Do you believe in the supernatural?

[yung.carl.jung]

I do respect a good troll but if that's the case it's kinda silly to speculate what he really thought.

it is for sure. my argument wasn't that "deep down Einstein was Christian", but rather that even the most intelligent people on earth can and do like Christianity for reasons that aren't social pressure. that is just a fact. being a Christian does not make one unintelligent, and many intelligent people were and are Christian.

it is pretty undeniable that Einstein had a phase where he was practically obsessed with catholicism and abrahamic religions in general. the reason why I picked him as an example is precisely because it wasn't due to pressure, but due to genuine interest!

 

[thecrazyscot]

Eh? They were born in Christian societies, raised by Christian parents, and surrounded by Christians in every social circle. What is that if not social pressure?

There are plenty of people who were devoutly religious who were in societies that were culturally religious. You can't dismiss someone's religious faith as simply due to "social pressure" unless you have some evidence that the person didn't actually believe. That's a bad faith argument. (ha)

 

[Lexicus]

There are plenty of people who were devoutly religious who were in societies that were culturally religious. You can't dismiss someone's religious faith as simply due to "social pressure" unless you have some evidence that the person didn't actually believe. That's a bad faith argument. (ha)

Secret non-belief is not necessary. Do you have an alternate explanation for why people almost always end up the same religion as their parents?

 

[thecrazyscot]

Secret non-belief is not necessary. Do you have an alternate explanation for why people almost always end up the same religion as their parents?

Nope. All I'm saying is that dismissing someone's religious belief as essentially insincere just because it's likely they "inherited" their beliefs from their parents or surrounding culture is an unfair and invalid assumption. Not to mention really, really arrogant.

 

[Lexicus]

Nope. All I'm saying is that dismissing someone's religious belief as essentially insincere just because it's likely they "inherited" their beliefs from their parents or surrounding culture is an unfair and invalid assumption. Not to mention really, really arrogant.

My question is where you're reading the "insincere" part, I guess.

 

[AmazonQueen]

Nope. All I'm saying is that dismissing someone's religious belief as essentially insincere just because it's likely they "inherited" their beliefs from their parents or surrounding culture is an unfair and invalid assumption. Not to mention really, really arrogant.

Its not saying they are insincere but we are all influenced by the society around us. Thats not just religious beliefs, its politics, prejudices etc as well.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Its not saying they are insincere but we are all influenced by the society around us. Thats not just religious beliefs, its politics, prejudices etc as well.

And things like music. Absolutely the Beatles, Stones and music of late 60s influenced my life.

 

[sendos]

Peer pressure always wins out. You cannot ignore the numerous instances in history of societies marginalising those who don't share the communal faith. And it's still happening today, which is why I hate religion with a passion. The supernatural is just small-talk to lure supposedly idle-minded, vulnerable people into being manipulated by gas-lighting losers who want to dictate what you believe and what you do. You show the carrot on initiation/proselytization and then the stick to maintain the belief. A Christian example is "how can you not love Jesus? The Bible says he's awesome", which then goes to "you'll burn in Hell for refusing Jesus' love".

For families, it's even worse. If your parents are devoutly religious, are part of a devoutly religious community, and you harbor anti-religious views, you are then forced to be something you're not. I am very fortunate to have a Mum to be mildly religious and my Dad to be an atheist. If not, my life would have been utterly miserable. I am also fortunate to be born in Australia, and not some backward religious country. That includes the US, despite its military and technological prowess.

Face it Scot, you're wrong on this point. People will feign being religious just to be left alone and to fit in. I am living proof of this as well. I feigned religious belief throughout my schooling days. I recall politely questioning my religious education teacher privately during lunch time about certain supernatural beliefs without openly saying I was atheist. In fairness, my religious education teacher was rather tolerant anyway. I still nevertheless got to him to say that discrimination is good to preserve the faith, or words to that effect, when I challenged him on the discriminatory nature of religion.

Only in a secular society can you be truly free to express your beliefs, whatever they are.

 

[Narz]

Nope. All I'm saying is that dismissing someone's religious belief as essentially insincere just because it's likely they "inherited" their beliefs from their parents or surrounding culture is an unfair and invalid assumption. Not to mention really, really arrogant.

How many people you know who spontaneously become Hindu or Mormon outside of any cultural influence? It simply would not happen. Religion is a cultural phenomenon, like a language if people stopped transmitting it culturally it would vanish.

