Find content
Not Telling
I vote we erase the last two pages and continue the discussion. I'll start with a rather special post..
I had a discussion with a women who was doorknocking the other day about her faith and, as it turns out, she had been vehemently exposed to it from a young age.
Very few people who grow up under this indoctrination have enough of their reasoning ablility still intact to be able to think their way out of this bewitching circular trap - nor do they want to. To them, to rejoice in life, to live for themselves, is trading eternity for a brief and sinful frolic before a looming doom-without-end.
The very fact that the unknowable IS unknowable is what they claim gives faith its virtue anad makes it sacrosanct. After all, what would be the virtue in faith if that which we have faith could be known? A person who can maintain absolute faith without any proof whatsoever must posess profound virtue. As a consequence, only those who take the leap of faith off the bedrock of the tangible into the emptiness of the imperceptible are righteous and worthy of an eternal reward.
It's as if you have been told to leap from a cliff and have faith that you can fly, but you must not flap your arms because that would only betray a fundamental lack of faith and any lack of faith would infallibly insure that you would plummet to the ground, thus proving that a failure of faith is a personal flaw, and fatal.
The more difficult the teachings are to believe, the greater the required level of faith. Along with the commitment of a higher level of unquestioning comes a tighter bond to those who share the same faith, a greater sense of inclusion in the special group of the enlightened. Believers, because their beliefs are so manifestly mystic, become ever more enstranged from the 'unenlightened' (Atheists), from those who are suspect because they will not embrace the faith. The term 'nonbeliever' becomes a commonly accepted form of condemnation, demonizing anyone who chooses to stick to the use of reason.
Faith itself, you see, is the key - the magic wand that they wave over the bubbling brew they have concocted to render it 'self-evident'.
<3 the sword of truth
A very insightful post, douchenozzle! This pretty much sums up the entirety of religion...
It seems odd that anyone would believe that god(s) exists when there is no concrete proof to support his/her/its existence. However, some people, agnostics in particular, maintain that you can't reject the idea of god in the absence of negative proof. There seems to be two different views:
(1) people who assume that god doesn't exist because there is no proof that he exists.
(2) people who won't assume that god doesn't exist without proof that he doesn't exist.
I'm not much of a logician, so I can't figure out what's wrong with the second view, even though it doesn't seem right. After all, how do you prove that god doesn't exist? But people holding the second view are not assuming that god exists either, so it doesn't seem to be a logical fallacy... Perhaps someone can explain this to me?
