Nice one


Abed at 11 am.  Ah youth, youth.

On the previous thread there was a mood of objection to believers "thrusting their beliefs down your throat" (as though R Dawkins never does.)  I used to feel the same, but Jehovah's Witnesses are generally people of no respected educational or social status, taking a lot of trouble and getting a lot of abuse and hardness for doing what they believe.  I am glad to hear you being so charitable, inky.  I'm not sure I would, but the last time a JW knocked at my door it was the most adorable dusky young man in a suit who just gave me a leaflet and the loveliest smile I have seen in a long time.

The Witnesses realise that sending out grumpy middle aged women in pairs is not a successful missionary strategy.

Ah well Sunday morning.  Off to church.  I will have probably sung three hymns, listened to two Bible readings and a sermon and inhaled enough incense to clear a major respiratory infection by the time you get up.

Everywhere I turn on this I find myself contradicting myself....  Does anyone else start doing that??  I've had several goes at writing a post for this thread, and abandoned each one.  So, this time I will just let it take me somewhere.....

One route I have been thinking about is comparing religion with parenthood.  Parents do things which save their children, but harm them too.  It is the parents' judgements which tell them what to do, and some parents may not even be aware of the trauma they are causing their child.

For example, little Johnny has his picked out a particularly sharp carving knife from the drawer and wants to see what it does to his hand, when his mother looks round and screams 'NO'.  Johnny stops, and his mother has saved him from physical harm, but didn't half scare the willies out of him - a form of mental harm.

From our position as adults, we can see this as reasonable.  But a child may feel that an injustice has been done - they've been shouted at and haven't found out what the nice shiny thing did.  Mum might go on to explain, but that works at an intellectual level, and not necessarily the emotional one the child is feeling.

So, what has this to do with Religion?  Well, perhaps we are uneducated children and there are things that religion and 'adult' religious rules protect us from.  It may feel like some aspects of religion are evil, but we are not the ones to judge.

[Here's where I start going awry...]

I could buy all that if I really believed religion was a God given thing.  But I don't.  I see Religion as a construct of society - a set of social rules made by man over the ages.  And I don't see why any man 10,000 years ago knew what was good or bad for me today.

But why do I have this belief?  I don't really know (well, it's something to do with my upbringing...).  But I can imagine having an equally justifiable position if I believed Religion was the word of God.

Any comments?

Tommo

I believe that no ones beliefs are absurd. Perhaps you could tell us what you believe in ?

Hello all,

I'm off for a jaunt tomorrow, so I don't have much time.

Just off the cuff though, we have been going on and on about religion, without defining what it is.  It is easy to assume Protestant Christianity is default religion, but it is only one of many traditions.  Buddhism has no God, ancient Judaism had no afterlife.  Calvinism, ironically, places no value of morality.

I have no definition of religion - I have just been trying to point out that it is not necessarily evil.

I always feel uneasy at the word "sprirituality".  It is quite useful to convey the mystic or non-doctrinal aspects of religion, but it often goes with consumer package, new age things, which are sentimental self indulgence.

All the best.  I'm off.

If somebody believes that they can fly by jumping off a tall building in the nip (however internally rational such beliefs might seem), am I to not consider this belief objectively absurd?


I might be able to try and answer to that, if you could help me out and let me know what you intend "believe in" to mean here?

(Taking 'relativity' to mean 'Einsteinian relativity') More than prove or demonstrate it, he formulated it as a concept (within a couple of months of others who formulated it independently; his was also the first vindication of the utility of the idea of "relativity" in general, which is, via the work of Emmy Noether, the modern physical source of all of this talk of 'symmetry').  To say that he didn't 'believe in' it is something like saying that people don't 'believe in' colour.

Of course not, and for the vast majority of our decisions we don't think much at all (I think it's safe to say this holds true in general).  But one shouldn't then seriously entertain beliefs as to their rightness without examining them (not that this necessarily helps, but it's better than nothing).

Back to Einstein again, like many theoretical physicists, he did have very strong (but not, ultimately, scientifically based) aesthetic and moral principles as to what constituted a satisfactory theory, and what constituted an unsatisfactory theory, such as that of determinism and the like.  This resulted ultimately in immense dissatisfaction on his part, but he never crossed any lines that I can see claiming his conclusions to be scientific; he was merely deeply dissatisfied with the statistical nature of particle physics (in some sense an understandable bias, given that he had been able to use the statistical laws of brownian motion to infer almost irrefutably, for the first time, the existance of atoms; but to see such statistical behaviour and to have seemingly nothing behind it?).  I think that this counts as an ingrained belief/prejudice on his part.


Enjoy!

#84
There is nowt absurd about killing yourself.  It's a personal choice.
I intended 'what do you believe in ?' to mean what do you believe in ?