Originally posted by googlefudgeReligion seems to be helpful to many people, in my opinion. Just because it does not work for you, does that make it right for you to attack others for what good they get from it?
I don't expect it to do anything.
However people keep claiming that their religions [b]DO do things.
[like get you to heaven as just one example][/b]
I don't blame anyone for attacking the extreme beliefs of radical Islam, since they believe they have a religous duty to kill everyone that does not believe as they do. But most people of religious beliefs want to live in peace with others and just want the right to practice their beliefs without being hurt or hurting anyone else.
Christians believe their religion is the best and want the right to tell others about it in an act of love for others without being ridiculed, harassed, or persecuted for it.
That is why in the USA we amended our constitution to prohibit the government from establishing a religion and to allow the free exercise of religion. However, that did not mean that they would have the right to murder people of different religious beliefs, but to prevent violent conflicts between those of different religious beliefs.
Originally posted by googlefudgeWell the opinion of Marx was that it did, this is his rather famous quote:
I don't expect it to do anything.
However people keep claiming that their religions [b]DO do things.
[like get you to heaven as just one example][/b]
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.For the full context see [1] below or [2]. If you are expecting religion to provide the truth then, well, this is where we run into the problem of what is the truth. However, for many it provides consolation when the world is heartless towards them. If God does not exist any hope provided is false hope, I agree, but sometimes false hope is better than none at all. People can gain strength to extract themselves from situations which they otherwise could not. It can also provide a moral foundation for those who need a reason to behave morally, and it gives adults a way to connect to the magical thinking of children. So I dispute the statement that religion does not work. This does not mean I believe it and it does not mean that I think the beneficial psychological effects could not be gained in some other way. But, with those caveats, religion does work.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
[2] A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. (Marx K.) Reproduced here: http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
Originally posted by RJHindsRJ, you should just have left that post. It was not bad until you edited it and added everything after the first sentence.
Religion seems to be helpful to many people, in my opinion. Just because it does not work for you, does that make it right for you to attack others for what good they get from it?
I don't blame anyone for attacking the extreme beliefs of radical Islam, since they believe they have a religous duty to kill everyone that does not believe as they do. But mo ...[text shortened]... eligious beliefs, but to prevent violent conflicts between those of different religious beliefs.
Originally posted by DeepThoughtI believed it needed some more explanation. The editions were for that reason and to answer potential questions or objections that I thoutht might arise. However, I know I can't think of everything and will not satisfy everyone. But perhaps it will give those that read it a better idea of where I am coming from on my beliefs.
RJ, you should just have left that post. It was not bad until you edited it and added everything after the first sentence.
Some of the edits were to correct mistakes made by my bad keyboard. 😏
Originally posted by RJHindsI used to do that kind of thing. Rhetorical questions can work well as a rhetorical device but, like all these things, they need to be used in moderation - unless you are a reincarnation of Robespierre, who was the master of that rhetorical style, it's better to let others make the counter-point and then answer it. I try to keep my points simple - which I sometimes manage to do and sometimes fail to do - but there is no point in arguing with oneself.
I believed it needed some more explanation. The editions were for that reason and to answer potential questions or objections that I thoutht might arise. However, I know I can't think of everything and will not satisfy everyone. But perhaps it will give those that read it a better idea of where I am coming from on my beliefs.
Some of the edits were to correct mistakes made by my bad keyboard. 😏
Edit: It was not I who gave it a thumbs down, it's a rare thing I do that.
Originally posted by DeepThoughtBut don't you forget that I am .....
I used to do that kind of thing. Rhetorical questions can work well as a rhetorical device but, like all these things, they need to be used in moderation - unless you are a reincarnation of Robespierre, who was the master of that rhetorical style, it's better to let others make the counter-point and then answer it. I try to keep my points simple - whic ...[text shortened]... uing with oneself.
Edit: It was not I who gave it a thumbs down, it's a rare thing I do that.
The Near Genius 😏
I apologize if I unjustly put you in the same nutshell with the wrong guy.
gf: "... If you are going to claim that it is/was inspired/written by an actual god, then I get to treat it like it was thus written and I get to go verify its claims/morality against objective standards and it only makes sense to treat it literally. Because if it is not meant to be literally true, then working out its meaning on both factual and moral issues becomes a guessing game of interpretation and it becomes both useless and meaningless [which it is]..."
I'd like to propose the following idea:
One does not expect songs and poems to be true; they move in an idiom where truth is moot. While some poems and some songs (epics, ballads) may refer to events which really took place and/or persons who really existed, it would be silly to apply Bayesian analysis to them. It would miss the point.
Similarly, prophecy and sacred literature tend to move in an idiom where empirical definitions of truth and how to prove it or verify it take a back seat to something else.
