Yazata said:
Signal said:
... and part of this burden of proof rests on the person who is demanding the proof.
”
It's just elementary rhetoric: If A hopes to persuade B to believe something that B finds unlikely and doubtful on its face, then A is going to have to put some effort into convincing B. It's unrealistic for A to assume that B is somehow obligated to believe whatever A tells him. Things don't work that way.
They can be quite preposterous, those theists can't they? I even started a thread once, on the proposition that the real problem of theodicy is about the ethics of evangelizing!
Seriously - a Mormon or a Born Again Christian can approach me in the street, asking "Have you met God?" - and I feel floored. How is it that a short question, a mention of a particular word can have such an incapacitating effect on me??
Many years back, I had an intense experience: I was out shopping with my relative. He is a staunch atheist, by all means, a cool-headed, rational man, a physically strong man too. At a store, we met a work acquaintance of his who after a few polite words started to preach some Christian teaching. And I saw how my relative cowered. He lowered his shoulders, his voice weakened. He didn't agree, he opposed, he argued against. But he physically submitted to the Christian, and apparently unwillingly at that. He, the staunch atheist whom I had put so much faith in. It was a very visceral and disturbing experience for me.
At first, I was bewildered and angry. I used to think that my being so incapacitated by theists was simply my own weakness, a flaw of my character. But seeing my relative cower like that was an impetus for me to find a better way to deal with theists. Without giving in, without cowering. Without doing damage to myself or others. Without anger, contempt, or sadness.
The immediate reaction to feeling threatened is to either fight, flee, or freeze. Most people seem to be in this FFF mode. My experience is that this is not a good way to live.
The theists are making an extraordinary claim - and by all means, they should provide extraordinary evidence.
But them making that extraordinary claim - and my being so very much affected by it - also means that I will have to have extraordinary measures to deal with it.
The fact is that many people are very much affected by the claims the theists make. Whether they admit to this affectation or not, whether they rationalize it or not. The fact is that they put a lot of time and effort into dealing with theists and theism, in one way or another.
Many atheists and agnostics resort to the FFF mode, trying to refute the theistic claims. But such refutations normally come at the cost of one's own intellectual integrity.
Calling Jesus a myth or claiming that we are just biomechanical systems might leave the theist at a loss for words, but it compromises my intellectual integrity.
Namely, claiming that something is a myth, I also claim that I know full well what reality is. Well, if I really knew that, then I would not feel in any way troubled by what the theists say, would I? And knowing how they work, it's not like I actually trust archaeology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, historiography and folkloristic to have the ultimate say on what is real and what is not.
And thinking of myself and others as "biomechanical systems" does not paint a hopeful picture for me either.
Similar goes for all the usual objections against theism.
Dealing with theism and theists requires extra effort on one's own. (Regardless how much one might resent that and find it is asking too much.)
What he wasn't doing was directing his listeners to accept all kinds of cosmological and metaphysical beliefs. When he was questioned about those kind of matters, he seems to have tried to redirect his questioners' attention back to dukkha, the arising of dukkha, the subsiding of dukkha, and the path to the subsiding of dukkha, which he sometimes says is really all that he teaches. For an example of the Buddha doing that, see the famous Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipit....063.than.html
Sure: The Buddha made it very clear that there are things which, if one were to speculate about them, one would go mad (
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.077.than.html).
Especially the fourth category of those things, about the origin of the world (which includes questions of where the self comes from, does God exist etc.) are pertinent for us here.
Note that the Buddha said that one ought not speculate, not conjecture about them. He didn't say that they cannot be known or that nobody knows them.
Since we're talking about Buddhism, I'll use it to make another point that's relevant to an issue that Dynyddyr made earlier and you opposed.
Christianity is basically an orthodoxy, meaning that it emphasizes right belief. Buddhism, in contrast, is an orthopraxy. That translates to right practice.
(I'm not sure how/where I opposed that?)
Christianity is anything but a monolithic building; by some counts, there are as many as 30,000 Christian churches/denominations.
One of the core disputes between them is whether salvation is by faith, by grace, or by works, or some combination of them.
