The Beginning of Faith

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suomalainen
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The Beginning of Faith

Post by suomalainen »

Ok, so i posted my question initially in...um...a thread that...um...was maybe an example of "doesn't play well with others"? I dunno. In any event, a serious question, and I promise I'm not trolling, baiting or looking for a fight:

I have a question for true religious believers (note, I have once been one): it seems to me that religious belief is literally just that - a belief. In other words, it's an a priori choice to interpret your life's experiences in a certain manner. In other^2 words, religious belief is an assumption that becomes the lens through which everything else is filtered. This leads me to believe that religious belief is nothing more than confirmation bias at work.

My fall from grace, if you will, was noticing how my "interaction" with God could be explained on the one hand as a religious experience and on the other hand as confirmation bias, i.e., I saw God's hand in my life from time to time, but when it failed to appear when and how expected, I just explained the discrepancy away after the fact. That just left me deeply unsatisfied, so I've jettisoned what I call my a priori assumption.

However, I'd be eager to hear others' thoughtful reflections on how their belief got started and how it is sustained (particularly through "trials of faith" when doubts, perhaps akin to suspicions of confirmation bias at work, arise).

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jennypenny
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by jennypenny »

I'm sorry your question went unanswered in the other thread.
suomalainen wrote:it's an a priori choice to interpret your life's experiences in a certain manner. In other^2 words, religious belief is an assumption that becomes the lens through which everything else is filtered. This leads me to believe that religious belief is nothing more than confirmation bias at work.
I don't think I use my religious belief as a filter for the events I see around me, or use those events as evidence one way or another for my faith. For me, the evidence for my faith is in the way it manifests itself within me. The existence of God or the faithfulness of someone won't, for the most part, alter the events around that person. That person's faith, however, will alter how they experience those events and how much they let them influence their lives.

My faith sustains me, not the other way around. I see it [faith] as stoking the fire within me, and not a separate flame that I need to maintain. My steadfast faith means that no matter what happens around me or to me (good or bad), I remain the same.

That doesn't mean that I just decided to "believe" one day and my faith arrived like an Amazon delivery. I'm like most other people on the forum and needed to research and analyze every aspect if it. I studied Christianity and Catholicism for years. I learned everything I could, to the point where I now teach classes and write for a Catholic media outlet. I can't say there was one moment where I crossed a line from being a non-believer to a believer. It's been a journey that continues to this day even though my faith is an integral part of me now.

My suggestion would be to approach it like any other subject that interests you. Let go of any preconceptions you have. Do your research and apply the same critical eye you would to anything else.

Dragline
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by Dragline »

Yes, a good place to start is with the anthropology of modern religious practices. Actually, anthropology is probably the most useful place to start when human behavior is at issue, because it does not presuppose what it "is" or "should" be, but starts from the premise that we really don't know what it is beyond our limited personal experiences until we have studied it. I'd recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Ba ... god+speaks

Which is briefly summarized by the author here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tanya-luh ... 73277.html

Bear in mind that the people she was studying are what you would probably call "hard core" and are only a limited subset of the entire population of believers. But it also gives a flavor of the more "casual" believers.

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GandK
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by GandK »

suomalainen wrote:However, I'd be eager to hear others' thoughtful reflections on how their belief got started and how it is sustained (particularly through "trials of faith" when doubts, perhaps akin to suspicions of confirmation bias at work, arise).
I was raised in a traditional yet politically liberal branch of protestant Christianity (PCUSA, specifically). PCUSA has, or had at that time (70s and 80s), a hard emphasis on history, tradition and the education of both church members and clergy. Think robes, 300 year old hymns, and the Nicene Creed in the worship service, and classes everywhere you turn. Even back then, everyone I knew in church leadership had at least a master's degree. In my particular church, one could not vote on church affairs without going through a year-long confirmation class that included reading the Bible cover to cover and being able to articulate how each type of Protestantism was different from the others as well as from Catholicism. (People went through that at twelve.) At the same time, PCUSA ordains women and gays, and they vote to decide on pretty much everything. It's a democratic organization, not top-down at all. Far left of most of Christianity in spite of the hymns.

However, there was little emphasis on relationship with God there, or relationship with others, except in the abstract (e.g. the Golden Rule). I didn't grow up linking God to outward events, and to the degree that other people insisted that they were, I thought them weird. As I grew older, I drifted away from regular church attendance, but I still thought of myself as a Christian, at least in the cultural sense. That was me until my early thirties.

