[Nesster]

Jesus, supposedly, had siblings so I don't know how the Catholics get around that.

Yes there were (younger, obviously) siblings, it is said. Of course Mary didn't need to be a virgin for them

[normhead]

The issue here is how one perceives the world. I think everyone would agree we don't understand everything... that somethings are beyond human comprehension.. unless of course someone believes that the human brain has evolved to the point where nothing is beyond it's grasp. It's how we deal with those things that makes us who we are. Despite the Christian statement "Judge not lest ye yourselves be judged", people Christians and non-christains a like do a lot of judging. This study is a case in point. The whole religious thing, setting up a story where some mythical being has done something and you owe him... and there are self appointed people out there willing to collect the debt owed the great one.. it's almost as bad as the whole atheistic / agnostic thing " If I can't touch it it doesn't exist."

All of these , though people hate to hear this, are responses to the un predictable nature of the universe and people's attempts to make sense of it. And the sad thing is, very few really offer much insight into the workings of the universe.

All you need to know is, anything that claims to be infallible isn't, ... anyone who claims to know the mind of god , doesn't, ... anyone who claims to have a theory that explains every known fact of science, doesn't ....

The power of the Dalai Lama, is in his opening statement for most of his speeches.."I am just a simple monk". Those who go beyond that in their vanity of the way they perceive themselves, is just trying to hook you into their delusion, and probably wants some of your money. The simple fact is we wander around in this brain, that is 90% devoted to evolutionary and genetic tasks, and with which we try to resolve questions for which it was never designed. You don't use a telescope to see quarks... coming to an understanding of the cosmos would seem to be an inadvertent by product of the inability to comprehend everything around us... and the need to impose some kind of understanding to enable us to function. I tend to think realizing you'll never understand everything and going from there makes a lot more sense. Preaching there is some kind of intellectual resolution leading to inner peace can only be counter productive.

[woof]

Merry xmas

Merry Christmas to you. Here is the issue for me Mike.

I do not "believe" in antiqued myths. What I believe is that, setting aside some of the potentially ridiculous details associated with those myths, every culture has something by which we can set our moral and ethical compass. It is OK to say the bible is in essence a set of stories which tell us how we should behave and how we should live with and treat each other. In some fashion all of the "good book(s)" do just this. And much of that material is shared by Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. More than the practitioners care to recognize.

I was and remain interested in ancient cultures. Almost everyone has had some form of pantheon, some form of higher order. That is not for no reason.

When you look at faith in the face and say that it is worthless based on the more mythical aspects of it, I immediately have to assume that in some manner you eschew the underlying moral and ethical messages therein. At that point you are liability to me, my family, and my peaceful coexistence in this world and I will never, ever put myself in a position whereby you can compromise that. In short, this is a risk mitigation strategy. I know I will not be alone in this.

Now, there are plenty of supposedly god-fearing people that I do not trust either. Faith is not really an indicator of whether you can trust someone. But disdain for, and dismissal and ridicule of religion is a rather reductionist point of view and lends nothing to my opinion of a person's trustworthiness. So it is not so much that I trust others more because they have faith as that I have a slightly less of a reason initially to trust you. The fact that you wear this openly and decry the backlash only adds to the impression because it means you are incapable of understanding or tolerating my reasons for distrusting you.

I am sorry for this. It is blunt. But it is honest, and it does not mean I do not like you. Actually, it seems you struggle with this perhaps a little and may even be a bit angry. It is my hope that you will understand that this is not a "fringe" view of what you are saying. It probably puts words to what many might be thinking. And if you gain any small understanding of how it is that YOUR choices lead to the consequences that you are feeling, and perhaps that those consequences can and probably should be expected... and as a result you come to own those consequences instead of feeling persecuted, you might find some measure of peace with it in this, what is for some, a most hallowed season.

Kind regards and with respect,

Seaain
Senior IT Architect, Computer Scientist, and former educator and archaeologist

[Ratmagiclady]

One of the reasons monotheists and atheists have such conflict is, of course, the literal-mindedness that can be found in both: science is, of course, a *means* of finding out about the material world, and 'book-religion' claims to tell us about the material world by claiming its own myths are 'special,' ..ie, 'literally true' to one extent or another.

