A Belief Question
 

I am not inviting flame wars here, but I am honestly curious...

In this day and age of logic, science, and understanding, how do you, personally, choose to explain in a rational (or irrational I suppose) manner your religion or system of beliefs?

Do you back up your ideas with evidence? Do you trust in faith alone? Is science compatible with religion to you?

I think this is a great question although I'm sure there'll be 'flame wars' in response if some people notice the thread. lol

From my perspective what I believe would have to be defined before I can tell you why I believe it, so here goes.

I think I believe in a God...at least, I've been brought up to believe in one...somewhere or other he lurks, but it's possible that he/she doesn't exist, in which case I'm fine with that too. I do believe that the Budhist philosophy works pretty well in that I can see how there are lessons to learn in a lifetime and there are different people at different stages learning different lessons in life and I've often wondered why some people have such hard lives and other seem to have it much easier. So with that in mind, I think it's possible the Budhists have got it at least correct in part. Also, I find their belief in the 7 planes of existance fairly comforting since this one we're on now is apparently the lowest which means it can't get any worse.

I think I believe these things because I don't want to accept that maybe when I die I just no longer exist.

Also, since I do believe in ghosts and souls because I think there's overwhelming evidence to suggest they do exist - in my opinion - that there must be something that comes after this life.

It's just what comes next that I'm confused about. :)

Oh, and I don't believe that God watches every little sin we commit and holds us up for judgement after death. If that were the case, God wouldn't have given us the ability to sin. I believe that if there is a God who sees all, that he knows when we're doing the best we can do, and that if that's what we're doing, then we're square with the keeper. To me, God is more like my conscience, so if I can sleep at night, then what happens next is beyond my control.

A universe without God(s) does not make sense to me. "God" and "Science" are not mutually exclusive terms.

I can't explain it in any more detail than that. I do not think doing so is necessary.

/agree totally

There is a line in shogun where Mariko and Toranaga agree that analyzing the divine is a waste of time. There are lessons to be learned there that have nothing to do with fact, or even with truth.

Growing up as the child of a Protestant clergyman who also taught elementary science was an interesting experience.

My own "belief system" does not require insulation from my knowlege of science and mathematics. That understanding encourages me not to expect too much enlightenment from religious systems based in language...as so many are. Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem makes it clear to us that formal symbolic systems aren't even up to the task of encompassing themselves, much less the Transcendant.

The development of western organized religions, (like other memetically-based systems for aggrandizing power like "government"), are informed and mediated by information technologies, including linguistic systems and communications media....from the invention of written languge to the Roman system of couriers and roads to Gutenberg's press to the fax machine to the Internet.

These are two different ways of describing the same thing, IE the universe which we can never fully understand, or remove ourselves, as observers, from being a part of. The effort to find the common ground between these two methods of understanding, and eliminate false conflicts where they exist, is a great opportunity to find a more comprehensive way of looking at the universe. After all, two different methods of describing an object do not create two different objects, merely two different descriptions.

Wherever conflicts arise between the two, it is necessarily the fault of the methods themselves, as reality cannot be blamed for our faulty perceptions. Wherever science and religion appear to clash, there is an opportunity to resolve our fundamental problems in describing the universe.

I believe its called "faith" for a reason. Some things cannot just be explained to EVERYONE's satisfaction. I have a Master's in bilogy and I see no cross over between faith and science. Science is about logic and proof; faith is about belief. I do believe in some Higher Intelligence of the Universe, but I wouldn't dream of attempting to explain my faith beyond that.

I propose that the "cross over" is: these are two ways of attempting to describe the universe. And, there is only one universe.

I'm flying on faith. There are so many amazing things in the world. I can't abide people getting into major discussions about religion versus science. I don't believe they are really separate. I'm always amused by the evolution/creation disagreement. Isn't it possible that God created evolution? The only constant is change, so things have to evolve. That's part of the deal. Anyway, that makes total sense to me.

Science has a lot of that faith stuff mixed into it as well...just not so blaringly obvious. You have to have faith that the experiments and theories were established properly and all that mumbo jumbo is more than just mumbo jumbo that the scientists are using to make themselves feel smart. Many theories and experiments are debunked by later theories or experiments. More scientists are advocating the Intelligent design idea rather then the Big Bang theory nowadays.

