@divegeester saidDoubt is an essential component of an inquiring mind. It's the people who don't doubt, who are absolutely convinced they have absolute truth, who institute Inquisitions and put people to death for daring to think for themselves and propose ideas at variance with dogma.
A powerful need to seek, to want to believe can be confused as faith or can overlap with faith. It is not a straightforward condition. I struggle with it (the dichotomy) all the time, but I confess that the faith I have my Lord and his existence is thankfully strangely resilient to my wayward ways and doubting prevarications.
I recognize that if you get yourself to believe a fairly small number of propositions, then the Christian religion gets off the ground: that souls exist, that a man was born of a virgin, that that man came back from the dead to save souls. If you get yourself to believe those three propositions, pretty much all the rest of Christianity follows. What does not work for me is two-fold.
Firstly, the extraordinary content of those three claims, and the complete lack of anything even approaching evidence that those claims are true, much less an extraordinarily compelling sort of evidence.
Where's the evidence of a virgin birth? If someone claimed that a child had been born of a virgin in present-day Kentucky or Venezuela or Bangladesh, would you believe that, just on someone's say-so? Probably not. You'd want to interview the mother, find out her situation, talk to everyone else in the village, do DNA paternity tests, etc.
Where's the evidence of a bodily resurrection? If someone claimed that a man came back from the dead in present-day Kentucky or Venezuela or Bangladesh, would you believe that, just on someone's say-so? Probably not. Sane people would assume that the person wasn't really dead; just in some sort of coma. You'd want to interview the doctor who issued the death certificate, interview the person, find out his situation, do extensive tests (X-Ray, MRI and CAT scans,) etc.
We can't do any of those things for claims 2,000 years old. The putative evidence is all gone. Somebody's say-so just doesn't cut it for me.
Secondly, the fact that so many of the other claims made by the Christian religion are outright inconsistent with what is known about how nature works (for example, the claim that all life appeared at once, from nothing, over a period of a few hours, is not borne out by the evidence); it casts the whole thing, for me, into the box marked "superstition & edifying myths." Except that, for me, it isn't even edifying. It certainly is an entertaining allegory, but when I say that, Eladar and some others get upset and say I'm insulting him and belittling his religion. They don't want to hear that it might be just edifying allegory and not 'really true facts.'
That's not to say that I think I have all the answers. I don't know where everything came from. That seems to be KJ's standard retort to anyone who challenges his religion; with the presumption that if someone can't answer the question, he is entitled to keep his answer ("Godidit" ). Of course, he is entitled to that answer, but not to claim it is rational to do so. Personally, I don't care where everything came from. But I know a faulty answer when I hear one, and "Godidit" is a faulty one. If anyone asks where God came from, they get the answer "God didn't come from anywhere, He always was." That could just as well be said of the universe: it didn't come from anywhere, it always was; laws of physics didn't come from anywhere either, they just are. In this respect, Suzi is right: even steven -- but not every in respect "even steven".
If you want to believe unbelievable things on faith, not on evidence, that's no skin off my nose, and you'd be in august company. Tertulian said, "I believe because it is impossible!"
22 Jun 19
@bigdoggproblem saidExcellent point.
Faith cannot be completely free of overlap from observation and evidence. If it were, it would have absolutely no grounding in anything remotely connected to anything real people experience in real life.
22 Jun 19
@moonbus saidGravity is the result of curvature of space time. Energy is a theoretical construct that is conserved in theories of mechanics.
Well, that's an entirely fair question. We don't actually know what gravity is but we do observe what it does. What it does is attract massive bodies. Current thinking in physics is that gravity may be a form of energy, or it may be a property of massive bodies.
What is energy? Energy is the capacity to produce change.
Your turn. What's a soul?
22 Jun 19
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@eladar saidI do not despise religion per se, but I have utter contempt for those who perpetrate injustice in the name of it. It is not so very long ago that people were tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft, for example in Salem Mass. That was organized murder based on superstition.
Which is to belittle.
One of the positive results of that gross injustice is that the legal concept of "evidence" was refined to exclude intangibles; tangible evidence is, partly on account of the Salem witch trial, now the only sort allowed in a court of law. Rightly so. We are well-rid of that sort of superstition.
See for example:
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/schizoaffective/witchcraft-or-mental-illness
http://jaapl.org/content/41/2/294
22 Jun 19
@bigdoggproblem saidI can go along with that, I think there is a lot more showing God is real than nothing is responsible for everything.
