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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
So obviously this isn’t part II, this is part I.5 (I’m so tricksey, decimal and roman numerals ). Part II is being delayed but in its place I want to explain why I think my faith is rational. This is not an explanation of why all faith is rational, or why other faiths aren’t, this is just mine. If other people want to explain why their faith (or lack of faith) is rational go ahead.

This isn’t going to be very organized, I’m writing this as I fly home on a plane that left 45 minutes late and the last bus home leaves 45 minutes after the original flight time so I’m rather… distracted. Anyways, sorry about the lack of clarity and organization.

First off, I want to make it clear that there is a very big difference between faith and blind faith. I like to think of it on sort of a scale. There’s complete knowledge, and blind faith. Except I don’t think anything is perfectly blind faith or perfectly knowledge. There’s always doubt, even if it’s as small as that our senses may be just reading in input from a giant computer, and there is always rationality, even if it’s just that he’s taller than me so what he says must be right. So when I talk about faith I’m not talking about blind faith, I’m talking about something else.

My favorite definition of faith is that it is a surety of facts enough to act on them (or some phrasing of that anyways). Thus I have faith in gravity, in the solidness of the ground under me. Right now I’m exhibiting faith in the wings that are flying me home (even if they just build a 1.1 safety factor into them). I understand that people have faith in these things for reasons, they have seen these principals work before, they’ve seen things fall to the ground because of gravity, planes make nit across the country. The faith in these things is not blind faith, nor is it knowledge. Wings sometimes crack, and even seeing millions of things fall without one thing rising off the ground without any other force doesn’t mean that gravity has to work, it just makes it very, very likely.

So clearly when I say I have faith in my religion it must be because I have some sort of reason for them to be true, past experience that points to the truth in these things. And of course I do or why would I be writing this?

However, I’m once again going to stray off the point and come at this from another perspective. I touched on this in my Cousin Hobbes 5000th post, but I’m going to go over it again anyways.

This is the idea of logic and postulates. Many people get confused and think that logic alone will give you a solution. Or rather that with only logic all things can be unraveled. The problem with this idea is that logic needs postulates. It needs data make conclusions off of. A good example is that of Euclidian geometry. Euclid set up certain postulates, one that could not be proven. He assumed that between any two points there could only be one straight line that connects them. There is no way to prove this (try!), though it made sense to him at the time, so he assumed it. It’s not important that it seems now that he was wrong, Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that actually any two points have an infinite number of straight lines connecting them.

The important thing to note about this example is that the postulates that Euclid came up with formed a very specific working model, out of which many conclusions were made. And every single one of them was logical given the Euclidian assumptions. It’s important to understand this, because this is a key thing many people miss. Euclid made a series of assumptions, none of which contradicted with each other. All of the theorems that were created from these postulates were completely logical, no contradictions existed at all. Yet should he have assumed differently, that two lines can be connected by an infinite number of straight lines, he would have once again created a series of postulates that could spawn many theorems all of which would be logically consistent. In fact that’s what some mathematicians did, they changes Euclid’s theorems and creates whole new types of geometry all of which were completely logically flawless.

I’ll say it one more time and try to make it big picture this time, any set of assumptions that do not contradict each other (do not lead to two opposing theorems) can not be proven wrong, nor in any way inferior to any other (logically tested) system of assumptions. Do we all get it? I don’t want to say it any more so I hope so.

All right, so how does this apply to what I was saying before? Well let’s look at religion a little different now. Let’s say that it is a series of assumptions made that lead to specific theorems. I don’t think that this is completely accurate but let’s go with it and I’ll explain that later.

An example to start off with:
Postulate: God loves me
Postulate: God is infinitely intelligent and understanding
Postulate: God said that following His commandments will bring me the most possible happiness

Theorem: I should follow God’s commandments to be happy.

This is a good example of taking the teaching of a religion and seeing it as postulate/theorem logic. But that doesn’t relate to how I have rational faith, or it’s at least missing one step.

That step is the qualifier I put in one of those fun paragraphs up there, that the assumptions made do not leas to theorems that disagree with each other. Then they are not logically sound as logic comes up with two conclusions from one set of assumptions, two ones that say different things. So the key here is that if you can see religion (at least in terms of rational belief) as postulates and theorems, you know that it is a meaningful (non-logically flawed) representation of the universe if no theorems that spawn from its assumptions contradict. This was always my problem with religion, I found none that had this. I’m not going to go into any specific examples because then I would be violating the rule I started off with at the beginning of not explaining the non-rational faith of others, which has nothing to do with why I think mine is rational. It suffices to say that I saw logical flaws in the assumptions made by other religions.

The major problem is that a religion doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it exists in this world. So if one assumption is that gravity does not exist and object are in fact, just as likely to rise off the earth as to fall towards it then all though that assumption by itself has no logical flaw, when you add in experience (which is its own type of assumption) it shows contradictions. Experience says gravity causes things to fall where as the assumption is that things don’t fall. So these two assumptions can not exist rationally together. Not to say they can’t both be believed, but then it wouldn’t be a rational faith.

