the mix of worlds
In my last post, I basically talked about why I don't think atheists should shirk away from any debate about religion they can, if they think religion is dangerous or wasteful. The central point here that most people get upset about is the idea that you can think your beliefs are right and other people's beliefs are wrong
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Re: The millions remark, apparently a 'RELIGIONS MAJOR' doesn't study the same kind of thing an anthropologist studies. Adherents.org counts 4200; A vast majority of these is certainly lost forever, especially the religions predating writing, and I hope I don't have to remind you we existed much as we do now for tens of thousands of years before we developed writing. I didn't say the religions have to be active: Just because a religion isn't active doesn't mean it wasn't correct, does it? But anyway, I see the world in black and white because the vast majority of god-having religions have it that way.
I don't understand how you can be happy to live in a vague and fuzzy world. It's easy to think, before you have glasses, that the whole world is just at the resolution, malformed with no distinct lines. That's not how the world really is: You put on the glasses, you focus the lenses of the telescope, and things snap into focus: Not every detail, but there are real, hard facts in the world, things that are true and things that are false. It's rare to meet someone who put on their glasses, and saw what the world was, then decided to toss them off again and live in the fuzzy world.
You might be comfortable to live in a vague world that doesn't force you to test any of those beliefs you want to hold dear, but I am live in a world where we build things: We have to have facts we can count on. There is no 'all sides are right' when it comes to any practical task people with real jobs (or educations) do.
I am incredibly open minded for anything that delivers any solid evidence -- any evidence of a miracle you can offer me that I can rule out self-deception as the obviously more likely cause of it, I will gladly accept.
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Now about anthropology. Religions have evolved over time and that can account for most of the numbers if you put them under the same umbrella of the same religion. Take Christainity for instance. There are three different "types" of Christianity: Protestantism, which has over 34,000 different denominations each with some distinct practices. Catholocism, which is self-explaintory, and Eastern Orthodox which has 2 different "branches", Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox. IF you were to count ALL of those as seperate religions, I can understand how a person could derive millions of religions. The problem is that they are all counted as Christians by everyone I have studied under in Religion. Additionally I would avoid using the internet as a source...not only is it mostly unreliable, you would be laughed to scorn by a professor if you turned a paper in with an internet source.
Actually, I have a very open world where I welcome new ideas and new ways of thinking. It comes with age bud. The older you get and the more you study, the more your mind opens. Personally, I think that it's very open to only think of the world in few absolutes. Personally, to use your own analogy, when I began to put on the glasses the first thing I saw was how mucked up my own views were. Additionally, when you focus the lens the world does not become more concrete, it becomes more "grey" as you allow yourself to consider more possibilities. haha trust me, I have had to rearrange my mental furniture on many occasions. I used to be very fundamentalist religiously, but I had to throw off all that. If I was to return to my old church they would run me out for preaching "herasy".
The problem is that religion and many things in philosophy (except maybe logic philosophy) are not practical tasks. They are theoretical and you have to have the theoretical before you can do the practical. Of course to advance anything, sometimes you have to make a radical claim and take that claim on faith that it is true.
Lastly, I will tell you a few stories of people in my life of how God changed thiers. Hong, one of my students was on her way to getting her Ph.D in Engineering in America so she can return home with her husband. However, she was only 1 class away when God changed her life and came into her heart. She is now pursuing a Divinity degree. I'm actually going to talk to her tonight and help her with Ethical Studies class (English is not her first language).
#2 Another one of my students, Flora (her Manderin name is Meng Xu) hated religion. She used to visit Tibet and see the monks begging on the side of the road. Of course I could go off into a tangent about some of the negative aspects of religion but I'll spare you. Anyways, she got a very polemical view of religion and since she was in China that view was nurtured. After coming here though and meeting Christians and experiencing Christianity, she too had a life-changing experience and is now a born-again believer. She is also much nicer from what I understand.
These are just 2 stories. I have a lot more just like them. Of course this is not conclusive that there is a God (how could it be?), but it does demonstrate how God works in people's lives: In intangible ways.
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Don't harass me about internet sources. I can find any of the religions in adherents.org in a comparative religions textbook for anthropology. Even just the number of gods in Menckel's old 'Graveyard of the Dead Gods' essay offers the same problem as millions -- and each of those gods listed are to be revered above all others, an exclusionary belief. Suffice to say, there are plenty of exclusionary beliefs in religion even if you can think of some exceptions.
That's a lovely story about Flora. But... As you've heard plenty of times before, someone having a good experience with religion doesn't make religion true.
"All truth claims must be empirically verifiable in order to be true." -> No one is claiming that. There are certainly things that are true, but may never be able to be proved. The difference is that if you cannot confirm or falsify a fact, even if it is true, you can't build on that fact reliably. If we just accepted that the Earth was 200 million years old when Lord Kelvin said it was, we wouldn't have been able to build the sciences of plate tectonics, geology, paleontology, and, well, almost all modern science even. Getting it wrong is easy to see because so many different points of data become so problematic, as with the 200 million year estimate.
As far as philosophy goes, I also am only interested in applied philosophy: Philosophy as it has to do with things we can actually measure and test, because no other philosophy can be applicable or useful to our society at large. Sure, we can hypothesis about nihilistic scenarios or Cartesian brains in a jar all we want, but nothing about that is provable -- so it's useless.
Same with the idea of god. God cannot be proved; Any particular tenet of any particular faith can't be proved; No evidence of any kind strongly supports any faith over any other faith. Nothing can be built up from it. There can't be any real understanding of god, if he was real, that wouldn't be just completely personal and subjective (and therefore almost totally useless. I am sure you are aware the power of personal deception -- If anything, the scientific method has illuminated that spectre hanging over our day to day life and shown us how unconsciously we can effect results of things without even realizing it.)
Anyway, we've hashed it all out before. Thanks for your comments.
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