More? I doubt that.
I just wish that people would leave those of us who do not believe in God alone. The evangelical idea has been warped beyond recognition.
Also, it is none of anyone's damn business how I raise my child. This nation is not, nor has never been based on any religion... it needs to stay that way, in all forms and forums.
I respect those who have religious beliefs, as long as they do not feel that they have a right to impose them on others, ever.

I suspect this is a purposefully deceptive phrasing you picked up somewhere, intended to conflate "Big Bang" theory of 1927 with modern scientific thought. The suggestion that ID is taken seriously by the peer-reviewed scientific community is utter bullshit. It isn't even science.

No you don't. You can try it yourself. That may not be practical, but it is possible, so faith is not necessary.And the debunked theories are discarded. This is not indicative of faith, but of pragmatism. If you maintain faith in a debunked theory, you are no longer doing science. (See astrology and phrenology)Maybe if you are making a distinction between "advocating" and "generally acccepting".

I have no faith. I want to take the word "believe", tie a cinderblock to it and toss it in the East River.

And what may I ask are your scientific credentials? There is no "faith" that experiments were established properly. Any scientific study or experiment published in a respectable peer reviewed journal MUST be reproducible. That means that if I publish that I have discovered a vaccine for small pox, 99.9% of the scientists who follow the protocal given in the paper will get the same results. That is called "proof" - not "faith."

Science is an EVOLVING field of knowledge, just like any other. As further research is conducted, new discoveries may be made. However, just because we have made discoveries in the area of quantum physics does not mean that the law of gravity ( a component of classical physics) no longer is true.

Very few, if any, respected scientists advocate intelligent design. Do you even know what intelligent design postulates and why comparing it with the big bang is like comparing apples and oranges?

Just because YOU don't understand something, doesn't make it mumbo jumbo. If you spend just a couple of years taking a few basic science courses in college, maybe throw in a year of calculus, and a good introductory course in logic, you might be able to make coherant replies to discussions such as this one.

Or you can keep listening to the Focus on the Family crowd. :eyebrow:

Crowd is close. County or country would be closer. He get so much mail that, and I am not making this up, he has his own zip code.

Yes I would have to say that my beliefs coincide with modern science...but then again, I am naturally practical. Kind of a bore. And before any one jumps to conclusions, I am not a christian.
Now I'm going to just ask before I google. Hopefully I won't get anything thrown at me.
What in the hell is "intellegent design?" What is that all about?

If anyone can describe this to me I'd be grateful. Obviously I was not intellegently designed.

"Intelligent Design" is the idea that life is too complicated for evolution to be responsible without some sort of oustide intelligence guiding it.

Thanks.
I'll agree with that- life is complicated but, who said that something intelligent did this? Yeah. Bright fellow. :D
Oh no, here comes Zeus now.........

ID (short for idiot design) takes a look around at the complex world of living things that man is eradicating as quickly as possible, and says God did it. When I studied evolution and environmental biology in college,I was awed not by the hand of God, but by the life force in all beings which cause them to compete for food, make use of any helpful mutation that comes along (most mutations are lethal}, raise viable progeny, co-evolve with other creatures - flowers and their pollinators are execellent examples of this. On and on. In your spare time grab a book by Gregory Bateson or someone like that. You'll be stunned.

And come to think of it, why aren't the fundies upset by all the extinctions going on that are caused by man? Shouldn't that be a sin or something?:eyebrow:

:lol:

I've always been stunned by the lack of capacity of people to imagine that perhaps Evolution is *how* their God created things. I mean, believers in ID (the new more politically correct version of Creation) are always making comparisons like "you can't take a bunch of watch parts in a box, shake them up, and get a watch." No, watches are made in watch factories...there's a frigging *process*.

Why should creating something as exotic and unlikely as the vast panoply of Life be any different, damn it? And why is it an insult to God to think that he didn't just will Everything into existence from scratch, but rather had a *process*, perhaps even one that still continues today? Doh!

It's a debate of semantics. I'll go one step further and ask: why can't the Laws of Nature themsleves be thought of as God? Since any descriptive system, be it scientific or spiritual, is merely an approximation of reality, I find it helpful to think of them as attempting to describe the same thing. There is, after all, only one universe to be described, and since we are a part of that universe, we cannot make an objective observation of it. Every descriptive system we have is flawed, inevitably, by this fact. You could say God created evolution, or you could say Evolution is God, or whatever. These are just words.

I'd like to know where you pulled that little gimlet from.