So any system of religiouis assumptions has to deal with experience in the world, and if they are to be rational they must either not contradict, or one must be wrong. Basically, to be rational beliefs, either religious assumptions must agree with the world or there must be a flaw in the experiences had. If you grew up in a place with incredible upwards suction then you may assume that things do, in fact, fall upwards and that assumption would be irrational with the assumption that things fall towards the earth. So to come to a rational faith you must discover the flaw in one of your assumptions or you would be in a condridicting faith.

All right, so in applying this rational test to religions, one must begin creating a series of theorems from both the assumptions they make and the assumptions you’ve been making. And if you come up with contradicting results then you must discover where these come from (a flaw in your assumptions or a flaw in the religious assumptions). If you find that your assumptions are correct (or that you have faith in your assumptions) then you can say that those religious beliefs create a non-rational faith.

So finally, we will move onto my faith, which was supposed to be the subject of this post until I discovered that unless I’m able to disembark from the plane, get my baggage and get to the bus in 20 minutes I’ll be spending the night in the airport (isn’t it interesting to see a whole other story develop in the midst of an essay?). This means that if I think I have rational faith in religion, I must’ve examined all of the assumptions that it makes and found that not only do they not contradict each other, but that my own experience does not contradict them. I’m not going to go through all of the things that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gives as truth, but from what I know of it does not violate this. I don’t know all of it, no one knows all of it, just as no one knows all physics, I feel that I know enough of it to judge it however.

Hah! I’d just like to say that at this part of the story, I’ve just gotten in the bus, we got in about 30 minutes late and I made it to the bus with on minute to spare. Go me! Now maybe we can all relax and finish the essay.

All right, so now we have two different tracts of analysis coming into it. On the one hand we have that no things are sure, but that we can add on experience and knowledge to know some thing better than others (gravity is a force is a better none fact of faith than string theory describes the universe accurately). And then we have the idea that multiple beliefs can be logical if the assumptions within each belief do not contradict.

I’ll try and make putting these together our final step, have one concluding thought type of thing and then stop writing so you can stop reading.

The world is full of belief systems, religions, various scientific theories, and personal opinions on just about everything. The way I chose something was to take each one (or as many as I could) and first check to see if it was logical. For some things this was very, very easy. Atkins, for instance, was done away with right away (that’s a joke, laugh). Some of them took much longer. When I was done I was left with two things, the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and then a kind of existentialist type of thing. Humans are simply collections of complex chemicals that react to, and act on the world. That the brain is just a very complex example of this. I saw small flaws in the latter belief, however all of them I felt could easily be removed, and did not show flaws in the underlying assumptions, but flaws in the way reached conclusions from them.

There is absolutely no way of proving the existential belief, nor does it help anything really, meaning, believing it doesn’t give me any directions as to how to act. Let me remind you, this is in no way disproof of the system, but it does make believing the only other option I found a little more substantiated (as believing in that would help me achieve goals I had set for myself, like being happy). However, this was not enough for me to believe.

So I kept on researching. This is when that idea about some things being more sure than others came into play. I decided that to know if it was a true or false (or, more true or more false) I would have to gain experience of it, just as a child must experience gravity before knowing with a high degree of certainty that it exists. So I tested it, I looked to see if the principles it taught actually worked, if the Lord would give you a confirmation of the truth of those original assumptions. I’ll also noticed things happening that where either complete coincidences (and fulfilled the existentialist theory) or they were further proof of the existence of God.

In the end it comes down to choice, I feel that I made the most rational choice because my experiences gave me (and give me) a high probability of likely hood. I feel that the Church is the truth with a high degree of accuracy, that the world backs up its veracity. So I have enough evidence that I am willing to act on, I have rational faith in its teachings.

My final thought is actually doing something I said I wouldn’t do, explain why one aspect of my personal faith is rational. I’m doing it because it comes up so often, and is perhaps the most common reason people have for thinking that the Church is wrong. That is the question: why doesn’t God show Himself? Why does he make us find out through things like life experience and the Spirit?

One final reminder, before I answer, these are my beliefs, these are what I think is true, they are not necessarily the reasons anyone else would give you.

The key to answering this question is to first answer the question of the purpose of being on this earth. I think the whole point of all of God’s plan is for us to obtain happiness. And I also think that a big part of life on earth is to be happy, but it also has some other, short-term goals we need to achieve in order to reach complete happiness. And that is to exercise correctly, our free-will. That means that we must have the ability to choose, and we must have choices to choose from. The idea is that these experiences we’re having will help us make those right choices (not killing people for instance).

So let us picture what the Earth would be like if God did show himself and all His power to everyone visibly, in other words, to make prophets of all of us. Each time we came to a choice in life, like if we should murder someone, we would have impressed upon our minds vividly the fact that we will be rewarded for choosing differently, that choosing to kill will cause us pain, and the more sure we are that God exists, the more clearly He shows Himself to us, the less of a choice we have. If God is standing right in front of us as we choose to kill this person or not, we would no longer truly have the choice, or at best have just a glimmer of one.