The simple fact is, of course, that we are not entirely-objective creatures. We have more faculties than just the logical/literalistic.

Some of both atheists and monotheists tend to *overstep* when claiming some things apply outside their own modalities, or that their modalities somehow constrain the actual world: for instance, claiming some things are 'supernatural' or 'unnatural,' respectively tends to be just an a priori assertion that those modalities limit the world and human experiences.

They're also both tending to be from a point of view of 'Is this literally true or not' ...whether they've softened that position with various philisophical caveats or merely insist they know the one truth or even define the 'odds,' ...and tend to muddle up questions of what the paranormal is with the theological/philosophical literalisms in the first place.

It tends to lead to an all-or-nothing thinking that doesn't really serve reason very well in these regards. The conscious mind tends to *like* absolutes, but that itself has to do with one's emotions and instincts and all, too. ...being blind to that doesn't help. It's why certain believers are so scared of ghosts, and why it happens fairly often in my experience that hard-materialist atheists might see a ghost or something and suddenly think everything 'paranormal' they heard must in fact be 'true.' (At least temporarily.. Denial tends to set in later, and I think it may well be this very thing that a lot of atheists are so *afraid* of about any possibility of 'the paranormal' or Spirit or anything like that: they may well feel that kind of pressure behind the dam, so to speak, and fear any 'crack' would lead to chaos: this is actually a similar dynamic to how religious absolutisms set people and societies up for 'moral panic' phenomena. )


Me, I've been living with 'non-ordinary' stuff all my life, (Even if for a while there I somewhat compartmentalized a lot of it. ) For me, total 'disbelief' would be pretty irrational, actually. (As I touched on, before, 'extraordinary proof' is something one can observe for oneself and indeed with other people: such proof you can carry away and hand to a peer-reviewed journal is something of another matter: where this bears on reason, that's about what *claims* one makes based on some things: I compare it to things once thought mythical, like 'rogue waves' and the like: considered old sailor's tales simply because of where the info came from and the rarity of them being observed, and science itself not having a model for how that could happen. But there they are. ) ...anyway, that 'Non-ordinary stuff' is something that has certainly impressed a lot of people individually. ...and it certainly doesn't mean my *Conclusions* about everything are total Divine revelation, but it is pretty interesting how it *fits* with both the generalities and details about what people who've specialized in this stuff across cultures and times seemed to derive. Both in general scheme and quite often obscure specifics. Then there's just the pure question of *information* about it.

Something's sure going on. And it's about more than existential claims of one kind or another, then setting 'feelings' and rituals against 'logic and materialism' in a context of 'proving' literalism.


When the conflict is really about the 'authority' of a very *particular* God, for instance, people still exclude all other possibilities, and that's what the 'arguments' are kind of designed to do. Go nowhere, but keep that 'argument' central to people's consciousness... As opposed to a lot of other things.

[stevewig]

For simplicity sake, I will use Wikipedia definitions to demonstrate that I am an Agnostic rather than an Atheist:

"In some senses, agnosticism is a stance about the difference between belief and knowledge, rather than about any specific claim or belief. In the popular sense, an agnostic is someone who neither believes nor disbelieves there is a God, whereas an atheist disbelieves there is a God. In the strict sense, however, agnosticism is the view that human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify knowledge of whether God exists or does not.

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists."

This gives me more comfort than an Atheist will have about what happens at death but I do think that I know what happens at death because I have already been dead once - before I was born.

[Ratmagiclady]

Of course, saying, 'You can either know everything or know nothing, and that's important to choose' is itself an absolutist kind of assertion.

I happen to think that you can potentially know *anything,* ...whether or not that translates into 'You can claim to Know Everything and thus dictate Anything' is kind of a different matter.

[les3547]

Princeton professor Elaine Pagels writes in her book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas of an early competition between two sorts of Jesus' followers, those who understood Jesus' teachings in an inner way, and those who primarily externalized his teachings. One example of this found in the synoptics is the story of a man who asks Jesus how was a person supposed to get back in the womb to be "born again." Other Christians scoffed at those who believed that when Jesus spoke of resurrection he meant a physical one, or that "son of God" was to be taken literally.

These two competing strains are well represented by the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John, and the fate of these gospels shows clearly which strain won the competition. Pagels argues that the Gospel of John was specifically written to counter the inward sorts who claimed God could be found inside each person, and that through inner prayer all could experience a degree of what Jesus had manifested. After Constantine made Christianity Rome's official religion, that pretty much sealed the fate of Christianity, at least for the masses. I say that because it didn't entirely kill the inner strain since it was brought into the growing monastic movement and kept it alive there until 1700s or so.

For further reading check out Lost Christianity by Jacob Needleman; The Desert Fathers by Helen Waddell; and The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages by Marilyn Dunn.

[Nesster]

When you look at faith in the face and say that it is worthless based on the more mythical aspects of it, I immediately have to assume that in some manner you eschew the underlying moral and ethical messages therein. At that point you are liability to me, my family, and my peaceful coexistence in this world and I will never, ever put myself in a position whereby you can compromise that. In short, this is a risk mitigation strategy. I know I will not be alone in this.

Well written post! I like!


There is a sense in which the hard-line atheists throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The power of a symbol is such that it can move mountains, change society, overthrow governments, separate or bring together millions of people.


Also, let's keep in mind that as a species, humans aren't all that different from all others: we demonstrably Don't Know What We Are Doing! Regardless of all science, we still don't know what we're doing. We may be doing it better or more cleverly... but really?

Let me relate a favorite story from Jung:

"Let us take as an example the incredibly refined instinct of
propagation in the yucca moth (Pronuba yuccaella). The flowers of
the yucca plant open for one night only. The moth takes the pollen
from one of the flowers and kneads it into a little pellet. Then it
visits a second flower, cuts open the pistil, lays its eggs between
the ovules and then stuffs the pellet into the funnel-shaped opening
of the pistil. Only once in its life does the moth carry out this
complicated operation.

....

but we should never forget that what we call complicated or even
wonderful is not at all wonderful for Nature, but quite ordinary. We
always tend to project into things our own difficulties of
understanding and to call them complicated, when in reality they are
very simple and know nothing of our intellectual problems.


...

the archetype is an instinct's perception of itself, or a self
portrait of the instinct, in exactly the same way as consciousness
is an inward perception of the objective live-process."

from Instinct and the Unconscious by C.G. Jung

[normhead]

Of course saying you either can know everything or can potentially know everything is just talk... it's an untestable theory. I'd argue , that knowing that you don't know everything and probably can't even theoretically is a sign of maturity. Thinking you have the have the ability to know everything then would be a sign of arrogance. Something not lost on many cultures where elders make a point of avoiding people with child like beliefs... which would include the whole of Christianity and most of western thought. The thing is, as long as you are satisfied with child like beliefs, you will never see the "great mystery".... holding one precludes seeing the other. It's quite understandable then that those who simplify the cosmos to a subset of imaginary teachings can't understand more complex systems of thought that don't place so much emphasis on duality and judgement. Their biggest mistake is to think that those who don't believe what they believe are wrong... that would be the biggest impediment to their growth. Most people are dependant on something literally blowing them out of their current mindset to get beyond it.

For example, people who have had near death experiences or encounters with aliens tend to develop a more universalistic less ego focussed way of seeing the world. Once you have had one of those kinds of experiences, you tend to realize that the people going around mindlessly debunking these things, are totally full of crap. And that's not doctrine, that's a response to an experience. Many cultures have rituals designed to blow the aware mind back in to the background where it belongs. The world is not composed of intellectual concepts. Intellectual concepts are the result of interaction with the world, but not the cause. No intellectual concept can be what is out there, they can only point you to or shut you off from what is out there.

That being said, Intellectual concepts are also a crutch.. you don't want to be trying to discard them if you need them. You just need to realize they are for sick people. Once your leg has healed, you toss the crutch. But you don't go around starting whole movements based on the total necessity and divine origin of crutches, and considering people without crutches to be somehow lacking.

[Nesster]

Intellectual concepts are the result of interaction with the world, but not the cause.

