or religious experience on a lesser level), or reason. Reason certainly doesn’t seem to provide for God satisfactorily.
As far as I’m concerned, the bottom line is recognising that sacred texts were written by humans in human languages (however they were inspired) and that religions are human things made by humans (whatever greater truth they aspire to). Did Jesus go to other planets and chill out with sentient beings there too, as it seems pretty likely that they exist? Or is it just one species of ape on a remarkable planet in an unremarkable solar system in an unremarkable galaxy? And at what point did humans become special? Do Neanderthals get in? How about Homo Habilis or Bonobos?
I’m happy with my beliefs. I’ve been an atheist before. I’m satisfied that I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I always say, not to take everything literally. There’s something about the totality of it all that I’m not smart enough to explain. I don’t care what anybody else believes. I really don’t care what I believe. It doesn’t make any sense. But I’m satisfied that nothing could.
I can’t answer regarding religion, because I never believed in god. My parents didn’t instill me with god belief, and I didn’t live in a god-soaked community.
The only parallel to my experience was that I actually believed in Santa Claus as a little tyke. My parents taught me he was real, and I didn’t have anyone say he wasn’t real. And parents are infallible imparters of truth to a little kid. So yes, I actually believed, and I can understand, to some extent, how powerful belief in something not real can be if it’s something you’ve been steeped in since birth.
But as a kid, after thinking about the Santa Claus issue, I found some things weren’t right: how could he deliver so many presents all over the world in one night? How could he climb down our narrow chimney when he’s so fat? How come I never saw him when I stayed up late to see him come into the house? Etc. etc. Soon I figured out he wasn’t real. It was a sad realization, but I got over it quickly enough.
God is like Santa Claus for adults. Some people figure out he’s not real; others don’t.
That’s pretty arrogant. I wouldn’t disparage your non-belief. There’s plenty of guys smarter than you that believe in God.[/quote]
Apparently, there are smart people who believe in creationism - and I would most certainly, and with no apologies disparage that.
My original point was inspired by things like ghost money.
So you burn that stuff as a ritual that has cultural meaning, perhaps a metaphor etc. OK.
But if you quite literally believe money is being sent to dead people, I think you haven’t really thought about it. As I’ve said before, what about hyper-inflation?
This goes for other religions tall tales and rituals too.
That’s pretty arrogant. I wouldn’t disparage your non-belief. There’s plenty of guys smarter than you that believe in God.[/quote]
Apparently, there are smart people who believe in creationism - and I would most certainly, and with no apologies disparage that.[/quote]
I get your point. There’s a lot of crazy stuff out there, and presumably there are smart people that believe in it. I guess it just rankles to have my faith being so easily and simplistically dismissed. I think it’s worthy of a profounder refutation. Oh well, it’s the Internet!
Chris, no worries. I’m not usually testy about the subject. Sorry if it came off that way.
That’s pretty arrogant. I wouldn’t disparage your non-belief. There’s plenty of guys smarter than you that believe in God.[/quote]
Santa Claus is a story made up for by people in order to produce emotional responses in children. Chris did say that God is “Santa Claus for adults”, so he’s making it clear he doesn’t consider belief in God to necessarily be a childish thing, just that the stories about God have also been made up by people to produce emotional responses - and real life responses and control - in people. You don’t have to be a genius to have sufficient critical thinking to realize this, so Chris’s level of overall intelligence isn’t really relevant: the facts are there for anyone to find.
How would you go about disparaging disbelief? Would it be along the lines of “infidel” or “heathen”? Would it be though accusations of “low” or “no” morality? Or by calling a disbeliever a “commie”, or claiming a disbeliever is “heartless”? As I see it, the problem with disparaging disbelief is that you have to either disparage reason and critical thinking, or you have to speak to a person’s social behavior (“commie”. “heartless”), which can be entirely separate from the disbelief and fairly easily disprovable.
I admit it sounds kind of condescending, but the only way it should be seen as arrogant is because most people - believers included - admit that Santa Claus is a made up story, so that just makes the claim that God is an adult Santa seem that much more cold to believers.
That’s pretty arrogant. I wouldn’t disparage your non-belief. There’s plenty of guys smarter than you that believe in God.[/quote]
Santa Claus is a story made up for by people in order to produce emotional responses in children. Chris did say that God is “Santa Claus for adults”, so he’s making it clear he doesn’t consider belief in God to necessarily be a childish thing, just that the stories about God have also been made up by people to produce emotional responses - and real life responses and control - in people.[/quote]
Yup. It doesn’t have anything to do with level of maturity or intelligence. I’ve met and encountered online highly intelligent and mature theists, as well as embarrassingly stupid and immature atheists.
The similarity is that god belief and Santa Claus belief are both beliefs in extraordinary yet unevidenced entities, and that such beliefs are learned through social conditioning rather than through reasoning or empiricism.