If you were a child standing next to a cookie jar your parents told you not to eat from, then you would have to choose, do I disobey and eat them anyways, or do I obey my parents? If you choose to obey than you have grown in strength and chosen rightly. It will also help you remember that you did choose right, make you proud of yourself and your parents happy with you. But what if your parents were standing right there net to you, watching you? Then the choice to not steal the cookies loses meaning. Did you refrain because it was the right thing to do, or because you feared your parents? Are your parents going to be very proud of you for the choice?

The more surety we have of God and the laws that He tells us, the less choice we have in our lives. The less each junction in our life represents growth. So God does not show Himself, nor make himself evident beyond all doubt because to do so would eliminate choice.

Going the other way, why does God matter at all, why does He show himself if that weakens our choices? Well picture the child again, what if he had no parents telling him not to eat the cookies, he would not even know it was wrong to choose to do so and would eat them, and then not be properly nourished. Also, he would have no parents to be proud of him, or to help resist. These are exactly the same reasons God must show himself at all, to tell us right and wrong, and to help us grow.

Well that raps it up for me. My batteries running out of power, I’m exhausted, and when I get back (I’m still in the bus) I have to do two lab reports for tomorrow and study for a test. This is a good example of making poor choices, forgetting the materials you need to work at home when that work has to be done shortly after you get back.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
Just so you know, I wrote this when I was really tired, and only because I had forgotten my homework which I despertly need to do. I'm sure there are errors all over the place but hopefully you can get past them because I don't have the energy or the time to fix it for a while and I really wanted to post it. Sorry.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
 

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So if one assumption is that gravity does not exist and object are in fact, just as likely to rise off the earth as to fall towards it then all though that assumption by itself has no logical flaw, when you add in experience (which is its own type of assumption) it shows contradictions. Experience says gravity causes things to fall where as the assumption is that things don’t fall. So these two assumptions can not exist rationally together. Not to say they can’t both be believed, but then it wouldn’t be a rational faith.

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Now Faith...is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods where they get off, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

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But what if your parents were standing right there net to you, watching you? Then the choice to not steal the cookies loses meaning. Did you refrain because it was the right thing to do, or because you feared your parents? Are your parents going to be very proud of you for the choice?

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When I was done I was left with two things, the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and then a kind of existentialist type of thing.

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If this is true then I suspect you've left out a lot of your method, because there are probably many many possible internally consistent theories that wouldn't directly contradict your experience. The fact that you cut it down to an existentialism similar to your earlier views and the religion that a whole bunch of your friends are a part of suggests maybe there's more to this decision than just eliminating logical and experiential contradictions.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
Xaposert, what you have to realize is that I've had experience in a decently wide range of pssoble beliefs, not deep experiences, but enough that I felt that my experience did not line up rationaly with what they say. Of course narrowing it down to those two was a little more copmlicated than how I described, but that was the basics of it. Meaning, it's true, I didn't test out every single set of beliefs ever put forth and decide that only two of them worked. In the end I had to go through each possibilty I could think of and determine which was right. Kind of like a chess alogorithim, it goes down each possible path of moves and determines which is best. Except it doesn't have time to go down every path so it cuts many off because it determines those paths can't lead to victory.

Celia, the paterns analogy has a lot of flaws, nothing is quite like the existance of God, though some things are closer than others. So you're right, it doesn't quite work all the way out, but I like to think that what I said makes sense by itself.

I also disagree that you must first believe in God to see if He exists. I suppose in some belief systems you do, but I certainly didn't. Like I said in my other thread, you must believe that He may exist, but I really don't think that you have to believe that He does without any rationality at all.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by celia60 (Member # 2039) on :
 
The problem being that the analogy fails in exactly the place you need it to work.

And to postulate that God may exist implies that He may not exist, which sums to zero, no? Short of experiencing God, himself, there is no other experience which can rationally be used to interpret one way or the other under such a postulate.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 

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The problem being that the analogy fails in exactly the place you need it to work.

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And to postulate that God may exist implies that He may not exist, which sums to zero, no? Short of experiencing God, himself, there is no other experience which can rationally be used to interpret one way or the other under such a postulate.

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It doesn't sum to zero, it just says that you honestly don't know one way or another. It's the experiences that you have that determine which side of the postulate you take. Just like doing a science experiment, you may honestly have no idea what the result of what you're doing is going to be, so you conduct the experiment and see how the results relate to the question. If you started off the experiment sure of one answer over another it would be very, very difficult to get that answer, right or wrong.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by Papa Moose (Member # 1992) on :
 
Shouldn't it be Part I.V?
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
Ha ha, yes it should, but as I said, I felt like being tricksey.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by celia60 (Member # 2039) on :
 
I think you're making a good argument for agnostics being the saved people.

Propose and experiment that will actually lead to one or the other conclusion. Gravity does or does not exist. A falling apple might lead me to believe it does and a hot air balloon might lead me to believe that it doesn't.

What, aside from experiencing God, could lead me to lean to one side or the other?
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 

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What, aside from experiencing God, could lead me to lean to one side or the other?

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Well I don't know how you define experiencing God, but the way I would define it would pretty much encompass everything. However, if you mean besides feeling the Holy Spirit, then how about things happening in your life. Like say, missionaries knocking on your door right after you being investigating. Or after getting the sudden and firm impression that the best thing to do is try to live the pricibles and see where that takes you, you recieve an unsolicated copy of the Doctrine and Convanents. Things that while they may be coincidences, would point to God existing if they aren't.

