Do We Need Faith?

[9-10ths_Penguin]

That's what is wrong the Western world today, using religion as a hobby. Religion should be people's life, and used to make the world a better place.

I think "hobby" is a fair description of religion, and not just in the West. It's an individual pursuit that someone chooses based on their passion and not for financial gain.

When religion goes beyond a hobby - e.g. when it starts to influence governments or gets imposed on people who didn't choosr it - that's when the problems begin.

 

[PureX]

The phony conflict between religion and science needs to die.

They are rival 'gods', nowadays, in that they are both perceived representations of and solutions to our profound existential unknowing. So that the rivalry is unlikely to diminish.

 

[Audie]

Yes, obviously. But I mean evidence using independent investigation fairly.

That's pretty vague as is your good or bad.
Maybe you could give an example.

 

[Audie]

They are rival 'gods', nowadays, in that they are both perceived representations of and solutions to our profound existential unknowing. So that the rivalry is unlikely to diminish.

You do understand the reason for rules against calling science a religion?

 

[PureX]

You do understand the reason for rules against calling science a religion?

Do you understand that there is no rule against calling science a religion? Especially when there are religions that are not based on deity, but rather on philosophical ideology.

Science can easily take the place of religion for people who need to believe they have the key to understanding the great existential mystery. And it's doing so for people in increasing numbers, these days.

 

[SalixIncendium]

Sounds like a miracle.

I prefer to call it a realization.

 

[wellwisher]

Original Sin.

Kind of critical to Catholic theology, and it depends on the notion that every human being who ever lived is descended from one original pair of humans who committed the "original sin."

The problem is that this just isn't how speciation works.


Here too.

But homeopathy is very much anti-science.


Please be sure to lift with your legs as you move those goalposts.

Original sin is connected to human conscious evolution and not just biological evolution based on bones and DNA; a software instead of hardware change.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil, is a metaphor for a conscious way of thinking; moral value judgment, that comes from the mind and the brain. Genesis is speaking of human conscious evolution. The formation of civilization required a new type of mind with more neural sophistication than was needed for the old hunting and migratory gathering ways. The tree of knowledge of good and evil was reduced to 10 commandments; seedling. This trees has grown into millions of laws, world wide; giant redwood.

A good analogy for this evolution of human consciousness is a domestic dog; poodle, versus a wild dog, like the wolf. Both have canine DNA. Biology may lump them that way. However, a domestic dog has a different operating system in their brains compared to a wild dog. Wild dogs are millions of years old while domestic dogs are about 30,000 year old. These two types of dogs can mate, but their brains are wired very differently. If they do mate their offspring will become feral which has an operating system closer to the wild dog.

The same was true of Adam and Eve. They were a new type of human with the same DNA, as the caveman. We ma not be able to tell by bones. But Adam and Eve had a more advanced brain and consciousness. They were the first true modern humans; new type of domesticated human. When Cain was sent away he could still breed with the pre-humans since both shared human DNA, but their offspring would be more instinctive until they were domesticated by Cain; teach them things.

Religion is the observational science behind conscious evolution. For example, in Greek mythology, the Titans came first and then the Olympians. The Titans were larger than life; mutants, strong but were also like monsters; metaphor for early modern human behavior after the polarization; children of Cain. This was superseded by a more civilized disposition; Olympians. The Olympians were still polarized into good and evil characters and tendencies. Original sin still clouded the mind making hard to see. This has now degenerated to all aspects of modern culture.

Religion helped cause this evolution of human consciousness. Say, for the sake of argument, we assume religion is all imaginary. Say as we go through life, we add this imagination stream, to our natural instinctive approach to reality. The brain will drift away from our pure instinct and will start to add some of the imaginary to our way of life. This is where civilization begins. Every innovation in science is not DNA based, since it is new or of the then future. These idea come from the imagination, synthesized at an unconscious level. These visions interact with the reality of science, until an innovative change appears. Religion was a way to organize and harness this inner power for change; main frame processing.

This topic is about original sin and that human tendency to judge some things as good and other things as evil. Atheism is a case study, via a class of humans, who can only see in black and white, with their own belief assigned white and anything that is opposite, black. This conscious tendency, that atheism cannot control is called original sin. By their own judgement, religion is a sin toward atheism and needs to be purged, as though this will heal them of their internal neural polarization. If you got rid of religion a new energy will appear to fill in the polarization. Religion by teaching original sin causes one to be self aware and try to control this neural subroutine and remain faithful and objective. Atheism cannot use this trick since anything religion is evil and needs to repressed.