Absolutely, they're just words. But, words are multilayered, we take different layers of information from the words we hear, some obvious, some less so. The word 'God' is not used in isolation from the cultures in which it is used; it therefore carries certain implicit meanings, which we with our cultural understanding, take on at a conscious and unconscious level.

If we want to talk about evolution, why not just call it evolution? Why take a word already well-laden with meanings which do not apply to the concept of evolution and use that instead, just because a couple of its meanings correspond.

Read what it literally says...

Buddhists, once we reach a certain point, don't really worry about what "happens next"... you realize you just don't have the energy to worry about it and do what you need to do to become the person you need to be now.
Plus, there is no way to know. So, you concentrate on what you have to do now.
There is no dogma of the afterlife, so one can be whatever they like, before reaching that point... most tend to be whatever their nationality was before Buddhism moved into that area. The Japanese are ancestor worshipers, the southern areas are into reincarnation, the Chinese tend to be Taoists or whatever regional "thing" they were into and the Western nations are either Christian/Buddhists or Atheists (or they adopt one of the Eastern philosophies, which always confused me).
I am an atheist.
In Buddhism there is one faith, in the altruistic final nature of the innermost being.

I wouldn't use a word outside of it's cultural associations without explaining why, and on what basis. I'm not switching words willy-nilly because of scant similarities, I'm describing my personal, unconventional idea that diverse disciplines, imperfect as incomplete, compartmentalized concepts, can be hashed together to form a more complete, "bigger" picture.

The point that is being missed in these rather rational notions is this: True Believers *need* their God to be a conscious entity, one which apparently thinks like a human being, but has awesome super powers - an entity above and apart from The All.

Doesn't make a lot of sense, but it does explain how The Almighty likes all that attention and praise. Probably gets kinda lonely being separate and apart from Everything Else.

There's no point in worshiping something that isn't conscious. Why offer thanks and praise to something that had no intent to do what you're thanking and praising it for, and doesn't hear your thanks and praise anyway?

I don't miss that point.

To you. That you know of.

To someone that worships. They are hoping or expecting that their prayer is heard.

That is true only sometimes. Maybe even most of the time, but not %100 of the time.

The other times, too.

Many people have worshipped non-anthropomorphic things, with none of the specific agenda you describe.

I don't think so, but I'm all ears.

There are people who worship nature, not as a conscious entity, and not to achieve a desired outcome by communicating with, exerting influence over, or receiving special favors from it. You may not agree with it, or understand it, or be aware of it, but there they are. They do exist.

I never said they expect or hope anything in return, but if they worship, they expect or hope to be heard. Otherwise it's just therapy.

This boils down to whether the definition of the word "worship" necessarily indicates a communicative act as you've described.
This is clearly your definition, but not the same one that everybody uses. From your persepctive, this is all merely speculation.

Y'know, you really can deconstruct language to the point where none of it means anything, or all of it means everything.

Prayer is the conscious focus of energy, based on whatever imagery to which you are attuned. Thus, when one worships, be it Jehovah, rocks, Allah or Britney Spears, that individual is having a personal, energetic interaction with The Universe. IMHO, it is immaterial *what or who* the focus of it is, because it is the individual who is doing all the work.

So, from my point of view (which I grant is not shared by most Western religions), there *is* a reason to worship something which is not necessarily anthropomorphic, or conscious in the classical, human-centric sense.

The definition of "worship" that doesn't involve communication is the figurative one, like worshipping the almighty dollar.

But in some other sense.

You only disagree with what is in the sense that you mean, but you've been insisting that everything is in this sense.And you also can't project your definitions on other people and insist that they are using them when they clearly aren't.

No I haven't. I've been insisting that a worshipper thinks that there is something that in in some sense (classical, human-centric or not) could hear them. The worshipper does not think that the object of their worhip is not only indifferent, but incapable of being otherwise.

(And I'll note that I never said anthropomorphic, just conscious)

An interaction. The worshipper is sending and the worshippee is receiving.

And, you're wrong. You're clearly, definitively, wrong. This isn't debatable.
You're projecting something that isn't there 100% of the time, as you claim.

In my belief system, I adhere to the notion that I am an inextricable part of the Universe, part and parcel of the All. Thus, I can interact with it by a conscious act on my part, and it doesn't have to respond verbally. The change/action/whatever I am seeking is within myself, not outside. In a sense, I'm trying to rearrange my little part of the All, the part that is me, in some way. Prayer is a way of doing that, and therefore, in my mind, an interaction with the Universe.

