is religion real or a way to feel comfortable?what do you think?

that was my first clue that religion has got it wrong..some of my loved ones are not worthy of heaven...

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not arguing right vs wrong..but prove that this is empirical..

that does not make it a lie..maybe the ppl back in those times believed those cures worked..

this i cannot argue with..

 

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Ask the entire fields of geology, geophysics and astrophysics.

But both that and the age of the Earth are in the bible, which is supposed to be the perfect, inerrant word of the living god, right?

If someone reads the bible and views it as the bronze age thinking of a bunch of people living in the Middle East and should be taken as their opinion and not literal then fine. If someone thinks it's 100% absolute perfect then they are flat out wrong.

 

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Tleit004,

Religion, is to the soul, what food is to the body.
Sometimes we eat for comfort for various reasons, when we
are really hungry we eat to satisfy our hunger or else we get sick.

Sometimes we eat junk food, which appears, in the short term, to be satisfying, but ends up being harmful, even fatal.

Religion isn't just a trend, because if it was it would have died long ago.
It is a natural part of humanity and will be around as long as humanity exists.

Try and understand what the purpose of religion is, by lining up the information from all scriptures, and from past great souls (saints etc..).

Ultimately we are all individuals even though we form very strong bonds
in life.


jan.

 

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I think he treats transcendence in a relativistic way in the sense that he is in favor of an individual(istic) understanding and realization of it.
He contrasts fairytales and the realizations that an individual comes to through them with religion and pedagogy. Namely, in religion and pedagogy, it is prescribed what and how a person is supposed to learn about transcendence from the texts provided. But with fairytales, this is not the case; instead, the realizations are individual, according to the child's current abilities and inclinations, but nonetheless reliable and creating a good foundation for the child.

Indeed. Although I myself am not American, and the culture I was raised in, children's literature was mostly very tame.
I first read that lullaby in a Kurt Vonnegut novel - and thought that it was his literary fiction!

Yes. Some cultures are quite open about all kinds of things that happen in human life.
Note that an objection often made is that traditional religions are not acceptable for modern times because of all the cruelty, obscenity and the like in their stories.

Yes, absolutely!
It's as if we are stuck in self-reflexive mode, like two mirrors facing eachother.

I am not sure how much that is really a relativism - and how much it is an example of being elloquent and socially adept.
Reading those texts from the 1800's, it seemes to me that they had a much more intense awareness of the variety of discourses and were better equipped to navigate through them than we are.
Nowadays, we seem to suffer from a simplistic "be the same, be yourself, 24/7/365 everywhere, at all times." A consistency that some people of those earlier times would probably call "the hobgoblins of little minds."

This really speaks to me.

I have so far had the tendency to feel uncomfortable about some theists who, although they certainly look (meaning dress in particular religion-specific clothes and wear certain accessoires), talk and generally behave like theists of that particular religion, still struck me as deeply unhappy or even said so themselves - but who nonetheless keep to their religious faith and practices. I couldn't understand why they are like that, and I certainly wasn't the only one less or more openly suggesting that if they are so unhappy, then why don't they just give up their religion - since it is apparently all just a sham.

But your explanations here about the tension shed a new light on that for me; especially the idea of the tension-toward.
I can think of several theists that I have known, personally or through their writings, whom I would now describe as having this tension-toward.

 

i follow science, i am a fan of science,and the one thing i have noticed is they use ALOT of words like 'could be' 'may be' 'possibly' 'if' etc..
btw the area i live in is wonderus for geology and geophysics,(new mexico)
i am fascinated by the geology of the area.

nope.not what i believe.
anything that man has touched has the possibility of man putting his own flavor into the mix. i am not saying the bible is completely wrong, i am saying it should not be used as law. discretion should be used.

that's what i am saying. context,context,context, without it, it is VERY subjective to misinterpretation.

 

God is very real to me. Much religion is not real. But God is above what people think of Him.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

 

why can't it be both?
Is there something about reality that necessitates it being uncomfortable?

Actually if god has a beginning, he is no longer in the position of primal creator, summum bonum , etc ... IOW the ultimatum "everything has a beginning" is something atheists call upon in order to make themselves feel comfortable.

I am not sure what you mean by "such as earth" but last check abiogenesis is still a work in progress ... and physicists still tend to run away from biology with their tail between their legs
:shrug:

 

I'm inclined to agree with you. I think that the reality of religion is mostly to be found in its psychological effects on religious people and in religious societies.

