"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ~ Richard Feynman
Inspirational quotes faith & doubt - thread split
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ~ Richard Feynman
Inspirational quotes faith - thread split
when science doubts itself you end up back at religion or with pure nihilism, pure nihilism gives rise to state-based "rational" substitutes, and if the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom then the dictator state is all too ready to provide the requisite terror. you can throw out nature with a pitchfork but it will always return. people who think science is the answer are just such well socialized cows they can't even consider that the default state isn't some form of congenial knowledge seeking without bias or violence, and that if you cut the moral slats out from under society, something has to replace it or the whole thing descends into anarchy. if the thing that replaces it is based on the supremacy of the state as source of all good and not in an image of Christ then it simply devolves into a totalitarian shithole which is essentially just run by whoever climbs to the top and makes a God of themselves in the process. this idea that you can do away with religion is true in name only but you can never do away with man's need to aim at something higher. if that object isn't something that fundamentally captures the need to transcend oneself in a moral sense, then it becomes simply another vice that the state turns the entire society to pursue. denying all religion in principle is not a transcendence of oneself its a denial with predictable consequences
doubt is one thing, but what usually is perniciously smuggled along with it, when considering such slogans as moral imperatives, is that the barrier to overcome said baseline doubt is nothing less than a positive causal determinist proof. this essentially begs the question up front about what is real and cuts off humanity from an entire side of itself, with a promise something like "if we get around to finding you with a microscope we'll let you back in", meanwhile a million things that are in fact real are denied with predictable consequences. when a society adopts this point of view, it can't actually even do as it purports itself to do, because it immediately realizes its totally lost. except now all guiding wisdom hitherto developed is illegitimate and they're left to guess and utilize their base instincts. its not even a serious idea, yet it gets adopted and treated as seriously precisely for that reason--because its easily packed into an empty slogan people think it could be true, but this presumes people fully understand the truth to begin with and are in a position to pass such an immense judgement. thats essentially the sin of pride in a nutshell, they essentially went back to square one, only to relearn religion the hard way and yet announce it triumphantly as if it were an achievement and not a simple regression. its essentially an infantile statement through and through. however, Jesus did say "come to me as little children" and so these people will. their existence is a testament to God's abiding love, and if people wonder how God can permit evil to exist you need only look to your derpy scientismic professor man-child to see how evil stems from man's existence and God's love simultaneously
Last edited by Bertrand; 07-05-2018 at 09:27 PM.
Doubt leads to discovery and qualification of results.Originally Posted by Bertrand
these silly one-liners cause unimaginable harm when applied. much like "from each according to his ability to each according to his need", the devil is always in the details.. you think the devil is in faith, but its just as much in these little slogans
let's start by doubting a person's value beyond their social utility. its in this premise that we have inspectors of inspectors that exist only to drum up guilt so as to provide a self justification because they also need a reason to exist. what this essentially amounts to is, if the enemy is cast out with religion it needs to be found again for society to understand itself in contradistinction to something. you end up in an inquisition of unimaginable proportions. ultimately doubt itself is cast out because its seen as heresy to the party line and what once was a naive ideal becomes the new religion, except this time vested in secular institutions with no transcendent ideal that protects the individual's right to exist by grounding it in something greater than the state, which is what the God concept functions to do. Without God there is nothing of equal weight to counter balance the individual against the crushing weight of society and whatever it decides is best for itself. except in adopting such a position and by cutting off individuals from the source of their inspiration it freezes all possible development except that from which comes down from the limited imagination of the ruling class. this idea that doubt will only lead to discoveries and qualification of results forgets that it also leads to a lot of other things, and we have plenty of discoveries in progress already. the question becomes what would adopting such a radical proposition entail and what would the benefit be. the anti religious do not take this question seriously because they do not understand religion to begin with, they simply want it gone and the simplest way to do that is not to address the question but to start from the ground up with an empty slogan. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"--these slogans are just aspirations at Godhood, to displace that which they'd rather not deal with
Last edited by Bertrand; 07-05-2018 at 09:57 PM.
Can you tell me what the value of faith is? Compared to knowledge (which in a true sense, is impossible), and compared to doubt, which prevents people from taking things for granted and thus drives them to quantify their doubt and drives them to new discoveries?