See, that is harrowingly skeptical, coming from a 'non-skeptic'.
Surely the only reason one can be a theist is that they think it is more likely than not that there is a god?
22 Jun 19
@moonbus saidThen believe it or not (lol, see what I did there? ), we're on the same side.
I do not despise religion per se, but I have utter contempt for those who perpetrate injustice in the name of it. It is not so very long ago that people were tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft, for example in Salem Mass. That was organized murder based on superstition.
One of the positive results of that gross injustice is that the legal concept of "evidence" wa ...[text shortened]... ychiatrictimes.com/schizoaffective/witchcraft-or-mental-illness
http://jaapl.org/content/41/2/294
What happened in Salem, the carnage that was the Crusades, the carnage that was the Spanish Inquisition, I am just as against these gross injustices as you are.
Rightly so, your beef is with "those who perpetrate injustice in the name of [religion]", and not religion itself. I have held and mentioned in this forum that religion is not the culprit in these things, it is the evil people who use religion for their own ends.
I even agree with your mention of tangible evidence. In a secular society, not a theocracy (may we never see such attempted in the West, The Handmaid's Tale comes to mind), tangible evidence should be the only evidence in state-driven courts-of-law.
I am thankful that the First Amendment to the US Constitution not only guarantees freedom of religion, it rules out a state-sponsored religion, which naturally pre-supposes a separation of church and state. We can have churches, but it was also decided to keep them out of the business of state, for good reason. We must remain vigilant against attempts to fuse the two.
22 Jun 19
@bigdoggproblem saidI don't pretend to know all the answers, as some here do, or even that "Goddidit" is the best answer for everything. I believe in my heart that my faith is true, that is, the things I believe in regarding a deity, His rules, His creation, His actual Holiness, are true. I have my personal faith, and as I have often thought about this, not being the sort of person who normally is comfortable just assuming that things I've been told are somehow "naturally" true, I've worked out many likely answers to questions I've had regarding problems I've noticed with the "testimony", i.e. scriptures as well as various writings by people close to the events. I'm now satisfied with the cohesiveness of my faith. But I stipulate "my faith". I know there are others with differing viewpoints of the same material, this I chalk up to people not being robots, they think differently from one another. So their set of beliefs is "their faith". (And yes, I know this is another sticking point for non-Chrstians, "how can y'all have such different ideas about it?" )
See, I find this post difficult to swallow.
Faith cannot be completely free of overlap from observation and evidence. If it were, it would have absolutely no grounding in anything remotely connected to anything real people experience in real life.
The decision to take a claim seriously, FAR from being a simple "free-will" decision, is based on an evaluation of th ...[text shortened]... the result of the outcome. At best, we can try to pretend we did not actually reach THAT evaluation.
This thread started with a request for evidence. I do have evidence. But as a dsiclaimer, I stress that this is not evidence for everyone, this evidence is only good enough for ME. It IS based on my own observation, not the observation of others (although others have similar testimony). Because of this, yes, I agree that such evidence could be considered "subjective" and not "objective", but I'm okay with that, because as I said, this is MY faith, and so it's natural that the evidence of its veracity is only MY evidence.
Like most people, I had a life before I became a Christian, since I only became an actual Christian in college. My life before I became a Christian was typical, up to the age of 16, for an American who also happened to be an only child, somewhat spoiled, somewhat naive, but my life from 16 to 18, about 20 months, was a horror story, which I will not go into here, since I've talked about it in this forum a couple times now, at least, and some might say I've brought it up too much. During my first year at college, I became a Christian with the help of two sorority sisters. My evidence of the truth of my own faith is simply that it has worked for me. My life has been better every year since I became a Christian. I now have the "more abundant life" Jesus promised us in scripture. I've done many things in my life that I thought I could never do. I'm happy. I have people who love me. And I have put myself out there to help my community, and I feel that I have made a difference. Not everyone can say that. And I also feel that this life is not fully mine, but has been directed by Jesus, as fulfillment of his promise. Quite literally, I feel that I could not have done it without him.
So my evidence, for me only, is just my life itself. I'm here, at this point in my life, because of him.
I know this is not objective, but I don't care. Yes, it is subjective as hell, thus my disclaimers. But this is what has proven God to me.
22 Jun 19
@moonbus saidCampbell also roughly equates religion with myth, which, while interesting, leads me to take some of what he says with a grain of salt.
Well said.
If I may paraphrase an observation from Joseph Campbell: religion must be at least roughly consistent with what is known about how nature works, otherwise it's superstition.