However, without getting any sort of confirmation beyond something you can write off as coincidence I think it would be very difficult to believe.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by celia60 (Member # 2039) on :
 
exactly.

Subscribing to things like "don't lie" or "don't kill people" or "don't do drugs" can be backed by experience, but ascribing the earthly consequences to God existing requires that leap of faith.

[ February 17, 2004, 10:55 AM: Message edited by: celia60 ]
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
A true agnostic who is so in all fields of life, not just religion would never act.

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I think you're making a good argument for agnostics being the saved people.

Propose and experiment that will actually lead to one or the other conclusion. Gravity does or does not exist. A falling apple might lead me to believe it does and a hot air balloon might lead me to believe that it doesn't.

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I think that agnosticism is a great way to start off, admitting you don't know is the first step to finding out. However, if you say you don't know now, that doesn't mean that you can know in the future. The falling apple and rising ballon can be confusing, but after reasearch and expermentation you would discover that gravity still works, it's just other forces make the ballon rise. And thus you remove your agnosticism and act on faith as you throw your keys in the air (for whatever reason), being sure enough to act that it they will come down again.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by celia60 (Member # 2039) on :
 
I believe that if I do nothing I will die and if I do anything, eventually I will die.

Short of that, I act as is consistant with my experience.

edit: is "However, if you say you don't know now, that doesn't mean that you can know in the future" what you ment to say?

[ February 17, 2004, 11:06 AM: Message edited by: celia60 ]
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 

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What I was trying to say is that if you don't think your parents are around then it is much more of a choice to take a cookie than when you think they are. God, should He exist, would know if you took the cookies or not, but if we aren't sure of his existance beyond all doubt then the choice to take the cookies with a less than perfect knolwedge of us being caught becomes more of a choice than should we know beyond a doubt that we would be.

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This has got to be one of the saddest things about sincere mainstream Christian belief.
 

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Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
 
Why?
 

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Posted by BrianM (Member # 5918) on :
 
Am I the only one who remembers the perfectly spherical M&Ms? I think they were called Sixlets.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
Because why doesn't God want us to have cookies? j/k
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Very brief explanation, because their definition of morality precludes people doing the right thing for no other reason than they think that it's the right thing to do. While this has bad effects on society, I'm really mainly saddened by what this belief does to many of the people who hold it. Basically, they never mature to the point where they do the right thing for it's own sake, rather than because of some punishment/reward system.
 

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Posted by dkw (Member # 3264) on :
 
Did you know, Squicky, that that's almost exactly what John Calvin said in his debate with Jacopo Sadoleto?
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
Did Calvin put it more or less eloquently?
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
dkw,
I knew of those letters, but I've never read them. I'll see if I can google a copy. That Calvin said that speaks against my view of him and of Calvinism. I thought they were all about submission and predestination, which is the exact opposite of the idea of personal responsibility that I was talking about. Now I'm going to have to reevaluate him.
 

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Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
 

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Very brief explanation, because their definition of morality precludes people doing the right thing for no other reason than they think that it's the right thing to do.

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Why do you think conversion experiences are empty?

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In both cases, it seems to me that, rather than deal with these problems head on, people are fleeing into a comfortable version of religion.

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outgrowths of obvious psychological weaknesses

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For an agnostic to get the most efficient use from the atonement, they have to avoid moral teaching. And how do they know what it is in order to avoid it?

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Do you think you could maybe explain that in small words or something? Is this a counterpoint to the arguement I wasn't making?

[ February 19, 2004, 08:11 AM: Message edited by: celia60 ]
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Here's a snippet from a thread at Ornery that is pretty much what I'm talking about:

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Oh for sure! I'd have taken over the world multiple times by now. Seriously, if there is no higher power what is there to live for? Three things: money (material wealth), happiness (can be material wealth or a combination of things), or power. Power trumps all the rest. With power comes the rest in my opinion. I would spend my life in search of that if I didn't know that God had the ultimate power, that my quest for power will be fruitless before the eyes of God, and that pleasing God is the one true source of happiness and contentment in this world. Without God's peace, I would not be content, and when I'm not content, I make changes.

So if I got to choose, I'd say make me a universe which I can master. That's the greedy, lustful human side of me. Only through God's grace is my hateful energy sublimated.

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However, just because some conversion are valid, doesn't mean that others, or parts of the valid ones, aren't manifestations of human psychological weaknesses.

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The heart of Christian doctrine, for instance, is that humans cannot escape their desires without divine help.

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not because God's going to check up on his investment and punish me if I don't have a high yeild, but because I think that it is the right thing to do. Doing the right thing is a part of me, not part of some external thing that I'm being held to.

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1) Can people have faith, hope, and charity without submission to God? If they are free to choose these things without God, what purpose does submission to God serve?

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Was Gandhi a good man or would he naturally have been a better man if he was Christian? Since he didn't submit to God, was he unable to achieve virtue or happiness?

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2) Are you denying that heaven/hell considerations are a large part of Christian doctrine? Why do you perform the Act of Contrition? Isn't it because you "fear the loss of heaven and dread the pains of hell"?

