What to believe, crisis of faith

Just one more point.Don't trust anyone who uses smiley faces.

Why you nihilistic, empiricistic, materialistic...edited to add the tongue-sticking-out smilie.This message has been edited by TheLiteralist, 09-16-2005 01:47 AMThis message has been edited by TheLiteralist, 09-16-2005 01:53 AM

The date of the Christmas holiday was based on the dates of pagan festivals. The date of Easter was based on the dating of the Passover.But I really don't see the harm in partially taking over pagan festivals. What is the alternative ? To ban the festivals altogether and stir up resentment for no good reason ? IIRC the Puritans banned Christmas - but it didn't stick.m

These points are in my head right now...they may or may not be helpful to consider:1) The word, Christmas, actually means "annointed service" or "annointed Ones Communion". We actually should (and occasionally do) celebrate "Christmas" many times a year without it being a designated festival.2) The Bible speaks of "spiritual water" and "spiritual light". These are not the same as physical water and observable light.

I'm going to make a plug for my first reply to you, though Ben accurately distilled it when he ref'd it earlier (thanks Ben). Maybe it'll help with a more detailed analysis of where you go once you start as human. Ben seems to be tackling (or started to tackle) the identity/nonempirical side of life, while I was trying to tackle the empirical. Whether the you (your one bit of true knowledge) is inseparable from the body you appear to have, or not, immortal, or not, is interesting to ponder but perhaps irrelevant.Isn't the more important question who you are inside? What is your character? What good is it to know that in fact your mind is not part of a body, or that it will last forever? Would that possibly change who you are inside? Why?Whereas discovering who you are ends up with a practical result you can use whether you end up being immortal, or die the next day.I'm with Ben on the agnosticism toward souls. I have pondered it, but have found no conclusion. Ben answered this already: Because it has a practical value about something specific in the empirical world. It sounds like you are using it as the alternative to a creation story so as to give you meaning. It can't.Nothing coming out of science can give you meaning. It only gives you coherent physical explanations regarding what you will experience in this world.I might add that evolution can't account for everything anyway, as that is only one theory about a specific phenomena (species diversity). There are questions regarding how life arose in the first place (science theorizes abiogenesis), as well as how the elements of the Universe arose so that life could arise (science theorizes the "big bang").Think of science as a fact checker, or a sensory organizer, in order to explore the world you experience. Do not lean on it for more than that or you will be severely disapointed.This then cycles back around to Ben's question, which mirrors a suggestion I tagged on at the end of my first post to you... if you are looking for meaning, which may entail religious exploration (for moral reason rather than clinical fact), why are you so focused on one entity all or nothing?Perhaps the Catholics had something right in adopting all of those Pagan holidays. Instead of reaching out and smashing/killing others in every case of difference, exploring those other faiths to see what could be accumulated into the their own faith.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

How do you know this? True, read the first couple of paragraphs of Ecclesiasties and find a fellow nihilist in Solomon. Life without God is meaningless. The thing is, objective (in the touch, see, feel, smell, taste sense) cannot be shown to all there is, objectively. There is something about humans which senses that this isn't all there is But nobody actually lives this way. Even the great nihilists couldn't live out the philosophy consistantly. Ravi Zacharias wrote of Nietzsche, who went mad in the end: "He compelled the philosopher to pay the full fare of his ticket to atheism and to see where it was going to let him off. Nietzsche wanted to look life square in the eye, with no God to obstruct his vision, and the picture he saw was agonising to the mind. He saw no vast mind behind the framing of the world, he heard no transcending voice giving counsel to this world, he saw no light at the end of the tunnel and he felt the loneliness of existance in it's most desolate form"John Paul Satre, the existentialist in a taped interview with his lover Simone de BeauvoirSatre: Even if one does not believe in God, there are elements of the idea of God that remain in us and that cause us to see the world with some divine aspects.S.d.B.: What for example?Sartre: That varies according to the person.S.d.B.: But for you?Sartre: As for me, I don't see myself as so much dust that has appeared in the world but as a being that was expected, prefigured, called forth. In short, as a being that could, it seems, come only from a creator; and this idea of a creating hand that created me refers me back to God. Naturally this is not a clear, exact idea that I set in motion every time I think of myself. It contradicts many of my other ideas; but it is there, floating vaguely. And when I think of myself I often think rather in this way, for want of being able to think otherwise.Satre goes on to reaffirm that God isn't necessary to him but it seems that he accepted that all can not be explained existentially. If you limit yourself only to the objective and exclude all other aspects of you then perhaps 'no evidence'. Except the notion of God seems to be the only thing to explain all the aspects of things which science is powerless to get glimpses into. It would seem apparent that God in order to create everything would be so far outside our terms of reference that we have no hope of being able to get any kind of handle on him by ourselves. Like, we can't even comment on something relatively minor like what happens to a person after death. If inability to get-to-God-under-our-own-steam was accepted, then it should be equally apparent that for man to know God, then God has to be the one to do the revealing of himself to man. The only question then is under what conditions could that be expected to occur? And whether one is interested in tackling the issue on it's terms. This isn't altogether accurate. 'Super' means above/outside the mental, which materialistically, is described a natural phenomenon (although science cannot locate the source of that inside you which says 'I am'). If supernatural can be said to operate anywhere, then it would in our spirits - if we have one. Man is without question a spiritual being. Whilst some folk would supply naturalistic reasons for why this may be their evidence is woefully weak in the face of that fact.