Prophecy is an exhortation to see things in a certain way, or to re-form one's life, or to make something happen, or to make some principle operative in one's life, or to organize the experiences of life into something more meaningful than 'you consume a lot and then you die'. Prophecy can also take the form of presenting an example of a life lived in a certain way and thus constitutes a call to others to live in that way. Prophecy is not foretelling, but telling-forth.
Sacred literature expresses truths about human nature, but only very poorly or derivatively about nature; the all-important difference between them is that truths about human nature are meaning-saturated, whereas truths about nature are meaning-devoid. Empirical criteria of truth and procedures of verification apply only very poorly or derivatively to sacred literature.
Prophecy often expresses itself as if something were already true in some timeless nether-world, but the point of it is to induce people to make it true in this one.
gf: "it's pretty much impossible to rationally justify any god-like being trying to impart what it thought was an important message in so unreliable and unintelligible a fashion." Bear in mind that the message may have had a different significance then than it seems to now, that what was then an idiomatic way of putting it ('raining cats and dogs' ) may have become blurred or indeed unintelligible over time, and that standards of rationality shift a bit from century to century. Anyone who nowadays tries to follow Leviticus in all its gory detail is liable to find himself in deep do-do with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. For the Levites (the clan of butcher-priests charged with restoring the rites of animal sacrifice after the return to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon in the 6th c. BC), it meant something quite different and seemed rational (at least by the standards of the Middle East 2600 years ago).
"Religion doesn't work." It doesn't work the way science works. It doesn't work by formulating hypotheses (maybe God exists, maybe Jesus was a real person, maybe meditation is going to improve my memory) and then beating the bushes for evidence to confirm or disconfirm them. Sometimes, believing that a thing might be, contributes to its really being, and that is more like the way religion works. You might think that is just wishful thinking, baseless irrationality. But consider this: if you smile at a stranger, it increases the likelihood that he will smile back, rather than scowl back. (There's no guarantee, of course.) Similarly, if you show a neighbor or an acquaintance kindness and friendliness, it increases the likelihood that a friendship will grow, than if you show him animosity or indifference. Making it happen is what makes it happen. In the case of a sacred text, making oneself receptive to such a message is what makes it possible that the message might come to mean something to you. Making yourself ready to listen is what makes it speak to you. Preparing oneself to receive grace is what makes it possible to accept that grace has been offered. That is how I think religion works. If you (gf) don't want to hear any such message, ok; it's no skin off my nose. But a lot of people think it does work for them, by giving their lives meaning, by providing them a framework within which to orient their lives beyond 'you consume a lot and then you die.' Maybe the promise of an afterlife is a lie; maybe people die and stay dead; but I don't begrudge them that their lives had a meaning up to the moment of death which they would not have had without belief in an afterlife.
gf: "You say we go to an afterlife when we die... Prove it exits before trying to explain to me the entrance requirements. You say you have a meditation technique that helps improve memory... Prove it, before I spend 6 weeks tying to learn how to achieve it. etc etc... Otherwise you are just wasting my, and everyone else's, time."
Six weeks, eh. Nothing was ever achieved by pursuing the path of least persistence. You did not learn to read in a day. If anyone had tried to prove to you what reading is worth, before you could read, you wouldn't have believed them. You didn't know what awaited you when you started sounding out letters and words, but you made a start, wobbly at first, and you got better. And now you know that the effort was worth it; now a world full of richness of meaning lies open to you. Getting religion is not like proving some proposition true, once and for all, no further effort required. Getting religion is like learning a new vocabulary for making sense of one's life. It only begins to make sense when one achieves a certain level of proficiency. As one grows in proficiency, new layers of meaning, new nuances, become apparent which were hidden before.
I agree that secular prophecies are possible. Thus Spake Zarathustra and Wm. Blake's works suggest themselves.
How am I defining "sane" and "mainstream"? Mainstream Christians define themselves as mainstream. I don't define them, I merely adopt their definition of who is mainstream and who isn't. The fact that some Christians think they are mainstream and some others think they aren't says something about how diverse Christianity is. If it weren't so diverse, it would have died out centuries ago because it would have appealed to too few people to keep going. The border between mainstream and almost-mainstream is not a border, but a gray area; nonetheless, the radical fringe is clearly discernible. Thorough-going literalists, Young Earthers, and snake handlers are not mainstream; they are schismatics. I don't have a hard and fast definition of "sane." Without claiming to be expert in this field, I would say that having a distorted view of reality is one indicator of a breach of sanity or living on the frayed edge of it. I would also say that anyone who, in this day and age, feels compelled to discredit, dismiss, discard, and bizarrely re-interpret the last 500 years of scientific discoveries, on the one hand, but who, on the other, demonstrates a certain proficiency at using computers, navigating the Internet, sending and receiving electronic messages, etc. etc., is seriously compartmentalized.
