God we can understand

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This topic contains 57 replies, has 10 voices, and was last updated by  PopeBeanie 4 years, 6 months ago.

Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 58 total)
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  • #28076

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    Faith doesn’t just mean “believing things without evidence”.  It also means “trust” or “confidence in”.

    #28077

    Unseen
    Participant

    Kierkegaard defined faith as a leap of belief, and the more unlikely or unsupported by evidence and logic the belief may be, the greater the Faith. The more absurd the belief, the greater the faith. This is why drawing the faithful into debates over facts is useless and just confirms their faith even more.

    #28078

    Davis
    Moderator

    As atheists, we like to be logical

    Where do you get this idea Simon?

    #28079

    Davis
    Moderator

    Faith doesn’t just mean “believing things without evidence”. It also means “trust” or “confidence in”.

    Simon…in this context those are the same bloody thing.

    #28080

    _Robert_
    Participant

    A major hurricane is forecast to be a direct “eye” hit to my community Monday morning. I will put up shutters on my house and my rental house, buy gas for the generator, clean up the yard from all the possible projectiles and probably get stoned as hell. Best case is the structures stay in tact and we have about three feet of flood water and no electric for a month or so in 90 degree heat. Worst case is the structure collapses. I recall spitting up pink fiberglass insulation one time but that’s all a blur….LOL Spent the next 2 weeks with a rifle protecting my destroyed hood from raiders while under curfew. My guess is that most right wing extremists will start to understand community and very few leftists will be getting “triggered” :_)… around here at least. A reset is a beautiful thing.

    #28081

    Unseen
    Participant

    Faith doesn’t just mean “believing things without evidence”. It also means “trust” or “confidence in”.

    No, religious faith in God is a lot more than just trusting or having confidence in Him. Otherwise, it would be no different than one’s feelings toward a favored politician or doctor. Faith in the context of, at least the Abrahamic religions, is always a 100% commitment. Following Kierkegaard, the less likely the belief to be objectively true, the greater the faith displayed by the faithful one.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by  Unseen.
    #28083

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    the less likely the belief to be objectively true, the greater the faith displayed by the faithful one.

    Surely that’s just by definition?  If faith means believing in something that doesn’t have evidence for it, or isn’t true.

    #28084

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    As atheists, we like to be logical

    Where do you get this idea Simon?

    From observing atheists.

    #28085

    Jody Lee
    Participant

    Keyword, LIKE to be logical. 😆

    @robert

    Be fun, have safe…or something. For real, hope it’s not too bad.

    #28086

    Unseen
    Participant

    the less likely the belief to be objectively true, the greater the faith displayed by the faithful one.

    Surely that’s just by definition? If faith means believing in something that doesn’t have evidence for it, or isn’t true.

    To the faithful, it’s not word play. When they feel they are defending something patently absurd, enduring devastating criticism, appearing ridiculous, it confirms their faith. And the more absurd, ridiculous, unsupportable, and indefensible whatever it is that they are defending, the more they can feel that their faith is strong and deep and unassailable.

    #28087

    Davis
    Moderator

    From observing atheists.

    And the 1 billion atheists in and around China? The ones who utterly outnumber any of the kind of atheists you’ve observed?

    #28088

    Belle Rose
    Participant

    @unseen

    Certainty, clearly, is subject to qualification without devolving into nonsense. Not so with faith. It’s the nature of faith that it is 100%, a total commitment. Certainty can recognize facts and qualifications, faith cannot because “kind of faithful” isn’t real faith.

    I 100% disagree with your statement there…

    Without doubt there is no faith, there is just belief….and any person that doesn’t doubt doesn’t think. Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin.

    #28089

    PopeBeanie
    Moderator

    It is amazing to me how people of all different backgrounds and origins can hold so many radically different beliefs…And all think that they are right.

    Indeed! Meanwhile the most common thread in most of those beliefs connects to the culture they grew up in. Therefore it’s logical that people that share culture also share similar experiences that reinforce their belief. They  confirm such experiences with each other. Also meanwhile, we cannot ignore the differences between religion, the most obvious (to most of us) are the differences between Christianity and Islam.

    I think I remember you asking what we think God might be like, but if it wasn’t you, here’s an answer to the question anyway. It’s clear to most of us that Muhammad, claiming to be “the last messenger of Allah”, was the author of and “expert” at the time of defining what Allah/God is, what Allah/God wants, how we should worship Allah/God, and so on. Perhaps Muhammad intentionally shaped his Allah/God in the way he (Muhammad) expected would be most useful for his own agenda? And of course, he had a head start, thoughtfully riding on coattails of popular scriptures of his time, for added “credibility”.

    Would you doubt, in spite of billions of believers of Islam, that Muhammad made most of Islam up, or was perhaps even recalling it from hallucinations while visiting his cave?

    It’s safe to say that (at least recently) there are a lot of rabid believers, ready to kill and die by their sincerely held beliefs. All because of the culture they grew up in, albeit their repressive ruling class likely became the largest impulse for using violence in praise of Allah.

    The history of religion is about how various cultures invented gods in their own image, and of course the rulers of the most successful cultures (of the past) were in the best position to enforce and take advantage of those belief systems.

    In this context, traditional ways to define “God” are easy to understand and accept, especially when freedom of thought is highly discouraged. And that’s why I fly the atheist flag… not to prove that God doesn’t exist, but to resist the rampant indoctrination of human beings who are especially vulnerable to pressures to fit in to their culture.

    #28090

    Davis
    Moderator

    Without doubt there is no faith, there is just belief….and any person that doesn’t doubt doesn’t think. Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin.

    More anti-knowledge post-modernism. You have a real hangup on the difference between evidence and rationally based claims vs. intuitively based ones. As though there is no difference. Obviously there is a massive one. While it is true that in theory either argument derived from those processes may be no more or less “true”, they are still two very different kinds of claims. And you personally make these kinds of different claims every day. There is no doubt you have made various claims today based on evidence and rationality and others intuitively. If you deny this, then you are the person who isn’t thinking.

    #28091

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    What do you mean by “faith”, @ivy?

    I can see that Christians spend a lot of time agonising over details of this and that to do with theology, and that’s thinking.

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