A question for all religious believers -- why is your religion more true than any other?

[Quintessence]

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you with "private party". It was not meant literally...

So your religious truth is that reality/nature/universe and its various aspects are sacred/gods/divine. You actually have faith in this. You just don't teach anyone (other than yourself). So your religion is actually a religion (not just folklore).

I don't typically use a term like "faith" to describe how I got to where I'm at, but for some purposes it suffices. No worries about offense - but I did think it was weird to phrase it the way you did haha. There is something to using a more light-hearted and jubilant word. Rituals are only sometimes somber and serious affairs - the Druid order I joined years back definitely appreciates good humor and fun. It's actually interesting to think about the subtext and comparisons between terms like "party" and "celebration" and "ritual" and where those do or don't overlap. Could be its own thread topic.

 

[MikeF]

The concept of thought styles in science has been developed by Ludwik Fleck (1979). Fleck claims, and we agree, that a thought style shared by members of a "thought collective" determines the formulation of every concept that underlies observation and description. "If we define the `thought collective' as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the special `carrier' for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style" (p. 39).​

​

Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, The Origins of Sex, p. 5.​

Margulis and Sagan quote Ludwik Fleck (who sounds much like Thomas Kuhn, and Kuhn does the foreword to Fleck's book) concerning the fact that a "thought collective" is a particular community of persons, say atheist, humanist, religious folk, who guard their thoughts and beliefs by engaging in a "collective" who are like-minded thinkers working to guard and construct the orthodoxy erected as their particular "thought style."

Writing in 1935, Fleck recognizes that once "a structurally complete and closed system of opinions consisting of many details and relations has been formed, it offers enduring resistance to anything that contradicts it.". . he asserts that one is hardly even aware of the prevailing thought style in which one is operating. Although scientific thought styles should be more open than, say, religious ones, the dominant thought style . . . "almost always exerts an absolutely compulsive force upon [an individual's] thinking . . . with which it is not possible to be at variance (p. 41). . . Words which formerly were simple terms become slogans; sentence which once were simple statements become calls to battle."​

​

Ibid.​

I have a particular affinity with Fleck's concept since though I am myself a bible-toting Christian, many of my best ideas come from atheists and Jews. I quote the likes of Richard Dawkins, or Daniel Dennett, not (mostly) to demean them, but to show the brilliance of their ideas both within the confines of their own "thought collective," but also to argue that their ideas can apply equally well, or in many case more so, within the confines of my Christian "thought style." Ditto Judaism. Jews here rarely debate me since I too often agree with them and their scriptures. There can be no "calls to battle," when one's interlocutor agrees with you for the most part. Where's the fun in that?


John

Is there really an atheist thought collective? There certainly wasn't when I was growing up. I didn't go to atheist church and Sunday school. I was not imbued with atheistic slogan on the currency of my country. School didn't let out for atheistic holidays. My liberal arts college didn't have a requirement to take course credits in atheism, religion yes, but not atheism. Courts of law did not require one to be sworn in on atheistic scripture (or would it be manifesto?)

I really do not see non-belief in theism fitting into this "thought collective" model.

 

[Truthseeker]

33 But seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

When I consider this verse it makes sense to me. Well, not quite. Things happen to righteous people that are not a happy occurrence. It does help to be righteous, but that doesn't cover everything that may happen.

 

[muhammad_isa]

That is the whole point: if you are careful about planning for the future, you have much less reason to worry about it..

..and if you think that there might be a life hereafter, then it also applies.
There must be a balance, as it shouldn't be just about "me me me".

 

[☆Dreamwind☆]

I don't believe my faith is better then any others. I don't believe in one spiritual, note I say spiritual and not religious, truth above all others. There's many paths a person can take throughout their life. Why some people hafta stamp their feet like children and try to bully others into their path is, quite frankly beyond me? Its annoying and pointless.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

..and if you think that there might be a life hereafter, then it also applies.
There must be a balance, as it shouldn't be just about "me me me".

But since I don't think there's a "life hereafter," never mind. To me, it makes zero sense to suppose that a mere human anaesthesiologist can make "me" disappear so far that my body can be cut open without my knowledge, but that death itself couldn't.

And yet still, I've never met the atheist who didn't have that balance, and thought of nothing but "me, me, me." Is it ONLY the notion that there might be rewards and/or punishments that prevents YOU from avoiding that solipsism?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

When I consider this verse it makes sense to me. Well, not quite. Things happen to righteous people that are not a happy occurrence. It does help to be righteous, but that doesn't cover everything that may happen.

Many righteous suffer. Many unrighteous do very nicely, thank you very much. The verse might seem to make sense to some, but it is not reflective of what happens in the real world. More wishful thinking than anything, in my view.

 

[John D. Brey]

Is there really an atheist thought collective? There certainly wasn't when I was growing up. I didn't go to atheist church and Sunday school. I was not imbued with atheistic slogan on the currency of my country.