I think most believers think of God as a given. It’s intuitive to believe that the universe, with all its grandeur and complexity, was designed by a superior being. Asking the average believer whether there is a God is like asking if there’s a sky. The answer is obvious and not really worth thinking about. Sure, it’s an argument that can be refuted, as was done superbly in Dawkin’s The Blind Watchmaker. But relatively few people are interested in those discussions.
Religion provides people with a unique experience that is rather hard to find in the cold world of atheism. Specific theological details aren’t really all that important or relevant to most believers.
Not really, as someone who was raised Catholic (though no longer practices) I can say that many people have direct experiences of God that they would count as evidence. All humans have not just a hunger for the larger questions of existence but also a capacity to have experiences that are best described as mystical or spiritual in nature. If you’ve never had these kinds of experiences I can see skepticism but they are common across all age groups and cultures.
Humans have spiritual experiences whether or not they believe in any faith. But if you are raised in a certain faith then those experiences are given some direction and clarity. This can make them even more powerful hence creating a pretty powerful feedback loop if you will.
[quote=“Mucha Man”]
Humans have spiritual experiences whether or not they believe in any faith.[/quote]
I have spiritual experiences each day with the Lady Of The Loch.
[quote=“Mucha Man”]Not really, as someone who was raised Catholic (though no longer practices) I can say that many people have direct experiences of God that they would count as evidence. All humans have not just a hunger for the larger questions of existence but also a capacity to have experiences that are best described as mystical or spiritual in nature. If you’ve never had these kinds of experiences I can see skepticism but they are common across all age groups and cultures.
Humans have spiritual experiences whether or not they believe in any faith. But if you are raised in a certain faith then those experiences are given some direction and clarity. This can make them even more powerful hence creating a pretty powerful feedback loop if you will.[/quote]
What kind of spiritual experiences? Having never experienced one (that I know of… does taking shrooms in college count? ), I’m curious as to the nature of such an experience.
Actually drugs like mushrooms can give many people an incredible spiritual experience. That sense of heightened and altered reality. Of greater meaning within the simplest things.
But people get these kinds of mind-altering experiences naturally all the time, especially if they are open to them. You can dismiss them as mere brain activity but then you need to dismiss aesthetic experience as well. Both are as meaningless or as meaningful as you want to make them. An both are enhanced by training, self-awareness, and being within a culture or family that appreciates them.
Want to know what spiritual experiences are like? Read William Blake.
The feeling of communion with your fellow human being, or standing in awe at beauty, love, the scale and complexity of the universe, or the very fact of existence is one set of very healthy experiences. Believing that anybody ever actually heard god “speak,” and devising identity, laws and cultural practices based on what you think he said is entirely another. Religion is the deliberate (or not) confusion of those entirely distinct experiences and it is becoming very dangerous. It is actually one of the key problems of our age and it seems to be becoming worse. If I were to draw an analogy to a person I would have to say it is like watching a person being ravaged by mental illness. You know it is crazy, you watch the decline, and it happens anyway. Religious “belief,” the notion that anybody EVER heard God speak, or that they had any access whatsoever to his thoughts as might be embodied in language is collective psychosis, literally.
Talking of disparaging…[quote=“the chief”]fruitloop, putting aside my personal feelings regarding the direct correlation between atheism and pederasty, giving you the benefit of the doubt here, on an “exception to every rule” basis…[/quote]
I was assuming this was tongue in cheek. I hope so.
When I meet ‘regular’ (sorry, can’t think of a better word) people who actually believe in the literal teachings of religions, I find myself thinking “do you really believe that?” Count out fundamentalists or those from sufficiently different cultures. So I am motivated by curiosity to ask, how much of it and why? Having been brought up a Catholic, religion is not foreign to me. But it’s a bit weird. For example, I do find it hard to believe that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama are actually genuine believers. Where I’m from, they would be good candidates for agnosticism or atheism but if you want to be President of the US, religion seems to be a requirement (compare the UK where if a politician talks about God, people think he’s a nutter).
I’m not talking about the existence or non existence of a divine creator (whatever that means). That question doesn’t have to have anything to do with human religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism etc. I’m talking heaven and hell, god with a beard and the pearly gates, virgin birth and literal resurrection, ascent into heaven etc.
Some beliefs are just irrational and wrong. For centuries the Catholic Church opposed cremation on the grounds of the literal resurrection of the dead on the day of judgment. Taken in its most literal sense, it is obviously absurd, since all organic matter is recycled - you don’t have a freehold on your constituent atoms. If you say you believe in the literal ascent from the mount of olives, it is perfectly reasonable for me to say “Did Jesus keep going after the stratosphere? At what point did he stop?”
We know the gospels were written decades after the event. We know that they are self contradictory. And we know that there are several others. They’re all written in human languages. So it’s quite reasonable to say “I can accept the God hypothesis, but how much of that other stuff do you really (not as metaphor or ritual) believe?”
), I’m curious as to the nature of such an experience.