With apologies I'll rephrase the question. Do we care what we believe about God? And Why?
At last count [Pew Research] there were 45,000 competing Christian denominations, not to mention the contradiction of three different mono-theisms, with their own cracks, divisions and subcultures, all in...
I would agree that science provides an exceptionally solid model for the scrutiny of truth claims, which existing religious ideas have yet to counter. But what is rarely discussed is that there is much within the scriptural record to suggest that the teaching Christ revealed two thousand years...
Ask who? But for anyone who would go strait to the source of all Enlightenment, here is a definition worthy of further investigation:
"Where the reality of God responds directly to an act of 'perfect faith' with a direct, individual intervention into the natural world, 'raising' up and infusing...
I have to agree with your suspicion. A path to true Enlightenment does not exist from any of the traditions that would pretend otherwise. They are only self deceptions being sold to the gullible. But such aspiration is itself both valuable and important to maintain and to guard carefully. It...
Theism comes with so many serious logical problems it is difficult to know where to begin. Given the limitations of reason and what goes for 'logic' depending upon what rules of philosophy one uses, "It is quite obvious that there is no end to this conundrum," with a single exception, discovery...
"because actions can be observed by their effects upon other things." and 'effects' can represent direct evidence, also called proof.
If the living, invisible God, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent within his own
character and existence wishes to demonstrate his being perfectly and...
"we would have a simple-to-use, cross-cultural, internal moral guidance system. It's very likely that conscience is exactly that."
I have to agree completely. Yet there must be something missing necessarily to make conscience more, informed, potent and with more integrity than it is. That would...
I find the most merit it the last paragraph: "If you knew you were personally responsible because of your beliefs, would you change to avoid world wide destruction?" And knowingly or not we are all part of the problem.
Self evidently, the collection of religious ideas and claims that make up...
My default is Dualism. Though no longer fashionable, and probably yet to be understood, but my assumption may be easier to explain via the idea of aspiration or utopianism. As a species we appear to be able to 'dream' of a more rational, more just, a greener and peaceful planet but are unable to...
I did view the video. But for a start I would deny that 'pure rationality' is even possible for a human nature that comes with 'reason' conflicted and corrupted with vast collections of bias and prejudice of both cultural and religious origin, in the attempt to secure and sustain a sense of...
This is where language gets slippery. And there are certainly hard and soft skeptics as there are hard and soft atheists. Which ever on might be, there is no alternative but to hold to some conception of knowledge. And that ground is shifting all the time. An atheist that holds to scientific...
So what is it that attracts people to the spiritual to begin with?
So what is it that attracts people to the spiritual to begin with? In a word, Aspirations. Whether those aspirations provide for an authentic 'spiritual' encounter remains open to question. It's back to definitions. With...
I have always considered 'belief by itself' to be intellectually and spiritually disingenuous if not outright dishonest. That any religious belief, of any tradition, does not lead directly to a distinct experience of transcendent power is the PROOF that has eluded religious claims and tradition...
The 'events' of two thousand years ago remain mostly a mystery and the theological narrative of tradition no more than self serving, institutionalized myth. The question is how to know what, if anything about Jesus has relevance and what does not. The means to sort out that mess may be at hand...
Whatever notions of idealism a people, culture or nation have built upon, whatever the sum of human knowledge, achievement and understanding, whatever cultural veneer arts contribute or religious claims pretend the world is none the better. And what choices exist between any political...
No, a street artist in London did that for me, in oils, on a 3 by 5 inch piece of board more than twenty five years ago, for an embarrassing small sum. Don't even remember his name. I found it only recently when packing up to move house. My hair and beard have gone rather grey since then! Glad...
For a start I can't call it 'my' particular interpretation. And I can't tell you if it is correct/true or not, at least not at the moment. For I am still TESTING the first wholly new interpretation, for two thousand years, of the moral teaching of Christ. And what science and religion, not to...
In one paper I recently read, there were counted more than three hundred direct references to and warnings against false teaching among the scriptural record. Even more counting indirect ones. I have always wondered how so much warning could exist without also having the means to recognize and...