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Don't some Christian sects teach that the state of your life on earth is partly determined by being rewarded or punished for their actions?

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Or that you can pray for something to happen and God might make it happen because of your prayer?

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Incidentally, I hold an Emmersonian view of Christianity and believe that I live my life pretty consistently with Jesus' teachings and with how they were presented in the Bible. I don't believe in the submission to spernatural or worldy authority that has formed that backbone of mainstream Christianity since at least the time of Constantine, but that doesn't mean I reject Christianity.

To give an example, I believe that Jesus' "I have given you an example" speech was referring more to his crucifixion than anything else. His life was an example and a call for us to walk in his footsteps. Thus, we must also be crucified (figuratively speaking) for our own redemption. This fits in with only my blood being good enough to merit my redemption.

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I don’t know how you live your life. But remember that Jesus submitted to the Crucifixion. He also spent 40 days fasting in the desert, and spent the last night before he died praying in the garden.

Have you chosen to only acknowledge the part of his example that relates to how to treat other people? Jesus said a lot of difficult things; it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he was either exactly what he said he was or a raving lunatic.

Dagonee
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
MrSquicky, since you seem to be bouncing around again, I'd like to know your thoughts on my last response to you in this thread.

Dagonee
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Sorry about that Dag, I've been meaning to get back to this but I've been real busy. I'm only around now because I'm sick enough that I think I was doing negative amounts of work. However, I definitely owe you a response. I've started typing one out a couple of times a little while ago, but I couldn't seem to strike the right tone. I'll see what I can come up with tommorow.

One thing I want to put out there now is that I hope we're doing this in an air of mutual respect. I think you're a heck of an addition to this place. I intentionally took an antagonistic tone in a couple of places here to see if I could rattle your cage because I was pretty sure you could take it. You do seem to me to take a more negative impression from my stuff than I intend. I just wanted to make sure you know that I'm really not trying to be dismissive or malicious.

edit: Also, I was thinking, I'm not sure if you're seen Storm's humanism thread, but I think that a lot of my points on that thread speak to our disagreement here. You might understand me better if you give it a read.

[ March 25, 2004, 10:48 PM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
Never fear, MrSquicky, I think there's definitely mutual respect here. I read the Humanism thread, and think it is basically the flip side of the points being discussed here: that is, the dispelling of misconceptions about a belief system by those not holding the beliefs of the system. I think the misconceptions arise from looking at parts of each belief system in isolation from the whole; this is incredibly dangerous in Christianity. I would assume it's no safer in Humanism.

Looking back over things, one possible reason I may be taking things more negatively than you intend is that I can't tell if the incomplete picture of Christian beliefs you present in your posts represents your true conception of Christianity or is merely the portions you deem relevant to the discussion.

Any frustration I've felt has stemmed from my impression that you are presenting either/or (or either/or/or) choices that I don't think exist. Looking back, I'm not sure if that's your intent or not now. It is how I interpreted it at the time, though.

Dagonee
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
You see, that's why I feel blind when I can't talk to someone face to face. I was trying to point out things I saw as weaknesses in Christianity and I was seeing you taking an apologist standpoint that none of these problems existed. I think it might be best if we sort of start again from fundamentals.

For the record, I think that I have a very complex view of Christianity. I was at one time a very devout Catholic. I think that I left the religion in large part because I believed strongly in the message and much less in the structure. Part of the problem was that I kept coming up with heretical ideas and, in studying Church history, I came to admire the heresiarchs and neglected thinkers much more than those whose works became canon. I certainly didn't leave because I hated the religion or even the people in it. I still have a lot of affection for the religion and I find it fascinating. I feel like there have been numerous times on the 'Rack where I've come in to correct people's misinterpretations of certain parts of Christianity or to provide a different context to see things in. I think that these have shown that I don't have a simplistic or extremely distorted conception of the religion.

I'm trying to keep talking about myself to a minimum, but I feel like I should explain the overriding context I'm approaching this from. Two of the central traits of my thinking about individuals and organizations are dynamics and relativism. Dynamics, as opposed to statics, is recognizing the systems are always in a state of flux and take a lot of their outward structure from the environment they express themselves in. This tends to lead to a concern with underlying motivations over their superficial expression. So, for example, rather than classifying someone as an extrovert or introvert, I'm more concerned with what they are expressing by their intro/extroversian. Relavatism is sort of the outgrowth of the scientific rejection of judging values. That is, science itself is supposed to only describe and not judge things. This isn't really possible in psychology, but at the very lesat it's important to understand that you make judgements with respect to what values you're imposing on them. The idea I'm trying to get at here is that I don't feel justified in criticizing the ultimate values that people are striving towards. Instead, I look at the general maturity - yes, that's a value judgement too, to an extent. sue me - of how they go about pursuing these goals. A good way of expressing this is that I try not to judge people on their opinions, on whether they agree with me or not, but rather on how they hold these opinions.

I'm sorry I'm doing such a bad job of explaining this. I don't think in words normally and this has been sort of like translating these ideas into a foreign language. Anyway, that was all a complicated way of saying that I focus on motives and don't necessarily judge outward expressions. So, I've more respect for a sincere Christian than for people believe like I do for what I think are immature reasons. Also, from a spiritual standpoint, I'm willing to recognize that my truth can be extremely different even contradictory from someone else's and yet both can still be valid. In a very real way, objective reality is made up of the union of our separate truths, and not their intersection. My job isn't to convince people to believe as I do, but to help them get past all the things that obscure their own truth.

That's the big reason that, like I said in the stuff that started all this, I am saddened by many of the conversion stories that I hear and by the attitude that many religious people take that people are inherently evil. I can't be sure (nothing is ever sure) but I feel strongly that these are often those types of psychological defenses that don't allow people to grow past them. They can protect against certain things (and protection is important), but they often trun from a sheltering house to a confining prision

As I said, I've studied Christian history and, from my perspective, Christianity has often been used to serve the worse and most unChristian aspects of human nature. I don't necessarily put this at the feet of "evil" people who manipulated the religion either. Rather, I think it's often because certain aspects of the religion have fostered an immature outlook in many of its adherents. That's not to say that these are necessarily bad ideas, only that the effect they had on people in a certain state was undesireable. For other people in other situations, they might be very useful and life-affirming. It's a rare belief or practice that can't cut both ways.

That's why I believe in honest criticism of systems. One honest critic with integrity is worth a thousand appologists in terms of the health of an organization.

One of my big criticisms of Christianity concerns the doctrine of original sin and of magic redemption. That's sort of what underlies a lot of the stuff in here and also in the Humanism thread as well as my respect for the Pelagian heresy. I think that this idea has tons of very harmful consequences and generally serves to distort truth. However, it fits in very well with the individualistic bent of our culture (aI'd say that the two are highly intermingled, with one causing the other and vice versa).

If you want, I can trace out how I think this leads to a culture that is both psychologically destructive and unChristian, but I've written a lot for one post as it is. To put it very breif, do you really think market capitalism is an honest expression of Christian values? Yet, it has been strongly identified with being Christian.

To put an end to this rambling, yes, I think that Christianity has a lot of strong points. Some of the best people I know are Christian. However, so are some of the most immature people I've met. Also, as I've stated many times now, studies consistently show that the majority of American Christians score worse on many measures of maturity than non-religious people. I believe that a lot of both the good things in the Christians I know and the bad things about Christians both historical and contemporary are bound up in the structure and teachings of the religion.

Like I was trying to get at before, there are plenty of people who are Christian largely because they want good stuff and don't want bad stuff and the Church, in a lot of their teachings, has encouraged this type of thinking. Also, like when the Curia issued a statement to the African churchs that using condoms causes AIDs, they are very concerned with regulating people's behavior.

I'm willing to recognize the many good things about Christianity, but I think it's more important to openly investigate the many bad things about it too. however, it seems to me that Christians, much like all other sorts of people, generally react to bad things in their religion with defensiveness and apologism and not with the zeal for truth that they should. For me, one of the most disheartening about the priest sex abuse scandal was the lack of rage on the part of Catholics. For me, they acted just like a beaurocry with a "Let's do the minimum we can to get this out of the public eye" attitude, instead of the air of betrayal that I expected. A lot of my hope in reforming society through stengthening religious commitment died during that scandal.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
I’m not quite sure if this is part of your problem with Christianity’s outlook on humanity Squicky, but I know others have this problem anyways so I’ll just go ahead and address it as best I can. The idea that some how all people are inherently evil.

I know different religions have different takes on this, and many of them undoubtedly will disagree with my take, but even if I only speak for myself, that’s still at least one person I’m representing.

People sin, they do. In my opinion that’s not from some predilection to do evil, but from a lack of perfection in one’s soul. A sin may be evil, and heck, a sinner may be evil too, but in my opinion most of the time they aren’t evil, or trying to do evil, they are merely not perfect.

I can understand why someone would resent it if I told them that what they do is not sufficiently good, because undoubtedly what it would sound like is I’m saying they aren’t good, which normally means they’re bad (evil). I know a lot of good people, they go through life with their understanding of morality and the world around them and try to do the right thing. I think they’re good, certainly better people than I am, but they are still not sufficiently good. They are not perfect. This isn’t something to be ashamed of, just like you wouldn’t think less of a 2 day year old child that was incapable of running a marathon, it’s just something to work on.

That’s how I see it, but the problem is most of the time believers and non-believers are speaking in completely different contexts. A non-believer would hear that since when they were little they stole someone’s pencil they’re now a bad person and resent it, seeing as how since then they’ve lived a righteous life (hyperbola, go with it ). Where as a believer probably means, you’re not perfect, flawed in some way, and though hopefully, after sufficient time you will become perfect (through work and effort), someone has to clean up for the mess you made while you working at it.

I’m not sure if I’m making sense but instead of trying again and just garbling it more and more I think I’ll leave it and let you ask for clarifications.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Hobbes,
I get what you're saying and I pretty much agree. If you check out the Humanism thread, I sort of address that there. I call this sort of thing maturity because it really isn't a matter of good and evil, I don't think, it's a matter of unfulfilled potential.

