Hi Steemers! I'm a philosophy professor, but my specialty is not in philosophy of religion. It is a kind of hobby of mine, though, so I would like to jump in on the discussion here. I am a staunch atheist, and to be honest, I'm eager to see others share my views. But I also like to think I'm open to the possibility I'm wrong, and will happily (okay, maybe grudgingly) change my mind if given good reason. Meanwhile I promise to be respectful to all in my discussion.
Anyway, I have learned the hard way that before I can have any productive discussion of religion, I have to get a sense of your answer(s) to a crucial question: do you believe in supernatural stuff based on evidence, or is it a matter of "faith" for you?
I have different follow-up stuff to say depending on how you answer this. (Maybe I'll write one post for the evidence-ers, and one post for the faith-ers.) I'm eager to hear from you!
Sidenote 1: by supernatural, I mean, very roughly, stuff other than what's acknowledged by the standard sciences - stuff like gods, ghosts, chakras, torsion fields, etc. Even more roughly: it's stuff you couldn't get an NSF grant to study. So belief in standard Christianity certainly counts as belief in the supernatural, but I'd like to be more inclusive than that.
Sidenote 2: by evidence, I mean, roughly, truth-related reason to believe in something. So for example "because I hope it's true" is a kind of reason to believe, but not a truth-related one - hoping something is true is not, all else being equal, reason to think it is true. Similarly if I offer you $100 to believe that Wyoming is the capital of Nebraska, you now have (practical / financial) reason to believe that, but not truth-related reason. And for purposes here belief by faith just means belief without (or despite) evidence.
Everything we believe starts with a certain amount of evidence and then, when we get close enough, we take a leap of faith over any remaining uncertainty.
When I jump out of a plane with a parachute, I'm combining the evidence I got from prior training with the faith I have in the person who packed my parachute.
This is a great example and a good one to discuss. Another way of looking at it is that you have an evidence-based belief that you have (say) a 99.99% chance of being fine, based on what you know about other parachutes rates of not opening, and then you calculate you accept that risk. That's very different from believing (without evidence) that there is a 100% chance this parachute is fine.
My religious beliefs are based on great in-depth evidences, and contains logical, scientific and physics proofs.
Great! I look forward to discussing them! Perhaps you will be able to change my mind. Can you give me a taste of the reasons involved?
Hi Spetey! I can share my beliefs and reasoning but I might not be able to change anyone's mind, lol.
Go through these two articles and taste a bit: https://steemit.com/religion/@princewahaj/trinity-is-impossible-scientifically-and-how-it-is-impossible-to-have-more-than-one-god-episode-continues-and-why-the-message-of
https://steemit.com/religion/@princewahaj/jesus-christ-never-claimed-that-he-is-god-instead-it-is-mentioned-in-several-places-of-bible-to-worship-only-one-god-and-why
Thanks for sharing! These posts look like what I would call "theology". They take for granted that there is a personal god of some kind, and then try to work out what that god is like based on sacred texts and the like. But I am asking whether your belief that there is a god is based on evidence. What would you say if someone asked why you think there is any god at all?
Yes, it is backed up by dozens of strong evidences too. :)
The fun part about witchcraft is that it's a series of experiments to gain evidence-based beliefs about the world. Each spell is an experiment. I love talking about the scientific and psychological sides of my craft and some interfaith superstitions. Is there placebo effect sure, but also self-fulfilling prophecy, personification, projecting, metaphor and symbolism, etc and I practice knowing I'm enacting those pieces of the brain and letting that brain process do the spiritual work I need done. I like faith, the word, the feeling. I like to embrace that feeling once in awhile, but it is not a natural act for me and most of my practice is evidence based rather than a full reliance of relinquishing control.
I used to do something similar with the I Ching - I sat somewhere between detached skepticism and an elaborate sorta-scientific story about how it might actually work. I think I wanted to believe, and so I made myself "pretend-believe", you might say. Does that sound like your experience? It sounds a little like you enjoy pretending to believe, without really believing in witchcraft. (And just to be clear I have no problem with that, at least until the pretend-beliefs start encroaching into action the way real beliefs would.)
And I still think the I Ching is remarkable for being so suggestive for thinking about puzzles (though I don't use it any more). It takes a certain skill to write 64 different entries that sound meaningful and yet could apply to just about any question. I guess that part's like the placebo effect in your example.
I Ching is wonderful poetry but as divination, it's an experiment and always will be. Because there is skill involved in divination, I constantly keep track of my tarot card predictions and see how close to true they turn. When I do this consistently, the readings get better and more on the mark. Divination is utililizing reading people, emotion and predicting human behavior and dynamics to most probably outcome of a situation. We can do this without divinatory tools, but the tools sometimes help the brain get there. If any card or I Ching role can apply to anything, then the interpretation is not exact enough and pretty useless. There are better diviners and you should experiment with one, see how specific predictions can get and how close to the mark they eventually get.