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Romans 10:9-10: " if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved....."

Okay, that's fair enough. But personally I don't think the argument holds up that well whoever its directed at.

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Is there life after we leave this world? Life, the exhistence in general, the BIG question, WHY ARE WE HERE? and WHAT IS OUR PURPOSE IN LIFE? or is there one?

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Our species is very smart but there are disadvantages to that.The only reason you, or anyone else has been able to ask and be troubled by such questions is because we have evolved to have these big ol' brains capable of very abstract thought. More specifically, we are capable of understanding that we are going to die.Part of humans' enormous success as a species is that we are very curious. We like to figure stuff out.But there are some questions we will never know the answer to.I think a big difference between people who need religion and people who don't is in the way individuals learn to deal with uncertainty.Nobody knows what happens when we die. Nobody knows if God or gods exist. Lots of people say they know, and all of them tell a different story, but nobody's story is any more credible than anyone else's, as they all have the same basis; faith.I can choose to accept the fact that nobody knows the answer to these questions and live with the ambiguity, or I can decide to believe in one or more of the multitude of speculative, non-evidence based answers humans have come up with over the millenia.Personally, I choose to live with the ambiguity.I prefer leaving it at "I don't know" to a belief resorted to in order to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty.Because once you pick a belief to believe without evidence, and you decide that it is The Truth, then you have closed yourself off from any information which might contradict that belief.You have stopped being open.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 09-16-2005 08:04 AM

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In an objective sense, our lives are meaningless, though we can make our own small meanings out of life as indeed we must do if we are not to go crazy.

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The meaning of a word is nothing more than how it is used.IMO if we look at human existence objectively we see the meaning. The meaning is what you see. We consume food and leave waste. We reproduce and we die. When we die (if we didn't bother with embalming) our remains provide nourishment in the soil for plant life. Our meaning is basicly the same as the rest of life on this planet.Now iano responds that life is meaningless without God, but with or without God our objective meaning doesn't really change that I see. For you are dust, And to dust you shall return. (Gen 3:19)
Although with embalming, metal coffins, and burial vaults we no longer add to the soil.Now personal or internal meaning, IMO, is what you do with your life that brings you inner peace.

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Then someone else will take my place and after a while my existence on this earth will be of no more significance then of some dog that died in a ditch.

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You really need to work on positive imagery.Actually IMO if we are embalmed, then we are less significant to the planet than the dog which completed his cycle and contributed to the continuation of living things.

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

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I'm not sure you are understanding me. It is highly possible that God will never choose to submit to your need to have Him experimentally verified.

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What probability formulae did you use to determine this? I used to be a believer, so it wouldn't be my whole life.But as I said, I do not go out of my way to try to convince others that they shouldn't believe in Zeus or Loki or Krishna, but this IS a debate board. I do not publish pamphlets and leave them at interstate rest stops, nor do I have a television show during which I beg for money to sustain my agnostic ministry, nor do I go door to door trying to convince people to have doubt in their faith.People choose quite freely to interact with me (or not) here. To debate ideas is the reason we are here.

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IF the Bible is true, though, then your doubts are wrong. You and those you have convinced will find out on the other side of life, in which case, it is too late to do anything about the matter.

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That may be true.However, IF The Buddha was correct, then all of your closeminded thinking and fear of death will not have gotten you any closer to reaching Nirvana, and possibly will have set you back a couple of steps. No, I am a participant on a debate board and people are responsible for themselves.

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Listen, you believe what you preach (i.e., "I doubt the Bible is true"), and I don't mind you preaching it. But isn't there a possibility that you are wrong?

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Sure. Just as there is a possibility that you are wrong.

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If I am wrong, what happens to those I preach to? They rot in the dirt like every other product of abiogenesis and billions of years of evolution.

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They also live a life of lies, denial, guilt, and fear.If this life is all there is, you will have influenced people to live it much less fully than they might have, and with their minds not enjoying and experiencing the here and now, but always focused on some imaginary afterlife.You could also be setting people back on their path to reach Nirvana.

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If you are wrong (AND the Bible is right), what happens to those you preach to? Possibly, they spend an eternity in hell.

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Are people responsible for themselves or should they be completely sheltered from all thoughts and ideas that just might cause them to think and struggle?

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Have you or science disproved the Bible?

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Many of the factual claims about natural phenomena mentioned in the Bible have been shown by science to be untrue.Has the Bible disproven the Buddha?I noticed that you made no comment upon my answer to your questions. I am interested in what you believe the role of doubt is for personal growth.

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What purpose does this serve for you? What if you succeed in causing people to doubt that which they originally believed? What will that accomplish for you? What will it accomplish for them?

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This message has been edited by schrafinator, 09-16-2005 08:32 AM

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Did God tell people to use the speed of light as a clock to guage the age of the universe? Is it possible that God is not confined to the laws regarding one of his creations: i.e., light, and that He can put light wherever He wants and however He wants?

