I know, I'm talking about anything that's an organized approach to human spirituality, anything that tries to find meaning in the world, or tell people how to think.
I would say faith isn't much more than belief in a religion?
Why dropping church and not praying might have been a mistake...
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I would say faith isn't much more than belief in a religion?
Well, even atheism falls into this category to some extent. That extent comes when a person is told that you should put all your "faith" into technology and none into one's self.
It can be, but again, is not 100% synonymous. Religion is not just a belief, but is something you practice as well. It effects you from external sources. Faith, on the other hand, without practicing a religion, is meant to aid in the striving to better one's view of the world and of one's self from within. Organized religion is impersonal, whereas faith is very personal. As easy as it is to fuse the two together, I feel it is important to keep them separate in such a discussion as we are having here.
Not really, all atheists say is that there is no God, that's it. Their beliefs beyond that varies like.
It can be, but again, is not 100% synonymous. Religion is not just a belief, but is something you practice as well. It effects you from external sources. Faith, on the other hand, without practicing a religion, is meant to aid in the striving to better one's view of the world and of one's self from within. Organized religion is impersonal, whereas faith is very personal. As easy as it is to fuse the two together, I feel it is important to keep them separate in such a discussion as we are having here.[/QUOTE]
Faith in what though? What's faith without religion
@Crotale: Actually, atheism only addresses the absolutist claims from theists, simply stating that the probability of there being any god or gods is simply too low to be considered, on par with any other fairy tale creatures we usually don't go around saying we're anti- about. It's not something you worship. Theism has already taken the job of making something we don't know into a religion, mind you. (..and remember that Stalin and Pol Pot followed other ideologies.)
@Azura: Maybe this is something more on-topic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgCb85PG-A&feature=PlayList&index=0&playnext=1
Physics, Metaphysics & the Consciousness Connection 1 of 18
Thomas Campbell
The Q&A is less dry.. hehe
I liked this guy for his objective approach (dismissing the ritual bs associated with meditation), and he was very willing to answer questions from the curious, including myself, though I didn't find myself swayed in the end.
@Azura: Maybe this is something more on-topic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgCb85PG-A&feature=PlayList&index=0&playnext=1
Physics, Metaphysics & the Consciousness Connection 1 of 18
Thomas Campbell
The Q&A is less dry.. hehe
I liked this guy for his objective approach (dismissing the ritual bs associated with meditation), and he was very willing to answer questions from the curious, including myself, though I didn't find myself swayed in the end.
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Not all, or even most, but there is a sizable contingency of atheists who like to tell others what to believe in , just the same as many theists. This is not exclusive to either group.
Faith in what though? What's faith without religion
Think of it this way:
Religion - belief in a greater force. Belief in this regard can become an truth, regardless of whether it is true or not. Faith, on the other hand, does not automatically tie into religion or a belief in a higher being, although it is usually there already. Faith alone is more of a belief in humanity and your own inner self. "Without faith, music, art and language, a civilization will not thrive," as paraphrased from a book by Charles Murray, rather puts some emphasis on faith as one of the important pieces of humanity. This is subjective, of course, but I would bet most agree on the major points.
You're right. You can add television (aka hypnobox) to the list as well as the press.
The atheistic view is simply one of tangible thought. Theistic views allow for intangible thought. This is why I said earlier that some of the most intelligent and successful people I have ever known or met can reconcile both their faith and their logic.
Now, you can call anyone who might have a belief or faith in some deity to be a nutjob, but let me ask: in the vastness that is our universe, can you prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that no such entity exists on any level? Did you know that there are places in our own galaxy that we cannot see, even with Hubble? The data captured has to be artificially filtered so that our eyes can recognize the images as valid. How does this apply to the existence of a god? It does not directly, but shows that there are forces and places that exist that we cannot see even if we look.
You want to know about faith and how it isn't locked to religion? Take a gander at one the most prominent scientists in history, Dr. Hawking. He had so much faith in himself and his work, he never gave up on his wormhole theory even after his debilitating illness struck and other scientists shunned him for his ideas. Eventually, his theory was accepted, but it and Hawking would have been but a footnote if he hadn't have had the faith and will to succeed.
Because some atheists behave like that doesn't change the definition of the word, it's someone who is not theist.
So it's just a dictionary word really, like "toaster"; It's existence is unquestionable but there is no need to put much thought into it, faith in yourself is important, I don't see much more in it after that?