Pretending to believe I did for the visualization process of my spells for some time. You have to dive in headfirst to give the experiment and legs. But after awhile of doing this and seeing results, seeing what actually produced results and which spells or aspects of spellcraft didn't work, I had faith in certain experiments, like you would have faith that if you dropped something from your hand it would fall on the ground. After awhile, you know the circumstances and how to open your hand to produce the desired result. I usually use the word faith for faith in something else, and knowing for knowing a spell will work, with a critical eye to double check that knowledge of course.
As you probably know, these experiments aren't of much use unless they're double-blinded, because of the incredible power of confirmation bias. As a step, you might write down very specific predictions, and also a bunch of specific things you don't predict as though they were predictions. You might do 30 predictions and switch 15 of them to the opposite prediction, maybe. Keep track of which are which, but use labels only you know (like a triangle and a square, say). Then ask others to help. Ask one person to rate each prediction on its specificity and surprisingness (for example, "you will meet a handsome stranger" is not specific, while "the sun will come up tomorrow" is specific, but does not require tarot to predict). Then have some other person look at all the predictions and fake-predictions you made, and mark which ones came true. Make sure they have no idea what the labels mean, and make sure you are not anywhere nearby giving subconscious cues while they do these tasks. You should just hand them the predictions, labeled in a totally generic way (so not plus versus minus, for example, which has connotations), and let them rate them. This still isn't a well-designed study, I would say, but you get the idea. Tarot's predictive power is only confirmed (some) if you get surprising, specific predictions right significantly more often than your non-predictions get marked as right.
Also: I don't have faith that if I let go of something it will (in typical circumstances) fall to the ground. I have very good truth-related reason to think this will happen, based on what I know about gravity, past such events, and so on.
Then spellcraft is reason, after awhile and repetitive work. The study sounds interesting for someone more concerned with the process and scientific analysis and less for something more interested in its practical applications. When you said leave before you give away subconscious cues, well, most of witchcraft is about harnessing and manipulating that subconscious. Not to say confirmation bias is the only thing going on in a tarot reading, many other things such as a woman unhappy with her relationship is eventually going to leave it just because that's the most probable outcome, basic predictions people who study psychology can do fairly easily, as well as confirmation bias. That's why the job of a tarot reader has to be taken seriously and with a sense of morality. We guide the people we read for using the philosophy of the stories in the cards, which is basically just this philosophy that things are cyclical and any end is a beginning, you know, basic uplifting stuff. Much of tarot reading is also reading the current state of the person, which we get confirmation of in the moment by their subconscious cue admitting what we said was true. And for specificity, we just look at how happy someone comes out of the reading, do they know something more about themselves or the path they choose to follow, or are they left thinking it's a hoax. If the latter, not specific or a good reading. Tarot isn't actually about predictions. It's one part current emotional state, one part meditation on a problem, and a very small spice of most likely outcome to come from the emotion and problem, which psychologists have been able to predict with these double-blind studies and authors because they just study and write about people all the time.
There's nothing supernatural about the heart of religion.
It is a methodology of self-transformation. One leaves behind ignorance, to travel toward the true and immediate knowledge, without the intermediary of the senses or the mind.
I'm not sure how one gets "immediate knowledge" without senses or even a mind, but if by "religion" you mean "wants to get knowledge", then I am religious by that definition - but you should note that's an unusual definition. (Also, as the comedian Emo Philips points out, if by "religious" you mean "likes cole slaw", then I'm fairly relgious by that definition too.)
Of course you are my good man! In some important sense, the craving for religious truth is hard-wired in mankind, as evidenced by the fact that there are no peoples on the earth who do not have gods or songs.
One can always ride out on a fully armored scientific battle horse and knock over the encampments of "organized religion", however that may ultimately not prove very satisfying - too similar to going full Rambo on a bunch of retarded kindergarden age children, defeating them utterly, and raising the atheist flag above their mangled corpses.
The mind and the senses are bypassed by means of diligent introspective practice, ones with real and even measurable effects on the brain's electrochemistry. The very possibility of such a maneuver is left deliberately unexplored and obscure in the western educational system, which aims to produce only specialized worker drones and atheists (ignoramuses) at its every layer except the very elite capstone.
My belief is based on faith. I find that most academics I talk to cannot understand faith at all.
They have minds that are attracted to complexity and cognitive reasoning but cannot grasp a simple thing like faith at all. It is that simple, either you believe or you don't. Its probably not even anything to do with thought at all.
Have a look at Orch-OR, the Penrose Hameroff theory of consciousness and its physical presence in our brains.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188
I think I get what faith is - it's belief without evidence. I just don't get why and when it's okay to have it. Is it okay to just believe on faith that Miley Cyrus is a robot from the future? Is it okay to believe on faith that the climate is not changing as a result of human activity? Is it okay to just believe on faith that infidels should be murdered?
I did not believe in anything other than business earning money and then i saw a demonic entity and many more since then. I now know that God is real and so is the devil and its doing a job on people like you!