At that time I met and married my husband, G, who is an ordained Church of Christ minister who now practices law. Church of Christ Christians are the opposite of Presbyterians in almost every respect. Worship services are super modern (electric guitars and light shows), but many CoC believers interpret the Bible 100% literally and are politically and religiously conservative to what most would consider a crazy degree (think Sarah Palin). G has more sense, but he's still far to the right of my upbringing.

Through my interaction with my husband, my faith has changed a great deal. I haven't become a "the end is nigh" sign waver. However, I began to think of my relationship with God as a real relationship rather than something on a pedigree chart. I began investing in it as I would any other relationship that was significant, first through prayer, and later through a gradual change of attitude that I believe prayer brought about. My life changed, slowly as Jenny's did, and the biggest change was in my relationships. The main focus of my life was no longer myself. I don't see God as a puppet master, as you seem to imply Christians might. Rather, I see him as a catalyst. When I apply God to my life, it changes. It takes on energy, and I use that energy in my relationships with Him, with myself and with others.

Faith also took on a different meaning when I shifted my focus to individual people (relationship) rather than humanity in the macro sense (culture). There's a difference between believing Jesus was an important man in his day and is worth studying, and trying to follow his lead today. I make an effort now to reach out to others, especially those in some sort of need (in love as opposed to in evangelism). My life became richer as a result.

I now attend a CoC church with my husband. I will never agree with everything they espouse, and the music gets on my nerves... I like a contemplative service, not bongo drums and cheering. And I occasionally miss the focus on education at the church I grew up in. But the CoC folks do have a very big point: when Christ was alive, his focus was on relationships. Full stop. If I'm to follow him, so must mine be. Education is a good thing, but if it crowds out relationships, in the end it's not helping. It's just turning you into a Pharisee.

Bad things haven't happened less as a result of my relationship with God. In fact, since my faith changed, they have happened much more. My thirties absolutely sucked. By far my worst decade. But my faith did sustain me, for the first time in my life. My relationship with God made a difference. It didn't fix everything. I just didn't have to go through it alone. And for once, everything stayed in perspective. So, I don't do anything to "sustain my faith." Like Jenny, my faith sustains me. In my life, it brings depth to a world that is otherwise extremely shallow. And I while I have many doubts about the underlying meaning of specific Bible passages, I don't doubt God's existence or His love for me. I've seen/felt/experienced too much evidence to the contrary.

I realize this is all subjective. It won't fit into a formula or be analyzed easily. I may not have even said anything intelligible. But this is an accurate answer to your question.

workathome
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by workathome »

My faith came via nihilism. Either life is imbued with purpose, such as through a creator God, or it is essentially and totally meaningless.

People will disagree, but materialism reduced is without any meaning or purpose. Some try to make a god out of evolution. Maybe we can evolve into gods onto ourselves, but even then the meaning is entirely subjective and malleable. That is why, ultimately, people who object to something like transgender-ism must be shouted down so vehemently. Even if biologically a male can be classified as a male, to disagree is to attack the inversion of meaning that is the essence of progressivism. It is to deny the individuals as gods-onto-themselves and deny that reality is entirely malleable and essentially meaningless.

So I started from a purely utilitarian basis. I concluded that such a society is not healthy and will sink into self-destruction, and that to raise a healthy family required some sort of moral structure, and that the morals must be objective or else it was fraudalent.

Only after that did I begin studying Christian theology and found it was possible to believe and still feel rational about it. So ultimately it's an active choice and, of course, faith. No fireworks or dramatic change followed. The Eastern Church tells us it's like climbing a ladder, and I think that may be exactly right.

Dragline
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by Dragline »

The empirical research tends to support your utilitarian observation about human social groups, workathome.

"Atran and Henrich begin with the same claim about by-products as do the New Atheists. But because these anthropologists see groups as real entities that have long been in competition, they are able to see the role that religion plays in helping some groups to win that competition. There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.

The clearest evidence comes from the anthropologist Richard Sosis, who examined the history of two hundred communes founded in the United States in the nineteenth century. Communes are natural experiments in cooperation without kinship. Communes can survive only to the extent that they can bind a group together, suppress self-interest, and solve the free rider problem. Communes are usually founded by a group of committed believers who reject the moral matrix of the broader society and want to organize themselves along different principles. For many nineteenth-century communes, the principles were religious; for others they were secular, mostly socialist. Which kind of commune survived longer? Sosis found that the difference was stark: just 6 percent of the secular communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to 39 percent of the religious communes.

What was the secret ingredient that gave the religious communes a longer shelf life? Sosis quantified everything he could find about life in each commune. He then used those numbers to see if any of them could explain why some stood the test of time while others crumbled. He found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded , the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes . Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity."

Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (pp. 298-299). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

henrik
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by henrik »

Dragline wrote:the more sacrifice a commune demanded , the longer it lasted.
This seems to imply a causal relationship. What if those where simply the communes with the most motivated members and thus lasted despite the sacrifices demanded?

Devil's Advocate
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by Devil's Advocate »

suomalainen wrote:Ok, so i posted my question initially in...um...a thread that...um...was maybe an example of "doesn't play well with others"? I dunno. In any event, a serious question, and I promise I'm not trolling, baiting or looking for a fight:
That part of your post seems to be doing all three : trolling, baiting, and looking for a fight.

But no problem. :) Carry on with you quest for faith. And ERE as well.

I'm tempted to gab on here, in the context of your question, about my own arrival at faith, but I'll refrain : since if I do that, I will then go on to gab about my subsequent realization about how misplaced the very concept of faith is nine times out of ten (although one time out of ten it is both apt and necessary) : and that may end up derailing or killing off your thread, since it will go against most 'faithful' people's idea of faith.

suomalainen
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by suomalainen »

@DA, no offence intended. As you may gather from my initial post and this response, my experience may be aligned with yours, but I was simply referencing your approach to the topic which, I think you admitted in the other thread, was not...inviting.

@jenny, I don't think I intended my question to be an internal/external juxtaposition, but I can see how it came across that way, and your reply makes me reconsider what my approach to faith was. My "problem" with god may more likely be a problem with organized religion. Hopefully that will be fleshed out here in my responses to others.

@drag, I'll check out the book.

@K, thanks, I think I really related to your response on a number of levels, but I'll point out here that what I intended in my initial post with respect to my experience was similar to what you described. To flesh it out a bit - I would have an experience of one sort or another and I eventually came to label such an experience and similar experiences as "God". The experience could have been a feeling, an external thing that happened to me, or a reaction to a feeling or an external thing, or maybe others, but in every case I, at the time, interpreted the experience as one in which God played some part - be it an interaction with God, or God guiding me, or God arranging the situation to be so, or in some other way involving God. For me, the turning point was the realization that my labeling a thing "God" doesn't make it so. Like, I was using the label "God" as a descriptor for a certain set of experiences. "God" wasn't necessarily an external thing. "God" wasn't (to my knowledge*) an objective, external reality. It was just a label. Maybe I should have (or could have) labelled my experiences something else. Perhaps the label I could have or should have chosen was simply "love", which certainly aligns with the core of Christian teachings and is something I believe deeply, but...I wonder, does the existence of the principle provide evidence for the existence of an external thing that teaches the principle? Maybe I'm mixing up "faith in 'God' (as a metaphorical device)" and "faith in the existence of God as a specific identifiable 'person'". Maybe my question is really how does the former lead to the latter? Or maybe the latter just doesn't matter/isn't a thing subject to "the scientific method" and should therefore be approached differently? I dunno. I'm falling into a mental rabbit hole and am babbling.

* Maybe part of my problem is the inability to separate God from religion. Like, how often do you hear "follow God, in such manner as you feel appropriate" as opposed to "follow God, in such manner as I tell you is appropriate because I have [seen, spoken to, been visited by, whatever] God." It's usually the latter, right? But that latter one is really "follow some guy" and not "follow God". Maybe this is akin to @K's reference to doubting certain Bible passages but not doubting the personal relationship she has with God.

@workat home, purpose really is the thing, isn't it? But the human desire for purpose left me wondering: is there a Purpose? Is there an external thing called "Purpose" that is accessible by everyone and against which anyone and everyone could measure their existence? Long midlife crisis story short, I eventually came to the conclusion that nothing matters objectively. There is no Purpose. Rather than depress me, this was actually freeing, as I came to realize that if nothing matters objectively, then anything can matter subjectively. I have the choice. (I love, love, love East of Eden, perhaps the greatest book I have ever read in addition to Siddhartha). It's timshel. And THAT's where divinity lies.

@work and @drag, I also read something about the utilitarian basis for religion (an unseen bogeyman that will punish you reduces transaction costs for leaders wishing to control followers with less blowback).

Thanks to everyone for their contributions. I just don't have a community of people to explore these ideas with IRL (it hits too close to home for DW for us to talk too much about it).

Chad
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by Chad »

Devil's Advocate wrote:
suomalainen wrote:Ok, so i posted my question initially in...um...a thread that...um...was maybe an example of "doesn't play well with others"? I dunno. In any event, a serious question, and I promise I'm not trolling, baiting or looking for a fight:
That part of your post seems to be doing all three : trolling, baiting, and looking for a fight.

But no problem. :) Carry on with you quest for faith. And ERE as well.