E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fide
The whole issue is rather complex in Christianity.
Buddhism begins with Right View, which is a kind of orthodoxy, is you will.
In Buddhism, it's entirely possible to set out on the Buddhist path without having formed any conclusions about the truth or falsity of Buddhist doctrines. What Buddhism offers its new practitioners are things to do, whether they are moral precepts to follow (in the manner of rules of training) or contemplative techniques of mindfulness and meditation. These practices in turn lead (or perhaps not) to experiences. These probably won't fully corroborate all the doctrines, but at least they will suggest to the practitioner that there's something to the practice and motivate him/her to keep on with it. And that in turn will lead to new and more subtle experiences, and so on.
Christianity and religions like it emphase belief as opposed to practice. And that puts these religions into a much more difficult position: Religious experience supposedly verifies a person's belief. But the person won't enjoy the experience until he/she accepts the belief. So the whole thing threatens to contract down into a tight little circle. For those able to make such a strange inner movement, doubt would indeed seem to be well and truly banished.
Of course, such a self-justifying psychological move could probably be performed with any belief whatsoever. It appears to my eye to approach perilously close to madness.
I agree with all you're saying here; in fact, I have previously posted on the danger of effectual solipsism (and its insanity) in relation to religious belief.
As far as I can tell, there are some assumptions here about how a person arrives at a religious conviction (belief, faith), and those assumptions may not necessarily be true.
For example, even religious doctrines sometimes make the point that a person's faith is God's doing, not one's own. Ie. no matter what a person might do or how un/philosophical thoughts they may think, this doesn't actually bear on whether they will have faith in God or not. In this view, the majority of religious philosophy can seem like a waste of time and space.
When theists describe how they have arrived at their faith, we must bear in mind that perhaps they do not know the whole happening around it or are not able to talk about it accurately.
In fact, we'd be taking for granted they are omniscient, enlightened or close to it if we believed they do (which would put us into the trap of conjecturing about the unconjecturable mentioned earlier).
If we posit that God is a person, and that in order for two persons to get to know eachother, it takes the input of both, then we also must posit that God has a say in a how a person gets to have faith in Him (or any related faith).
In this sense, those theists who say something like "I sought God, and God made Himself known to me" are actually the most accurate. As opposed to those who say something like "I have studied many books on philosophy, science and religion, talked to many people, prayed and fasted, and came to the conviction that God exists and He loves me". The first reponse might seem dogmatic and useless, but it is accurate (at least as far as personalist theism goes). The second response sets one up for a potentially infinite search or resorting to the in(s)anity of extreme epistemic egoism.
How some theists talk about how they have arrived at their faith might not necessarily be the accurate description, nor an actionable instruction.
What I can say is that you often seem to defend what appears to be a traditional view of theism.
That isn't my specific intention. If I am sometimes heavy (on theists, atheists, agnostics), this is a reflection of my urgency to settle the matter for myself, not to promote a particular kind of theism.
Years back, I almost drowned. I was free diving, overestimated my abilities, went too deep, ran out of air, panicked. And as I was struggling in the water, I was wondering whether life is worth living. This was the worst part of it the experience - being under durress and realizing that I don't know whether life is worth living or not. It also made me realize that once under durress, I will not have good opportunity to start thinking about these important things.
It is only a matter of time when aging, illness and death will strike. And when they do, it is not a favorable time to start thinking about things such as the meaning of life. Hence the sense of urgency.
A few other things have caught my attention as well. For example, your interest in virtue epistemology parallels a number of contemporary evangelical Christian philosophers. Your points in this thread (and your use of the Kalama Sutta) seem to parallel reformed epistemology and the kind of arguments that I've often seen educated evangelicals making on other boards.
Actually, I am not familiar with them.
That's perfectly fine with me. Not only is it often interesting, it's a lot more intelligent than most of what happens here on Sciforums. But it does make me wonder where you're coming from and what motivates you.
Thanks.
As best as I can describe, what drives me is to understand my desire for God, to justify that desire, to justify acting on it.
