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Originally Posted by Charlatan
To me, this is a healthy approach to religion. One must always poke and prod at your beliefs regardless of what they are... to move blindly through life without reflection is just asking for trouble.
The problem with poking and prodding is that sometime you damage what you are poking... It is no longer usuable to you. But you realize that you must move onto something else... something different. Many people are afraid of what comes after this... and the answer is never an easy one if you are truly searching.
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Moving momentarily from philosophy to psychology, this is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance. We inherently don't want to hear anyhting that disagrees wtih out beliefs. Through selective exposure, we keep ourselves away from anything that challenges what we think, and become hostile to that which we cannot avoid.
One of the things I have learned in life is that seeking out dissonant thoughts is the only way to truly learn. When I was religious, I never wanted to hear anything that challenged my faith. When I was a communist, I didn't want to hear any sort of conservative economic ideas that contradicted my idealistic views. When I was anti-gun, I didn't want to hear anyone telling me that good people could use them responsibly.
When I realized that the only way to improve myself was to critically analyze what I thought and what the other sides said, I prodded my beliefs and found that I didn't damage what was there, but rather that my instrument of prodding hit empty space. Off the top of my head, those are three extreme things that I used to think, and now find absurd. I couldn't justify belief in religious teachings to myself, I couldn't continue to advocate the replacement of our economic system with one so obviously doomed to failure, and I realized that if good people like myself were armed, then someone could fight back against the bad guys.
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Originally Posted by cellophanedeity
(And as far as the Australia thing goes, Australia can be easily verified. Angels can't really be. It's sort of like me saying "I believe in jabberwocks because Lewis Carrol says so, and Lewis Carrol is infallible." It's not bad, but why bother trying to figure out philosophically if jabberwocks and angels exist? That is neither moral nor metaphycial.)
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I have been offered countless pieces of evidnce that suggests the definite existance of Australia (and if it's all wrong, my dad's Uncle Jim has been fuckking with our heads for the past 35 years,) and Carrol made no attempt to classify his work as non-fiction. The Bible is a great piece of work by a lot of talented people, but its validity is up in the air as far as I'm concerned due to a significant lack of concurring evidence and proof of significant meaning-altering mistranslations and creative interpretation during transcription (who can tell me about the original story of Lucifer from ancient pre-translation texts?)
In my mind, only recency keeps Judeo-Christian scriptures above the level of classic mythology in terms of popular acceptance. Sure, billions of people believe in the writing and its messages, but I'm willing to bet that a similar percentage of populations exposed to classic mythology before it became regarded as fantastic tales of fiction believed in one or another of its deities. I expect that in thousands of years, the only difference between our current views of Greek and Roman mythology and future generations' views of our modern religions is that they'll have a lot less names of deities to memorize in elementary school.