First, sorry for the length of this but I've got some stuff to say now that I got back from dinner. Bear with me if you're really interested in this subject.
What I think makes people so hot and bothered by religion in general is not even what is done in its name. Let's take the idea of faith in itself. Some people embrace it and others do not. So you have 2 simple groups right there. When you further dice it down, you have various sets of beliefs such as christianity or new age, a belief in a God or simply in the existence of paranormal phenomenon. Every person seeks to find others who share their ideas and who they can learn with. In the scientific world, this is the logical thing to do, and fully encouraged. But for some reason when you apply the same principle to those of faith, thus creating "religion", it couldn't be more despised? The real rational explanation here is fear and hatred, which is exactly what the non faith side claims religion is based in. What I think, personally is that faith is simply a principle that any person can embrace which is beyond logic, and is so powerful yet at the same time defies humanistic logic because you can't apply the scientific method. It's not understood, and what we don't understand, is either feared, or treated with wonder and a great hunger to explore it further. It depends on what attitude you want to take towards it.
And so you have many people who choose to have faith, and in truth, as many simple hillbilly people as the well educated embrace faith, if not more. I think that this works against faith in the modern world view. These people are "less evolved", cling to "myths", yada yada. These are all understandable thoughts for a humanist. What do I mean when I talk about humanism? Those who have a view that we are at the center of things, and should be primarily seeking the advancement of knowledge.
Because I have said this, there will be those who jump to the conclusion that "Bersy's this or that, he is against progress bla bla bla, just wants the apocalypse to come etc". All that I mean is, I think that there is more meaning in our existence than the advancement of our knowledge. There are more ways to solve problems than trying to rationalize, dissect and analyze. I believe that we have dormant instincts, whether they are a result of nature or something God given, that when used make us more effective people. There are also elements that can't be examined under a microscope, but that does not make them less existent.
Faith and love to me are two such things, and you can argue that any person can have love. Sure, maybe. Without sounding like I am giving a sermon, I believe what the bible says about faith and love being interlinked and sort of magnifying one another is correct. You can "love" someone, and do things that appear loving, without really having love in your heart. Maybe to some, love is the feeling they get from another person fulfilling their own needs. And maybe some have a genuine compassion for human life, animals and nature and wants to see nothing suffer and always be happy. So there are different ways people interpret it.
People ask "how could a 'loving' God allow people to suffer?" This goes against that interpretation of love, which is wanting people to always be happy and pain free. Well sometimes to really find happiness you have to first experience pain and toil, and someone who loves you understands that. A loving father for instance won't try to do everything for their children and let them have their way all the time, they will justly punish them when they make bad choices, because when done right, the child will realize later on in life that their father was right and was doing it out of love. I am not about to get into a debate about bloody fields of bodies in war torn nations. All I am saying is that I think pain, death, and the existence of disgusting atrocities in this world does not preclude the existence of a loving God. That is humanistic logic. I believe logic and faith can co-exist, as Crotale stated, and personally, that is what the logic I follow dictates and it makes perfect and clear sense to me.
I don't want this to get incredibly long but I want to make one more point while on that note, and this relates to what Azura said about prayer. Prayer is all about faith, but it is a prime example of when faith and love together can be the most powerful. Seperate scientific studies on prayer have been conducted by different groups. The first one which was somewhere here in Europe I believe, tested the effects of prayer by taking two groups of people with an affliction and one group was prayed over, the other was not. They measured that the groups which recieved prayer had a significant improvement over the groups that didn't. (Don't hop on me yet I'm not done.) Now in the second study by a different organization, they claimed to do the same thing, with the important difference I believe, being that the scientists themselves were conducting the prayers. They found absolutely no measurable difference within the margin of error.
I may not have got all the details exactly right, but I think that this is still a good illustration.
I believe prayer is about intent. Prayer WORKS through intent, and emotion. If no genuine intent or positive emotion is created, if no love is behind the prayer, it will not be "heard", to interpret it one way, and if you want to interpret it another way, (both may be true) it is not a genuine prayer because certain brain activity is not triggered, transmitted, or what have you.
