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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Please, I'm not looking for an echo chamber of responses along the lines of "because religious people are dumb!!!" That's not helpful. I'm looking for any insight into why people trust this gut-feeling-esque method of understanding God if it is so clearly unreliable. Am I wrong in any of my assumptions? Are there no true disagreements among Christians? Are there ways of verifying revelation that I'm not seeing? Would God have different rules for different people, and if so, why write the Bible and fill it with so many seemingly universal laws? I do not think religious people are dumb (or at least, I don't think they're significantly dumber, on average, than secular people) but has it occured to you that the reason people rely on gut feelings is that without them there'd be no real reason to stay religious? Basically, the answer to your question seems to be that Christianity is not the product of divine revelation, hence its followers don't have any special insight, hence its easy for them to disagree because all they are really defending are their personal opinions. My Imaginary GF posted:One nitpick about women being unable to lead a church: its roots are anti-patrilinialist, not anti-gender equality. Women have children, a fact which cannot be denied. A male priest who has children could always have doubt sown upon his seed before paternity tests came about. So, you don't have women as priests because you don't want them to pass down the office to their children, making religious office a heriditary position with corresponsing title and grants of privliges. This is a remarkable amount of mental contortion for somebody to go through just to deny clear cut misogyny. I guess as long as we ignore actual history and don't think about passages like Corinthians 14:34-35 your argument is almost convincing!
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Nov 21, 2014 22:13
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Well, look, I'm obviously in agreement with you, but simply for the sake of argument I'm starting from the assumption that Christianity (or whichever religion you'd like to examine) is correct and true. Even GIVEN that the God of the Bible is real, how are we to know anything at all about what it wants if our only method of discerning information is so clearly faulty? If listening to the Holy Spirit is no good, what then? In that case the only consistent answer I could give that would be consistent with the idea that the Bible is accurate would be that there are no real Christians in the world today. After all Mark 16:18 tells us that Christians will be able to do the following: quote:They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. And Luke 10:19 says: quote:Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you. So maybe the reason "Christians" disagree over how to interpret the bible is the same reason that they cannot drink poison or shrug off deadly snake bites: they aren't the real deal. Maybe the Christian God really does exist and Jesus was divine but no existing Christian sect is actually adhering to the true faith, thus its easy for people to disagree over scripture because none of them are actually being spoken to by the Holy Spirit.
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Nov 21, 2014 22:43
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Yes, they do, but two ways that are still unsatisfactory. What exactly are you expecting to get out of this thread? The simplest explanation for your question is that Christianity is not the product of divinely inspired knowledge and therefore 'revelation' is, at best, a misunderstanding of some other process occurring at the brain, or at worst a form of self interested deception used to justify some goal. But you've basically ruled that explanation out. Now you're complaining that the answers you are receiving are unsatisfactory. Well, of course they are! I suppose one could argue (as I've seen Christians do from time to time) that God places obstacles in our paths to make us grow stronger. Perhaps the seeming incoherence of Christianity is actually a test of faith or an obstacle that was put there for our benefit. This wouldn't be entirely without precedent, after all parents sometimes force kids to go through seemingly arbitrary 'character building' exercises that seem utterly bizarre and mysterious to the kid. But since you seem not to be interested in the generic "He works in mysterious ways" answer to this question either I'm not sure what to tell you. So again, I don't really understand what answer you could possibly receive that would satisfy you here.
