RE: If you were ever a theist...
December 30, 2015 at 5:12 pm
(This post was last modified: December 30, 2015 at 5:15 pm by Simon Moon.)
(December 30, 2015 at 4:54 pm)Deidre32 Wrote:(December 30, 2015 at 4:52 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: You say this as if faith is a virtue.
Faith is not a path to truth. As far as I can tell, it is no different than gullibility.
The majority of humanity believes in different gods than you do, with equal amounts of faith. Yet, their faith has lead them to the "wrong god belief" according to Christians. And from the view of an outsider, I have no way to tell who, if any, is correct.
Curious that when you returned to a god belief, it turned out to be the one you were raised in, in a country where Christianity is the dominant god belief. What a coincidence, right?
My own journey is like this.
I was a born skeptic. Unless a claim is accompanied by supporting: demonstrable evidence, reasoned argument and valid and sound logic, I withhold belief for that claim.
About the age of 15 or so, I came to the realization that I was not examining my god beliefs with the same level of scrutiny as other existential claims and supernatural claims. As soon as I did, I discovered that they did not hold up. In order to maintain my intellectual honesty, I could no longer hold on to my god beliefs.
I'm not claiming anything, just what happened in my own life. And this thread isn't to spar over it, to be honest...it's just an interest I've had to hear why people left their respective faith beliefs and now identify as atheists.
Why do you feel it's intellectually dishonest to hold beliefs that can't be defined by a scientific process, or that level of scrutiny?
Because I have an overriding passion to have as many true beliefs as possible, and as few false beliefs as possible. I want my internal model of the universe to map as closely as possible to the actual universe. I think that making decisions with the most accurate map of reality as possible, is more likely to achieve better results.
Besides your god beliefs, how many other beliefs do you hold based on faith? I'll bet when when you hear about: alien abductions, speaking with the dead, dowsing, bigfoot, telekinesis, astral projection and other supernatural claims, you don't believe them on faith. You, like most theists, are skeptical of at least some of these claims, if not all of them.
Quote:Unless those beliefs harm others, then that's a different story. But, to me, spirituality, faith, whatever one calls it...is a private thing, and if it edifies my life, why would that be 'intellectually dishonest?'
Because I don't believe it is possible to keep one's beliefs entirely to themselves. Your beliefs don't live in a vacuum, they inform your actions.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