In my understanding, the doctrine of original sin doesn't allow for unfulfilled potential. The point is that people are unable to want to do good things without God's grace. Thus, to do good, you don't try to do good. You try to get God's grace, then you can do good things. But your aim should be Grace, not straight out doing good things.

A corollary of this is that people who aren't seeking God's grace, because, say, they're not Christian, are all evil. Even people who are Christian can't be trusted because they're going to do bad things as their default. I think hat this is more a case of a immature person projecting their own weaknesses into the world than a genuine truth about human nature.

Another corollary is that urges that come from inside yourself are only bad. I think this resulting in alienating your nautre (both good and bad parts) instead of integrating it and growing ad a person.

I remember a thread a while back where you mocked a teacher for telling you that a big part of releasing your creativity is to let go of constrained thinking. I think that sort of fits in with what I'm talking about.

People often seem to have a strange concept of what repression means. Repression doesn't mean feeling an urge and not acting on it. That's a much wider range of strategies and many of them are psychologically healthy. Repression is feeling an urge and then alienating the urge or even awareness of the urge from yourself. It's completely possible to handle an urge without directly expressing it. However, repression doesn't do this. In fact, the urge is still there, and you still act on it. You just are unaware that you are doing so or you feel a sense of guilt assosciated with it. You don't grow from your experiences when you repress.

[ March 26, 2004, 03:10 PM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
Then I think we're in agreement on this point, if I'm understanding you right. As I'm sure you're aware, the LDS Church does not hold orginal sin to be a true thing (Second article of Faith: We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgressions).

Hobbes
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 

quote:

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I remember a thread a while back where you mocked a teacher for telling you that a big part of releasing your creativity is to let go of constrained thinking. I think that sort of fits in with what I'm talking about.

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I think that was an edit in so I'm responding to it in a different post. First off, as I recall I wasn't quite as tolerant as I should've been, but I hope I wasn't mocking her.

I'm unclear though, how you think this comes in. I brought this point up a few times and went completely different ways with it so I think you'll have to refresh my memory as to what I was saying in that case because I made a few points about it, msot of which don't seem to relate to this discussion.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
I've got to come back to MrSquicky's post, but I need to respond to this, first: "We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgressions."

This statement is not in opposition to the doctrine of original sin. Original sin is not the concept that we are being "punished" for Adam's sin. Instead, it is an acknowledgement that Adam's sin voluntarily removed him from the supernatural relationship with God he originally possessed. His descendents have inherited his state; Christ's atonement has corrected it.

I'm not saying LDS believe in original sin. I'm just saying the quoted statement is not the place in doctrine where that disbelief is articulated.

Dagonee
 

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Posted by BannaOj (Member # 3206) on :
 
/tangent
You know in reading this dialogue I just realized that the doctrine of original sin and the ideas of humanities goodness is probably one of the things that turned both myself and several close friends off from the brand of Christianity with which we were raised.

I need to ask dkw when she's over her extreme twitterpation (I hope she stays twitterpated for the rest of her life, just not quite at the current levels) how "liberal" type christians view this doctrine.

Essentially the way it played out in our upbringing was that "everyone outside of the church is going to hell." I have heard dozens of times from my mother "yes, so and so is a nice person, it's a shame they are going to hell" and "there will be a lot of nice people in hell because they don't think they need God." These people were always the few people we had contact with as children in the course of daily life outside of the church and I know my mother some how thought by saying this she was "neutralizing" their influence on me, since I shouldn't accept the weight of anything they said since they were going to hell.

When we went off to college and we were confronted the reality of the numerous good, kindly wonderful people that not believe the exact way we were raised, it became obvious that there were flaws in the logic. Because this just doesn't jive with their own teaching that everything good comes from God. So "good people" who are "good" because only things from God are good, then going to hell, just doesn't quite add up in my mind.

Like I said, I wonder if the liberal christian theologians have this dilemma solved in a less exclusionary fashion. I seem to remember dkw saying something about redemption eventually applying to everyone.

/end tangent
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 

quote:

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The point is that people are unable to want to do good things without God's grace. Thus, to do good, you don't try to do good. You try to get God's grace, then you can do good things. But your aim should be Grace, not straight out doing good things.

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On a similar note, the doctrine of Original Sin states we are inclined to sin - not that humans can't commit good acts on their own or that they only want to commit sinful acts. It states that we cannot become the fully enabled people God created us to be without some additional help from God.

Since we couldn't exist without the original act of God, it doesn't seem outrageous that our true fulfillment can't exist without him either. The beauty of it is that we can choose the fulfillment - it is not forced on us.

Dagonee
P.S., I'll reply to the rest later. Quick question though, does that post embody the response to my last post on the previous page as well?
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
Ohh I know Dag, I realizied that as I was typing but decided to put it in anyways, because it's the same type of idea. We aren't all tainted by something beyond our control is the message I saw in it.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 

quote:

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Like I said, I wonder if the liberal christian theologians have this dilemma solved in a less exclusionary fashion. I seem to remember dkw saying something about redemption eventually applying to everyone.

