Windwalker, The truth is that you are assuming and have nothing to show which suggests that those who believe do not apply a sharp and critical eye regarding all things religious and unreligious.
You are assuming my thoughts here and are incorrect about them. You seem to largely miss the contexts and the point of what I was saying overall. I'll see if I can't shed a little more light on this in the rest of my response.
What you have wrote will neither support or even help examine a faith.
It may not for you in the context of how you hold your faith. And that goes to my point about what atheism brings to the table. There are other, larger contexts that I'm examining, and what I say in fact has a considerable substance and support to it, and it bears directly on questions of faith.
Cold hard facts about religions and debates which discuss these issues are what arrive at an intellectual and intelligent outcome.
To a certain extent, yes. To another extent, no. Arguing back and forth who has the right idea is a very myopic view, essentially the flip side of the same coin. Should you wear a black hat during prayer, or a white hat, or no hat, are all part of the same
mindset.
What I am talking about is challenging the whole mindset, to cause one to reexamine the very questions themselves, to examine the nature of the questions, and to examine how we are perceiving things in the first place. It's about a shift in contexts. It's here, in that action that stages of growth take leaps forward. This is the context I'm talking about in the OP.
But the truth is we live by faith everyday whether religious or not.
We got to be at night expecting the sun to rise tomorrow and the world still to exist.
I don't consider that "faith" in the sense of what faith is in a religious context. Religious faith is much more than just having 'faith' your car will start in the morning. The very object of religious faith has to do with questions of Ultimate Reality, what that is and means to us, how we relate to that in ourselves, and so forth.
This other stuff about 'faith the sun will rise' trivializes what religious faith is and misses the point of it. However, for many maybe that's what it is for them, which then in that case the atheist rightly would say you better place that 'faith' in something that has empirical support, such as a the common pattern of sunrise and sunsets anyone can observe.
Religion does not exist because atheism exists, neither does it support it.
You could say death does not support life, yet understood another way, without death life would not exist. It is because of death, life continues. Consider that in the context of this thread. Can you not say, "Thank God for death," because without dying there would be no new life? Isn't that somewhat the same? If it we were not casting off the old, how could there be the new? Isn't this what atheism helps us do? Casting off the old?
What were Jesus' words about putting new wine in old wineskins?
Truth is the best way forward impacted with sincerity and honesty.
No argument. But when we malign and deny our critics, and don't listen to them with sincerity and honesty, can we truly claim to be interested in truth?
It is the lack of answers outside the truths we believe we have which makes faith a reality and God the creator.
I'm not sure I track exactly with your reasoning here. I hope you're not calling filling in the blanks of current knowledge with religious answers is what is called faith. I don't consider that faith at all, actually. God of the gaps, is just promissory notes for current religious beliefs. That's not faith, that's wishful thinking.
Faith allows beliefs to change. Beliefs that will not change is not faith, but rather fear.
Shot in the foot... How can two opposites both be right?
First of all, there is in reality a continuation of a line between polar opposites. Most everything actually exists on that line within that spectrum somewhere. Everything is part of something else, so in reality atheism and theism are part of that same line, and their questions and truth fall somewhere on that line, and not so cleanly as 'absolute' opposites. That's like saying the north pole of a magnet is not a magnet because it's not the south pole. Both atheism and theism are perceptions of religious truth, dealing with questions of ultimate reality. Both deal with the same thing. Right hand and left hand are not opposite in the sense they are not connected to the same body. There are the same, just functioning differently towards the benefit of the whole.
Secondly, Thesis and antithesis are 'opposites', but all that is simply creating the the tension that gives rise to the third thing - synthesis. Reality is not so much a binary system, but rather a ternary system in this sense. It is that
dynamic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis that gives rise to creation itself. In reality that 'synthesis' is not a blending together of the two, but rather an
emergence of novelty; something new that is its own thing that includes elements of the previous reality, but transcends both with something new that hadn't existed previously, nor can be reduced down to what it emerged from.
