On Religion

[themidnightgirl]

Hmm....



I don't understand religion. Or Mysticism, or Spirituality.

I mean, I understand the concept, but it holds no truth or attraction to me, doesn't fit in my world view and hence makes no sense.

As near as I can tell, faith comes out of a need for reassurance and security - the belief that a) there is some purpose behind things (or even a capricious and delibrate lack of purpose)
b) there is something beyond and more powerful than that which we can observe and
c) there are things that we can't explain...and they are due to some mystical power.

I'm sorry, but I just don't believe it.

I tend to work on the basis of observable phenomena. And the only observer I trust is me. Whilst, if someone says something that I can't verify, if it fits in with things I _know_ I'll take it on trust, I tend not to believe things until I can observe it myself.

Thus, I believe only things that are logically related to observations I have made myself. So, for example, I believe that gravity exists because everything I have ever let go of fell to the floor. (crude example)

Nothing I have seen or experienced is outside what I could conceivably explain. Hence, there is no need to believe in some greater power.

I'll quite cheerfully tolerate and respect someone who does believe in a religion or who has "powers" or spirituality...in the same why that I tolerate and respect someone who likes the musical works of Missy B Elliott. I don't, and can't really see why anyone would, but am quite prepared to live and let live.

For years, I classified myself as just "Atheist". But of late, and despite my suspicions about groups and organisations in this field, I might be a "Secular Humanist". Yay for group identification.

Waffle ends.

Comments

and here i was hoping to be offended !

[liriselei.livejournal.com]

...although, if i had to be a pigeon, i would most definitely fall into the hole marked "Mysticicism"... but i don't subscribe to your a), your b) or your c).
with regard to faith, reassurance & security - i'd opine that it's equally applicable to the rational scientific paradigm.
observable phenomena, things you know, logical relations - don't these all require faith in the objective validity of your observations, faith in your ability to 'know' & a belief in a logical basis to reality ?
science is also a religion, a widespread mystery religion with temples both inner & outer - it has the tenets of faith, the priests, the holy books, the places of worship, the saints, the martyrs, the sites of pilgrimage, the sacred miracles, the mysteries comprehensible only to the initiated - what more do you need ?
( mentions of quantum physics are becoming all too clichéd, so i won't )

Re: and here i was hoping to be offended !

[borusa.livejournal.com]

Faith : a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust

(Source Merriam-Webster...yucky and American, but online and free)

It's that "Firm belief in something for which there is no proof"
Whilst I'd accept that, if you want to get solipsistic, you can't validate what you see, hear, touch and smell... they lock solipsists up, and with good reason.

Science isn't a religion, as any religion is based on faith, and science is based on evidence.
I'll concede there is a degree of belief here...but belief based on faith (for which _by definition_ there is no proof) and belief based on preponderance of evidence are very different things.

To duck out of the argument, because there are people who are brighter and more eloquent than me, have a look at http://www.2think.org/Richard_Dawkins_Is_Science_A_Religion.shtml

Dawkins wanders off the point a bit in this lecture he delivered, and I disagree with him about some things (cheap example : I do think that astrology is basically just harmless fun), but he's an intelligent guy, and worth reading.

Re: and here i was hoping to be offended !

[liriselei.livejournal.com]

not solipsism, so much as subjectivism, which is one of the core components of my personal belief-structure.
the concept that, while there is a noumenal reality, everyone perceives it differently, and different people perceive different parts of it, and that the noumenal reality itself is no more than the sum of all possible perceptions of itself.
in this concept, i'd guess that probably something like 99% of humans have probably a 97% overlap in their perceptions, but this still leaves room for a lot of other stuff, especially stuff which humans can't perceive - and when the perception comes secondhand (such as a human perceiving what is being perceived by a scientific instrument) the scope for interpretation is increased.
and that's before we begin to take account of the (scientifically proven! <grin>) fluidity of memory and the effects of preconception.
i don't believe that anything can be proven - vast amounts of evidence can be accumulated that is in accord with a theory, but that only shows that almost all evidence perceived by those who have investigated the matter agrees with a theory. which isn't the same thing as proving the theory - the theory might fit the evodence for the wrong reasons, or there might be other things that the theory cannot explain, etc.
ok, you can be 99.99% sure - but there's still that elusive glimmer of possibility out there.
pedantic, i know, but an important point.
part of the problem is not so much the evidence itself, as the tangibility of evidence.
a useful model i once saw divided reality into four segments, by means of two axes. personal/consensus and endo/exo. science tends to concern itself almost exclusively with consensus exoreality, whereas religion/spirituality/mysticism/etc. tend to concern themselves primarily with personal and consensus endoreality, which by their nature have less of a universal overlap, and far more margin for subjective interpretation.
the proof is there to those who have experienced it, but not in a form that can be extrenally verified - because how can one externally verify an emotion ? i wouldn't necessarily trust a religious expert to build me a computer, and i wouldn't necessarily trust a scientist to give me advice on finding mental/spiritual peace and satisfaction.
as Christi said, the faith in science isn't in the evidence, but in the axioms behind how that evidence is regarded and interpreted.
the RD lecture - cheers for the link, is a cool read.
he does make some very good points, but overall he comes across as not only bright and eloquent, but as a skilled and practiced rhetoritician playing to his audience, with an agenda to push and a determination to push it, and a (understandably considering the culture we're raised in) rather mainstream monotheistic view of religion, so possibly not enitrely the objective scientist in his arguments. (oh, and i do believe in a rational scientific basis to astrology, which i'll try and mention to some point)
i mean, starting off with talk of suicide bombers and terrorists is about as fair play emotively as starting a talk on the evils of science with slides of Hiroshima victims!
also, religion gets an extremely bad press from those who have blind faith - faith without questioning based on literal interpretation of holy texts is about the equivalent of scientists with pre-GCSE level knowledge of biology and chemistry, in my estimation. i have more respect for the most rabidly anti-religious scientist than i do for fundamentalist Xians, for example.
but i think the main problem with RD's arguments is that he sees it as an either/or thing,
whereas the ideal would surely by a symbiotic/synergistic integration and evolution - which i believe is becoming increasingly likely.
but anyway, it's late and i'm rambling... ttfn

oh, and two words i almost forgot to mention:

[liriselei.livejournal.com]

Gödel's Theorem

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I've had enough personal experience of "weird shit" that I'm pretty convinced in some sort of spiritual world, but there's no way I could convince you. I have this part of my brain that provides rational explanations for everything, that has happened to me, and by and large, they work. You'd probably want to go for those because they make sense within your frame of reference. But the simple explanation is that what I have experienced is real. That's why I choose to believe it.

A lot of people who take your position pride themselves on their open-mindedness. They say "If I saw evidence, I'd be convinced". That's pretty much doomed to failure because it's harder to work magic around that kind of person, because they're only open minded as long as their core axioms aren't violated, the important one being "everything is explainable within a scientific context".

What Xan said about science being a religion is true, I believe. Most "rational" people reject that idea, but to me it seems like people cling to the idea of cause and effect, or inductive and deductive reasoning in the exact same way that a "religious" person clings to a belief in their deity (deities). In the end a rationalist places their faith in the structure of logic that underlies science, but that faith is no more justifyable than a religious faith. Consider:

"Why do you believe in God?" "Because He is always with me."
"Why do you believe in inductive reasoning?" "Because by and large it's worked in the past, so it seems reasonable to assume it will carry on doing so."

These two statements have a symmetry. You can't justify the belief outside the context of the belief itself in either case. Perhaps faith is simply belief in your axioms.

And no, I wasn't offended by what you wrote. I hope I've not offended you either.