I'm tempted to gab on here, in the context of your question, about my own arrival at faith, but I'll refrain : since if I do that, I will then go on to gab about my subsequent realization about how misplaced the very concept of faith is nine times out of ten (although one time out of ten it is both apt and necessary) : and that may end up derailing or killing off your thread, since it will go against most 'faithful' people's idea of faith.
Let's not make this a believer vs non-believer discussion. No reason we can't have that discussion, but if you want to do that just start another thread. ;)

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GandK
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by GandK »

suomalainen wrote:I wonder, does the existence of the principle provide evidence for the existence of an external thing that teaches the principle?
C.S Lewis (famous for his Narnia novels) wrestled with this very question in the first section of one of his non-fiction books, "Mere Christianity." It may be a good thing for you to read. Here's the relevant section, as well as see some comments below which contain a few arguments for and against his line of thinking: Mere Christianity, Part 1
suomalainen wrote:Maybe I'm mixing up "faith in 'God' (as a metaphorical device)" and "faith in the existence of God as a specific identifiable 'person'". Maybe my question is really how does the former lead to the latter? Or maybe the latter just doesn't matter/isn't a thing subject to "the scientific method" and should therefore be approached differently? I dunno. I'm falling into a mental rabbit hole and am babbling.
The latter certainly isn't subject to the scientific method, LOL! But I think it does matter. You can't have a relationship with a metaphorical device.

I can't speak for everyone, but I began by seeking God through prayer. (Proof followed.) This is a scary thing, because for someone who was used to thinking of God in the abstract like I was to begin praying as if you're confiding in a trusted friend is uncomfortable. You start out thinking that what you're doing is delusional. "They lock people up for talking to thin air... believing you hear voices is a sign of mental illness... maybe all practicing Christians are schizophrenics?" Then as the relationship grows, that feeling gets worse. You move on to believing that maybe you're delusional. "I think this is real... no, I know this is real... but am I just fooling myself... maybe I'm schizophrenic too!" And eventually you get to the Luddite stage of faith, where you simply don't care anymore how it works, because it just does.
suomalainen wrote:* Maybe part of my problem is the inability to separate God from religion. Like, how often do you hear "follow God, in such manner as you feel appropriate" as opposed to "follow God, in such manner as I tell you is appropriate because I have [seen, spoken to, been visited by, whatever] God." It's usually the latter, right? But that latter one is really "follow some guy" and not "follow God". Maybe this is akin to @K's reference to doubting certain Bible passages but not doubting the personal relationship she has with God.
FWIW, God (the entity) is not the subject of much debate amongst Christians. What God wants and how to follow His instructions (religion) is. Also, there's no single agreed-upon definition of what a "Christian" is. There are many tiers, roughly:

* Believe that Christ existed and taught cool things about God.
* The above, plus church attendance.
* The above, plus belief that Christ was the son of God (divine).
* The above, plus following certain cultural rituals that vary from one branch of faith to another.
* The above, plus belief that following Christ's teachings is a necessary part of Christianity.
* The above, plus belief that the Bible is 100% accurate.
* The above, plus belief that the Bible should be taken 100% literally, no metaphors.
* The above, plus rejection of modern technology (living as Christ lived).
* The above, plus retreating from society altogether and living in a compound.

In general, Christians believe that everyone above them on this scale is not a real Christian, that they're not going far enough. And they think that everyone below them is - though admirably pious - progressively more crazy. In summary, when someone says he's a Christian, you really have no idea what he means without further questioning.

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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by jacob »

FWIW, the confirmation bias in terms of finding meaning in events by selectively ignoring contraindications is called synchronicity (in statistics lingo, it's a case of making type I errors, false positives).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity ... I have seen a person arguing for his faith committing this very error: "God told me that the lampshade had 65 corners... I just heard this strong message in my head. So I counted the lampshade and there WAS 65 corners. This has happened a few times to me. So I conclude God exists."

However, this does not constitute proof in any philosophical, mathematical, statistical, etc. sense.

You might also remember the popularity of observing the number "11" in various places about a decade ago. The NFs (in MBTI terms) I know/knew were completely hooked on this, having the iNtuition to make the connection but lacking the logical T to control for the stats.

Faith is defined as "belief without proof". However, note that only mathematicians have deductible proof (and thanks to Goedel even they have beliefs which they consider true but which they can't prove...and they can prove this). Science relies on induction which admits a kind of confirmation bias as practitioners will admit. In particular, science tends to focus on things which can be measured(*). It's hard (but not dogmatically impossible) to change one's focus---but that usually just means trying some other instrument. Thinking of science as nothing but connecting measurements to theory in a kind of Bayesian way is called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism ... Noting the immense success of this process we reach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism ... which is the claim that 1) science is the best understanding because of its past successes; and 2) unlike instrumentalism which thinks of an electron as a convenient thought metaphor in the math connecting the instrumental observations to the prediction of other observations, scientific realism sees electrons as being real.

(*) This means that science creates the risk of making type II errors, false negatives, that is, ignoring stuff that's actually there because "our instruments can't detect it" or worse, dogmatically claiming it doesn't exist because we can't measure it with our methods.

I just mention this because science requires some faith as well and that [the underlying assumption] is often ignored. Basically, I'm an instrumentalist, like most hard scientists are. I'm an scientific realist in the sense of (1) but not (2). To me, "science is not just another postmodern narrative about the world" (it stands above the rest), however, I don't believe that electrons are "real" in the same sense that I believe that a brick is real. For example, if you could show me that an electron is actually a vibrating string rather than a wave-function, I'd be inclined to change my mind. If you told me that the brick that just fell on my foot does not exist, I'd be inclined to think that either you or I am crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB-JzPBJalA

As a kid I was one of the few who left the [state] church intentionally (most Danes just kinda ignore it instead). This would mainly due to my failure to find any confirmation. Like one of the early French said: "The existence of God is an assumption I've never had to make to explain things". Something like that ... So I guess that is a kind of the opposite of what the OP suggested.

So in my case, I tried, but failed. Religions that lack a personal god appeal to me somewhat more for this reason, perhaps because it's easier for them to get through the instrumentalist test, that is, they're not making claims that couldn't in principle be tested by an instrument.

Sorry for the diversion. Please don't go off on a tangent with this. Start a new thread if you must.

workathome
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by workathome »

suomalainen wrote: @work and @drag, I also read something about the utilitarian basis for religion (an unseen bogeyman that will punish you reduces transaction costs for leaders wishing to control followers with less blowback).
This is something that bothers me and I'd like to explain.

The existence of Hell is conceptualized mythologically in various ways, but these are best taken metaphorically than literally. If you associate God with light, Hell is really an "outer darkness" or the total absence of God. Heaven is the total presence of God. So it's not about God giving you coal for being naughty, but as the only possibility for those who chose to totally separate themselves from God.

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jennypenny
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by jennypenny »

A post from Hugh Howey's blog ... http://www.hughhowey.com/john-pavlovitz ... my-pastor/

I was raised a Christian, but I left the church when I was young. I didn’t believe in God anymore. As I got older, I was drawn back to the teachings of Christ, not because I had faith in his existence (or that of his dad, despite the obvious dual miracles of cocoa and coffee beans), but because I liked to think of Jesus as one of several revolutionaries of his time who tried to change how we see the world and how we treat one another.


Studying religious texts and writings can be a worthwhile venture, even if the final result isn't "faith."

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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by WYOGO »

workathome wrote: This is something that bothers me and I'd like to explain.

The existence of Hell is conceptualized mythologically in various ways, but these are best taken metaphorically than literally. If you associate God with light, Hell is really an "outer darkness" or the total absence of God. Heaven is the total presence of God. So it's not about God giving you coal for being naughty, but as the only possibility for those who chose to totally separate themselves from God.
Your position while understandable, is a defensive one based on the complexity and confusion of this concept. However the text is clear that parts of the Hell discussion are not resolved by the arbitrary assignment of metaphor. Actually the traditional understanding of this is flawed in many ways and has to do with the translation of the various Greek and Hebrew words associated. The Bible does refer to a number of places that are not necessarily synonymous with each other. Hell, Hades, Sheol, the Pit and possibly Gehenna along with Abyss are not synonymous with the Lake of Fire refered to in Revelation chapter 20 upon which our modern conception of Hell is mostly based.

workathome
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Re: The Beginning of Faith

Post by workathome »

You're right, my position is defensive. I find a lot of people object to Christianity based on straw men, or overly literal, materialistic biblical interpretations (like how early Christians were accused of being cannibals) for what is essentially mysterious or perhaps beyond this world experience.

The important thing though is that the Marxist-type materialist-reductionist/historical-revisionist views are wrong when trying to dismiss it. I think the core idea of "hell" is that if one accepts the reality of free will (which I think is a basic metaphysical assumption, you can't really argue against it or your argument is meaningless), and you accept the idea of the good - God (I have the same position WRT this as with free will), there is something essentially important about life and separating oneself from the good during it has not-good results. That's me trying to simplify it as much as possible.

I think that goes along nicely with the central purpose of this place: to allow people to get away from the not-good (i.e. meaningless, empty, soul-draining things) to free themselves for the pursuit of good things, which can take infinite forms.

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