As Above, So Below - the religion thread (formerly: People of California, beware)

Only in the sense that the lack of belief is based on probabilities. I believe the probability of life out there in the universe is quite high. But I lack the belief itself because there isn't any evidence to verify it. (And not all beliefs are equally valid. Because, well, people believe in some fucking crazy shit.)

But getting back to what you said on the previous page, the adherence to religious belief is largely due to emotional reasons ("I believe in Jesus because it makes me happy"), but religious beliefs are not arrived at purely from emotion ("I believe in Jesus because that's the religion I was brought up with"). Nobody's born believing in Jesus. It needs an input, a claim to truth, a piece of evidence in order for the belief to form. To say faith isn't a replacement for knowledge is complete rubbish. In what sense would anyone be able to talk about their religious beliefs with any sort of meaning if that was the case? Faith is an excuse to believe things when evidence fails, or worse, when the evidence and reasoning suggests otherwise.

Faith is still a belief, a form of "knowledge" (really it's the other way round as Peter has already noted). It's still a way of discerning fact from fiction; a way of forming a picture of reality, whether it's flawed or not. People really do believe Jesus was the son of God. That to them is reality. It's a fact, a description of the world they live in, regardless of which way they choose to excuse its ridiculous nature. But when reason and evidence fails to validate that belief, they use tactics like the ones you've just displayed to excuse it. If real scientific evidence was found verifying that Mary was indeed a virgin (although I'm hard pressed to think what that evidence could be!), you can imagine how the Christian community would jump on it and proudly exclaim "Look! Evidence! We were right all along!", but when faced with the same scrutiny, and the outcome is negative (which it no doubt always will be), they fall back on the age old "Well, that's why they call it faith. We don't need evidence".

It's all bullshit, no matter how you dress it up. Powerful, emotional, deeply personal bullshit, sure. But bullshit all the same.

Not really, Steven. First, reason and evidence can't prove anything regarding things that are believed in, say, Christianity. Why? Because what evidence would you need to prove whether Jesus was the son of God or not? You would probably need a perfectly conserved body of Mary and check whether she had her hymen intact (and even then, the virginity of Mary was accepted as a dogma only as far as less than 200 years ago, but that's not the point of this discussion). You won't find it. Ever. So, every claim of religion is beyond rational thought. Evidence here just doesn't quite cut it.

I would claim that what led to "fucking crazy shit" in history of philosophy in general was trying to rationalise religion at all costs. Or, to be precise, rationalise religious faith. Let's keep religion as a dogmatic system of metaphysical beliefs out of the discussion for a while, because this is where really dodgy things happen and that's a wholly different place to discuss.

Let's think of something we could ponder on a bit. Your anti-religious rants are often very, very emotional. Is it as right or as wrong as the very emotional approach people take to their religious beliefs when they are defending what they believe in? In that way, theism and atheism are (very often; there are quite many atheists that are pretty blase about religion and they just don't believe, period, they don't rant *against* religions, should we liken it to moderate religion? I think we actually could and would definitely strengthen the point I am trying to make). OK, so let's establish this.

Where does the emotional aspect of faith come? From stating the absolute truth? What kind of absolute truth? Basically we have two differing sentences:

1. God exists.
2. God does not exist.

Now, on a formally logical level, they can be either true or false. Formal logic deals with only that. But, aside from the fact that analytical philosophy (I kind of used their language right now) tries to reject any metaphysical though whatsoever claiming it as, well, bullshit (and that claim is bullshit in and of itself - rejecting metaphysics as... exactly what? is a metaphysical choice! Just as God was the metaphysical keyword for Medieval philosophy, Nature for early Modern philosophy, Spirit/Mind, depending how you translate the German word Geist for Hegel and Life for a guy like Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel or Henri Bergson, Language is a metaphysical keyword for them!), metaphysics is what we are dealing with.

So, you reject God. That's very much OK. But, that doesn't make you have NO metaphysical background whatsoever. Is religion an easy way out? Kierkegaard was making a point about how it's hard to believe among a scientific environment. Everything is trying to disprove all we believe in... and yet we do. It's not easy to accept the fact that God told Abraham to kill his only son and we know it was hard for Abraham to accept this request, but yet, he went there and did it and went through the ultimate test of faith. But still, we can't believe what we are reading, but somehow...