Having read Fleck's book, I'd say he's not using the term "thought collective" as though to become a member you must join a club or church. In the foreword to Fleck's book Thomas Kuhn says:

These and many other phrases in the book indicate that the effects of participation in a thought collective are somehow categorical or a priori. What the thought collective supplies its members is somehow like the Kantian categories, prerequisite to any thought at all.​

​

Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Kindle Edition.​

In this sense, an atheist doesn't necessarily have to be taught that there's no God, as a sort of initiation into that thought-collective. It's probably most often the default, or a priori, idea in their brain, or mind, and thus comes prepackaged in an epistemological sense. For these kinds of in-born atheists, the idea of God is something that would have to be proven to them beyond a shadow of a doubt and to such an extent that they might be willing to forego their in-born, default belief (there is no God), in order to join a new and initially absurd thought-collective (theists).

School didn't let out for atheistic holidays. My liberal arts college didn't have a requirement to take course credits in atheism, religion yes, but not atheism. Courts of law did not require one to be sworn in on atheistic scripture (or would it be manifesto?)

Your statement is fascinating in that it points to the the fact that there's a real sense in which atheism is, or should be, the default status of every natural born brain. In the intro to Jeff Hawkins' recent book, One Thousand Brains, Richard Dawkins points out that the "reptile brain," the original animal brain prior to the evolution of the huge cerebral cortex in human mammals, atheism was universal. There was nothing like belief in a God until the evolution of modern man. In this sense, atheism is natural. It's the default epistemological status of every creature that's ever existed up until very recently in cosmic time such that today's atheist are part of an enormous thought-collective made up of the lions share of all thought that has ever occurred.

I really do not see non-belief in theism fitting into this "thought collective" model.

Fleck says that the thought-style of the default thought-collective, ". . . almost always exerts an absolutely compulsive force upon thinking . . . with which it is not possible to be at variance" (Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, p. 41).

Nevertheless, your statement is more valuable in its justification of what was said earlier: that atheism isn't considered a thought-collective that requires serious thought since it's the default style of thinking by no fault of the atheist. In this sense theism is newfangled in that though it makes up a large percentage of human thinking today, even having overtaking atheism for a spell, in cosmic time it's a thought-collective whose existence is like a mere twinkling of an eye. The Bible even states that New Testament theists will disappear just as quickly as they appeared, that is to say in the twinkling of an eye (1 Cor. 15:52).

John

 

[Maninthemiddle]

It does seem to me that all of the religious people I know accept that their creed, their religion's essential beliefs, are correct, while all others -- because they obviously don't agree with the central tenets of their sect, must be somehow lacking.

As a non-believer in any religion, I am curious how it is, what evidence, what logic, leads you to suppose that your particular religion/denomination/sect got it right, while the others did not.

This thread is meant to be a great opportunity for believers of all kinds to engage -- to write apologetics in defense of their beliefs. I'm hoping to see significant essays!

Why is your belief as a non believer the way

 

[John D. Brey]

First, I am not remotely convinced that Jesus actually said everything that is attributed to him. The writers of the Gospels wrote quite some time after Jesus was dead. If I asked you to quote, verbatim, a speech of some length that you heard 10, 20 or even 50 years ago, I have very little confidence that you could do it. As someone who has acted, I can tell you how hard it is to correctly remember something that you rehearsed for many weeks, and performed for perhaps longer, after even a few years. To think that the disciples could remember so much from a period of 1-3 years, 35 to 80 years after his death is, to me, a tad hard to swallow.

I think you're imputing your modern biases on a completely different epoch. In the first century most people were illiterate so far as the written word is concerned. At that time there were "oral-traditions" passed down through members of society who had a gift for memory (see, Birger Gerhardsson's Memory & Manuscript). In fact, the "oral-tradition" functioned much like what today is called "natural selection." Persons would gather in groups while a number of persons recited the words of Jesus as they remembered them. Each recitation would be compared with others until the one most persons remembered as correct was "selected" (naturally) as the recitation most fit to survive.

As any grammatologist will tell you, in the ancient world, the written word was considered the dead letter. People trusted the word of mouth, particularly a well-established oral-tradition, more than they trusted a written text they were unfamiliar with concerning the writer or the tradition it was recording. The spoken word was alive ---like a pastor reading the Bible for a congregation while giving his concurrent interpretation --live, real time, rather than someone just reading the Bible for themselves.

The Talmud and the Gospels were living oral-traditions. They were (both of them) written down only because the living carriers of the tradition (those who recited the tradition daily or weekly) were all dying off such that the necessary evil of the written word was used to archive what up till that point was a living, breathed, tradition.

Paul's letters almost never repeat the tradition recorded in the Gospels. Paul's letters are commentary on the oral tradition that was authoritative and expansive in his day. He wrote his letters just a few decades after the events in question such that the events weren't in question. The written Gospels were written after Paul's letters which are commentary on the oral-tradition spreading throughout the Roman world mouth-to-ear-to-mouth like a wild-fire.