Damn, well said. This thread has some mighty good stuff in it.

[RoxnDox]

Merry Christmas to you. Here is the issue for me Mike.

...

When you look at faith in the face and say that it is worthless based on the more mythical aspects of it, I immediately have to assume that in some manner you eschew the underlying moral and ethical messages therein. At that point you are liability to me, my family, and my peaceful coexistence in this world and I will never, ever put myself in a position whereby you can compromise that. In short, this is a risk mitigation strategy. I know I will not be alone in this.

...

Kind regards and with respect,

Seaain
Senior IT Architect, Computer Scientist, and former educator and archaeologist

(jumping back into the snake pit because this thread actually has good content...)

Seaain, I think you have to re-examine your automatic assumption that a person who rejects faith must also reject any moral messages. After all, "faith" by itself does not contain a moral message - the scriptures, or writings, or sayings, etc of any particular religion/philosophy are what contains the messages. As an agnostic, I am quite capable of looking at any of these sources and deciding that (for example) "Thou shalt not murder" is a pretty good idea and one that is worth keeping around, even though it came from some old Greek scroll... Or that the Kama Sutra is a good idea Your automatic assumption that we'd toss out the baby with the bathwater is kinda part of human nature, but it's still not correct. Sometimes, sure, but not all the time, so maybe it's worth re-examining and then reacting case by case instead of automatically.

Just my two cents

And Merry Christmas to anyone who likes holidays, and Bah Humbug to the rest

Jim

[kenafein]

(jumping back into the snake pit because this thread actually has good content...)

Seaain, I think you have to re-examine your automatic assumption that a person who rejects faith must also reject any moral messages. After all, "faith" by itself does not contain a moral message - the scriptures, or writings, or sayings, etc of any particular religion/philosophy are what contains the messages. As an agnostic, I am quite capable of looking at any of these sources and deciding that (for example) "Thou shalt not murder" is a pretty good idea and one that is worth keeping around, even though it came from some old Greek scroll... Or that the Kama Sutra is a good idea Your automatic assumption that we'd toss out the baby with the bathwater is kinda part of human nature, but it's still not correct. Sometimes, sure, but not all the time, so maybe it's worth re-examining and then reacting case by case instead of automatically.

Just my two cents

And Merry Christmas to anyone who likes holidays, and Bah Humbug to the rest

Jim

Right, faith and morality are completely separate. One could argue that the faithful don't have morality(as a product of their faith) they have obedience, and sins aren't necessarily immoral they are simply forbidden. Sometimes those coincide. Murder is considered immoral by most people, and it's also a sin, but I don't know if anyone feels that getting a tattoo or working on the Sabbath are immoral acts; they are, however, sins.

[MRRiley]

Right, faith and morality are completely separate. One could argue that the faithful don't have morality(as a product of their faith) they have obedience, and sins aren't necessarily immoral they are simply forbidden. Sometimes those coincide. Murder is considered immoral by most people, and it's also a sin, but I don't know if anyone feels that getting a tattoo or working on the Sabbath are immoral acts; they are, however, sins.

Some would submit that the "good" atheist is in some ways more ethical and possibly a "better" person than many "good" theists... Why? Because many theists are good out of a desire for their final "reward" or from fear of final retribution while the atheist expects neither supernatural reward nor punishment for his deeds.

Mike

[Nesster]

Right, faith and morality are completely separate. One could argue that the faithful don't have morality(as a product of their faith) they have obedience, and sins aren't necessarily immoral they are simply forbidden.

Faith doesn't produce morality... but sometimes faith - or obedience - is a convenient way to transmit morality to people. Let's face it, most of us don't spend hours puzzling out the basis of moral vs immoral action in a given situation. We use heuristics and obedience to received tenents. As long as one behaves as though one is moral, who's to say one isn't?

[GeneV]

Some would submit that the "good" atheist is in some ways more ethical and possibly a "better" person than many "good" theists... Why? Because many theists are good out of a desire for their final "reward" or from fear of final retribution while the atheist expects neither supernatural reward nor punishment for his deeds.

Mike

Good point. Some (but by no means all) theists see the pathway to heaven as separate from the ethics practiced on the earth.