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Did God tell people that isotopic ratios in rocks were indicators of the age of the earth? Is it possible that God set the ratios for some other purposes and we have misinterpretted them?

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So, is it your contention that pretty much all of the natural sciences have gotten everything wrong about the Earth and the life that lives on it? The many hundreds of thousands of scientists over the last 200 years or so, the millions and millions of observations and tests of theories are all spectacularly wrong, yet somehow scientists have been able to use all of those completely wrong conclusions to make enormous medical and technological advances that influence nearly every aspect of our lives?

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I believe the events in Genesis occurred just as it says it did, and I fail to see how science has disproved it.

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And quite a failure it is.

Basically same here, when I actually decided to compare the Creation story. Oddly enough, for many years I just kind of kept science and the Bible in totally seperate areas of my brain, and didn't ever critically examine the Bible in light of evidence until after high school.It's a good fact to break the Creation account on. Either Creation didn't literally happen the way the Bible says, or God made the universe to lie to us. Not a hard choice. Remember that string theory is a mathematical theory, and there have only been bits and peices of evidence thus far to support it. It looks great mathematically, but it's far from complete, and for many aspects we are simply not yet technologically advanced enough to test it.For those theories, like evolution, that are widely held to be highly accurate descriptions of the natural world, there is no reason to doubt, unless you have a bias towards believing in another origin story - like the Biblical Creation myth.The key with science is to remember that science is not the search for truth. It's curiosity and an attempt to describe our natural world as accurately as possible. We may never get it exactly right through science, but our theories will be damned close (or at least functionally capable of making accurate predictions).Science is like believing your own two eyes, becuase it can be confirmed any time if you can set up the experiment. Religion is a more...personal matter, and cannot be verified except through personal faith.

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Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.

Hi, Aztraph. You have asked a number of hard questions that I want to comment on.In Message 53 you asked: That is a hard question. But I think you answered it yourself in Message 67, when you wrote: That gives you a wonderful purpose in life.I think that our purpose in life is what we make it to be. I have made it my purpose to leave the world a better place than it would otherwise have been. That includes my wife and children (now adults). And it also includes my work as an educator. And even my contribution to this site is part of how I try to leave the world a better place.As for life after death -- in a sense there is. For if I leave the world in a better place, then I will live on in the memories of people who have benefitted from what I have done in my life. And I think that's the most important kind of life after death.In Message 73 you ask: I don't have any problem with that. I have a sole on each foot. But I think you were really asking about soul.Different people mean different things when they use the word "soul." But I think it really means the spirit and energy with which we live our lives. We see how biological systems are gathering energy from their environment, and using that energy to propel them forwards. But the exact way in which this produces our human consciousness is still not fully understood. It is something that is studied by cognitive scientists, and I guess I am an amateur cognitive scientist. I am confident that we will eventually understand how it all works. But even when we do understand it, we will continue to be filled with awe at its wonders.A question that is a theme of your messages, is We cannot automatically trust anyone. Trust is something that must be earned. It is not automatically given.A new store opens in my neighborhood. Can I trust that store? I cannot tell. So, initially, I shop there with caution. But, as I shop there time after time, I might find that the management always seems to be honest and fair. And because of that, my trust increases. That's an example of how trust is earned.At the moment, you really cannot trust anyone at this forum. For we are telling you different things, and contradicting one another. In a way, that's a good sign, for it means we are being honest with you and not trying to trick you by agreeing on a common story. But that doesn't help you decide who to trust. You will have to work that out for yourself.You can surely trust your own judgement. Maybe your trust in your own judgement is not complete. But you know your own failings, so you know how far you can trust your judgement. That's your starting point. From there, you can look at what people are saying, and then do some investigation of your own. Allow your trust in others to grow, based on your own judgement.You can generally trust science. You cannot automatically trust individual scientists. They can make mistakes. But there is a lot of self correction in science as an instition, and that can be the basis of trust.There are many kind, generous and thoughtful people, and some of those have probably already earned your trust.We cannot trust a person on everything. I trust my wife a great deal. But I would not trust her to climb a ladder and remove the leaves from the gutter. She trusts me to do that. Trust is always earned, limited, and subject to our own judgement on what we can trust.I hope these comments are helpful.

Very good point. You are right. I should have said, "I don't know if anyone knows the ultimate truth." I agree. Nihilism cannot be lived. It can only be theorized. I do not find this question "relatively minor" myself. The problem I have with this idea is that it seems to multiply entities unnecessarily. We know what "mind" is in the sense that we have a private experience of it (otherwise, we have no idea what it is). There is no reason not to equate mind with self. Why introduce another and mysterious concept called "spirit"?"Supernatural" means above/outside the natural. The mind might be that--unlikely that it is to me--but one could posit such a view.

That's different. I had no idea that the meaning--or purpose--of my life was to replenish the soil with the nutrients in my corpse. Now I feel meaningful. So if one is buried in such fashion, one has no meaning? What do you think of cremation? Or perhaps another option, less expensive: heavy trash day. I need to know what to do with my corpse. My goal was not to be positive but to be vividly realistic.