I don't think that it's possible to offend people here. Everyone on Sciforums wears asbestos flame-suits. (Lori's is very stylish.) Everyone kind of provokes everyone else for sport.

I don't believe in the literal truth of any divine revelations. Nor do I look to religion for my cosmology or to give me any information about the true nature of physical or biological reality. I look to science for that kind of stuff.

I do think that there are a lot of early ethical and philosophical ideas to be found in religion, presented in the mythological story-form that was pretty much universal before around 500 BCE. In early times, what we think of as abstract ideas were almost always imagined as if they were personalities, and the relationships between abstractions were imagined as if they were supernatural personal relationships. So there's definitely what we would call philosophical speculation in there, though it's being presented in a rather crude way that's often difficult for us to interpret.

And it's pretty clear to me that some of the religious traditions include very sophisticated and profound spiritual psychologies. Some of this material is probably more advanced than contemporary Western psychology.

So I look to science for my ontology, but I don't simply dismiss religion as being totally worthless.

 

Frankly, I don't think you know much about atheism, despite all your qualifications.
You're too busy writing them off as "rascals", "fools", "mudhas" and the like to actually have a conversation with them.

Would you open up to someone who calls you names like that?


But perhaps the Great Lightgigantic has an inner atheist!

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Spooky!

 

errr .. actually all I said was that the notion of everything having a beginning is something atheists commonly call upon in order to feel "comfortable" ... namely because it under-rides the very definition of god

:shrug:

 

Face it LG, you are a crackinyan fundie trying to sell nose puppies to eskimos. But aside from that, I would be interested in your objective definition of the word "beginning".

 

I am sure people who eventually end up calling themselves and being called "atheists" would be much less militant, much less defensive, resort much less to what even they themselves know are logical fallacies or otherwise problematic notions - were it not for the anger, contempt and impatience of theists - theists, the supposedly superior, well-wishing-for-all kind of humans.

I think that people who are usually considered atheists and agnostics are nowhere near as averse to theism as theists tend to make them out to be.
It's the constant devaluation from theists that eventually puts them on the defensive, even at all costs.


That said, it is not uncommon in different theisms to posit that the real atheists are those who look like theists, talk like theists, walk like theists - but in their hearts are not theists.

 

ball's in your camp if you are the one advocating "everything has a beginning"... while you are at it it might also pay to provide a definition for "everything"

 

are you responding to something I wrote or something else?

 

I think that religion is (both real and a way of making people feel comfortable). But probably not in the sense that you and the OP intended.

Religion obviously has some kind of historical and psychological reality. The question is whether the various 'gods' and supernatural principles that religious traditions talk about are real in a literal sense. I'm very doubtful about that.

The Buddhists would probably say 'yes'. People often experience pain, they constantly feel dissatisfied, they suffer... and utimately everyone is doomed to die. Probably not in the most pleasant of ways.

It seems to be true that people in just about every religious tradition call upon their religious principles more often in situations of extremity, when they are experiencing seemingly insurmountable misfortune.

That, btw, might be one of the reasons for the high prevalence of secularism in modern societies. People in wealthy places find it easier to feel comfortable, or at least to have the hope that they will soon feel comfortable if they can just... acquire some more possessions. People stop going to church/temple in exchange for going to the shopping mall.

The 'first cause' argument is one of medieval tradition's so-called 'proofs' of God's existence. It depends on the propositions that everything (except God, for some deus-ex-machina reason) has a beginning, and that everything with a beginning has to have had a preceeding cause.

The ideas that the world of experience is marked by constant change, flux and contingency is very old. It was a fundamental idea in both early Greek and Indian philosophy.

They what? I don't understand why you wrote something like that.

 

How many people who call upon "everything has a beginning" have you asked whether they call upon "everything has a beginning" in order to "feel comfortable"?

 

I don't think I have ever used that argument or even wanted to... simply because it would be dishonest for me to do so; however, without context I am sure you have no idea what I mean by that. The ball's back in your court. One little definition.

 

Beginnings are anathema to any theory of All, for then there would be a difference of when it was and when it wasn’t, making it not the All at all. That covers duration, and the same would have to be true for its extent, which could have no boundary either.

 

have you read the OP?

 

then perhaps you should direct your requests to the author of the OP since you have obvious problems with the premises he utilizes .. although I am pretty sure that you have used the argument "god doesn't exist because he has no cause" on more than one occasion

:shrug: