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

[tirianmal]

Belief and rational thought are pretty much by definition opposite sides of the human equation. To try and impose the rules of one on the other, is doomed to failure. I find both sadness and strength in the fact that people are not wholly given to one or the other, but thankfully exist in a middle ground where they are willing to use logic some of the time and their beliefs are not wholly capable of rendering their rational capabilities useless. Mostly.

But that any idea/concept/thought should bring comfort and that such comfort should be necessary ... I guess I've never had a loss deep enough to want to fall into that thought as a means of comforting myself. The closest I've come is my grandmothers' passing and with them, for me at least, the comfort came from the understanding that they were no longer suffering, not that they were in a better place.

And if there is an after existence, and we do not know the rules of that after-life (and by "know" I apply the scientific "know" not the religious "know") then who is to say that such existence is a better place?

I mean, for me, if I imagine that my soul would continue on for all eternity (some 15 Billion years before the heat death of the universe and beyond) without the ability to interact with the life I had for some half dozen decades or more, perhaps to float aimlessly about Creation ... that would more or less fit my definition of Hell. Better Oblivion or true Nirvana, I think, than that. Is the "end" like that? I don't know. But not knowing, I choose not to believe in something I can't prove, either. Yet.*

Still, that's not to say that it can't be a healing thing. For those who choose to believe, it prevents a lot of anguish and perhaps even other emotions that could be just as dangerous. In this fashion, you could consider "belief" to be an evolutionary advantage, for it would allow the species to cope with death once it became intelligent enough to understand what is lost when a mind ends. Rationally, that doesn't mean you have to believe in the FSM or Orbitting Godlike Toasts in order to cope with death yourself, but you also don't have to consider those that do so "lowly". In some ways, they are doing the best they can, with what they are given. If it doesn't hurt anyone for them to think their loved ones are now floating serene in an afterlife ... then good for them.

I'm probably atheist-spectrum myself, perhaps agnostic in hope, but I think that to try and push all of humanity onto the atheism stack all at once ... ain't ever going to happen. The best we can hope for, is that everyone learns to get along with whatever beliefs exist, and that logic for the most part, allows us to continue forward, rather than backward.

* You never know where I'll be the closer I get to the end myself.

[tirianmal]

as to

Sandy's Argument: Belief in the existence of human consciousness after death is justified because it provides comfort to the bereaved and supplies a possible sense of meaning to people's lives. As the existence of souls is an idea that cannot ever be decisively "disproven", it should be accepted as a valid theory. This belief exists in part because people would be incapable of dealing with the psychological impact of thinking that their loved ones would eventually truly cease to exist.

[edit: As stated by Andy above, my response to her position would be ... if she said something different, I might have to comment differently.]

Sandy ought remind herself of what a theory, what a hypothesis and what the scientific method is. Anything that can not be disproven is by its very nature not valid input to a theory much less a hypothesis. While very little in science can ever be proven 100% as hard unchangeable FACT, there is nothing scientific in a position that starts off with premise "this can't be disproven, therefore let's accept it as a fact".

This is not to say that the concept of a "soul" is a bad belief. It's just not a good theory. Actually, it's not much of a theory at all.

[ghostowl]

Haha I never said it was a theory - that's Andy's misinterpretation of my argument. All I said was that you couldn't prove it or disprove it.

[tirianmal]

Like I said, I was replying based on his summary. :)