Even if God exists, I'm more concerned with what I think and do than what God thinks and does. If I am not the measure of all things, how I can trust the thoughts and actions of somebody else?
the value of faith is self awareness
@Bertrand, but faith is inherently contrary to the senses, which seems completely contrary to being self-aware.
there's a million and one assumptions loaded in that sentence that simply proves that any sort of worldview is grounded on some kind of faith. the benefit to openly acknowledging it is you get to have the conversation instead of trying to explain to the other person why their materialist worldview is inherently a dogma that runs just as deep as any explicitly religious belief. the difference is the secular materialist dogma is just unaware of their own assumptions and inasmuch as that is the case they feel justified in a way that is unwarranted. certain kinds of faith may be equally or even less warranted, but that doesn't mean faith in principle is the culprit. to declare faith unreasonable doesn't make whatever counter position that is adopted more reasonable, and it certainly does not resolve the paradox of faith being absolute and necessary to any perspective at all, it simply excludes it from consideration in one more form of psychological one sidedness. the idea that if people were reasonable and gave up faith the world would get better is, again, impossibly naive, it doesn't even begin to respect other people's position. its founded on the assumption such positions are of zero value at the very beginning of formulating their own position. the fact that their entire course of reasoning begins and ends with this assumption is precisely what demonstrates how little work such a theory actually does, except for the individual who takes comfort in thinking they know something about the world. that is the dirty little secret of secular materialism: it simply cuts out understanding faith as not worth the effort and rationalizes not making the effort in the guise of a dogma that purports to better the world, when really it does not care a whit about the world. it cares most about summing things up in a single sentence and then focusing on other things, namely material things. clearly such a position is sustainable for the person for whom faith holds zero failure to begin with, but the question remains what about all those people who were robbed of meaning and left with only the option to better the world through official channels. these people have nothing left except to recreate God via the state or to simply wither on the vine chasing pleasures that can't satisfy. its like cutting out your own organs or trying to get them a new job. its not empathy that is at the root of that, its selfishness and ignorance and ultimately pathological self harm. in any case, the counterstroke is they enslave the very people who made possible the state based reign of terror in the name of doing away with the "excesses" of faith. these sort of office cows are first in line to be enslaved as thanks for their efforts. if you want a faith based organism to thrive make the object of their faith something worthy, don't just take it away. for the people who live a life of the body alone, their atheism can be a principled and honest creed from their mouth, but they should decide mainly for themselves. when elevated to a slogan they are just as dangerous as any competing article of faith, despite how they style themselves as being above it... its more like they're below it
I have nothing against a harmless creature who professes atheism or principled doubt as an individual way of life, except to say that a dog with no teeth deserves no praise for not biting. their virtue of "self awareness" should begin and end with realizing they cannot comprehend faith, not that they have transcended it. in the final analysis you cannot argue anyone into or out of faith, because if you could it wouldn't be faith. people simply are what they are, absent a miracle that transforms them, and their outlook flows accordingly. an atheist who does not understand faith is no threat because they tend to lack the motivation to ever act in a manner that requires faith to see through. what happens is however, people with a genuine capacity for faith adopt these "faithless" positions and thats where everything goes off the rails
in other words, genuine faithlessness is not a problem, inasmuch as it exists, because it is toothless. what we have are multiple camps cross talking and confusing eachother, where rational slogans infect people with ideas that mean something different in the mouth of their originator but get taken up in exactly the wrong way by the listener. true absense of faith is no big deal, but what happens when you promulgate that message to an inherently faithful creature? that is the real problem with quadral succession, what was once a equilibrated position gets completely unbalanced but the process is so invisible people are continually taken by surprise by benign philosophies being unexpectedly turned murderous. this idea that everything would be fine if people just gave up on meaning is like asking half the world to just jump off a bridge. when people seriously entertain that idea you end up with a gulag anyway
Last edited by Bertrand; 07-06-2018 at 09:46 PM.
@Bertrand
As I understand it, faith is contrary to reason, and in a religious sense, belief in non-phenomenal things which thus cannot be observed. Faith therefore can never be proportionate to the evidence. In religion, the problems caused by this are amplified, because religions generally require absolute faith. And why is that?
I don't believe that belief in aspects of the material world can constitute a dogma in the way that belief in non-phenomenal things can, because a hypothesized phenomenal thing should be falsifiable. While it is probably true that everybody has beliefs that are disproportionate to the evidence, faith adds nothing to the world that qualified doubt (i.e. in proportion to the evidence) can.
