Exactly what will happen upon my demise

[DoctorTwo]

You will have noticed the title is a statement not a question. What is certain to happen is you lot and all this will cease to exist.

I'm not trying to be mean, but that's just the way it is.

LMAO at 'grooming'

Can I ask what evidence you have that you love your child(ren). Taking care if them doesn't count as it could be done out of a sense of duty.

Btw I am trying to make the point that some things are not possible to prove but you do know them to be true.

We can trade names all night. Bizet, Delius, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson.........all atheists.

But that would be silly. Claiming creativity for faith is a hiding to nothing. As is claiming morality.

Actually brain scans can show certain areas firing up. But that's by the by because I don't claim there is anything supernatural about what I feel for my kids.

I'm not saying atheists don't have creativity, and so on. I was saying that creativity (and imagination and wonder) are part of faith. Can you see the difference?

There are millions of people who 'just know' completely different things are true. How come? You can't all be right. But you can all be wrong

"I'm not saying atheists don't have creativity, and so on. I was saying that creativity (and imagination and wonder) are part of faith. Can you see the difference?"

No. Creativity, imagination and wonder are part of the human condition. In some people it is fired up and fuelled by faith, in others it is fired up and fuelled by different things. I can't see why that is relevant to this discussion.

so creativity, imagination and wonder are part of being human and can be turned towards whatever endeavour we focus on - ergo religious people (not being aliens or others species) also have those traits. it doesn't make them a part of faith, it makes them a part of being human.

headin - your 'childlike' is expressed as irrational theism (as opposed to rational theism) which is the what most religious people have. not irrational as in negative aspersions of hysteria but as based on non rational premises (faith), believing in spite of evidence to suggest that belief has no substance in reality.

The childlike comments are interesting.

Stages of faith theory in its most basic form says that children have a childlike faith which they grow out of. The anti theists who have grown out of that early stage of faith assume wrongly that all people of faith are still in the childlike stage of faith. It is way more complicated than that. After the childlike stage of faith comes one or more stages where a person takes on the values of the group and these can be quite rigid so conservative churches which have all the answers can be very attractive. People of other faiths or beliefs who are outside of that box are 'the other' and to be opposed. So anti theism sits within this stage of faith quite neatly.

Growing out of this stage of faith is hard because it means letting go of certainty. It is apparently rare before middle age and many people remain in the early stages all their lives. But there is a later stage where there is an appreciation of paradox, mystery and wonder.

There are a number of theories Scott Peck and Fowler are the best known. There is a really good book from the evangelical Christian perspective called 'Chrysalis' by Alan Jamieson which describes the journey of faith from the certainty of conservative evangelical Christianity into a more complex and reflective faith as caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly.

Greenheart has said very well what I was trying to get at. Wonder, creativity and imagination are part of faith at the later stage when you have let go of certainty and lived through the difficulties that comes with that. In the later stages of faith, you might say, we find again the newness of the child's vision allied to the depth of experience that comes with age.

Great. Wonderful. That's fantastic. Just so long as you don't feel that going on a journey of faith entitles you to special privileges, exemption from laws that bind the rest of us, and the right to impose your views on other people.

I don't think we have actually agreed that people of faith really have or do those things.

Brain scans don't actually prove love. And what does supernatural or otherwise have to do with it?

This thread started off about whether there is any existence outside of the physical body. It was not even about organised religion as I see it. My point is that not everything is quantifiable or concrete in its existence. So to dismiss someone's experiences is wrong just because you haven't experienced the same thing. That would be like saying love doesn't exist if you never loved anyone.

"I don't think we have actually agreed that people of faith really have or do those things."