The bible claims this modern tendency in the human mind was not always the case. Before that there was paradise where people were not split minded by the polarization of good and evil. That earlier time was a time of natural human instinct which was more spatial or 3-D. It could bridge the gap between each other and with nature so these were not opposed to each other, within the human mind.

From the POV of neural science, Genesis is connected to the evolution of the human ego, or the secondary center of consciousness; conscious mind. It evolved from the inner self, which was and still is the original center of the unconscious mind; connected to DNA and natural instinct. These two centers can unite or they oppose each other, with original sin connected to a path of opposition to God and nature. The Satan subroutine may now be genetically engrained, due to its self serving natural selection, based on thousands of years of this tendency. Division in modern society is from the original sin neural subroutine.

Atheism and science cannot admit the possibility of Genesis being about human conscious evolution instead of bones and DNA; shell evolution. This possibility does not feed into their inner need to polarize religion via the symbolic neural subroutine. But this is how you start to deprogram it. Religion teaches us, not always by human language, but also by the raw symbolic language of the inner self, which knows the way back to paradise.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

"Since there is so much confliction [contradictions] in religion, why not get rid of all religion?"

That isn't most antitheists' argument against religion. My reason for wanting to see organized, politicized religion declawed is that it invades the lives of those who don't want it. If every religion had the same social influence in western culture as Jainism, Sikhism, Druidism, Baha'ism, etc. - ie, none - most skeptics would never think about religion again. It's irrelevant what people believe, just how they behave informed by those beliefs. If their behavior is limited to private religion - reading holy books, attending churches and singing hymns, praying around the dinner table, and the like, who would even know they were there?

but take away good religion

As best I can tell, nothing would be lost if religion disappeared, certainly not organized, politicized religion. That the world would be better off without it is the central tenet of anti-theism. There is nothing the religions do of value that secular institutions don't do better. If you disagree, perhaps you can offer an example of something valuable that religion does for mankind that it wouldn't have without religion. Are you going to say gives hope? That can be accomplished without holy books or belief in gods. Religion fosters that dependency on itself for hope. It's explicit in Christianity - "There is only one way to escape perdition." Religion promotes strong hope for an afterlife, which it then also promises. It offers the hope of protection from above and of seeing dead loved ones again. But without promoting such dependency, people place their hope in reality and its future like any humanist. Humanists are not hopeless people. It's just that none of their hopes depend on supernaturalism to exist.

It's too bad that the same word is used for "faith" - the faith you wrote of in this post and "faith" in the sense of religion.

That's done deliberately. Every time I write about faith, such as in this thread, I need to specify that I only mean unjustified belief when I use the word. And you are correct that it's unfortunate that the exact opposite idea, justified belief, often gets the same word. The apologist will use this equivocation to conflate the two in order to present his whimsies as equal to the knowledge gained from experience and acted upon.

Everyone needs faith just to get out of bed in the morning.

That's justified belief, not religious faith (here I go again trying to tease these two apart again). A contronym is a word that has two contradictory definitions, like to dust, which means both remove dust with a rag and add dust in search of fingerprints. Faith is a contronym. One definition is unjustified belief, and another is its opposite.

People need faith in more than that the sun will come up in the morning

People don't need faith for that. That's yet another belief justified by experience (empiricism). Faith is declaring that it WON'T rise in the morning against the evidence.

We need faith in ourselves, each other, and in the magnificence of reality and all that entails and is possible.

Also not faith if there is no unjustified belief in play.

Faith is belief.

And here we go again. Nope. Belief is belief, which can be divided into justified and unjustified beliefs.

So I turn on a light switch with faith that the light will turn on. I believed I could get into college, acted on it and then got in.

If those are reasonable expectations based in prior experience - that is, if they are justified beliefs - then no faith is needed to do either. The critical thinker is the person who is sharply aware of this distinction and has an unshakeable belief that only justified beliefs are worth holding, also based in experience. His entire analytical effort is trained on making this distinction in order to identify which claims and conclusions are sound and which are not with the expectation of admitting only the former into his belief set. He does things like flick light switches and apply to universities because they increase the likelihood of a desired outcome. That's what correct beliefs can do that incorrect ones cannot.

