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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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Apr 19, 2007 - 08:56pm PT
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this i believe:
I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word ''elephant'' includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?
So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.
But, this ''This I Believe'' thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, ''This I believe: I believe there is no God.''
Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.
Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, ''I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.'' That's just a long-winded religious way to say, ''shut up,'' or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, ''How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.'' So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.
Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.
Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
and climbing. let's not forget climbing.
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Apr 19, 2007 - 08:56pm PT
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psistis: Hmmmm, sound dialectic vs. impressionistic opining.... I doubt that you'll find anyone here who wants to follow any very strict rules of discourse. But good luck.
So, what exactly is the variety of your true-believerdom? There are so many to choose from. I tend to camp out with the ethical materialists myself (see above), so there's likely not much we'd agree on from the get go anyway. But feel free to opine. It's what we do here.
(Hey bvb, isn't that Penn Jillette's schtick?)
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pistis
climber
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Apr 19, 2007 - 09:05pm PT
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See what I mean, cintune? We're not overly concerned with making sense here. (And I mean that in a humorous sense).
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Apr 19, 2007 - 09:14pm PT
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Yes, no, maybe so.
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pistis
climber
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Apr 19, 2007 - 09:41pm PT
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With all due respect to all of you. What I see here is an absolutely amazing display of our cultural migration into postmoderism. None of you posting on the segment of the thread I'm looking is at all concerned with rational thought. And in saying this, please know that I'm not implying that your not smart, well-educated, etc. But I do see a strong implicit rejection of noncontradictory logic that I find stunning. (Hegelian / postmodern logic being "both and" and in trouble so far as the academy is concerned).
That being said, cintune, yes, this isn't a forum for formal discourse. But ideas are meaningful and they do have real-life consequences. Moreover, the claims of Jesus are staggering in their magnitude. So maybe he merits sober consideration.
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Apr 19, 2007 - 10:23pm PT
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But what does rational thought have to do with questions of faith? Christianity itself was the ancient world's version of postmodernism. A clever cobbling together of the preexisting themes of ancient near eastern mystical traditions on the framework of Abrahamic monotheism, with a tendency toward eschatology in place of the eternal return. Simply reading the Bible is not nearly sufficient to grasp the actual scope of the Christian project.
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Standing Strong
Trad climber
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Apr 20, 2007 - 12:37am PT
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"Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
and climbing. let's not forget climbing."
so.so.cool.
word. x infinity. to me life is all about the natural world and the relationships i have w/other human beans :)
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pistis
climber
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Apr 20, 2007 - 11:23am PT
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cintune:
You're absolutely right; ultimately, the essence of faith - the thing itself - isn't established by way of even the best of reasoning. But both faith's validity as a domain and Christianity's true qualitative distinctives can be established, and these are undertaken by apologists to deal with some very aggressive philosophical and theological subterfuges devised to destroy the province of faith and Christianity by various means. This defense is being undertaken with great success by thinking Christians today. (If you're interested in such things, check out the "Let My People Think" podcast by Ravi Zacharias. Ravi is a brilliant Christian apologist who for decades has been speaking in universities around the world. He's also quite expert in comparative religion, particularly those indigenous to India, his birth country. His recent talks at the Harvard Veritas Forum are considered by many unbelievers to be some of the most significant discussions on Truth to have taken place at Harvard for many decades).
With respect to your other comments, I can certainly understand how one might come to such conclusions. Yes, it's true that first-century Christianity, like today's postmodernism, was somewhat iconoclastic. But I think that's about where the similarty ends. Unlike postmodernism, first-century Christianity made very definite claims to not only the existence of Truth with a capital "T", but also to precise knowledge of that Truth. So there really is no substantive comparison.
Of course, what you call a "clever cobbling together of preexisting themes," Christians would call something like the "progressive revelation of God's Will and activity for the redemption of humankind." There can be no doubt that metaphysical presuppositions affect one's view of this. And there is certainly nothing like an iron-clad dialectic to establish the Christian perspective. However, ample evidence does exist to make the Christian point of view logically compelling. For instance, statistical Bibliology presents some amazing facts about Biblical coherence over numerous authors and thousands of years that very strongly challenges opponents of Divine Authorship.
And the more analytical things aside, there are some other very interesting things that occurred in the first-century Church that ought to at least give the skeptic reason to stop and wonder. For instance, Jesus' most intimate followers - the apostles - were really a struggling bunch right up to Jesus' crucifixion. But Josephus - not a Christian - bears witness to the fact that three days after Jesus' burial the apostles where radically transformed such that all willingly gave their lives to tell others about Jesus and his teaching. They saw / experienced something so radical three days after Jesus' burial that it cinched the deal for them. The same Peter who denied Christ while cursing went on to request to be crucified upside-down because he didn't feel worthy to be executed in the same way Christ was. There are numerous other examples.