Well, for starters, they certainly have special privileges in education and in the making of laws and the formulation of social policy. And there have been strenuous efforts by some to get themselves exempt from equal opportunities legislation. And however you minimize it, Christianity is imposed on all children in state schools- in varying amounts of course- but it's always there.

i love paradox, mystery and wonder - those two are part of being human and the reality of the amazing universe we live in - again not the preserve of the religious and many of us get there well before middle age because we have undone the stuff in the way of that earlier.

for the prvilieges business - it's most clearly seen law in special exemptions for religious organisations and religion based workplaces whereby they do not have to follow the same laws as everyone else re: sex discrimination, discrimination on the basis of sexuality, etc. in that sense religion does seem to be at odds with societal embracing of true diversity and equality because one sector is allowed a special get out clause whereby it doesn't become the world wide norm but something that one group don't have to adhere to and can actively work against and undermine.

and then you really have to ask yourself is it ok to allow one group precedence over others and essentially allow them to engage in promoting and advocating views that if done by any other organisation or person would be prosecutable as hate speech.

I thought you were using love as a synonym for god. I pointed out its a false analogy because I know I exist for starters. Whereas we don't even know god exists. We have the data of observing me being nice to my children to start off with whereas we have no such data for a god doing anything so it's not a valid comparison. Can you think of something you 'know to be true' that you have no evidence or reason whatsoever? And how come people say they just know all sorts of contradictory things. People 'just know' god A is real and god 'B' is false. Or they 'just know' that god doesn't care about homosexuality and other people 'just know' that god doesn't like it. 'Just knowing' is meaningless circular knowledge and ultimately a very dangerous way of discerning reality.

Sorry I meant circular logic

It's OK for an individual to believe in something that there is no evidence for existing, and for which there is quite a lot of evidence for not existing. It is not OK for that person to expect other people to modify their behaviour based on that belief beyond basic good manners.

And thus we come back to the beginning of this thread where the point was made that when the OP dies all existence ends. Philosophers have wrestled with the question of how to prove that there is anything outside of ourselves for a very long time.

The only evidence we have of that world is through our sense data and as Hulme and Descartes showed a few hundred years ago that can be fooled. The theory of knowledge is epistemology which I think someone referred to back on page 1 of this discussion. We cannot know that we exist. We could be brains in vats which makes films like the Matrix so popular. Assuming that there is a reality outside of ourselves is naïve realism. Critical realism is knowing that there is no evidence that the bottle of wine exists but I assume that it does and that a glass of it will make me feel better at the end of a long day

Good point curlew. Believing in what you want is fine, making decisions and changing your behaviour based on what you think that thing would like can be dangerous.

i think it also cheapens morality in a way. doing what you're told is the right thing because of your belief that god wants you to and will reward you is like.....? it's the morality of a child in a sense - we do stuff to avoid getting into trouble or more positively perhaps to please mummy or daddy or teacher.

true goodness or ethical maturity is freely made choice of doing good because it is good.

also i find religion eats it's own tail all the time - all that talk of there is evil because there is free will and we would not be truly free or able to choose goodness if the freedom to do evil did not exist... well why is there need for religion and fear of god then? true free will isn't there if you your choices are governed by a doctrine and a 'holy' book with carrots and sticks outlined to enforce them.

then the idea that a god would not let a good person into heaven if they had purely been good because they were good and acted with love and wisdom but would let in the bloke next to her who was actually quite poisonous at heart but had imbibed fear of god at the breast and so 'behaved' according to it's doctrines.

it's all so.... ethically small iyswim. a god worthy of being a god would have to be so much 'more' than what religion insists on framing it as.

i find more beauty and awesomeness and infinite cleverness and wonder and implications for morality and community and everything in the quantum fabric of our universe being glimpsed upon than in the that small and very flawed concept that religions insist on making of god.

Numptynamechange you will be glad to hear that I think that conception of religion is ethically small too. Luckily, it's entirely a misconception of what Christianity is all about.

Yes, eating it's own tail. Christianity says you can't trust your own sick heart so you need to follow god but then didn't god expect is to use that same sick heart to make the decision to be a Christian? We need his rules because we are flawed but he could hold us accountable for our flawed hearts not recognising the right religion over the other 3999 or so.

no nimin - it's not. it would definitely be a misconception if i thought it was what the gospels were about but reality is christianity has much less in common with the teachings of 'jesus' than it does with the pharisees he was speaking out against.

yes head. they make god mean and horrible and frankly a bit stupid. maybe it's hard to conceptualise omniscient if you haven't even stretched your own consciousness (not including the mental gymnastics required to carry faith beyond your 20's in 'stretching' by the way)?