the idea that faith is contrary to reason is an article of faith itself, in other words, it is a base presupposition. does reason supply for itself its own premise? again you simply start from the position that anything that cannot be positively proven is considered false by default. this frame is itself an article of faith. the truth is nothing at all can be positively proven if you do not first take something on faith. hence there is a real form of double think to act on faith, deny its faith, and profess rationalism all at the same time. none of these things go together or are self evident. the project that we start with nothing is sort of silly, instead we start with everything there is hitherto. to selectively omit things is immediately getting off on the wrong foot. to call that reasonable and justified is to beg the question and is unreasonable to the highest degree. its essentially defining reason up front as whatever our own prejudices happen to be. the benefit of professing faith is to acknowledge that one is doing that and hopefully that lends a shade of humility to whatever follows. doubt is not inherently more noble than faith. that is essentially a lie. at worst they are equally matters of preference without objective justification. more likely faith is the more noble position simply because it is more accurate since no one doubts everything. even descartes relied on the idea of a God who would not deceive his senses as grounding his worldview in the last analysis. that is essentially what materialists do. they need an absolute to ground their materialist perspective on, because you can doubt your senses too. eventually whether you admit God exists or not, you invoke him implicitly as being behind your senses when you refuse to doubt them. you make a God of your senses and everything flows from that, but to say it is not a matter of faith is not accurate, it is faith in your senses, and the elevation of them to the position of absolute. one cannot truly understand other people if they don't believe that other people have other absolute starting positions. in essence if your senses are your God you cannot have a truly psychological perspective on other people, because you never understand they are operating on fundamentally different but equal base principles. in the end fairness becomes dividing people up according to equal sensory shares and never really understands that God supplies the daily bread, its not that he is the daily bread. as soon as God becomes sensory equality you justify anything and everything in terms of meting out economic equality and we're back to the gulag because people who disagree with that position are a threat to the premise itself (that this is the highest and only real good, that by embodying a different position they undermine the premise by living example, that there is nothing more than food), and inasmuch as that is the case they are criminals beyond simple thieves and murderers, they are essentially evil because they represent an existential threat to the system, but the entire thing is predicated on a hubristic failure to understand the other. the sad thing is the only way to eliminate an idea that is a threat that is embodied in a way of life is to eliminate the person themselves or to brainwash them, because its like people never thought to really question their own premise lest they die their own kind of death. and in the end all this benevolence devolves into a me v you
faith is "belief in things unseen" and everyone has faith in something. to say it is unreasonable is to deny in others what we disallow in ourselves, but that is not fair for others. at best lack of faith can only ever be a personal statement never a policy, lest it become tyrannical, just like state enforcement of a religion would be tyrannical. faith in something unseen could be the most reasonable position of all, it is not for us to decide for others... likewise if another individual wants to be faithless then more power to them. we all benefit from the example of others
Last edited by Bertrand; 07-06-2018 at 10:20 PM.
@Bertrand
Believing something blindly is not reason. Reason is doing something based on its own merits, and not believing things outside your own scope.
Something being false if it is not proven is a safe premise. However, that premise is not inherently necessary, because you could just limit yourself to believing things for which there is sufficient evidence without having an opinion on things for which there is no or little evidence.
It is possible to observe the natural world without needing faith to make conclusions. I don't deny that individuals do not have beliefs that are unfounded which may inadvertently allow them to make new discoveries. However, I again say there is no inherent value in faith - faith even in such situations represents unqualified risks or unwillingness to act contrary to prior superstitions. Far better to have qualified doubt.
The view that God would not deceive you is pure superstition. The senses certainly can be flawed, but the scientific philosophy has nonetheless produced the most accurate understanding of the universe, which is why I regard qualified doubt as highly effective.
In regards ethics, that is purely a subjective domain, albeit one that can be informed by what we know of the world, e.g. in regards pain. I personally believe that if the worst act is not inflicting pain on others, then there is no objective morality.
@Bertrand
The God of Abraham is said to be followed by four billion people. This is a god that requires blind faith in its existence and blind obedience.
I think you seem to be saying that when God becomes flesh, including when you make your own perception and judgement to be infallible, then you can justify anything.
But the God of Abraham, which is invisible (or at least has been for a millennia or two), actually told Abraham to kill a child as a test of faith.
its blind faith! your position that people believe things without sufficient reason is inherently more unreasonable than you realize. its like do you think people wake up and say "i think i'll be stupid today for no reason" there is obviously a reason, it is just not the principle you would prefer. this idea that things can be "blind" is just a metaphor for what you yourself can't see. it ultimately doesn't matter. I could tell you that time is a function of the same visual centers in the brain as eyesight, but the point is simply this: if you stand on a mountain and someone sees further, you're not helping anyone by denying such a thing as possible. all you've done is limit yourself. God is not the God of televangelists, God is the idea that there is something greater to which we will always strive. you can rename it science and pursue it with all your might, but your life is just a testament to whatever your God happens to be. people live their faith whether they acknowledge it or not. the advantage to acknowledging God as a transcendent ideal that is extra mundane is it means no man can ever lay claim to it , which seems to be your biggest fear, "but what if they trust in something perverse!"... ultimately we have the same fear, and the truth is, it will happen. what people have done is define religion or belief in God as being all those things opposed to science, without realizing science is just the logos which is the original Christian God. they renamed him in order to wrest it from the charlatans, but in doing so threw out the baby with the bathwater. the underlying meaning was not only "truth for its own sake", which culminates in nihilism, it was truth for the betterment of man across all possible vectors. because religion lacked technological thinking they think inverting this new religion into a cult of scientific development is the path, but its just a one sided counter stroke, and the symbol of the whole got lost in the process. both sides are equally to blame because they got too one sided. this sort of back and forth over which side is better is silly because every form of one sidedness contains within in it strengths and weaknesses in measure with whatever position it takes. its by uniting the opposites not obliterating the opposition where progress lies. every position that stands for one sidedness is inferior in light of that view, and that one sidedness lays equal claim to atheism and fundamentalism... people have known this and written it down since at least Heraclitus and yet history has continued to conform to this pattern, and yet the slogan is heard once again "we must reject blind faith!"
