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Why Believe?

Olm the Water King

across the universe
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Your point?

Your link is to a reference which must be purchased to be read.

It also seems to focus exclusively on the Middle East.

Not that that's a problem in and of itself, but if I'm not mistaken, the topic of this thread is wider. Haven't read the book, but the Middle East represents about 5% of the world's population currently, so if whatever is being claimed about it is true, it doesn't necessarily mean that's the case for the other 95%.
 

Passacaglia

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Dec 7, 2014
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So many religions seem to want people to keep blinders on. They not only don't seek out knowledge of other faiths, they often actively discourage it. This is too bad, because they might appreciate learning how much they have in common. Imagine if, before a young person could be confirmed as a member of a church/synagogue/etc., they had to study three other religions, including interviewing believers, to make sure their own group was really the best fit. Sounds crazy, but that's actually what my pagan group required before a seeker could be initiated.
Sounds great to me!

if you actually read the laws in leviticus it's kind of crazy that they are even still an included part of a religious book that is used today since they are primarily advice on living for people who lived in an era so detached technologically from ours that they come across as kind of crazy and funny :laugh:
I suspect that a good editor given free license would result in a lot more Christian converts...or heck, converts to any of the 'Religions of the Book.' Of course that would require acknowledging that these books are something less than sacred...

I wish they taught people of the 'cargo cult' (esp. ww2 pacific island ones as they describe 'us' as gods) and the life of the founder of scientology and empiricism side by side with whatever religion your parents want to brainwash you with to 'save you'.
I've really started to think that basic religious studies -- a survey of different religions/cults, their basic tenets, and their history/evolution -- should be a part of every public education, along with the other humanities. Kids who genuinely feel the pull of spirituality should be aware of all their different options, and those who don't are still served by the knowledge. It's a shame that most people don't get any sense of the full scale of religious beliefs until and if they go to college.

Like I posted on facebook...all these religious people are gonna pissed when they die and realize they are wrong. Amazingly I only got 2 likes...lol. I never said who was wrong or why or anything. Just with so many christians who believe so many different things not all of them can be right.
This made me think of:
 

Zangetshumody

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INTJ
So I've written an essay mostly to edify myself by doing research, but others may find it worth a read:



Full essay here. (Google docs link, no download, 5 pages.)

Apologies in advance for not reading your full essay, and so my critique may not be so fully grounded in the terms and systematized assessments you have expressed:

QUOTING YOU:
"I myself am naturally inclined toward doubt, and was raised to think independently,"...

'naturally inclined'?
'I myself am naturally'...

Why?

In answering why, please offer a full thesis that doesn't avoid rationale driven from principle. Whether you can accomplish expressing the basis of the claim I'm asking you to provide the "why" for, to me is immaterial because either you will:

want to avoid basing your claim on anything (to avoid all traces of what might call for something 'supernatural' as its source).

or:

express more principles for me to then ask you "why" about... unless you can admit to a principle as being a first principle of some kind, whereby wouldn't you then have just expressed an inclination for the supernatural?

Follow up question:
Can you escape the dilemma as I have described it?
 

Zangetshumody

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Messages
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So I've written an essay mostly to edify myself by doing research, but others may find it worth a read:



Full essay here. (Google docs link, no download, 5 pages.)

Again I have not read your whole essay, but judging it from the exert you provided, it seems to be a sociological (inductive) type argument against religious faith as a tainted or broken house for humanity? It is true that your Scientism might offer a broader barn roof, to house all the various radical diversity of faith we have on the planet: I'm afraid that any appeal at grabbing at the larger narrative that everyone can each have their piece of the largest existential pie (that's happens to be ripe for the sharing): is already the formula that basically all religion (including the obviously fake religions) is founded in.

And although it is conceivable that you would be able to get people to trade up their "false" form of faith for your "better" secular narrative, that claims to promise more... it probably will never promise enough: because likelihood at being the majority narrative to be adopted by the world's entire population, is still not the same as a truth claim. I have heard some positive arguments for the adoption of Science as a framework for maintaining a general perspective that carries defencibility; I believe those arguments to entitle science with that kind of authority: appeal to so few people, because the reasoning is so overtly feeble and unconvincing. (only a handful of people in the world supposedly understand the classical model of physics, furthermore, Jehovas Witness claim their factual supremacy in just the same type of claim- their claim to hold the ultimate general appeal for the entire population [that all could share in their accounts of human history]; therefore in my mind your logic follows their same tactic, which is also shared by some of the groups who self-identify as followers of Islam; which can mean that you might be able to displace believers in all those prone to that kind of philosophical-authoritarianism in favour of your secular Scientific-version, but I doubt you could produce a tasty enough narrative as propaganda enough to convert those who have already found their home with the authority of "strongest popularity";- that they have decided to promote (this style of faith derives a force rather like a chain-letter that is constructed to illicit sympathy also with the tacit implication that one day you will be punished by some hasty uprising of mob justice (that you are compelled to experience immediately by some trademark of existentialist angst peculiar with the group in question) because you didn't [or won't] promote the chain letter as instructed)).

It's a bit like trying to sell a product to a audience without being capable of demonstrating any proof for it, only telling people of the value you claim it possesses (when all it actually offers is the punishment of disconnecting from the popularity of its group-think); its a narrative of blind faith in people who wear lab coats and hypothesize all day.. who only manage to go onto qualifying for philosophy degrees because they have the collective money and influence to warp the entire academic enterprise around science's brittle schemes for gainsaying in support of their flimsy empirical authority (which is doomed to leave quantum mechanics misunderstood until the Scientific process is discovered to be flawed in its erroneous presumption on time conceptualization that already negates free will and God (thus making it utterly incompetent to examine those topics because of Science's presumptuous "oversight" over the basic fabric of reality, programmed into Scientific methodology).
 
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