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Nov 26, 2014 05:55
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Because for plenty of educated, logical people there is an answer that satisfies them and allows them to believe. Because if this poo poo is true, I want to know about it. Because if there's a way around the "problems" that I think I see, I'd like to find them. Ok, first of all you are treating "logic" like it is an attribute from Dungeons and Dragons or a computer game. "Oh, my character has 15 logic so when I roll this D20 to determine whether he can figure out the problem of Revelation I have a good chance of succeeding!" Logic is situational. Some people are really "logical" when it comes to engineering but totally illogical when it comes to understanding emotions. Some people are really logical in their professional lives while doing totally illogical or reckless things in their private lives. There are people who always seem to have a logical solution for other people's problems but who have no capability to apply that logic to their own personal situations, etc. etc. You should read up on the life of Linus Pauling. He was a brilliant scientist who won both the Nobel Peace Prize and a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (the only person so far to earn two unrelated Nobel prizes). He was considered (accurately) to be one of the greatest scientific minds of his generation. And yet, toward the end of his life, he became convinced, contrary to all evidence, that large doses of Vitamin C could prevent cancer. He basically destroyed his scientific reputation because he kept insisting that his false theories on vitamin C were accurate. By the end of his life he'd become something of a joke. Pauling was a famous scientist and he still made a fool of himself due to a mixture of wishful thinking and a refusal to recognize his own intellectual limits. So saying that 2 billion otherwise logical people are Christians isn't much support for anything. People can be entirely logical in one area of their lives and totally irrational in another area, especially when it comes to their own mortality. Now, second problem: you're dead wrong when you claim that Christians aren't bothered by the problem of revelation. Many prominent Christians (Kierkegaard, C. S. Lewis, etc.) discuss at length how Christians struggle with their beliefs in God. I guess there must be some Christians out there who never struggle with any self doubt but I think they are very much in the minority. Becoming a Christian does not free you fear or doubt: part of being a Christian is struggling with those feelings on a continual basis. It seems like your outsider perspective is causing you to attribute a degree of confidence, inner peace and calmness to the Christian pscyhe that doesn't exist in practice. I mean, I hate to say this, but chances are if you became a Christian then you might feel better for a short amount of time but pretty soon you'd be right back where you are now. Finally, I have to say that your overall motivations here seem very superficial. You're describing Christianity like its an insurance package or something. You literally just want to shut down the voice of doubt in your mind and seem to equate Christianity with a false sense of certainty. In other words you seem to be attracted to the worst aspects of religion rather than the best ones! I imagine that if you actually became a genuine Christian then your life would become much harder than it is now. If you imagine that all Christianity is going to do is make your life a bit more simple and easy then I think you're walking down the wrong path.
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Nov 26, 2014 23:00
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If you think it is reasonable to believe in a Christian God who sent His only son to die for all of ours sins then I don't really see why it isn't also reasonable to think that God intentionally created ambiguity in the bible. It may be that He does not want your blind obedience, but rather wants you to think really hard about your beliefs. Maybe Christianity and its doctrines are intentionally contradictory and obtuse because what God cares about is the journey rather than the destination. Personally I don't believe this because I find the idea of a Christian deity implausible to begin with. But if you're ready on some level to accept the idea of the Christian God then I really have no idea why you would feel comfortable demanding that God write a literalist text. There's plenty of examples in the bible of Jesus using allegories that have ambiguous meanings. Also God sometimes forces people to do weird things, such as asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, only to countermand his own order at the last moment. Or look at how God uses foreign armies to punish Israel for it's sins. Or look at God's explanation for Job about why bad things happen (short version: "you're so inferior to me that you cannot hope to understand so don't even try"). God regularly sends out messages that are confusing to a human audience or which seem contradictory. So it would seemingly be totally in character for God to give his followers a confusing and ambiguous and contradictory book as their central Holy Text, and that He would then expect his followers to spend a lot of time agonizing over its "meaning".
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Dec 4, 2014 00:34
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CommieGIR posted:No, even simple automated and instinctual actions required logical approach, regardless of if you gave them thought or not. Sure, not advanced intellectual logic, but logic is still present. How are you defining "logic"?