Do these distinctions matter to the faith-based thinker?

 

[Truth in love]

I prefer to call it a realization.

If you knew what would happen without trying it out it defies basic logic. If you thought it should work and then tried it out (which is what most of us do) then you had faith before the act that gave you knowledge.

 

[Truth in love]

That isn't most antitheists' argument against religion. My reason for wanting to see organized, politicized religion declawed is that it invades the lives of those who don't want it. If every religion had the same social influence in western culture as Jainism, Sikhism, Druidism, Baha'ism, etc. - ie, none - most skeptics would never think about religion again. It's irrelevant what people believe, just how they behave informed by those beliefs. If their behavior is limited to private religion - reading holy books, attending churches and singing hymns, praying around the dinner table, and the like, who would even know they were there?



As best I can tell, nothing would be lost if religion disappeared, certainly not organized, politicized religion. That the world would be better off without it is the central tenet of anti-theism. There is nothing the religions do of value that secular institutions don't do better. If you disagree, perhaps you can offer an example of something valuable that religion does for mankind that it wouldn't have without religion. Are you going to say gives hope? That can be accomplished without holy books or belief in gods. Religion fosters that dependency on itself for hope. It's explicit in Christianity - "There is only one way to escape perdition." Religion promotes strong hope for an afterlife, which it then also promises. It offers the hope of protection from above and of seeing dead loved ones again. But without promoting such dependency, people place their hope in reality and its future like any humanist. Humanists are not hopeless people. It's just that none of their hopes depend on supernaturalism to exist.



That's done deliberately. Every time I write about faith, such as in this thread, I need to specify that I only mean unjustified belief when I use the word. And you are correct that it's unfortunate that the exact opposite idea, justified belief, often gets the same word. The apologist will use this equivocation to conflate the two in order to present his whimsies as equal to the knowledge gained from experience and acted upon.



That's justified belief, not religious faith (here I go again trying to tease these two apart again). A contronym is a word that has two contradictory definitions, like to dust, which means both remove dust with a rag and add dust in search of fingerprints. Faith is a contronym. One definition is unjustified belief, and another is its opposite.



People don't need faith for that. That's yet another belief justified by experience (empiricism). Faith is declaring that it WON'T rise in the morning against the evidence.



Also not faith if there is no unjustified belief in play.



And here we go again. Nope. Belief is belief, which can be divided into justified and unjustified beliefs.



If those are reasonable expectations based in prior experience - that is, if they are justified beliefs - then no faith is needed to do either. The critical thinker is the person who is sharply aware of this distinction and has an unshakeable belief that only justified beliefs are worth holding, also based in experience. His entire analytical effort is trained on making this distinction in order to identify which claims and conclusions are sound and which are not with the expectation of admitting only the former into his belief set. He does things like flick light switches and apply to universities because they increase the likelihood of a desired outcome. That's what correct beliefs can do that incorrect ones cannot.

Do these distinctions matter to the faith-based thinker?

You make a distention that does not have any evidence so why does it matter what label you personally want to put on something?

 

[SalixIncendium]

If you knew what would happen without trying it out it defies basic logic. If you thought it should work and then tried it out (which is what most of us do) then you had faith before the act that gave you knowledge.

Neither of these relate to a spontaneous mystical experience. I neither knew it would happen or thought it would work because I had never heard of a mystical experience or heard of anyone that had had one at the time I had my first. I was in my early teens at the time.

You would do well to do a bit of research into what a spontaneous mystical experience is before speaking on the subject.

 

[Trailblazer]

If you have genuinely good evidence there's no need for faith.

There will always be a need for 'some' faith, since God can never be seen or heard from directly.

 

[cladking]

That's justified belief, not religious faith (here I go again trying to tease these two apart again).

You'll never find a believer who doesn't believe his every belief is wholly justified. I call this the "Holier Than Thou Syndrome" and it's far more common among believers in science than believers in God. The concept that there is no God because the planet rotates revealing the sun every morning is far less supportable than the concept that God makes the sun come up in the morning. Just because science can reduce reality to experiment does not make any interpretation correct and EVERY belief is founded on assumptions. The concept that the earth is spinning has no meaning until all the terms are defined and no meaning outside metaphysics. You can not extrapolate simple facts acquired through reductionism to apply to anything beyond the rules to reduce it.

Perhaps there are no laws of nature or laws of God. Perhaps reality is unfolding in ways we can't predict because we lack both the equations and the ability to quantify most of the variables. But those suffering "Holier Than Thou Syndrome" (all of us) still see reality only in terms of our beliefs and models. Everyone can't be right but everyone can be wrong.

 

[Audie]

Do you understand that there is no rule against calling science a religion? Especially when there are religions that are not based on deity, but rather on philosophical ideology.

Science can easily take the place of religion for people who need to believe they have the key to understanding the great existential mystery. And it's doing so for people in increasing numbers, these days.

I thought there was a forum rule.

Regardless, referring to science as religion
indicates deep confusion.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

If those are reasonable expectations based in prior experience - that is, if they are justified beliefs - then no faith is needed to do either. The critical thinker is the person who is sharply aware of this distinction and has an unshakeable belief that only justified beliefs are worth holding, also based in experience. His entire analytical effort is trained on making this distinction in order to identify which claims and conclusions are sound and which are not with the expectation of admitting only the former into his belief set. He does things like flick light switches and apply to universities because they increase the likelihood of a desired outcome. That's what correct beliefs can do that incorrect ones cannot.

Do these distinctions matter to the faith-based thinker?

You make a distinction that does not have any evidence so why does it matter what label you personally want to put on something?

So, no, then, to my question. You don't make a distinction between justified and unjustified belief. It's all the same thing to you. I suspect that you're in the majority there. I also suspect that most of that majority doesn't know what a justified belief is, or what makes a belief justified. If so, I guess such people can't know why the critical thinker only values one of those.

This reminds me of the people who are unaware that there is such a thing as expertise, and that not all opinions are equal. If they are unaware that there is an alternative way of deciding what is true about the world that simply choosing what you prefer to be the case and believing that, then one assumes that everybody else is guessing as well, and my guess is as good as yours. This is why there is a Dunning-Kruger syndrome, which I think falsely describes the victims as having an overinflated sense of his own competence, when in fact he has an extreme underestimate of what is actually going on in those other minds he equates himself with. It's not that he sees himself as elevating himself to the ranks of the cognoscenti, he's unaware that there is such a thing. He's not raising himself to their level. He's lowering them to his because he does not know about this higher radically different and far more effective way of knowing.

I'm a contract bridge instructor. I'll often ask new students to rate their skill level. It's remarkable how many beginners rate themselves as intermediate or advanced. They see themselves as about halfway there in their bridge educations. This, too, is Dunning-Kruger. It's not so much about having an inflated view of one's expertise as not recognizing what can be known and is known by others.

You'll never find a believer who doesn't believe his every belief is wholly justified.

That doesn't matter to the critical thinker, who decides for himself which beliefs are justified, including the beliefs of others.

The concept that there is no God because the planet rotates revealing the sun every morning is far less supportable than the concept that God makes the sun come up in the morning.

But that's not the claim. The claim is that it takes no faith to believe that the sun will probably rise in the morning. It's a justified belief, justified by past experience seeing the sun rise.

 

[cladking]

Regardless, referring to science as religion
indicates deep confusion.

"Science" is not religion. But among those who don't understand how and why it works it is a religion and its Peers are the high Priests.

Homo omnisciencis holds ALL knowledge as beliefs and models and this applies to every Peer as well.

 

[Audie]

Original sin is connected to human conscious evolution and not just biological evolution based on bones and DNA; a software instead of hardware change.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil, is a metaphor for a conscious way of thinking; moral value judgment, that comes from the mind and the brain. Genesis is speaking of human conscious evolution. The formation of civilization required a new type of mind with more neural sophistication than was needed for the old hunting and migratory gathering ways. The tree of knowledge of good and evil was reduced to 10 commandments; seedling. This trees has grown into millions of laws, world wide; giant redwood.

A good analogy for this evolution of human consciousness is a domestic dog; poodle, versus a wild dog, like the wolf. Both have canine DNA. Biology may lump them that way. However, a domestic dog has a different operating system in their brains compared to a wild dog. Wild dogs are millions of years old while domestic dogs are about 30,000 year old. These two types of dogs can mate, but their brains are wired very differently. If they do mate their offspring will become feral which has an operating system closer to the wild dog.

