CSflim

I think the point that asaris is making is that it is possible to debate these kinds of things without being insulting (or at least by phrasing your opinion to keep the 'insult-level' to a minimum).

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Lebell

For me, Faith is experiencial and somewhat subjective. It is also something that 'works' and by such is further validated. Paradoxically, it cannot be measured or analyzed as we are wont to do in the west.

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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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pinkie

Well said Lebell, I couldn't agree more.

Master_Shake

I don't think it's just you, that's what faith is, and that's why it's so dangerous.

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You know something, I don't think the sun even... exists... in this place. 'Cause I've been up for hours, and hours, and hours, and the night never ends here.

martinguerre

And with Godwin's Law, I declare this discussion done.

Thanks for playing, everybody. Just remember, hyperbolic references to National Socialism are not your friend.

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

fhqwhgads

Faith is not inherently good or evil, any more than science is. How someone uses faith is what makes it "dangerous", much like how science can be used for "dangerous" means. Faith can be used as a reason for genocide, and faith can be used as a reason to devote your life to feeding the hungry. Science, in the same token, can be used to invent new ways to kill people, and it can also be used to discover new medicines to keep people alive.

If I hand a man a hammer, and that man uses it to bash someone in the head, do we blame the hammer? Do we say that the hammer is evil and dangerous? Do we blame the carpenter's union that the man is a member of? The hammer, in the hands of a madman, is a dangerous weapon. In the hands of a responsible, caring human, that same hammer could be used to build shelters for the underprivleged. The hammer, itself, is not good or evil. It's how the hammer is used.

Master_Shake

Of course not. But if you hand a person a religious system that teaches that women should be subservient to men, gays should be killed, blacks should be slaves and it's all right to molest children then yes, the religion is evil and dangerous (of course assuming that those are bad things).

Hammers and science are tools and methods of doing things or acquiring information. Religion is an end-result statement of the way you should live your life based on the written word of men who have been dead for 2000 years.

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You know something, I don't think the sun even... exists... in this place. 'Cause I've been up for hours, and hours, and hours, and the night never ends here.

fhqwhgads

I've been attending my church for over 15 years, and I've never been taught any of those things.

EDIT: I thought this was a discussion of faith, not the religious systems in place. I'm talking about the hammer, while you're talking about the carpenter's union. Apples and oranges. Now I understand why I stopped reading this forum.
Good day, sir.

asaris

Yes, yes I do. The notion that all men/people/whatever were created equal comes from Christianity and nowhere else. Every society, from the Greek to the Viking to the Indian to the Chinese, had some sort of caste system, and more than that, never challenged or question the idea that people were inherently unequal. I'm not saying we've always practiced what we preach, but what we preach has had an effect.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

cyrnel

Eh? Greek democracies (ala polis) date from ~500BC. These are the ones we know about.

Arguments about all society's good originating with Christianity remind me of Chekov. "Everything was invented in Russia!"

Common sense says the earliest hominid tribes needed some form of behavior standard to maintain their cohesion and the advantages of a community. Soon after the first thunderstorm sent tribespeople running for caves, Chief Oomba appointed the mumbling guy with funny hair as community shaman, explainer of all weird things. Consider the stability and advantages this provides a primitive society and its power structure. We've grown in wisdom and variety but the mystical remains a valued explanation to those overwhelmed by complexity.

qweds

Faith is, one might think, a rational response to an irrational revelation.

We cannot, I think, rationalize the particular valididty of anything as an object of faith, we can, at least partially, rationalize the need for faith.

When speaking of faith it is, as others have mentioned, important to keep seperate the social church from individual faith. (in God or something likewise) By that I only mean that the failure of the institutional church to better the lot of mankind is not a failure of faith per se, but a failure of men to overcome greed and desire for power.

Much as communist russia didn't disprove communism per se, it disproved a tyrannical 'dictatorship of the proletariat' -- for all anyone knows communism may still be the way.

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tim(mah)

Drayab

God is something that is undetectable by any experiement and more or less ruled out of science from the beginning. Science is a natural study and God is supernatural by definition. Therefore, I think that faith in God's existence is irrational. At the very least the initial 'leap of faith' has to be an irrational move.

Well, a lot of value is placed on rationality in our society, so why would people do something irrational? I think people do it (often subconciously) because it gives them purpose and because it makes the world seem less cold.

I don't think it's very unlike how I convince myself that I have free will. I have a gut feeling that I have free will, and life seems kind of pointless without it. So, I tell myself, 'I can stop worrying about free will and just believe that I've got it.' Afterall, everybody knows what a quagmire it is to get free will out of a natural perspective on the world, but let's not go there in this thread. Suffice it to say that when I think about it, I have a hard time convincing myself in a rational way that I have free will.

So why have faith? Have faith if life sucks without it. I'm sure that's not what a lot of people who want to hear a 'case for faith' would like to hear, but that's my answer. People are looking for a concrete, rational reason to have faith, but I think that's asking for something inherently impossible. I think a lot of people have spent time trying to think God into existence, but they are usually just playing word games. Besides, just because you can make a logical argument for something's existence doesn't mean it actually exists. You can't think something into existence. If you want to prove something exists, you've got to detect it, and in God's case it has been ruled out from the beginning. Whatever new experiements we do, we will always describe the data with a theory that does not include God.

Have faith if it makes your life better. Perhaps God will reward your devotion when you're dead. Then again maybe he won't. Even if he doesn't then at least you did everything you could to make this life as good as it can be. I guess my argument is kind of like Pascal's wager.

asaris

First, I never said all of society's goods originating with Christianity. That would be an absurd claim, and I try not to make absurd claims. Second, there is a huge difference between the Greek democracies and modern democracies, the first being that the Greek democracies weren't democracies. They were oligarchies; rule by a single class (land-owning males) over the others. This, in itself, doesn't save my claim. After all, many modern democracies started out the same way. But another difference is in the rhetoric. From the beginning, modern democracies proclaimed the rights of all people, and this led relatively quickly to all people having, at least on paper, the same right. Think about it this way -- in the US, it only took 150 years for all citizens to have the vote (again, at least on paper), and only 200 for more or less equal rights for all to be inaugurated. Not only did this never happen in a Greek 'democracy', there was nowhere even the slightest hint from any side that slaves or women should have the vote. That's a huge difference. At the beginning of modern democracy, it may have been unequal, but there was a nascent equality in principle that has led towards an increasing recognition of 'human rights'. And this equality in principle of all people comes from scripture, and, I'm maintaining, nowhere else.

Why nowhere else? Well, it's really pretty obvious that the statement "all people are equal" is false, or at best meaningless. Are you as good as me at math? Am I as good as you at singing? And how would we ever add up all these things, properly weighted, to find that we are, at the end of it, equal? But Christianity teaches that "In Christ there is no slave nor free, no male nor female [...] for all are one in Christ Jesus."

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche