Subject:
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Re: What are your axiomatic religious beliefs and why?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 25 Oct 2006 21:58:11 GMT
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Viewed:
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2124 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Brendan Powell Smith wrote:
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What would you say are your axiomatic religious beliefs?
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Hmm, this is a really good question, Brendan. It’s hard to answer this
truthfully, because I was raised in a Christian setting. So there are many
things I believe that probably at their root go back to what I learned in Sunday
School as a child, but that I also think logically follow from reason or from
other more basic axioms. I hope that I would have come to these conclusions via
logic as an adult without prior inculcation, but I recognize that what I see as
a logical path miraculously brings me back to what I learned as a child, so
intellectual honesty forces me to admit that if I had been raised in another
religious tradition, I might well hold very different beliefs while still
thinking myself eminently logical.
That said, I spent last night thinking about your question, I think (or at least
I would like to think) that my axiomatic religious beliefs come down to one
statement:
If God exists, then God is knowable.
I suppose that any discussion presupposes a few things - that the universe
exists, that reality is constant, and that observation and reason are
trustworthy. If we can’t start with those, then no topic can be discussed,
because I am left as a bare Descartian self-aware soul, but all else is up for
grabs.
Anyway, back to my “If God exists, then God is knowable.”
I think, and I’m not going to go into a discussion of these as this thread is
asking about what our beliefs are, not to go into an endless debate about each
one, that there are valid logical arguments for the existence of some
supernatural creative force that we call God. However, I do believe that it
would be logically consistent to then think that that God has nothing to do with
us - that he wound up the universe and then went on his merry way, or that he is
not in any way personal, but is more of a blind force, or somehow so large and
great that our puny minds cannot even approach him. The leap of faith, as I see
it, is that we can know god and have some sort of rapport with him. (Please
excuse the gendered pronoun - I did grow up in the western tradition, after
all.)
Once we make that leap, it logically follows that there are ways in which God
can be known. I ascribe to the traditional “two book” school - that God is
revealed both in general revelation (“the Heavens declare the glory of God” etc)
and in special revelation (i.e. scripture). (Hmm, is this another axiomatic
belief, or a logical extension of the first?) If there is special revelation,
then we must look at these different candidates - Christian and Jewish forms of
the Bible, Koran, Buddhist writings, ravings of a crazy man, whatever. I would
like to think that if I came as a blank slate and read all of these I would come
to think that the Christian Bible would fit the best with my reason and
observation. Of course no one actually starts as a blank slate and studies all
of the religious writings of the world and chooses between. However, I would
like to think that I have been somewhat intellectually honest in my studies of
the Bible and do find it to be generally reliable. Once a witness has been
found to be generally reliable, it follows that we should give at least some
credence to it even when it makes statements that we have no direct confirmation
of. For instance, if I find that my friend is generally reliable, I have no
reason to disbelieve him if he tells me he ate eggs for breakfast yesterday,
even if I was not there to actually observe him. Even if he makes more
outlandish statements, if I have no direct reason to disbelieve, I will give him
the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, once I have accepted the Bible as a
generally reliable witness, most of the rest of my religious beliefs follow from
that, colored by my experience and my reason.
Bruce
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | What are your axiomatic religious beliefs and why?
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| This is an off-shoot from a (URL) discussion> John Neal and I were having on OT.debate, but I'd like to open up the following question to any religious believers who feel like answering. What would you say are your axiomatic religious beliefs? Let's (...) (18 years ago, 24-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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