Many other primates (and non-Primates ex: dolphins) form large complex social groups and "care for their neighbors" but do NOT worship Gods. Humans would have gathered in social groups BEFORE religion so it stands to reason we have some sort of genetic predisposition towards what we call morality that has nothing to do with religion.
Why isn't faith embarrasing?
- Thread starter superluminal
- Start date
That definition is very wrong. Why then have the term "blind faith" if that is indeed what faith is?
The truth is faith is like trust. They are quite synonomous. Trust generally requires a preexisting foundation and relationship. The same is true of Faith.
Moreover the definition of faith really shouldn't come from a secular source but from sources of faith.
For example the Bible defines faith at Hebrews 11:1
"Faith, is the assured expectation of things hoped for. The evident demonstration of realities though not yet beheld."
According to the Bible faith is founded on the demonstration of evident realites with future expectation. In other words trust. Like we would trust a spouce or friend who has never failed to come through or has never broken a promise.
It's true most Christians really don't have a foundation for their faith but this can not acessed externally it has to be questioned fundalmentally by he that has faith.
Last edited:
I wish theists would stop defining faith as if it were based on morality. Faith is based entirely on one's fear of death and selfish need of eternal life. People will do anything for the promise of eternal life, up to and including divesting themselves of any and all signs of morality.
Also by using a convoluted list of rules, such as the 10 Commandments, one can easily use one commandment to offset another. For instance, "Though shalt not kill" could be extended to say, "Though shalt not kill unless thy neighbor has been proven to violate any one of these commandments (such as committing adultery with your wife) in which case thou can and should kill thy neighbor to do the lord's justice."
Atheists understand that the true law of morality can be summed up quite simply in three words, "Do no harm."
Meanwhile Muslims and Christians promote stoning homosexuals, adulterers, prostitutes, and other "undesirables". Hmm, kinda sounds like eugenics doesn't it.
I was a fundamentalist Christian for 22 years and I can honestly say that atheism has made me a far better person today.
I don't totally condemn Christians for their bad behavior because they are caught up in a system of mind control that even for the very intelligent can be almost impossible to remove yourself from. Honestly, I pity them.
Also by using a convoluted list of rules, such as the 10 Commandments, one can easily use one commandment to offset another. For instance, "Though shalt not kill" could be extended to say, "Though shalt not kill unless thy neighbor has been proven to violate any one of these commandments (such as committing adultery with your wife) in which case thou can and should kill thy neighbor to do the lord's justice."
Atheists understand that the true law of morality can be summed up quite simply in three words, "Do no harm."
Meanwhile Muslims and Christians promote stoning homosexuals, adulterers, prostitutes, and other "undesirables". Hmm, kinda sounds like eugenics doesn't it.
I was a fundamentalist Christian for 22 years and I can honestly say that atheism has made me a far better person today.
I don't totally condemn Christians for their bad behavior because they are caught up in a system of mind control that even for the very intelligent can be almost impossible to remove yourself from. Honestly, I pity them.
As you should be able to recognise from your very own statement, trust and faith are two completely different things. Trust is evidence based. Like you say, you 'trust' a person because they have never failed to come through etc. Faith does not work in this manner...
You have nothing to support belief in or indeed trust in some unseen, unheard, unknown entity. You cannot support the claims made, most of which actually rely on your death, (heaven for instance). You believe it to be true with nothing whatsoever to suggest that it is.. That is not 'trust'.
As for never failing to come through. I am quite certain everyone that has prayed will admit that there are times when their prayers have failed to be answered. It is a failure. Religious people are just good at making excuses for that being they have 'faith' in. Blind faith in.
I have read the history. You view it as a game of checkers, I view it as a game of chess.
Point well made!
On the one in a million prayers that are "answered" god gets the credit. On the other 999,999 god gets credit for knowing better than you what you need. A beautifully twisted logic, bulletproof if you don't dwell on it too long. Another successfully constructed cog in the mind manipulation machine.
Well, you are on to a winner there.You get to define everything in your own terms. Only those who have faith can say what it means. Those without faith can have no say.
Would you care to explain how an invasion could have been launched from Ireland when until about 1921 it was occupied by British troops and the police were also controlled by the British. You are ignorant of the situation and those who are also ignorant will probably agree with your wild speculation.
I assume you consider chess to be the loftier view. That's fine by me because , in this instance, you have no pieces to play with.
All humans have a morality. Are you claiming that all humans have religion - and the religion came first ?SAM said:
Atheism is not a belief. And many atheists have moral systems - the religious ones, in particular, have moral systems any fellow religionist ought to recognize as such.SAM said:
btw: although you are probably just trolling with it, someone should point out that "love your neighbor" and similar moral beliefs are common to several atheistic morality systems - a famous one would be that of Mo Tzu (also: Mozi).
