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Battleground God--Are your attitudes towards religion rationally consistent?

gromit

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"The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them....It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man."
--GK Chesterton Orthodoxy, pg. 230

Yeah that's my answer.

Oh interesting quote...!
 

The_Liquid_Laser

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Oh wow. I didn't think that this test would piss people off so much. I'd reply to Magnificent Mind's rant against evolution and scientific philosophy but it's way too early in the morning for me to do any serious posting.

Heh, the test didn't piss me off, but I did think that several of the questions were poorly worded. I felt like I had to interpret what the question really meant instead of accepting it at face value.

At any rate it's just a silly internet test. I don't see why a person's beliefs have to be logical. The fact that my beliefs are logical is just a quirk of how my brain likes to work. It doesn't inherently make me any more correct than the next person. It only makes me more consistent.
 

Beorn

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"The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them....It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man."
--GK Chesterton Orthodoxy, pg. 230

This is one of the places where me and Chesterton split ways. I'm certainly willing to accept some amount of mysticism, but I can't handle nearly as much as Roman Catholicism seems to require. Every time I hear a Catholic discussing a relic or a modern miracle I get very confused very quickly.

In fact it was my search for rational consistency that drove me to Calvinism and the reformed tradition. I certainly hope Chesterton is wrong about Calvinism leading to insanity.
 

Stevo

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Heh, the test didn't piss me off, but I did think that several of the questions were poorly worded. I felt like I had to interpret what the question really meant instead of accepting it at face value.

At any rate it's just a silly internet test. I don't see why a person's beliefs have to be logical. The fact that my beliefs are logical is just a quirk of how my brain likes to work. It doesn't inherently make me any more correct than the next person. It only makes me more consistent.

I was not referring to you, I was referring to the people for whom rational consistency does matter, and who are therefore a little sore for not doing as well as they would have hoped.
 

Randomnity

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Congratulations!

You have been awarded the TPM medal of honour! This is our highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

The fact that you progressed through this activity neither being hit nor biting a bullet suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and very well thought out.

A direct hit would have occurred had you answered in a way that implied a logical contradiction. You would have bitten bullets had you responded in ways that required that you held views that most people would have found strange, incredible or unpalatable. However, you avoided both these fates - and in doing so qualify for our highest award. A fine achievement!
But I think it's a terrible test, honestly. Maybe it's only meant for religious people? I didn't make that assumption, but maybe I should have.

It did make me realize that my ideas about the baseline to be called a god are quite low, though. Interesting.
 

Totenkindly

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In fact it was my search for rational consistency that drove me to Calvinism and the reformed tradition. I certainly hope Chesterton is wrong about Calvinism leading to insanity.

If so, I will make sure you get good treatment and meals. :D

... more srsly, evangelical Protestantism never sat well with me because it demanded choosing between forced binaries, and I saw a lot of things as more blurred and overlapping than that. Also, the term "paradox" has no value outside of a framework where ideas are forced to be in opposition with each other to start with. It's not that eastern thought actively embraces what they consider to be paradox, it's that there is no paradox to accept those ideas; as far as I can tell, paradox is a western term.

I guess my shift toward a more "mystical" faith was inevitable. Some types of "contradiction" just don't bother me anymore or don't seem like contradiction per se.
 

ragashree

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...more srsly, evangelical Protestantism never sat well with me because it demanded choosing between forced binaries, and I saw a lot of things as more blurred and overlapping than that. Also, the term "paradox" has no value outside of a framework where ideas are forced to be in opposition with each other to start with. It's not that eastern thought actively embraces what they consider to be paradox, it's that there is no paradox to accept those ideas; as far as I can tell, paradox is a western term.
Quite. :yes: This test is full of false assumptions because of their complete failure to understand this.
 

onemoretime

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Got through it unscathed. The trick is that there's a lot of lateral thinking involved.
 

Chunes

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This is funny.

"Biting a bullet" appears to simply be the author's whining that I don't believe what he does.

Taking a direct hit is an actual logical inconsistency.

I took no hits and bit three bullets.

It complained that by considering atheism faith, I have to entertain a number of absurd possibilities. Well, duh.