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The Catholic position is that there is no salvation without Christ's action, but that we are not given to know all the ways that action occurs nor what forms it takes. So it's possible that people who do not consider themselves Catholic (or Christian at all) to be saved, but we don't know if/when it occurs. (I put the full quote in one of the Mel Gibson threads at some point).

It does not relieve us of our duty in the Great Commission to teach the gospel, so it's of limited practical effect to a Catholic.

Dagonee
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Hobbes,
My recollection is that it was stronger than not being respectful enough, but hey, I could have gotten the wrong impression. Let's just make it an abtract case. If someone mocked a teacher for doing that, I'd think that it was an example of this. Warning: I'm an arrogant bastard. I could be wrong about everything that I'm going to say, but this is what I took from it.

The important part of this for me was the motivated misunderstanding of what the teacher was saying. The teacher was talking about loosing constraints as part of the process, but what was heard was loosing constraints was the process. She was talking about creativity, but what was heard was something along the lines of "You should let go of all constraints to do your assignments." This was clearly not what the teacher was expressing nor what the person reported that the teacher said. They were paying attention enough to repeat what the teacher said accurately, but their understaning of it didn't accurately reflect what she said. Thus, this was probably motivated misunderstanding, fueled either by dislike of the teacher or of the idea or a combination. Based on later comments, it seemed to me it was the idea that was threatening. So, I figured that it was a fear of loosing constraints that motivated the distortion.

I could be totally wrong that this is what was going on. But it is a common situation. That sort of fear of open-minded thinking is very prevelant in our society.
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
Dag,
I guess it was the answer to the last post. I feel like we misunderstood each other so much at that point I didn't know how to go forward.

However, I think you're mistating the Catholic position. For one thing, salvation is much more circumscribed than you are making it. It is only through Baptism (by water, fire, or desire) that people can gain salvation and enter heaven. For example, babies who die without being baptized are going to spend enternity in limbo.

Also, the Pelagian heresey that I keep bringing up is that people can be good without grace, or their basic nature is not evil. This is contrasted with Agustine's doctrine of orginal sin. Pelagius is still considered a heretic and Augustine is still considered a doctor of the church. I think you're being more generous in interpreting the doctrine than is reasonable.
 

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Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
 
OK, I remember what you're talking about. Perhaps I wasn't specific in my thread but what she said was that your true self is who you are without the restraints that you enforce on yourself. That really gets to me, sorry.

Hobbes
 

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Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
 
ehhhh...I've got my own set of filters too. I probably misunderstood.

In the context (I think it was an English class), I think that statement was out of line. It's not her job or her responsiblity to teach you what your true self is.

Creativity is a big thing for me. I've been trained in improv and I've found that, while trying to teach others, the biggest obstacle (other than fear of performing in front of people) is the inability to let go, trust yourself, and play in the moment. But, in the few instances where I've been able to help someone overcome this resistance the results are amazing. It's never failed to deeply affect the person. I'd fight for people to feel that sort of joy for it's own sake, let alone as part of a whole effort to change society for the better.

[ March 26, 2004, 04:23 PM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
 

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Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
 
I don’t think what I said was a distortion. From the Gibson thread I referred to:

quote:

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The Catholic Church does not teach that people outside the Church cannot obtain salvation. Gibson is wrong about this.

First, there are several Orthodox sects that are recognized as true descendents of the original Church, even though they reject the authority of the Peter.

Second, as the quote illustrates, salvation is obtainable by those "not formally and visibly membersof the Church." It also says we're not sure exactly how this works but it does emphasize such salvation is through the grace of Christ.

The document this comes from is DOMINUS IESUS, published by the Vatican with approval of Pope John Paul II in 2000.

The document does say several things which non-Catholics find tough to swallow:

• Salvation is only possible through Christ and the Church. Note, it does not say whether the person has to express a belief in Christ - it just says salvation is a obtained through Christ's grace only. As explained above, Christ's grace works through the Church, so even a "non-Catholic" who receives salvation was somehow in communion with the Church.
• Most non-Catholic Christian denominations are not "true churches." Basically this means that their lineage is not traceable straight through to Christ.
• The preferred ("best") means of salvation is through full, active membership and participation in the Catholic Church.

The document was published largely in response to some missionaries in Asia, especially India, who were teaching "Catholic theological relativism." It's important to note that none of this is new. The document represents a restatement of 2000-year old beliefs.
For one Jewish reaction to the document, see A Jewish Response to Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church.
Dagonee

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quote:

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I believe that many Catholics hold a view of original sin and of the inability of the unbaptized to enter heaven that is much closer to what I'm saying that what you are. Also, I think that this is a big part of their belief structure.

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quote:

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See, I thought the whole reason Catholics found it so important to save an ailing baby, even if the mother died, and the whole reason they had a priest pray over you when you were on your deathbed, and the reason suicide was a moral sin, was that if you died with even a SPOT of sin on your soul, you couldn't get to heaven -- so that if you had sinned since being shriven, you were basically headed to hell until your next confession. (emphasis added)

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quote:

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I need to ask dkw when she's over her extreme twitterpation (I hope she stays twitterpated for the rest of her life, just not quite at the current levels) how "liberal" type christians view this doctrine.

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Sheesh, does nobody read my threads?
 

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