When you think, or when you talk aloud to yourself, are you interacting? I think you are, because you are going through a process of some sort, intended to produce some sort of a result. Either you think up the solution to a problem, or you mull over the facts of a situation and arrive at some enlightenment or knowledge, or you change how you feel emotionally about something through the process.

Yeah, it sounds flakey. But then, that's me.

I haven't seen a counterexample yet.
I never said respond, let alone verbally.

Do you call what you do worship, and if so, what is it that you are worshipping?

I cannot imagine people worshipping without some purpose in mind. For the sake of argument, let's say there was a cult of Sphinx worshippers. Once a year, they make a pilgrimage to the Spinx, chant "Far Fucking Out, Man!" then return to their daily lives. They wouldn't want to emulate anything the Sphinx might mean to them, they wouldn't expect it to answer prayers, their lives would not be in anyway uplifted, nor would they have a special moment of Satori or something - none of that.

I would call that group a bunch of crazies - not worshippers.

I have tried all my life to be agnostic and failed repeatedly in the attempt. I have "resigned" myself to beleiving in an intelligence of the universe (for lack of some better word). I pray sometimes, but I don't expect a return answer in a letter written in beautiful gold calligraphy on fine vellum paper, with the return address on the cloudy blue envelope "God, Heaven."

Sometimes I am simply stunned by the beauty of nature on a clear desert night with a sky full of shooting stars. I've had moments that I can only describe as gifts of grace. I hope my own decidely odd spiritual path will help make me a better person, and also help me stop fighting life and begin living it instead.

The idea of "worship" with no expectation of anything of the heart or soul in return is the wrong use of the word. You might try "admiration", instead.

There is no counter-example to what you are saying because all you are saying is: someone who is doing what you call worship is doing what you say worship consists of, when you say worship meaning what you mean worship to mean. That's air-tight, certainly. Because it's a non-statement.

But "no purpose" is not the only alternative to "a specific purpose" . . .

If the benefit gained is recognized as having come from within yourself, then you would be aware that you only "communicated" with yourself.

You're playing word games.

The closest kind of thing that I can think when it comes to trying to understand where you're coming from is either that you're just being a brat or you're thinking of something like Zen Buddhism. The purpose of Zen is to become enlightened. However, as long as you have a DESIRE to become enlightened, it will never happen. Give up all desire for ANYTHING and you attain Nirvana. Desire enlightenment and next life time around you get to be a mule.

I understood everyone perfectly.

yes he's a brat and no Rk is seeking enlightenment and elspode is communing and happy monkey is explaining. You and I are just annoyed. :p

Now about worshiping.....

I want to say that worship happens between two lovers. Maybe he can intellectualize that one to death.:p ..or not

If you insist on using the word 'Jam' to describe something which is about to be spread on toast, it would be reasonable for me to form certain assumptions as to what you are about to eat.

*I* don't call it worship, because I have this inexorable sense of the word in association with kowtowing to something greater than myself, outside of myself, and that's not my belief system. What I do I call "ritual", and I've made many comments about what that means to me before on this board.

The notion of "prayer", however, has a fairly universal connotation to me. How one gets results from prayer, though, is vastly different in *my* purview than it is to most mainstream religions. As to "interaction" and "response" from the Universe, I guess it depends on how you look at it. Yes, the Universe responds, but it is *me* that changes. Because I am a fundamental component of the Universe, neither more or less important than any other component, when *I* change, the Universe changes. I'm not being argumentative, that's just how I see things. I *am* reaching outside of myself, because although I am a part of the Universe, I still wish to draw from, be in tune with, tap into...the All. I'm part of the Universe, but I'm a damn small part, and there's a lot more energy and inherent "mojo", if you will, to be accessed from the All.

I'm not. HP insists that "worship" is always communicative, and I disgree. What we're discussing is whether "worship" is communicative, not whether it has a purpose. I'm not playing word games. A non-communicative purpose is still a purpose.

You can form whatever assumption you want about a person's use of the word "worship" but you can't insist that your assumptions apply to that person's description of a non-concrete, internal activity taking place within their own mind. Jam can be observed directly, worship can not. It is defined within the individual.

Incidentally, the collective assumptions about what "worship" means, from a dictionary definition, do not specify a communicative act.

True. It can also, though, be defined by certain cultural understandings. Granted those cultural understandings vary enormously through time, space, cultural origin etc. But, that those cultural understandings vary does not mean that they go away and exert no influence on the hearer's comprehension. Language works partly through those shared understandings and references.