Night
Boring old fossil
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2007
- Messages
- 4,755
- MBTI Type
- INTJ
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- 5/8
But it doesn't make sense to call a religious belief "personal" since it is by definition cosmological and universal in scope. To believe in any religious worldview is to believe it exists outside yourself, that it is true for everybody, no matter what they may believe themselves.
To spell it out: You don't believe you alone will get reincarnated while other's won't. You can't believe that some astrological 'star-influence' only hit you at birth, but failed to influence the un-believers. And the moral one: Do any Catholics think that only Catholic gays will spend their afterlife tortured in hell while homosexual Zeus-believers will be spared? Etc. ad nauseam.
This 'personal faith' stuff is just an excuse for religions not to face the music of criticism and responsibility.
Sure, if you never look to diversity in spiritual experience as the norm and instead rely on a sense of misguided universalism.
...I think you missed my point. Terribly.
I believe gravitational laws are true about the world. Not because of a personal taste, but because of strong arguments, strong evidence and strong theoretical consistency. This opens the peossibility that an even stronger theory might come up in the future, which would force me to change belief. To say "Personally I believe in gravitation" would be just as non-sensical as saying "I believe in a God that only exists for me until I change my taste tomorrow."
You don't "believe" in gravity. Gravity is empirical. Gravity is falsifiable.
Religion is neither. Religion depends on faith. Faith is conclusion without confirmable data. Faith doesn't use experimentation or clinical research to arrive at a conclusion. Adherence to -personal- theistic ideology depends only on strength of personal conviction.
This is an important distinction and is central to your confusion of my stance.