To take it one step further, there is another verse in the bible that states that "where two or more are gathered, I (God) am there with them". And yet another that states something to the effect that when two people agree on a matter, such as a prayer, it will be more "potent". This is not unlike the idea of the "collective mind" or "mass consciousness" creating the reality we live in. And this is certainly not a concept singular to deism. What it suggests is that the religious are really just exploring even deeper into a concept that even scientific circles on some level acknowledge, but beyond the threshold that they are willing to for a number of reasons.
That the simplest of people can explore faith is what makes it both resonant, and to the critical culture of ours, so below the pursuit of our intellectual furtherment. But make no mistake, as I said at the beginning, because you have two groups, the faith and non, you can't make religions out of one without having the religious on the other side of the coin. You see the evidence for that all over the internet where atheists congregate. I could say the website Digg for example is more or less a church of atheism. They have a set of chants they recite and dogma they adhere to, even a reward system in the form of thumbs up for being good and clever little soldiers, and a punishment system for those who don't agree with them. "Oh I don't agree with what you said. BURIED." You could liken it to more extreme forms of christianity but even more to what Scientologists are trained to do. The irony is none of them will see that. Religion is simply a convenient term to confront others with, and has no meaning when you are really honest with yourself.
What I think makes people so hot and bothered by religion in general is not even what is done in its name. Let's take the idea of faith in itself. Some people embrace it and others do not. So you have 2 simple groups right there. When you further dice it down, you have various sets of beliefs such as christianity or new age, a belief in a God or simply in the existence of paranormal phenomenon. Every person seeks to find others who share their ideas and who they can learn with. In the scientific world, this is the logical thing to do, and fully encouraged. But for some reason when you apply the same principle to those of faith, thus creating "religion", it couldn't be more despised? The real rational explanation here is fear and hatred, which is exactly what the non faith side claims religion is based in. What I think, personally is that faith is simply a principle that any person can embrace which is beyond logic, and is so powerful yet at the same time defies humanistic logic because you can't apply the scientific method. It's not understood, and what we don't understand, is either feared, or treated with wonder and a great hunger to explore it further. It depends on what attitude you want to take towards it.
And so you have many people who choose to have faith, and in truth, as many simple hillbilly people as the well educated embrace faith, if not more. I think that this works against faith in the modern world view. These people are "less evolved", cling to "myths", yada yada. These are all understandable thoughts for a humanist. What do I mean when I talk about humanism? Those who have a view that we are at the center of things, and should be primarily seeking the advancement of knowledge.
Because I have said this, there will be those who jump to the conclusion that "Bersy's this or that, he is against progress bla bla bla, just wants the apocalypse to come etc". All that I mean is, I think that there is more meaning in our existence than the advancement of our knowledge. There are more ways to solve problems than trying to rationalize, dissect and analyze. I believe that we have dormant instincts, whether they are a result of nature or something God given, that when used make us more effective people. There are also elements that can't be examined under a microscope, but that does not make them less existent.
Faith and love to me are two such things, and you can argue that any person can have love. Sure, maybe. Without sounding like I am giving a sermon, I believe what the bible says about faith and love being interlinked and sort of magnifying one another is correct. You can "love" someone, and do things that appear loving, without really having love in your heart. Maybe to some, love is the feeling they get from another person fulfilling their own needs. And maybe some have a genuine compassion for human life, animals and nature and wants to see nothing suffer and always be happy. So there are different ways people interpret it.
People ask "how could a 'loving' God allow people to suffer?" This goes against that interpretation of love, which is wanting people to always be happy and pain free. Well sometimes to really find happiness you have to first experience pain and toil, and someone who loves you understands that. A loving father for instance won't try to do everything for their children and let them have their way all the time, they will justly punish them when they make bad choices, because when done right, the child will realize later on in life that their father was right and was doing it out of love. I am not about to get into a debate about bloody fields of bodies in war torn nations. All I am saying is that I think pain, death, and the existence of disgusting atrocities in this world does not preclude the existence of a loving God. That is humanistic logic. I believe logic and faith can co-exist, as Crotale stated, and personally, that is what the logic I follow dictates and it makes perfect and clear sense to me.
I don't want this to get incredibly long but I want to make one more point while on that note, and this relates to what Azura said about prayer. Prayer is all about faith, but it is a prime example of when faith and love together can be the most powerful. Seperate scientific studies on prayer have been conducted by different groups. The first one which was somewhere here in Europe I believe, tested the effects of prayer by taking two groups of people with an affliction and one group was prayed over, the other was not. They measured that the groups which recieved prayer had a significant improvement over the groups that didn't. (Don't hop on me yet I'm not done.) Now in the second study by a different organization, they claimed to do the same thing, with the important difference I believe, being that the scientists themselves were conducting the prayers. They found absolutely no measurable difference within the margin of error.