Last edited by Bertrand; 07-07-2018 at 12:42 AM.
@Bertrand
If faith was rational, it would not be called faith.
It is not rational to believe in something for no reason whatsoever.
It is not rational to use an element of nature as proof of the supernatural.
You say "its like do you think people wake up and say "i think i'll be stupid today for no reason" there is obviously a reason, it is just not the principle you would prefer." ...it's important not to confuse distinct definitions of "reason", including for example: 1) A motive for an action or a determination. 2) An excuse: a thought or a consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion; that which is offered or accepted as an explanation. 3) Rational thinking (or the capacity for it); the cognitive faculties, collectively, of conception, judgment, deduction and intuition.
In regards defining "God" as something greater than ourselves - it is preferable not to use redundant terms or words that are otherwise likely to be highly contentious compared to their utility. If you mean "universe", then you should use that word instead. Otherwise there is a danger of hiding behind vague concepts and attempting to justify actions on nebulous grounds. You don't make something more profound by making it vague or otherwise giving it greater power than is merited.
As far as I'm concerned, all faith is blind, because anything other than it is a step in the right direction.
that's just a bunch of words over the simple fact you're so well socialized you think Christian values are self evident properties of the universe itself. its just naive with a gloss of "you can't prove religion exists by my arbitrary standards, therefore you're irrational" because you've appointed yourself as the arbiter of what is rational as a first move, without realizing that to cut out the base out from under your own values as if the thing will remain in the air with nothing supporting it isn't already a kind of faith in magic. Jung himself notices how rationalists take for granted irrational propositions as feature of their shadow. like I said that position is just its own brand of one sidedness, that finds the enemy in an opposing dogma rather than as a consequence of their own perspective. you can rail against religion all you like but its not really the problem, neither is irrationality. you've essentially defined religion as the source of evil in the world, and so as long as you adhere to that you will find it to be so, but in the final analysis you supplied the evil and the crusade is a kind of self delusion. if you were really true to your principle, that sensory actions are the realest thing, then you could easily admit that religion is not the problem, its what people do that's the problem, and many people do good things in the name of religion and many people do bad things in the name of religion, and that essentially its the actions that cause harm, not their pretense that is the problem. a religion that did nothing but good things by your own definition would be good, as would a rationalist atheist philosophy that did nothing but bad things would be bad, how then can religion be the problem in of itself. religion inasmuch as it is not real is of no consequence. as soon as you admit it causes things it in some sense becomes real and you can't just stuff it back into pandoras box as unreal, you have to reckon with what it really amounts to. it is always being judged in light of some super-values so what are those values and how are they distinguishable from just another form of religion
Last edited by Bertrand; 07-07-2018 at 02:14 AM.
@Bertrand
It's not so much that religious claims cannot be proven. No aspect of nature can be proven because we are not omnipotent - they can only be concluded to be true to a relative level of confidence.
It's more that religious claims are unfalsifiable. When someone makes an unfalsifiable claim, I can say with confidence that they are making a claim about something that has no effect on the natural world whatsoever.
When people act based on unfalsifiable claims, they are a huge liability to society. I agree in general with Steven Weinberg's sentiment when he wrote "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion."
I consider religion to represent belief and veneration of a supernatural or superhuman agency. If an act is good or bad, it is good or bad independently of any supernatural or superhuman agency, and this would be good or bad according to some aesthetic judgement, although it could certainly be quantified, for example in reference to how much of a defined good or a defined harm it does. Invoking a supernatural or superhuman agency in that process would only get in the way of doing what is "good". An act is not "good" because I think a supernatural or superhuman agency thinks it's good. An act is "good" because I have deemed it to be good. It find it is far better to rely on my own judgement than for example kill a child because I think that is what a supernatural or superhuman agency wants me to do, even if it is contrary to what I think is good. If I cannot rely on my own faculties, then I certainly cannot rely on someone else's relayed through my own senses.
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