Household Debate

[willtruncheon]

Sandy and I have been having a religious argument in our house this morning, which I want to reproduce here in the hopes that others might want to comment on it. I asked her to reproduce her side here, but she's a little too busy right now, so I'll just try to objectively boil down our respective statements here

Comments

[willtruncheon]

What would you accept as empirical evidence against the existence of souls? Could it not be said that because we are demonstrably unable to communicate with the dead that the fact alone pushes us closer to the "not likely" end of the spectrum, if not providing real certainty?

Also, that's a pretty big "if". If you use the belief in souls to justify, say, carpet-bombing a Vietnamese village because 1.) you're only destroying the physical personae of humans, not the humans themselves, and 2.) God will know the souls of the pure and just, and grant those souls existence eternal in unending bliss that is definitely preferable to crude physical existence, isn't that belief a little destructive? Aren't you better off living your life as a life, not a prelude to something that may or may not happen afterwards? If I am confronted with a knife-wielding assailant in an alley, it may be comforting for me to believe that he is actually a harmless rabbit (an assertion no one can truly disprove). It would be better for me to forgo the comfort offered by this unlikely explanation, however, and run away, fight, cry out for help, etc.

[willtruncheon]

Where I disagree is when you say that the truth of the matter isn't important. Why live a life based on a lie if you can help it? Do we need lies to be fulfilled and happy? I don't think anyone truly does.

[dcltdw]

I think... hmm, this is lj, which is such the Fount of Polished, Insightful, Carefully Reasoned Debate :) so I'm not sure, but I think you're oversimplifying. Namely, people do not lead lives that are singular in mood.

*Generally* speaking, yes, I'd agree with you -- but now I'm wielding a paintbrush four miles wide. And that's not where we (the areligious) run into contention necessarily with the religious people: it's when we're in specifics. Let's cut directly to the chase.

Somebody's mum/dad/spouse dies: oh shit, now what? That grieving stage for anyone is *complicated*, so we have to move beyond simplistic/binary declarations like the one above, even if we try to live our lives that way, and find something more nuaunced.

Yes, eventually we'll want to return to that ideal: but that takes time. And if people (myself included) use religion as their crutch, more power to them.

Urr, crutch can be read judgementally there, but I mean it objectively. As in, "I broke my leg, and I now I need this crutch to help me walk while I heal".

All that said, I may have made the faux pas of debating a different point that you were addressing; my apologies if so. :)

[willtruncheon]

"...the truth of either belief is less relevant than how the belief leads one to behave."

This is undoubtedly true.