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Author | Topic: The Essence Of Faith & Belief. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Stile Member (Idle past 364 days) Posts: 4295 From: Ontario, Canada Joined: |
It has always astounded me how child-like our gods are. I like the progression of Gods as seen as a child's arguement: God can smash you with one hand! (My Dad's the strongest!) - Greek/Roman godsGod can destroy entire worlds! (My Dad's stronger than yours!) - OT Christian god God is omnipotent! (My Dad's the best times infinite + one!) - NT Christian god ...it just seems so... mundane-ly developed.The progression is made just in order to "be better than the other guy" and not made with any thought in mind to the consequences of such claims. Consequences such as... omnipotent gods just plain don't exist or they are laughably unworthy of being acknowledged.
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iano Member (Idle past 2261 days) Posts: 6165 From: Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Joined: |
Stile writes:
quote: I wouldn't be supposing so. If you are light and if in you there is no darkness then evil you are incapable of. Moral agents can choose between good and evil. -
quote: That's not a very good answer. I don't think it's possible to answer that question. And I think you know that. -
quote: That's best answered with a question. How many women would you deny the potential joys that come with freewill by clipping the wings of it? -
quote: In order to think I have to have the freewill you don't think is worth it. It's a kind of a non-question really. God has chosen to create us. He has chosen to place us in an environment which will provide us with the balanced conditions required in order that each make his own choice re: postion before God. Good and evil are utilised in that set up. In order to decide whether that was good or not you'd have to blow the dust off the standard of good you measure things by (cue a 1000 debates of old). And since my standard is "what God finds good I find myself warming to.." -
quote: As I say, I don't really think you can quantify that. It's truly impossible to measure. And truly impossible to wash the subjectivity off it even if you managed to tot it up. It is the way it is, is about all that can be said.
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Larni Member (Idle past 174 days) Posts: 4000 From: Liverpool Joined: |
If the evidence is sufficient to convince the individual then it is hardly faith.
My idea of faith is belief in something despite evidence to the contrary.
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Larni Member (Idle past 174 days) Posts: 4000 From: Liverpool Joined: |
In the world of RPGs we call that 'power creep'.
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Dogmafood Member Posts: 1815 From: Ontario Canada Joined: |
What about all of the suffering that is caused by the conditions of the Universe that do not involve us or our freewill. I would not lay blame at god’s foot for the malfeasance of man but what of the sick child or the victims of nature?
Indeed, are we not all victims of nature with her limited resources, fierce competition and piss poor hygiene? Are these not the roots of ‘evil’ in man?
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iano Member (Idle past 2261 days) Posts: 6165 From: Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Joined: |
Larni writes: If the evidence is sufficient to convince the individual then it is hardly faith. My idea of faith is belief in something despite evidence to the contrary. That's a Dawkinsian definition of faith (unsurprisingly). The Bibles definition of faith is, as you would expect, the polar opposite of Dawkins. Hebrews 11:1 Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen Ho hum ![]() Edited by iano, : No reason given.
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iano Member (Idle past 2261 days) Posts: 6165 From: Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Joined: |
Dogmafood writes:
quote: Like the good in man that counters his evil, nature too consists of a balance: the good in nature that provides for us and gives us much joy, is tempered and balanced by the contamination caused by mans evil. Combined, the stage is set for our being exposed to a sense of heaven and a sense of hell. The question is set: which will we chose. -
quote: I honestly don't think so. I know myself too well to blame it on something external to me. There are all kinds of sub-players in this game - but the chief villan when it comes to me is pride. My pride. And when you track back to the root of the trouble in the world it's the same thing the world over.
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Phat Member Posts: 18712 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 4.2 |
Dogmafood writes: Does it make any sense, at all, that an eternal creator would require a book to manifest itself in the world? Especially considering that 95% of the world couldnt read when the book was first compiled. ![]() Iano writes: Which is a good argument in favor of Western Christianity and the Creation/Fall/Redemption paradigm. ...I know myself too well to blame it on something external to me. There are all kinds of sub-players in this game - but the chief villan when it comes to me is pride. My pride. And when you track back to the root of the trouble in the world it's the same thing the world over. Humans have had well over 2000 years to get it all right...yet we still show the seven deadly sins to each other on a constant basis.
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nwr Member Posts: 6489 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: |
Nobody seems to have a problem with an omnipotent God who is incapable of producing square circles.
A mathematician can have square circles any time that he wants, just by using the spaces Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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Larni Member (Idle past 174 days) Posts: 4000 From: Liverpool Joined: |
Hebrews 11:1 Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen As you say, evidence. There is always some evidence to convince the person. Faith cannot exist without evidence. Basically the faithful say "x means y", never change their position and when asked why they never change their position they say "I have faith that x equals y". It's like the faithful person's brain become feature locked.
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iano Member (Idle past 2261 days) Posts: 6165 From: Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Joined: |
Larni writes:
quote: and
quote: It could be that the evidence which undergirds the faith exceeds the evidence that exists to the contrary. It would explain why..
quote: (where 'feature locked' is the only thing to do when you've found that evidence in direction A exceeds evidence in direction B.)
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iano Member (Idle past 2261 days) Posts: 6165 From: Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Joined: |
Phat writes:
quote: I dunno. Survival of the fittest (a.k.a what is fit survives) explains it equally well.
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Larni Member (Idle past 174 days) Posts: 4000 From: Liverpool Joined: |
But 'feature locked' means that further evidence is ignored because the actor has faith that even if the new evidence is persuasive it will be wrong.
To paraphrase your good self "what I believe is true because I know it is". This blinding to new contradictory evidence is the very essence of faith.
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iano Member (Idle past 2261 days) Posts: 6165 From: Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Joined: |
Phat writes
quote: It would seem I fall into neither camp. I believe the creation/fall/redemption paradigm and believe we are possession of awareness sufficient* to make a decision w.r.t. God. I don't see a conflict between redemption offered and our choosing in regard to it. *The awareness isn't a direct awareness of God. Rather, it is a veiled awareness involving our knowledge of good and evil, our sense of significance, our recoiling from death, our desiring the good even when immersing ourselves in evil, etc. -
quote: In what sense is he being taken out of the equation? Actually taken out > would mean there are no people. Taken out (in the sense that atheists take him out) > would mean people believe the kind of things atheists believe. I'm not sure I've grasped the question.
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iano Member (Idle past 2261 days) Posts: 6165 From: Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Joined: |
Larni writes
quote: No harm. Arrival at any truth necessarily means the train pulling in at the terminus. One might step out of the train and investigate the lay of the land but to suggest that there are no terminus' and that the journey is necessarily perpetual is to deny the existence of truth. Which is faith position. You could visualise it as reaching escape velocity and leaving the gravitational pull of earth behind you. Future evidence of the gravitational kind have no relevance. You'd have entered a different orbit where the old evidences don't apply any more. That said, you do know that I permit that I could be a brain in a jar and that all my knowing is but the probing of a mad scientist. Edited by iano, : No reason given.
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