Why I don't need God/Religion in my life

Good points.

Even though I don't go church, I consider Jesus to be a role model.

Personally, I think Jesus was cool because he was a liberal.

 

Hmmm... you say you don't care whether there's a god or not, yet you write a long post about it.

I'd say the kind of thoughts like whether God exists or not, whether we are souls, whether the universe is infinite, whether history has a goal, whether life has a meaning, are all hard-wired into us. When we don't play them out we feel a lack of development within ourselves.

And so we feel the need to explore the deeper recesses of our own being. Once we do, we find gradations of belief; belief is easy and almost natural, or we suspend belief where there's always a tension, or most difficult is unbelief - the reverse of belief and almost unnatural, where we feel a dissonance within ourselves. I think these gradations coincide with how rationalist we are... for rationalism is itself a faith built on an initial purge of doubt. Needless to say, I graduated from philosophy to poetry.

All philosophizing serves as a distraction from the banality of everyday existence. God help us the day we cease to do this.

 

You're going to abandon God and risk hell to listen to Marilyn Mason? I'd understand if it was Queen or something...

Seriously though - I'm Christian and listen to secular music and have friends of various beliefs. I personally disagree with anyone who thinks you can't.

Anna Karenina came up at a family discussion and a Christian relative told me I shouldn't read it because it has to do with adultery. I disagree - people I know who only do Christian music and books and movies and people etc have a very narrow perspective and are not very fun to be around.

Peace.

 

If you are not just being rhetorical, this would be the 'Satanic view'.

 

If there were a god of the philosophers, that could be thought but unknown, it only seems reasonable that He might choose to reveal Himself in some such fashion as He saw fit.

Of course, just this possibility takes quite an act of imaginative these days; that is, to overcome the clutter of knowledge we've become so accustomed to.

I'll have a look at that Christopher Hitchens video later~~

 

@Latinboy32 you also claimed to not believe in an afterlife yet made a thread about our favorite afterlifes I didn't say it there, because you didn't want it to be a discussion about whether or not there is/could be/isn't one, but now it just triggered me to read this.

Spoiler: more babble

I will also use this opportunity to say that I think the idea of souls being able to be born but not die looks quite asymmetric, and for the afterlife to not be a totally crowded place I would believe that if there is life after death, there also has to be life before birth (as in reincarnation). And I believe we and our souls are eternal in some way, but so far I find it incredibly difficult to become more detailed about it.

I haven't been raised very religiously, and while I was fascinated by some aspects of religion, what I heard didn't really convince me. As a teenager, I considered myself an Agnostic for a while (just another rationalistic view), until I became familiar with Asian spirituality, which seemingly made a lot more sense. I then believed in a "god, but non-personal god" for a while, but this is just nonsense. Now I think this my thinking was a reaction to the anonimity we humans have created among ourselves in the world we live in.

Regarding science, I would like to ask a few philosophical questions that can make one think:
- What are the laws of physics? How do they relate to the physical world? Where do they come from?
- How do you explain that the mathematical time, t, does not contain the division of time into past, present & future as ever-morphing entities? (Physical cosmologists wonder about the direction of time, but hardly anyone ever asks for the present.)
- How do you explain that we perceive colors, sounds etc. when there are no colors and sounds, but only electromagnetic waves and sonic waves in the physical world?
- Moreover, all our ideas of electromagnetic waves and sonic waves rely on memories we have from perceptions in our consciousness. Like, we have certain images in mind when we speak of them, and these images wouldn't be there had we been born blind. A blind person will may be remember them in terms of sound or touch, heck, even smell may be, who knows. But what will they look like once you eradicate every last bit of consciousness from our idea of such waves? Every reality which is thought to be completely independent of the observer has to be completely unimaginable to the observer, i.e. us. So, what does it consist of? Does a reality like this exist in the first place?
- What do you think about Einstein's saying that it is your theory that decides what is physically observable in the first place?

You don't have to answer them, it's all fine. But I am a physicist myself and these are things I wonder about. Science is powerful in conquering the physical world, but it does not know the metaphysical.

 

I'm not sure whether I can be bothered watching a 'champion' for the atheist cause. For that matter, I can't be bothered watching a champion for the theist cause. It seems to me, we are outsourcing our intelligence every time we resort to so-called specialists.

Just as I think our own rationalistic representation fails us in metaphysical matters, so too I think 'representatives' of this kind doubly fail. It reflects our failure to grapple with the issues at the existential level.

 

That's a lot of questions, which goes to show you need a philosophy of science. Given the requirement for philosophy, that would make a mockery of any worldview which would reduce us to natural processes. An intelligent subject has to be at the center in order for science to even start making sense.

Now with the subject ensconced, we see that scientific theory is derivative of intelligence, and not the other way round. All these theories serve as models, they don't have explanatory power as much as they have predictive power; they enable our technology to expand in titanic terms. They serve us well until a better theory comes along. Thomas Kuhn is the best thinker I know of in the field of philosophy of science.

As for time, I think it's relative to us in a sense - there's a past [memory], present, and future [anticipation]The Scholastics used to draw a distinction between existence and essence. As a subject we experience time existentially. On he other hand, the essence of time would be experienced objectively, and that may require a super-mind to perceive/ ground it. Did I just invent another argument for the existence of God? Nah, I'm sure it would all be there in the Scholastics. But its all theories and models once again. These guys invented the process, without which we wouldn't have science.

Perception. You seem to be thinking within the Lockean paradigm, where a distinction is made between primary and secondary qualities. The primary ones are the mechanical physical ones [so-called objective in Newton's universe], and the secondary ones are those of color, sound etc that are supposedly subjective. Amazing to think this idea goes all the way back to the eighteenth century, and is perhaps a little outdated. But thanks to the split between philosophy and science it seems to have survived to this very day.

More sophisticated is what developed on the continent in the twentieth century with phenomenology. The precursor to this is Kant, who while taking the Newtonian science seriously marries it to both a philosophy of science and a metaphysics. A delicate balance that could not last. But this is the direction I'd point you if you are interested in understanding the underlying principles of the scientific method.

The Einstein theory you refer to is also found in Kuhn. The idea being that we order the mass of phenomena by the theory we have in mind. The theory actually dictates what will and won't make sense to us. It serves like a screen. The better theory, will be the one that is most workable or efficacious... not the one that is 'true'. The import of this is that it leaves the metaphysical questions quite open-ended. Scientists who don't see this are either ignorant or dogmatic.... which are perhaps the same thing.

 

You miss the point. I dislike all apologetics... on whichever side. I was even critical of C.S. Lewis, who is the great champion of the Protestants.

The above post is long-winded.

 

Yes, we all habitually do this. But there may be an important principle at stake. If pure reason can not objectively and definitively state it one way or the other, then it may be an exercise in futility to endlessly debate what is unknowable in those terms.

But what would not be futile, is a practical dialogue, or a discussion, which engages you existentially, and artistically, where other faculties besides pure rationality, such as the rational imagination, might begin to resonate. This is why in the past rhetoric was considered a significant factor, if not the most significant.

The tragedy for us today, in the modern scientific world, is we have lost sight of the aesthetic dimension of reality. And this dimension can only be experienced existentially. Personally, I think this is the very bridge to belief.