Religion Thread 2: Why do you believe what you do?

[Phoenix Dark]

faith itself is not a fallacious concept -- we are not omniscient creatures. putting one foot in front of the other every day are little acts of faith: faith that the ground is there as our eyes perceive it, faith that there are no hazards or pitfalls that could kill us. faith is a necessary transactional element of consciousness and our exceedingly finite capacity to know and experience our world as our limited senses permit. it is not a huge cognitive leap from the little faiths that move us through our day to the big ones of religion.

I am not ruling out the existence of faith in our day to day lives but I think you are magnifying it a bit too much.

What you are talking about is also called inductive and deductive reasoning. for example:
Premise: The sun has risen in the east every morning up until now.
Conclusion: The sun will also rise in the east tomorrow.

The same can be said about taking footsteps, you are not being blind folded and pushed down a step of stairs, your decisions are educated and come from previous observations and trials, you have learned to do this through observations, cause and effect reasoning and comparative reasoning among other kinds of reasoning.

You see others do it when you are a kid, you attempt practicing it when your legs are strong enough to hold your weight, and most importantly you see the evidence and the results, something that you don't do when it comes to faith in a God.

Faith might sound a little bit more poetic but its not faith that makes us walk and put one foot in front of the other, its our reasoning abilities combined with the necessity and the reward of doing so.

you can never know that your next step will not be your last -- that the ground will NOT dissolve underfoot. you can be assured of it, of course, but that is faith: assurance, not perfect certainty.

faith is reasoning based on faulty or imperfect data, interpreted to impart a sense of security around the immediately unknowable. what we experience -- the data we accumulate through living -- will always be imperfect and flawed, because it is derived through our limited senses and perceptions, as well as our limited ability to interpret our own past through recall. (after all, it is very hard to scientifically test and verify for what has already occurred, and upon those precepts we attempt to move forward in our lives.)

faith is not a foolish thing when properly applied. it is an acknowledgment of the unknowable and of our own limitations, but that we must move forward nonetheless, assuming where we cannot verify. it is not foolish when it is used in a practical capacity -- to impel us forward believing that the sun will rise, we are still employed at our jobs, our family is still there, and the world has not dramatically changed from the previous day. if we lived every day under the assumption that the future *is* immediately unknowable -- which is actually is -- we would be paralyzed. faith becomes foolish when it does not examine the sum of one's senses and experience, or when it does not examine alternatives, and operates on an irrational base, such as "i am told by many people that the christian god is real, and i feel very strongly that he must be because of a specific moment in my life," which demonstrates a faith predicated not on observable patterns and/or self-knowledge (the function that corrects and averages the sum of our experience) but on social memetics and (often willful) self-ignorance.

that said, the wisdom of the atheist or the agnostic comes NOT from the reverence of the dogma that is the scientific method (despite its overall worthiness as a strategy), but from the acknowledgment that we are fundamentally limited in our senses and recall, and that our realities are tapestries fabricated by these limitations (to put a lame poetic twist on it) AND that we must be forever doubting, questioning, and exploring if we are to maximize our lives. then, knowing that we operate on faith, and understanding its role in our lives, and struggling to understand it, we can also eject it when it fails to provide a practical answer -- and the practical answer to "why do i do anything if it's all unknowable to me" is not "LOL GOD!" but "because i am what i am, and i must move forward," and to have faith in your own essential nature as not just a human being, but in your own self and the product of your eminently fallible senses and recall -- and that you continue to test and observe and doubt and question in order to COMPENSATE for the nature of faith itself and its necessity in your existence.

tl dr, but I have faith you made a decent post

[demi]

I believe what I do because I have faith.  I talk with God, and I've felt his presence.  Because I know certain things have not happened by coincidence, like creation or knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.

I believe what I do because when I started to question what my faith and God was, I was lead to a great mentor who gave me a lot of great information about Him.

Oooh if God knew the things you were gonna do... naughty boy~

[Cormacaroni]

Right, and we can see it happening with every other public figure of high morals and a high Q rating, like Gandhi or MLK. People of lesser worth try to hitch a ride and start using that mindshare for their own ends. Ultimately to me it doesn't matter whether a religion actually seriously pushes their creation myth or just allows it to stay out there and doesn't really expect people to take it seriously. As long they are not saying, fuck it, we don't know, let's get to work on FINDING OUT, they're part of the problem in my book.

(not that everyone has to be investigating the mysteries of quantum physics or I will hunt them down, far from it. You just have to not actively stand in the way of intellectual and social advancement of our whole species)

Can I take a wee guess about you Cormac? Were you raised in Northern Ireland, under a typical Catholic family, went to typical Catholic school where the priest would come in and the teacher would act as he was the second coming of Christ. There was a general consensus if something felt good it was bad, and a general consensus in the community that alien things like drugs were the worst thing in the world, more so even than protestants.
Its just a guess, I could be way off the mark.

I've gone over my background many times in similar threads so no prizes for guessing, Sherlock. Obviously it informs my views to an extent but since I've lived half of my life in Japan away from the influence of the clergy, my distaste for it is almost purely abstract at this point.

[EmCeeGrammar]

if we lived every day under the assumption that the future *is* immediately unknowable -- which is actually is -- we would be paralyzed.

Uh, I think this is just where you and I and others would differ and attribute to different personalities and outlooks.  I do live every day under that assumption, I take nothing for granted but try to stick to my goals nevertheless. Yet I don't let it phase me or find it anything to be worried about.  What happens happens and I do my best and sometimes my best ain't good enough.  For all I know tomorrow a constant in the universe will change and the world will become unraveled.  I don't need to have faith in inertia or momentum or gravity or the strong atomic force to exploit it as long as it will serve me. 

[Cormacaroni]

Don't think you're getting it, EmCee. If you truly took nothing for granted, you wouldn't be able to do much of anything. If I turn this light on, will it blow up my house? If I go outside, what if gravity isn't working and I float off into space?

I think 'faith' is dressing it up a bit though. We simply become accustomed to the status quo because we don't have brains big enough to actively think about the 99% of reality that is predictable (the taste of cornflakes, the appearance of those close to you). Dealing with the 1% that is perceivably variable (the flow of traffic on the street you're trying to cross, say) is tricky enough. We don't think about most things and 'take them for granted' not because they are unchangeable and utterly predictable, but because we just couldn't handle it if we did.

[EmCeeGrammar]

I don't follow how I have to believe actively that the lightswitch isn't going to lobotomize me or turn the Indus River into jello.  Do crabs believe the ocean is wet?  Do Gorillas believe in waking up in the morning?

I seriously don't get where you guys are coming from.

[Maximus]

Right, and we can see it happening with every other public figure of high morals and a high Q rating, like Gandhi or MLK. People of lesser worth try to hitch a ride and start using that mindshare for their own ends. Ultimately to me it doesn't matter whether a religion actually seriously pushes their creation myth or just allows it to stay out there and doesn't really expect people to take it seriously. As long they are not saying, fuck it, we don't know, let's get to work on FINDING OUT, they're part of the problem in my book.

(not that everyone has to be investigating the mysteries of quantum physics or I will hunt them down, far from it. You just have to not actively stand in the way of intellectual and social advancement of our whole species)

Can I take a wee guess about you Cormac? Were you raised in Northern Ireland, under a typical Catholic family, went to typical Catholic school where the priest would come in and the teacher would act as he was the second coming of Christ. There was a general consensus if something felt good it was bad, and a general consensus in the community that alien things like drugs were the worst thing in the world, more so even than protestants.
Its just a guess, I could be way off the mark.

I've gone over my background many times in similar threads so no prizes for guessing, Sherlock. Obviously it informs my views to an extent but since I've lived half of my life in Japan away from the influence of the clergy, my distaste for it is almost purely abstract at this point.

oooh touchy.... Sorry I haven't got time to be going over peoples post history, it was just a guess is all, you seem like the typical Northern Atheist is all. I think its a culture thing, from some of the things I mentioned above as well as the duality system of the North in general. If its not good its bad, Nationalists allowed here, Unionists allowed here, etc. And you have borrowed that mentality unknowingly which is why you have such a virile hatred of religion.
What I'm getting at is Athiests that have been brought up in Northern Ireland have a more crusading athiest preaching the good news mentality than most others I've met, and I wonder if stems from that or from other things.
Now this is speaking as someone who has border hopped to and fro to both the North and the South most of their life, and its just something I've noticed in differences from atheists in the South and other places.
Again its just a hypothesis, so I may be off the mark.

 

[Cormacaroni]

We have a keen appreciation of how religion ruins lives and societies due to direct experience of it - it's not exactly an amazing feat of anthropological analysis to deduce that we are more virulently (my virility is a separate issue ) opposed to religion than those raised in a monoculture like the South, is it? I don't preach (terrible choice of words, but I'll roll with it...) atheism to anybody other than in uh, this thread since that's what it's about.

[Maximus]

no its not; never said it was, its just something I've noticed, but I'm surprised at you blaming religion for many of the problems the North has had over the years, most Northerners would say that religion was always only one small part in all the violence at the end of the day it was from the very beginning a cultural war between two opposing cultures. Religion was the excuse of the day in most of the media though, but it was only a part of the overriding culture and often simply used as an excuse by both parties rather than a valid reason.