Subject:
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Re: Atheism (was: Santorum Fails In His Effort To Pervert The Constitution)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 15 Aug 2004 23:52:06 GMT
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Viewed:
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1936 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Mark Bellis wrote:
> I would question whether you mean "religion" or "God" here. Faith in
> religion is what I call "Churchianity". It's no better than superstition,
> like athletes who always go through the same routine before the race starts.
I meant a little of both. Some denominations are less tied up in religious
rituals than others (RCA vs Roman Catholicism, for instance), and just because
you don't follow a particular denomination doesn't mean that you don't have your
own personal religion encompassing your beliefs regarding your particular
god(s).
> As a Christian, I have many questions about faith and about the God in whom I
> have faith. This is quite healthy as otherwise my mind would not be
> involved.
It's healthy in that the only true measure of a person's faith is what sort of
onslaught it can stand up to. If you're afraid to test your own beliefs because
you don't think it will hold up, can you honestly say that you have faith? And
this works both ways, too. It's just as much of a cop-out for an atheist to
"believe" in the utter lack of any supernatural force because "mommy and daddy
said so" as it is for an individual who believes in a theistic faith for the
same reasons. In either case, you're letting someone else decide what you
believe for you, which is just a more peaceful version of converting to a
different faith under duress.
> It takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe that there is a
> god of some sort.
Not having ever been an atheist, I couldn't say for sure if that's the case, but
I would think that the level of faith required depends more on your mindset than
your religion. There are a lot of casual believers on both sides of the fence,
who only really "believe" anything because they've always been told that it's
true. I would say that the only religion that requires no faith at all is true
agnosticism, since the very definition of that is that you don't ascribe to any
religious beliefs due to the lack of concrete proof one way or the other.
Societal/governmental coersion also makes a huge difference. It took a lot more
faith to follow any theistic faith under the Soviet Union than to be an atheist,
since being caught practicing any theistic religion bore heavy penalties.
Likewise, it probably required equally intense faith to ascribe to atheism in
Spain during the famed Spanish Inquisition.
> People have not yet managed to grow a tree from a jar of chemicals, so there
> is still a big gap in science. If science is not all-powerful then
> something else must be. Call it 'god', since that's what others use to
> explain things that science can't explain. This argument is not what I
> actually believe, but how well do you think the logic works?
Empiricists don't believe that just because you can't (yet) prove that a thing
is True doesn't mean that it is automatically Not True (hence agnosticism).
True atheists clearly beleive that life can spring from the cosmic soup in the
absence of any divine assistance, but true agnostics would require an atheist to
prove his standpoint just as readily as they would require any theist to prove
his.
> The chinese word for 'agnostic' is composed of 3 characters, meaning "not can
> know".
Makes sense, since the root Greek word is gnostic (knowing, from
gnosis/knowledge), and the prefix "a-" essentially makes it "without knowing".
> I wonder if there's any correlation between people who have trouble trusting
> others and those who subscribe to type 1 agnosticism?
Possibly, but I would think that agnostic logic as applied to interpersonal
trust would say that you can't trust or not trust anyone who you don't know, but
experience with a given individual will prove to you whether he/she is
trustworthy or not. Everything beyond that would probably have to be assumed by
generalizations (e.g. trust a Boy Scout before a defense attorney).
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