I wouldn't use the word "insincere" just unthinking. If choosing a religion was a thoughtful "choice" you wouldn't see 99% of people making the same choices as their immediate family/friends.

 

[Kyriakos]

Discussing religion is always a bad idea - I actually banned it from all my seminars, cause people inevitably would start to fight and in the end also exchange bad words
It also isn't really the topic of the thread, or is just a subset of it.

Re Pascal, I am not sure if that counts as "believing", given he seemed to have been making an assessment of probabilities, though quite problematic (cause it's not like if you just believe in x for all your life, it isn't causing other effects and all that remains is the pass-card to x's afterlife if it is real).

Terms such as "god" have weight, but that isn't because they are studied. In fact they tend to become taboo, and remain even less studied than other terms.

 

[Narz]

Religion is codified supernatural beliefs that you're meant to have faith in.

At least "actual" supernatural experiences (having a dream your gramma dies & then she does), while obviously having no reality are based on personal experience (however cherry picked & filtered). Religion is one step down the absurd ladder, taking others claimed experience as truth.

 

[El_Machinae]

Choosing faith is a conscientious choice, the mistake is thinking that someone came to their opinion completely objectively. If I'd been raised in a household (and church) that was more skeptical of the Bible, I wouldn't view it as a bundle of lies about God. So, I chose atheism as part of my rejection of the Bible-worshiping community. Now, no other faith 'made sense', because I would view them with the same skeptical eye that the Bible induced in me. It wasn't until I became an older adult that I would find glimmers of moral truths in various teachings, that that majority of the adherents seemed to miss because they believed much of the underlying mythology. Obviously, I don't have all the answers, but some faiths have some of the answers in their scholarship. It's why I like saying that the Bible is a collection by people that were doing their best to understand God, and it's valuable in that way.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Choosing faith is a conscientious choice, the mistake is thinking that someone came to their opinion completely objectively...

Be careful here. Lots of people will say that they had an experience and that led to their belief; they did not have a choice at all. Many people do choose and do so for a variety of reasons, but not all.

 

[El_Machinae]

Naw, people will still make best efforts to integrate their experience into a rational choice. But we're agreeing, because that effort to be rational just cannot be objective. All of us are integrating our senses and knowledge in order to make sense of the universe for ourselves. People who have an experience will try to explain that experience to themselves, unsurprisingly you can predict that explanation based on their underlying culture

 

[sendos]

Naw, people will still make best efforts to integrate their experience into a rational choice. But we're agreeing, because that effort to be rational just cannot be objective. All of us are integrating our senses and knowledge in order to make sense of the universe for ourselves. People who have an experience will try to explain that experience to themselves, unsurprisingly you can predict that explanation based on their underlying culture

I agree here. People with supernatural beliefs will always try to rationalise the irrational. It's part of their whole "don't you dare question my beliefs" thing.

Discussing religion is always a bad idea - I actually banned it from all my seminars, cause people inevitably would start to fight and in the end also exchange bad words
It also isn't really the topic of the thread, or is just a subset of it.

Re Pascal, I am not sure if that counts as "believing", given he seemed to have been making an assessment of probabilities, though quite problematic (cause it's not like if you just believe in x for all your life, it isn't causing other effects and all that remains is the pass-card to x's afterlife if it is real).

Terms such as "god" have weight, but that isn't because they are studied. In fact they tend to become taboo, and remain even less studied than other terms.

To be honest, out of all philosophers on religion, Pascal would be closest to getting me to believe in God. But once I realised this whole Heaven and Hell are just incentives and disincentives respectively, his argument fell away like the rest.

Moving away from religion and onto other supernatural topics, such as dreams, throughout my life, I never had a single dream which made sense. It was a like a random number generator of who, what, when, where, but no why or how. For example, I dream about one of my primary school teachers at my secondary school talking to some random person I spotted at university about politics. That's all dreams are to me.

While on the topic of nightmares, the last time I had a nightmare was probably years ago. I realise I was more likely to get a nightmare if I had superstitious beliefs or I had cold feet while sleeping.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am not sure if there are supernatural dreams (they are a category, but there obviously isn't proof of source; some futuristic visions tend to be categorized as such).
As early as the 19th century it was known that some types of dreams can indeed be triggered by physical states, including body position, existence of annoying circumstances in the room or physical illness.