The same was true of Adam and Eve. They were a new type of human with the same DNA, as the caveman. We ma not be able to tell by bones. But Adam and Eve had a more advanced brain and consciousness. They were the first true modern humans; new type of domesticated human. When Cain was sent away he could still breed with the pre-humans since both shared human DNA, but their offspring would be more instinctive until they were domesticated by Cain; teach them things.

Religion is the observational science behind conscious evolution. For example, in Greek mythology, the Titans came first and then the Olympians. The Titans were larger than life; mutants, strong but were also like monsters; metaphor for early modern human behavior after the polarization; children of Cain. This was superseded by a more civilized disposition; Olympians. The Olympians were still polarized into good and evil characters and tendencies. Original sin still clouded the mind making hard to see. This has now degenerated to all aspects of modern culture.

Religion helped cause this evolution of human consciousness. Say, for the sake of argument, we assume religion is all imaginary. Say as we go through life, we add this imagination stream, to our natural instinctive approach to reality. The brain will drift away from our pure instinct and will start to add some of the imaginary to our way of life. This is where civilization begins. Every innovation in science is not DNA based, since it is new or of the then future. These idea come from the imagination, synthesized at an unconscious level. These visions interact with the reality of science, until an innovative change appears. Religion was a way to organize and harness this inner power for change; main frame processing.

This topic is about original sin and that human tendency to judge some things as good and other things as evil. Atheism is a case study, via a class of humans, who can only see in black and white, with their own belief assigned white and anything that is opposite, black. This conscious tendency, that atheism cannot control is called original sin. By their own judgement, religion is a sin toward atheism and needs to be purged, as though this will heal them of their internal neural polarization. If you got rid of religion a new energy will appear to fill in the polarization. Religion by teaching original sin causes one to be self aware and try to control this neural subroutine and remain faithful and objective. Atheism cannot use this trick since anything religion is evil and needs to repressed.

The bible claims this modern tendency in the human mind was not always the case. Before that there was paradise where people were not split minded by the polarization of good and evil. That earlier time was a time of natural human instinct which was more spatial or 3-D. It could bridge the gap between each other and with nature so these were not opposed to each other, within the human mind.

From the POV of neural science, Genesis is connected to the evolution of the human ego, or the secondary center of consciousness; conscious mind. It evolved from the inner self, which was and still is the original center of the unconscious mind; connected to DNA and natural instinct. These two centers can unite or they oppose each other, with original sin connected to a path of opposition to God and nature. The Satan subroutine may now be genetically engrained, due to its self serving natural selection, based on thousands of years of this tendency. Division in modern society is from the original sin neural subroutine.

Atheism and science cannot admit the possibility of Genesis being about human conscious evolution instead of bones and DNA; shell evolution. This possibility does not feed into their inner need to polarize religion via the symbolic neural subroutine. But this is how you start to deprogram it. Religion teaches us, not always by human language, but also by the raw symbolic language of the inner self, which knows the way back to paradise.

Religion is "observational science"?

Surely you jest.

 

[cladking]

This reminds me of the people who are unaware that there is such a thing as expertise, and that not all opinions are equal.

All opinions are equal but expert opinion is the only one that counts. But when all experts are wrong you're better off if you think about it yourself or turn to other sources.

 

[cladking]

I'm a contract bridge instructor. I'll often ask new students to rate their skill level. It's remarkable how many beginners rate themselves as intermediate or advanced. They see themselves as about halfway there in their bridge educations. This, too, is Dunning-Kruger. It's not so much about having an inflated view of one's expertise as not recognizing what can be known and is known by others.

Yet you don't see how this might apply to our primitive science that can't even connect the elemental forces or make a prediction!!!

 

[cladking]

When religion goes beyond a hobby - e.g. when it starts to influence governments or gets imposed on people who didn't choosr it - that's when the problems begin.

I'm guessing you don't see a problem with a system that buys science called "global warming" and uses it to reward those who paid for the science as Congress forces taxpayers to pay for infrastructure on the beach.

"Science" has been largely perverted by government and big buyers. Even what's left of real "science" today is far too dependent on mathematics and speculation rather than hypothesis and experiment.

Google has deleted most of the internet to return only bought and paid for science and put most of this behind paywalls. How can this be supported?