Last edited:
Right, so why did the British feel it so critical to occupy Ireland? Must have felt it was territory of vital strategic importance, wouldn't you say? Do you think I'm stretching the facts? I'm not saying, "hey Myles this is how it is because I decided it is so". I'm simply postulating a theory, and asking you if you think, based on your knowledge, that this territory may have been viewed by the British monarchy in that way. As I said, I'm no expert on Irish history, but nothing you've mentioned, including (and especially) the occupation is what I would view as inconsistent with that particular hypothesis.
However, I want you to understand that I would never expect to judge any of my own hypotheses as facts without doing an incredible amount of research to back it up. To do so would be irresponsible, of course. So again I just want to reiterate, it's only a theory, and a tenuous one at that.
Bear down, SAM - we have in Mozi the founder of an atheistic moral system in which "love your neighbor" is a significant feature.SAM said:
This was the introductory sentence:
Nothing in there about Mozi not being influenced by religious beliefs, eh?
China being heavily agricultural, it is heavily religious. We do not expect to find examples of anything - from infanticide to selfless charity toward others - not influenced by religion, in China.
SAM are you implying that religions by definition are moral?
I'm glad you understood what I was saying.
"love your neighbor"
So what is the argument here? That humans somehow formed a social group, without, giving two craps about the other member of said group? And then somehow invented religion to gain the moral "care for other people in the group"???
Doesn't it seem more reasonable, considering the many highly social animal groups that presently exist - without any form of religious belief, that the concept of caring for other members of the group evolved naturally and that religions, once invented, then incorporated this natural concept into it's structure.
I'd bet most things we consider "moral" are simply products of evolution.
So what is the argument here? That humans somehow formed a social group, without, giving two craps about the other member of said group? And then somehow invented religion to gain the moral "care for other people in the group"???
Doesn't it seem more reasonable, considering the many highly social animal groups that presently exist - without any form of religious belief, that the concept of caring for other members of the group evolved naturally and that religions, once invented, then incorporated this natural concept into it's structure.
I'd bet most things we consider "moral" are simply products of evolution.
I'm glad you understood what I was saying.
So then by that logic Satan worship is also moral. :mufc:
So is that why they had the largest empire the world has known ? To repel an invasion from the Pope's allies which might have been launched anywhere from India to South Africa, the latter being full of "Catholic" Boers ?
You are completely wrong on this one. The British grabbed all the good land in Ireland, which was often owned by absentee landlords, and then had cheap labour to profit from. Catholics were widely discriminated against. We had what were called "Penal Laws" at one stage.
I don't think it's a god idea to float idle speculation masquerading as hypotheses, for fear of misleading others. If you had posed a question, that would have been a different matter.
sowhatifit'sdark
Valued Senior Member
We are all persons of faith. We differ in degree and what we have faith in. All of us have faith in Short Term and Long Term memory. We have faith in our abilities to apply the rules we know and to reduce specific situations to more abstract ones. Moving, getting out of bed and communicating all include faith.
Skeptics could whittle down the basic building blocks of your day and get in shreds of doubt. You could sit around trying to rebut a hypothetical skeptic before making any decision. You could take empirical studies before every act while also holding a dialogue with critics of induction and your test protocols.
This might be Maya. This might be the Matrix and not the one we think it is. Our memories may be faulty. I may have just forgotten how to walk or suffered a paralytic injury.
And yet we act on memory and take that next step.
We generally have faith in our epistemological rules.
We have faith in our ability to decide when it is a good time to use intuition, or when we should seek advice or engage in induction or engage in deduction to help us make the right decision or act ______________(wisely, efficiently, correctly, etc.) You have all noticed that you have a complicated at least partially unconscious way of deciding when to use one of these approaches in a given situation or around a given belief? Yes. You have faith in that meta-decision making faculty of yours that chooses an approach.
Let alone all the smaller less issue, mental oriented decisions we make, all the time, where we shift between faculties and efforts at considering before acting. We have faith in our faculties and faith in when not to have faith in this or that one. Little Boolean regions of use we generally do not question and much of it never questioned at all.
We choose, all the time, not to get sucked into infinite regresses of testing and checking and rational analysis.
The fact that we experience the world through cultural and psychological lenses should make every single one of us wary of thinking we are without faith.
Does all this mean God exists or all faiths are the same?
Nah.
But any position building up smugness in relation to 'those who have faith' simply because they have faith is ignoring Gödel
their own habits
laziness
intuition
choices
potential blind spots
and what it takes to live.
One example: some aspects of your personal ethics are based on faith. Faith in your ability to guage the outcomes of very complicated patterns of human interaction both short and long term.
Hell, if you are irritated by what I wrote and act on it you will in posting your response make hundreds of decisions based on faith. If you don't use faith, you'll never get the damn response finished.
And, my God, if you are certain I am wrong.....
tsk, tsk.
How can you be so certain?
Last edited:
Sure, who or what is Satan, but someone's idea of morality?
Who makes claims to certainty except someone who believes he has a hotline to god via some text or other. All knowledge is provisional as history shows. But it will only be abandoned if we have convincing evidence that it is flawed, That is the difference between our positions. If given proof we change our mind; it's called progress. Just don't ask us to believe in something for which you can adduce no evidence.