That said, from time to time I do have the sense I had dreamed of the future (when it is the present, I have the sense I actually saw it in a dream years ago). But it is a very faint sense and I am not particularly interested in hunting for its source, so it remains vague and thus may always be attributed to the deeper mind having calculated a number of possible future situations).
Sadly it tends to be about complicated stuff (like x happening when y and z, both strange, had been there already). If it was about being with some extremely hot girl, I'd likely recall it more easily.

In my experience, fever-dreams are the most literary. I recall a few of those.

 

[Birdjaguar]

nvm

 

[Kyriakos]

I'll just like the post, just to be on the safe side

 

[Birdjaguar]

I tried to post a picture but couldn't because of the source.

 

[El_Machinae]

Only someone who is not using their God-given reasoning ability blindly believes everything in the Bible to be literally true.
There is a growing consensus that large sections of the Old Testament are not meant to be literal histories but are more allegorical, while others recount actual events. Some books are "literature" (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, etc), others are "historical" (I/II Samuel, I/II Kings, Ruth, Esther, etc), others are "prophetic" (Revelation and lots of the major/minor prophets) ...

I think the most sensible interpretation of the early bits of Genesis are that it is allegorical, for example. If you look at the cosmology presented there, it looks very much like the cosmology understood by ancient peoples. In other words, it was presented in a format that the people of the time would understand and was supposed to communicate important truths, but is not meant to be taken as a literal scientific account.

But to answer your questions specifically as I'm not trying to dodge:
1a. No. I believe there was not a single worldwide flood. I do believe there was a massive regional flood though, as does virtually every ancient historian.
1b. Yes, in a general sense. Literally everyone believes we are descended from an initially limited gene pool.
2. Yes, I believe the Hebrews (although perhaps with less of their own unique identity at the time) were enslaved by the Egyptians and that there were a series of miraculous events and divine intervention which led to their freedom. And yes, I do believe they eventually conquered Canaan, as the existence of the Kingdom of Israel reflects.

So, we're back again to my original point, where I don't believe in the Dragon - not because it's not as I wish it to be - but because it doesn't exist in the universe that I know. If someone says there's a dragon, I doubt them merely because there are no hexapod reptiles in the fossil history.

We both know the Bible isn't literally true. I knew that you knew that. But, the God of the Bible doesn't exist because so much of it is allegory, and then it's up to each individual Christian to figure out which parts are allegory and which parts aren't. A god that actually commanded the murder of gay people in Leviticus is a completely different entity that didn't do such a thing, but was misrepresented, for example. We then describe 'God' to each other, with no real insight to figure out which acts were actually done by God and which are allegory and which are purely man's invention. We use the Bible as insight into what other people believed about God, but using as insight into God Himself is much, much more difficult.

You talk about "God-given reasoning", but there's just not enough information in the Bible to really discern the true nature of God.

For example, the freed Hebrews didn't actually genocide the Canaanites. How would a 5th century Christian know that by 'pure reasoning'? This poor chap is left with a dilemma. Does he love a god that occasionally commands genocide of people? Does he reject such an entity as not actually being 'good'? Does he use 'reasoning' to deduce that such an entity doesn't actually exist? I can reject that described dragon, because I have the advantage of knowing more. But they're stuck on whether to believe something based solely on its moral description.

Jesus suggests that we 'love God', but how can we call it love when we'd believe such wicked things about Him (without evidence?). The 5th century person can either believe the book or believe their heart. OR, they can create a theology where somehow God is good despite ordering such genocides. It's like, I dunno, justifying my dad's murder of my mom's previous boyfriend when he's actually completely innocent of such things. "Even if he didn't, it would be okay if he did". Barf.

Which is one of my criticisms of Christianity itself - it doesn't proactively look for evidence that their God isn't evil (like their Bible claims). It instinctively first tries to create justifications for those evils of which God is innocent. This isn't a personal relationship with God. The one thing we truly know about God's nature from the Bible is that He doesn't mind the libel enough to do anything about it. Jesus told us to love God, and so I consider that to be Christian. If someone chooses to believe lies (or even just bad things without evidence) about God because they'd prefer to believe the Bible, I call them a Biblilian. I love my dad enough to look for every piece of evidence he's not a murderer. I don't go to seminary to write essays on how the murders he commits are justified.