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Dec 13, 2014 21:24
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CommieGIR posted:Maybe I was a little too broad, but his definition is a little too slim. The idea that logic only exists in something you must think out completely prior to complete isn't true either. Bel Shazar posted:Are you sure you are not confusing 'logical' with 'analytical'? Because it feels like you are. The problem here is that "logic" has a lot of different meanings. Also just because we group several different phenomena under the same English word does not mean that those phenomena are all the same. It might be that what we group together under the umbrella term "logic" can actually be broken down into several distinct and contradictory meanings. Hence why I think its important in a discussion like this one that people be really clear and explicit about how they are defining their terms. What do we mean by "logic" here? Anyway, going back to the quote that started this interchange: Who What Now posted:If logic doesn't work with faith that should tell you that there's something wrong with faith. You apply logic to every single other facet of your life, knowingly or unknowingly, and use it to determine how and why things are the way they are and to make sense of reality. And when the logic doesn't make sense you say to yourself, "Hold on this is right." And you find the problem and then correct it. I'm not sure how accurately this summarizes our decision making. Forums user Who What Now seems to be suggesting that even when we aren't using conscious thought we are somehow using the same mental faculty to make decisions. Apparently me knowledge of which piano keys to touch in order to play "Moonlight Sonata" is the same mental process through which I figure out that 2 + 2 = 4. I think that this is actually a contentious claim and would need to be supported with evidence rather than simply asserted as obvious common sense. That isn't to say his point is necessarily illegitimate. I agree that Christians tend to indulge in some special pleading when it comes to applying logical processes to readings of divine texts. However, if we're gonna claim that the human brain reaches all its decisions "logically" then that requires an explication of how you define logic plus evidence that this definition actually encompasses all the decision making faculties of the human mind. To draw on an example: so far as we can tell the physical world is composed of atoms of matter. But we don't see the world around us as a huge collection of atoms. Instead, our brain perceives objects. Right now I perceive myself to be sitting in a "chair", working on a "computer" that sits on a "desk". Is it "logical" for me to think that the computer, the chair and the desk are discrete objects? There are many different materials forming the computer, why do I see them as all being part of the same object? And yet how do I determine that the computer is a separate object from the desk? You might say that there's a degree of conscious logic being used to decide where one object begins and another ends, but mostly I seem to be making these discriminations based on instinct. Is it actually "logical" to see the world as being composed of discrete objects rather than just seeing a huge collection of individual atoms? I don't know, I guess that would depend on how you define logic. Similarly, we assume that we have free will and that other people have free will as well. We base important predictions on our own and other people's behaviour based on that assumed free will. Is that logical? Again, depends on how you define logic. You could say that "free will" is a useful heuristic for predicting behaviour, but on the other hand it also seems to be predicated on the idea that your "will" is an uncaused cause of action, and that is pretty dubious. This line of thinking can quickly lead to naval gazing, but it's still a helpful corrective to the idea that our decision making is entirely logical. Our biology and psychology basically forces us to perceive the world in a certain way, and logic only really applies past that point. If you step back and examine the way our perceptions structure the world then they don't seem to correspond directly to any kind of "logic" as we would define it. So effectively we use our logic to navigate a world that is itself not built on logic but rather on something else. Or at least, that is my sense of things.
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Dec 13, 2014 22:23
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OwlFancier posted:So, uh, you walk places based on whether your animal brain tells you there might be food or a mate there, you are possibly the only creature in existence with an instinctive understanding of narrative, and you buy things almost entirely based on whether you think they're shiny, immediately edible, or you can have sex with them, and also somehow were born with the understanding of 'buying' something instead of just taking it, again possibly unique in the world. Seems to me like a lot of narrative is processed instinctively. Though, again, this kind of depends on how you are defining the terms.
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Dec 13, 2014 23:37
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Actually I get up and walk around all the time without any particular purpose other than expending energy.
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Dec 13, 2014 23:39
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Plus, why would God give us this fantastic tool to perceive and understand the world, then chastise us for using it on Him? Logic, reason, scientific processes - these are all virtues when applied to anything else. Why, when I read the Koran and apply logic and reason to it to find out it isn't true, that's proper and correct, but when I apply it to the Bible to find out it isn't true, I'm misunderstanding/taking things out of context/using reason where faith is better/etc? Why are you making claims about what God would or wouldn't do? Why should God care about some dumbass mortal's ideas on what is or isn't logical?
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Dec 16, 2014 04:06
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Yes but early on you ruled out the explanation that Christianity is not true so why are you so gung go on logic all of a sudden. Sure if you're not raised Christian then you can use fairly elementary reasoning to poke holes in the Gospels but if you start out with at least a vaguely Christian perspective then there is nothing special about logic. Perhaps the problem is that you are predestined for Hell, and your lack of faith is just a clue that you are not among the elect.
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Dec 16, 2014 05:32
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Just accept that you're an atheist and move on man.
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Jan 3, 2015 19:21
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:07 |
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:drat, aren't we pissy tonight. No, I'm not a troll. I just haven't gotten an answer to my question yet, beyond "hey just dive in and believe," which is still a problem, because: dive in and believe what? You obviously do not have what it takes to be a Christian (not necessarily a bad thing) so why do you keep torturing yourself over these pointless and unanswerable questions? You're never going to be satisfied because the things you're asking for - a rigorously scientific justification for faith - are impossible.
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Jan 4, 2015 04:19
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