Furthermore, this test means nothing to a trivialist.
 

ragashree

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This is funny.

"Biting a bullet" appears to simply be the author's whining that I don't believe what he does.

Taking a direct hit is an actual logical inconsistency.

I took no hits and bit three bullets.

It complained that by considering atheism faith, I have to entertain a number of absurd possibilities. Well, duh.

Furthermore, this test means nothing to a trivialist.

Funny thing is that some of the supposed inconsistencies are not actual inconsistencies at all; the test author relies on you conceptualising things in the same narrow way, and if you don't, there is no inconsistency. Yeah, I did like the whining on the bullet-biting front though, it made me laugh out loud in places. Apparently there's nothing so ridiculous it can not be attributed to you as the logical end result of choosing to take a different line of reasoning to the test author. :rolli:
 

Totenkindly

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This is funny.

"Biting a bullet" appears to simply be the author's whining that I don't believe what he does.

Taking a direct hit is an actual logical inconsistency.

Well, he just basically said that it meant it could lead, out of rational consistency, to you having to embrace ideas society might frown upon.

Which, in effect, I suppose is whining -- he can't complain that you were irrational, just that you might look funny believing what you believe.

Bitten bullets don't seem that relevant.
 

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Then he is not all good, nor all bad; otherwise we would live either in a paradise or in a hell. Why would you care about an indifferent god?

I was thinking about the god of the Bible. Perhaps that's where I failed?

Moreover: do you *need* to be omnipotent in order to be called a god?

Again, the Biblical god.

(Argh. Belief is becoming my new ENTP peak interest)

What do you mean?
 

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Oh wow. I didn't think that this test would piss people off so much. I'd reply to Magnificent Mind's rant against evolution and scientific philosophy but it's way too early in the morning for me to do any serious posting.

I was being sarcastic with the rage. I thought it was quite funny, to be honest.
 

KDude

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Congratulations!

You have been awarded the TPM medal of honour! This is our highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

The fact that you progressed through this activity neither being hit nor biting a bullet suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and very well thought out.

A direct hit would have occurred had you answered in a way that implied a logical contradiction. You would have bitten bullets had you responded in ways that required that you held views that most people would have found strange, incredible or unpalatable. However, you avoided both these fates - and in doing so qualify for our highest award. A fine achievement!



I was tempted to say that atheism was just another belief system, and probably would have taken a hit for it. I understand where they are coming from though. And objectively speaking, I think my (essentially faith based) approach is nothing like an atheist's (empirical/investigative). Saying that they are "believers" is just a snarky way of trying to argue with them (which I've done a few times, just being playful, grasping for some common bond or whatever ;)).
 

Manis

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I took a hit because I said it's rational to believe the lock ness monster doesn't exist, but that atheism is irrational. The difference for me is that the existence of the lock ness monster has been thoroughly tested in a fair and scientific way, whereas the existence of God hasn't been tested in this way. This is my bad really because I was treating the questions as their real life cases, whereas the quiz wants them reduced to the issue of whether or not you require specific proof AGAINST existence.

The second hit I took was pretty much because I make a distinction between the words 'justifiable' and 'justified'. Very annoying.
 

Lark

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Oh right, I was going to take the quiz but I can see from your posts that the entire thing is a pretext to profile and promote atheism.

No thanks.
 

Lark

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I took a hit because I said it's rational to believe the lock ness monster doesn't exist, but that atheism is irrational. The difference for me is that the existence of the lock ness monster has been thoroughly tested in a fair and scientific way, whereas the existence of God hasn't been tested in this way. This is my bad really because I was treating the questions as their real life cases, whereas the quiz wants them reduced to the issue of whether or not you require specific proof AGAINST existence.

The second hit I took was pretty much because I make a distinction between the words 'justifiable' and 'justified'. Very annoying.

Cryptozoologists reckon that Nessie probably lived but is by now probably dead, sometimes I wonder if it was a missile sub disguised as a monster out there during the Cold War in either case it would all depend on a lot of detail which was ommited from the straight forward yes, no, maybe answers.

I'm constantly disappointed by the pretty narrowly defined and conceited nature of atheism. To be honest I think that agnosticism or deism is more rational than atheism but to each their own really.
 
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