So now, in this understanding, you can start to see what I mean by saying, "Thank God for atheism", is that because of this necessary tension of thesis and antithesis, growth can happen. Out with the old, in with the new. God is dead, long live God. "You cannot put new wine in old wineskins, if you do the skins will burst and the wine will run out."
Light and Darkness only show both exist in the absence of each other.
Without dark, there would be no light. Without light, there would be no dark. These are things we define as truths by placing boundaries around them. These are dualistic constructions based on our perceptions. In a dualistic reality, all things are defined as "this and not that", but there are problems inherent in dividing up reality this way.
There is also a nondual reality, where these ways of perceiving are held by the mind differently. I won't get into that here, but the point being there are problems in assuming light and dark are independent "things" in and of themselves. They aren't. Neither exist without the other.
God exists outside, time and space.
If this is exclusively truth, that God exists "outside" anything at all, including time and space, then this God is not infinite. There is a boundary around God, a limit, a wall, a barrier, a stopping point. Infinity is boundless, limitless, without beginning or end. In my way of seeing and relating to God, God is both wholly transcendent, and wholly immanent, both before and beyond time and space, and fully present in time and space. There is no separation between the Transcendent God, and Creation itself. There can be none and God remain God.
To you I'll assume you see this as impossible because you see things in terms of polar opposites, that God can't be both, that God must be one or the other. Either theism is true, or Pantheism is true, but they can't be both. Either theism is true or atheism is true, but both can't be true.
One thing to note here that may help. When you are talking about Ultimate Reality, or God, anytime you begin to talk about that in a dualistic context, using words that put boundaries around things turning them into objects, this will begin to fall apart and break down in mutually exclusive contradictions.
The mind cannot define God without introducing direct contradictions into it. However, God can be held
paradoxically. These inherent paradoxes at this level are
unavoidable, but they CAN in fact be held unproblematically. This now is the nature of nondual reality in human experience. God can be understood to both exist and not exist, as questions of theism versus atheism are rendered moot at this point. God is seen within paradox. All other expressions of God, either through theism or atheism are partial views of Ultimate Truth.
I don't expect you'll get what I'm saying here at this point. It is understandably bewildering to us. But who says God is easy to understand, except those who haven't begun to yet.
Man is limited to his own thoughts, intelligence and they are limited to the things he knows.
Then he should quit claiming to know what God is, but rather instead explore beyond the limits of what we currently think we know to be true.
In God man is not limited to his flesh and the physical world he is made alive to the Spiritual elements of himself and the creative presence and knowledge of God.
I don't disagree with this. However, this does not mean you magically understand truth because you claim some prophet spoke words from God. Being spiritual does not mean magic knowledge. It is in
direct experience of God in yourself, that you begin to see that you really don't know anything at all about God.
To advance knowledge of God requires being able to know the Spiritual things of ourselves.
There is only one way that happens, and that is direct experience. Reading 'about' God has certain value, but if you have nothing more than that, at best you have thoughts about God and not a direct knowledge of what God is and how that relates to you. Religion all too often is about concepts and beliefs, which is not the same thing as direct, firsthand experience. Reading about bike riding is not the same as bike riding itself.
Spirit and Truth comes from God not the things of the world.
Spirit and Truth of God also come from the world. You should read the psalms.
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
All the world is God's word, spoken and heard in every gust of wind, ever sound of the birds, or children, or people walking the streets. It's only a matter of hearing and seeing.
When the darkness comes it blinds the soul to the things which cannot be seen but are nevertheless still there.
Yes indeed. Which is why we need others to challenge us to see beyond our ideas of what we have constructed about God in order to see God. Thank God for atheism! We can't see God when we are married to our beliefs about God.
To know God we have to use the Spiritual light which gives us sight of the things unseen but are still real hidden only from the Spiritually blind and dead.
And the religious in fact can be both Spiritually blind and dead because they substitute their beliefs for actual experience of God. Thank God for atheism to get them to maybe question these beliefs that may be standing in the way for them at this point in their growth. How can you see God when you place your religious beliefs in front of God?