As I've frequently noted, the atheist physicist Frank Tipler got interested in God when he and John Barrows wrote, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. While writing that book, he realized physics almost guaranteed a Creator such that he started studying Jewish and Christian scriptures (he is himself Jewish). After serious study for a few years he claimed that as a scientist he couldn't accept the ideas in the Gospels unless there was more proof that they were eyewitness accounts. The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg took Tipler up on the challenge and the two men studied together for a time, Pannenberg attempting to show the scientist Tipler that the Gospels were in fact eye-witness accounts of the events.

Today Tipler is a Christian and has written a book attempting to prove the miracles in the Gospels using his scientific expertise (The Physics of Christianity).




John

 

[Dao Hao Now]

Why is your belief as a non believer the way

He specified that he doesn’t hold a religious belief. (i.e. is not convinced of any of them)

The question is for those that are convinced in a particular religion…..
Why are they convinced (believe) in the religion they have adopted, and not convinced (do not believe) in those they have not adopted.

What lead them to be convinced by their religion and not convinced in another religion?

He distinctly expressed this as a matter of curiosity.

 

[muhammad_isa]

But since I don't think there's a "life hereafter," never mind..

..but you don't know that .. you just "think" so.

Is it ONLY the notion that there might be rewards and/or punishments that prevents YOU from avoiding that solipsism?

Perhaps you can enlighten us, as to why believers don't have "hearts", in the same way as atheists?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Why is your belief as a non believer the way

Where did I say it was? I made some observations -- and then asked a question, without offering an opinion of my own.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

The spoken word was alive ---

While I agree with you to an extent about the "oral tradition," do not forget this simple fact -- what is alive and reproduces will evolve. Try comparing any number of Shakespeare folios and quartos, and see if you can determine how today's editors decide what each play actually should look like.

I say this as a huge lover of Shakespeare -- I am willing to bet they actually bear less resemblance to what audiences at the Globe actually heard back in the day than we mostly suppose.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

But since I don't think there's a "life hereafter," never mind. To me, it makes zero sense to suppose that a mere human anaesthesiologist can make "me" disappear so far that my body can be cut open without my knowledge, but that death itself couldn't.

And yet still, I've never met the atheist who didn't have that balance, and thought of nothing but "me, me, me." Is it ONLY the notion that there might be rewards and/or punishments that prevents YOU from avoiding that solipsism?

..but you don't know that .. you just "think" so.


Perhaps you can enlighten us, as to why believers don't have "hearts", in the same way as atheists?

That is true, but it is equally true of those who "think" there is an afterlife. They don't know it because they can't demonstrate in any way known to us.

And I did not even hint that believers had less "heart" than atheists. I asked a question -- go back and look at the bolded sentence.

 

[muhammad_isa]

And I did not even hint that believers had less "heart" than atheists. I asked a question -- go back and look at the bolded sentence.

A loaded question that implies as much, imo.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

A loaded question that implies as much, imo.

No, it is not. You could just as easily say "I would be good without hope of eternal reward or threat of eternal punishment because that is who I am -- my religion has nothing to do with it."

I can say that.

So the question really is all about who you are. Would you do right because you want to, or if you lost your hope of reward and fear of punishment, would you do whatever the heck you wanted, regardless of right or wrong?

 

[DNB]

It seems like you accuse everyone (both non-religious AND religious) of being insincere. I think you have good insights on many things but it gets annoying after awhile when you do this. We're not insincere we're just trying to learn and understand others' views. I for one think @Evangelicalhumanist 's thread is a brilliant idea and am looking forward to reading the responses.

Yes, he's extremely obnoxious

 

[loverofhumanity]

It does seem to me that all of the religious people I know accept that their creed, their religion's essential beliefs, are correct, while all others -- because they obviously don't agree with the central tenets of their sect, must be somehow lacking.

As a non-believer in any religion, I am curious how it is, what evidence, what logic, leads you to suppose that your particular religion/denomination/sect got it right, while the others did not.

This thread is meant to be a great opportunity for believers of all kinds to engage -- to write apologetics in defense of their beliefs. I'm hoping to see significant essays!

My religion is not better, more superior or truer than other religions.

 

[ADigitalArtist]

One of the first and most central tenets of my religion is that a most optimal, 'truest' path, the truest essence of what it's like to experience the Dao, cannot be written or spoken. Not because humans are imperfect (or at least any moreso than anything else) but because our experiences, ability to collect and interpret data, and apply what we've learned will be unique for all individuals. So my path categorically cannot be someone else's path.

Are there aspects of my religion that might help others? Probably. I'm pretty passionate about spirituality being a holistic consideration of mental, physical, emotional and even social health.

But is my path the end all and be all of spirituality? Of course not. At the end of the day my religion is built by and for my experience, not someone else's.