Yes, this "somehow" is the whole point. Belief/faith are beyond understanding. It's experiential, it's not in any way rational. Your metaphysical system rejects religion and prefers science to that. But if mocking religious faith is valid, it's as valid to mock your anti-religious rants.

Because, in the end, it's all a choice, an emotional one, yet a choice, sometimes very, very conscious. In the end metaphysical systems are equal, as long as they don't lead to evil deeds and this is where the statement should be put very vehemently and very sharply:

Faith (religious or non-religious) doesn't, by design, lead to evil. What leads to evil is people who are able to manipulate those emotional aspects of belief and more often than not (in fact, almost exclusively so), religious leaders.

As is, there is nothing wrong with faith, because it doesn't (no, it does NOT) deal with anything factual, other than being a metaphysical background for what we think about the world.

How does that matter? Quantitatively or qualitatively an aspect X is not simultaneously a non-aspect X.

Edit: (For a more qualitative statement, change 'belief' (or 'gumdrops' as the case may be) for 'joy'. It still makes no sense!)

Pawel, do you use speech recognition or something ?

Of course I agree with every word of yours.

Basically we are caught within two different cultures, arn't we?

http://www.amazon.de/Two-Cultures-Canto … tures+Snow

This god does not agree with the other gods, but what god does anyway!

Some of the above is interesting but I fear I'm never going to be a philosophical person. I never think that much about the subjects above. On the other hand I more incline to agree with Martijn and Steven's approach to these issues because they seem logical.

Are you a pragmatist, Captain?

Actually, I'm afraid that there is a bit more psychology to that than pure philosophy...

Truer words ne'er were spoken!

Well dammit!
Clearly the hand (or the wrath) of God intervened, as TWICE I typed quite a long response and TWICE the server stopped responding.

Anyway, slightly more shorthand this time: yes Captain, that *is* poetic, but exceedingly dubious and the very thing that religion uses to provide a God hypothesis: if you go back far enough in the induction line, there must be a prime mover. Therefore (andI'm simplifying ridculously here, but I fear the server may burst agai any second) that MUST be God.

But maybe I misunderstand as this takes no 'constant effort of will' as you quote above (but then that would be entirely inconductive to induction! )

I believe that there are seven layers to reality and that we occupy the third layer (some have suggested eight, but such claims are quickly repudiated as the nonsensical musings of radical fundamentalists). We are multidimensional souls trapped in bodies that can only occupy one layer at a time, but when we have served our time in all seven realms, we give up the physical body in which life resides and we become pure energy; pure knowledge. I believe that my belief is true because I believe it and have arrived at it using my brain. I also don't believe it because it's not actually a belief. But it's what I believe. I call this post-revised-transvestitecendentalism-neoenlightened-omnomnominism.

I think I may need more gin.

So when people claim Jesus is the son of God and that he walked the earth a couple thousand years ago, they're not making a factual claim? What exactly are they claiming? A feeling? An itch? Are they just randomly stringing words together and just by chance happen to land upon the same words in the same order every time?

I think Jesus probably existed, partly due to the simple fact that the Middle East was teeming with self-proclaimed messiahs at the time, so it's a rather mundane claim to make. I'm sure it's possible for myths about men to arise from thin air in a supersticious culture, where stories were passed on word of mouth, but I find it more likely that an actual person inspired the whole thing, and the stories were since embellished.

It doesn't seem like he made such a ruckus at the time as people like to believe and as had been prophesied though, considering that the evidence most people cite is the historian, Flavius Josephus, who as a non-eyewitness 60 years later mentioned Jesus in a sub-note in a book with countless other names. According to the Bible the Jesus thing was a rather big event back then, and the graves of Jerusalem even opened and dead people walked through the streets and talked with their relatives, but no one seemed to have bothered to write it down at the time. It's only decades after as the tales had grown through word of mouth that more non-eyewitnesses started writing the stories down.

Peter

Slightly off on a tangent: interesting to see that all animals are created equal, but the Daily Mail holds that some are more equal than others.

There was the moment when someone sued NASA after Apollo 8 read out the beginning of Genesis during a broadcast while orbiting around the Moon. I don't know about the results of the lawsuit, but they were much more careful afterwards.