I may not have got all the details exactly right, but I think that this is still a good illustration.
I believe prayer is about intent. Prayer WORKS through intent, and emotion. If no genuine intent or positive emotion is created, if no love is behind the prayer, it will not be "heard", to interpret it one way, and if you want to interpret it another way, (both may be true) it is not a genuine prayer because certain brain activity is not triggered, transmitted, or what have you.
To take it one step further, there is another verse in the bible that states that "where two or more are gathered, I (God) am there with them". And yet another that states something to the effect that when two people agree on a matter, such as a prayer, it will be more "potent". This is not unlike the idea of the "collective mind" or "mass consciousness" creating the reality we live in. And this is certainly not a concept singular to deism. What it suggests is that the religious are really just exploring even deeper into a concept that even scientific circles on some level acknowledge, but beyond the threshold that they are willing to for a number of reasons.
That the simplest of people can explore faith is what makes it both resonant, and to the critical culture of ours, so below the pursuit of our intellectual furtherment. But make no mistake, as I said at the beginning, because you have two groups, the faith and non, you can't make religions out of one without having the religious on the other side of the coin. You see the evidence for that all over the internet where atheists congregate. I could say the website Digg for example is more or less a church of atheism. They have a set of chants they recite and dogma they adhere to, even a reward system in the form of thumbs up for being good and clever little soldiers, and a punishment system for those who don't agree with them. "Oh I don't agree with what you said. BURIED." You could liken it to more extreme forms of christianity but even more to what Scientologists are trained to do. The irony is none of them will see that. Religion is simply a convenient term to confront others with, and has no meaning when you are really honest with yourself.
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Yeah sure, why not? There's no guidelines for what is or isn't a real religion. It isn't anymore ridiculous from any of the other religions out there.
Leading question?
The answer is no, and here's why it changes nothing on your part: Failing to prove the negative (that no such entity exists) doesn't prove the positive (that such an entity exists). I'm beginning to accept that this way of thinking is a marker of absolutist minds.
Is this a rhetorical question..?
My guess is that most people are aware of that we don't know every nook and cranny of the universe, and we're open for more data on the subject.
This part also fell into a logical fallacy, if you really mean that this indirectly says there is a god, and in either case, it can't change anything at all whatsoever.
I'm not really sure what the point of this thread is or where the discussion has gone in 2 pages (haven't read any of the replies) so I'm just going to say what I say in every religion thread.
religion is a crutch.
and most people are frightened by the fact that when we die, we become plant food, and that's about it. so they take their crutch with them wherever they go in order to keep from slipping and falling into a hopeless depression.
most people are also very simple and somewhat sheltered.
for those of us that actually have the intrinsic drive to get up every morning and enjoy life in spite of it's meaningless end, religion is a joke.
live for yourself; make some money, f*ck some womens, have some friends, party a little, stop and smell the roses. maybe you make things around you a little better before you go, maybe you don't. either way, time will eventually forget you ever existed.
whether you die with a billion dollars or a handful of copper, we all end up in the same dirt.
religion is a crutch.
and most people are frightened by the fact that when we die, we become plant food, and that's about it. so they take their crutch with them wherever they go in order to keep from slipping and falling into a hopeless depression.
most people are also very simple and somewhat sheltered.
for those of us that actually have the intrinsic drive to get up every morning and enjoy life in spite of it's meaningless end, religion is a joke.
live for yourself; make some money, f*ck some womens, have some friends, party a little, stop and smell the roses. maybe you make things around you a little better before you go, maybe you don't. either way, time will eventually forget you ever existed.
whether you die with a billion dollars or a handful of copper, we all end up in the same dirt.
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nah, because everything in the universe is made up of the same material.
the particles which make up the mud and dirt we have on this planet are the same matter which float across space billions of lightyears from here.
so
the particles which make up the mud and dirt we have on this planet are the same matter which float across space billions of lightyears from here.
so
Unless you get obliterated by a comet, or sucked in by the sun's gravitational force and evaporate in a prominence.