In the final analysis, I personally just came to the point where it was a bigger leap of faith (in the colloquial sense) to not believe the claims of Christ than to believe them.
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pistis
climber
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Apr 20, 2007 - 05:18pm PT
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weschrist:
Yes, Hegel does fail, but not because he has a good machine with nothing good to feed it. In truth, Hegel's dialectic fails because it embraces contradictory terms. So Hegel's dialectic is one of the classic subterfuges - an interesting mechanism to think about, but produces nothing meaningful.
You probably know that Marx relied heavily on Hegelian thought as the sine quo non for the classless society, and we've yet to see one anywhere in the world.
Hindu philosophy is also predicated on dialectical reasoning (in the Hegelian sense, as Hegel's idea obviously didn't establish the necessary precondition to Hinduism). That is, Hinduism embraces contradiction, calling it unity or some such thing. Interestingly enough, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan - one-time President of India, one-time professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford, and devout Hindu - once commented that Hindu thought has "opened her arms so wide (see Hegel) that when she finally starts to close them she'll strangle herself." That is, Radhakrishnan recognized the absurdity of the Hegelian dialectic. And he's not the only one; Kirkegaard loathed Hegel for much the same reasons.
Your last comments obviously show your displeasure with Christianity, or at least certain actions in the name of Christ. Thinking Christians are well aware of the evil that's been done in the name of Christ. But one needs to be mindful that plenty of evil has been perpetrated by both individuals and nations who reject religion. Moreover, there has been a good deal of good done in the name of Christ; the abolition of slavery in both the U.S. and Britain as well as women's suffrage is largely due to individuals of Christian conscience. So there seems to be really good evidence throughout history that the problem isn't religion per se, but rather evil thinly veiled by specious claims to religious doctrine. Evil will always do such things; it doesn't like being known for what it is. If you were to read the words of Christ not even very carefully, I'm confident you won't find a crusade in there.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Apr 20, 2007 - 05:21pm PT
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pistis, you're sooooo right on the money about thinly veiled evil at work. It hides, lies, and deceives.
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pistis
climber
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Apr 20, 2007 - 05:51pm PT
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Hello bluering,
You might be too subtle for me to pick up your meaning. Are you agreeing with me or accusing me? If it's the latter, let me know where you see the evil in what I've written. I'd very much appreciate your thoughts.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 20, 2007 - 07:26pm PT
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pistis
Where does the root of your knowledge lay?
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 20, 2007 - 07:35pm PT
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There is no demon. Kali only manifests the fearsome form to the rascals.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 20, 2007 - 09:10pm PT
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I think the quote from Feynman is one which states the matter in my mind the best:
Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
So I would say from my own point of view as a scientist that the believing of not believing, faith, doesn't have much relevance to me or the way I think about things. As complicated and messy the scientific method is, it provides the best way to understand the universe around us, and it doesn't require faith to apply. In fact, as Feynman says above, it makes us a culture of doubt... a group of skeptics trying to tease out "truth" and learning a hell of a lot about the world around us.
I have found that I am less and less interested in the philosophical debates swirling around the topic of faith and religion, about the legitimacy of the scientific method. To me the issue isn't the existence or non-existence of whatever, but, what are you willing to do just based on your belief, your faith in what is "true". Since there is no way to confirm the veracity of your belief except your faith that it is so, you run the risk of being wrong, of acting on something "in good faith" that turns out to be wrong. Of course, here I am doubting...
...but isn't it important when your acts are significant. Going to war in the name of God, for example, it doesn't matter which God that would be, based on your faith. It would seem that a great deal of care is required in executing one's faith.
Now faith, hope, belief in things beyond all reason may be an important part of the human mind, something evolutionarily selected for, as a way of getting humans through tough times. That would be a tremendous intellectual irony in my mind. Because of the limitations of our scientific knowledge there is a lot of room to believe in something, and probably it is important to avoid despair and hopelessness in the face of great adversity. But something that may have been essential to our existence, irrational belief, may also be counterbalanced by the power of scientific knowing.
It is not religion that I have an issue with, it is faith.
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Apr 20, 2007 - 10:36pm PT
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"Do not fear god, do not worry about death; what is good is easy to get, what is terrible is easy to endure."
 Philodemus of Gadara
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Jaybro
Social climber
The West
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Apr 21, 2007 - 03:28am PT
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"I don't need faith, I have experience," Joseph Campbell.
BVB expressed it better than I have ever heard, before.
Atheism demands we take responsibility, is that why it's so hard for most to accept?
"None of you posting on the segment of the thread I'm looking is at all concerned with rational thought."
-might want to read a wee bit closer, donchya think?
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cintune
climber
Penn's Woods
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Apr 21, 2007 - 06:48am PT
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Is bvb really Penn Jillette? Lost a lot of weight.
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pistis
climber
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Apr 21, 2007 - 11:00am PT
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Hello WBraun:
I suppose my answer to such a question would be largely a matter of how you're defining knowledge. If you could help me out with a bit more info, I'll try to give you my answer.
weschrist:
I whole-heartedly agree with your second paragraph. The Bible is packed with much of the same sentiment. For instance, Colosians 3:12 mandates that believers "clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience." This is a common NT theme. So those who do otherwise in the name of Christ are simply either seriously misinformed or purposely perpetrating bad things, using Christianity as a cover. It really isn't more complicated than that, though the shear magnitude of history might make it seem so.
With respect to your first paragraph, nothing of the most substantive dimensions to human life lend themselves to the physical dimensions of scientific inquiry. So "proof" in that sense is an entirely wrong category of thought so far as "belief" is concerned. However, there exists enormous volumes of evidence concerning the historicity of Christianity, the Bible, and the Biblical accounts. If you're really interested, send me a note and I can certainly line you up with much reading from top scholars in their respective fields.
Ed Hartouni:
I appreciate your thoughts on this matter. Actually, I'm with you; anymore I only hesitantly engage matters of faith on terms of philosophical debates. Early on in my academic career, I took it on aggressively because, for me, religion was a burning and necessary ontological question. But now that many of my essential questions have been settled (for me), I try to spend most of my time working toward growth beyond the basics of substantiation.
I am at least a little puzzled over your issue with "faith" per se given your strong attachment to the Scientific Method. I'm a strong advocate of the SM. It's a useful tool for simplifying an otherwise far-too-complicated physical reality so that humankind can understand and even manage physical reality to some degree for the common good. However, the SM is predicated on the logically question-begging fallacy that we live in closed material universe; it assumes the very thing to be proven. So, while I appreciate the usefulness of the SM, naturalistic philosophy has essentially ordained science with much more significance that it can deliver by elevating the underlying assumption of the SM to the status of irrefutable fact. And this latter thing is entirely a matter of faith. And to make matters worse, there are many in the scientific community who assert that to not buy into that irrefutable assumption is be "unscientific." So I wonder if scientists with philosophical precommitments to naturalism aren't reducing the truly great and useful discipline of science to something where the word "science" has become an incantation for metaphysical substantiation.
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426
Sport climber
Buzzard Point, TN
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Apr 21, 2007 - 11:03am PT
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You know what they say on the way to T-Wall...
I'm more of a Tom Paine "convert" myself...
cheers bvb, well said...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 21, 2007 - 11:46am PT
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It is a mistake to take the scientific method as a "fact" as it has many forms and changes to fit various situations. However, at its root are a set of ideas which guide scientific activity. One can make a philosophy of it, but scientists do not.
What is at the root of the scientific method? I would say that there are two important ideas: 1) that nature is the only authority and 2) that quantitative description is possible. Neither of these ideas are provable, however, the only proof a scientists requires is that the application of the scientific method actually does produce knowledge.
So while I may have to take faith that this will work when I first start out, in the course of my study and work as a scientist I found that quite independent of what my views on the outcome of a particular experiment, or my love with a specific theory, or the cleverness of a posited hypothesis, that as I tested these against the actual behavior of nature that nature told me what was and was not correct.
However, it is not simply empirical observation, but the fact that these observations are connected via quantitative relationships, that we can build theories and models of how nature operates, we can understand and predict what nature will do, that give the scientific method its power.
The finiteness of our ability to observe nature necessarily makes our theories and models and experiments provisional. And so scientists are quite used to holding contradictory ideas regarding phenomena; we simply haven't done enough, or looked "carefully" enough (or even at all), it's natural that we don't know everything. However, of what we do know we are able to observe, quantify and relate to a body of knowledge, science, that helps us understand even more.
I do not need faith to pose and test my ideas, I need just go and do it. If what I observe in my experimentation, my querry of nature, is consistent with my assertions than I go on to the next test. If nature disagrees, than I was wrong.
Scientists are amazed that it works, perhaps the greatest mystery is that quantitative logic, mathematics, has any relevance to describing nature, as mathematics is a logical system conceived of by humans, and applied in the description of quantitative observation.
One can be amazed, but the proof is in the pudding, it works. That's good enough for me.
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