i thought irony was over

[vanlose kid]

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[vanlose kid]

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[IanEye]

[JackRiddler]

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Thanks for this thread, vanlose kid. I took the challenge, read the story out loud, and saw that it was good.

i don't think MLK's faith was a failing. i don't think Malik al-Shabazz's faith was a failing. nor Jefferson's (read his bible if you will.) i don't think Rumi's faith was a failing. that wittgenstein's faith was a failing. dostoevsky's. tolstoy's.

Not at all. However, it should tell you something that all of these thinkers were committed persuaders, and they all sought to persuade using appeals to reason or justice, not invocations from faith. Notwithstanding the occasional basic principle taken as axiomatic (from God) like, "All men are created equal," their works otherwise rely on argument from logic of one kind or another, and on experience drawn from living in this world. (Um, except that I should exclude saying anything about Rumi, since I don't know his work. Sorry.)

Furthermore, I don't think a lack of faith in a supreme deity on the part of many other great thinkers is a failing, either.

i find the blanket denial of faith and it's possible object a bit lacking in rigor and candor of thought, to be honest.

The problem here is, faith in which possible object? Since faith is claimed in often very different and even conflicting objects (loving gods, vengeful and jealous gods, reincarnation without any god in particular, and so forth), those who profess it have little to say to those who don't (or to those who profess it in something else) without resorting to reason, interest, force, or other forms of communicative persuasion. Do you see what I'm saying?

I'll confess I don't particularly get faith, except as something one might desire to fill the hole of existence, which is what I take the Coupland story to mean. Which is a pretty strong motivator, yes.

Please note that a personal experience of divine revelation, as with the proverbial burning bush, is no longer faith; it is may be an empirical experience of a higher power, a self-delusion, or the lie of a salesman, but it is no longer based only on a belief of the mind.

Russell spent the best part of his life trying to prove to himself that he was right to believe that 2 + 2 = 4. (gödel drove the last nail into that coffin.) yet held that people who had faith were wrong since they had no proof.

They may have such excellent intuition that they guess right, or they may have faith in something that serves them and others well. (Depending on your philosophy, those two might be distinct, contradictory, or pretty much the the same.) But yeah, otherwise, I have to agree. Those who invoke faith alone to make a given claim are not wrong, they're just baseless in their attempt to communicate with me (or with Russell). Unless I happen to already agree. And if I don't, saying it is so won't convince me. See?

And I'll venture into dangerous territory here where you may make me look like an idiot (since I have also not read Goedel, or any Russell work on epistemology, though I read other stuff he wrote) and proclaim the following: of course 2+2=4, it's axiomatic, it's defined that way in the arithmetic and base 10 counting system we have agreed to adopt for practical reasons of life on earth (something to do with the need to count tigers and crops and cattle and having 10 fingers, right?). That doesn't require faith, only a common definition on how to count. (In base 4, 2+2=10.)

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[zhivkov]

This was an unusually beautiful thread...thank you for the brainfood and the distinct uplift on a busy, hectic and depressing day.

This thread is the reason I love RI so much. Its not the politics or wondering what the next national or global nightmare is going to be. It is the incredibly thoughtful, intelligent and interesting people here. Thanks for starting this vk! I can't wait to read the book.

[orz]

"Consider the One God Universe: OGU. The spirit recoils in horror from such a deadly impasse. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. Because He can do everything, He can do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition. He knows everything so there is nothing for him to learn. He can't go anywhere since He is already fucking everywhere, like cowshit in Calcutta. The OGU is a pre-recorded universe of which He is the recorder. It's a flat, thermodynamic universe, since it has no friction by definition. So he invents friction and conflict, pain, fear, sickness, famine, war, old age, Death. His OGU is running down like an old clock. Takes more and more and more to make fewer and fewer Energy Units of Sek, as we call it in the trade. The Magical Universe, MU, is a universe of many gods, often in conflict. So the paradox of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who permits suffering, evil and death, does not arise.

[alwyn]

Our image of God has evolved along with our society. We've gone from the savage father demi-urge to the kinder gentler Jesus, and the Muslims even talk about evolution in their holy book.

I have hopes that evolution does exist (in spite of emphatic statements to the contrary by my hubbie, who states that "if there was evolution, we'd have peace) because we really need a new definition of God if our society is to survive.

And, really, I do think that our definition of God is evolving along with our society (in spite of my husband ).

I think that the gnostics were certainly right to emphasize the science of the knowing of God.

Direct experience of the Divine is possible, but, perhaps, not quantifiable. And certainly not controllable, by all reports. Personally, I've had direct intervention in my life by some transcendant force. I could call it God, or Angels, but I don't think that God is limited to either my words or my conception, thank God

And I must say, I would love to see a move away from the God word. It's been too associated with the old man with a telescope and a record book.

Lao Tsu, again: that which can be spoken is not the Ineffable Source. And those who speak, do not know. Those that know, cannot speak. Words don't cut it. Experience does.

What if God was evolving too? And it took all our brains working in concert? And what if we were part of that process of God becoming... more than?

Either way, we will all get a chance to see. Place your bets, no one gets out alive.

[alwyn]

Our image of God has evolved along with our society. We've gone from the savage father demi-urge to the kinder gentler Jesus, and the Muslims even talk about evolution in their holy book.

I have hopes that evolution does exist (in spite of emphatic statements to the contrary by my hubbie, who states that "if there was evolution, we'd have peace) because we really need a new definition of God if our society is to survive.

And, really, I do think that our definition of God is evolving along with our society (in spite of my husband ).

I think that the gnostics were certainly right to emphasize the science of the knowing of God.

Direct experience of the Divine is possible, but, perhaps, not quantifiable. And certainly not controllable, by all reports. Personally, I've had direct intervention in my life by some transcendant force. I could call it God, or Angels, but I don't think that God is limited to either my words or my conception, thank God

And I must say, I would love to see a move away from the God word. It's been too associated with the old man with a telescope and a record book.

Lao Tsu, again: that which can be spoken is not the Ineffable Source. And those who speak, do not know. Those that know, cannot speak. Words don't cut it. Experience does.

What if God was evolving too? And it took all our brains working in concert? And what if we were part of that process of God becoming... more than?

Either way, we will all get a chance to see. Place your bets, no one gets out alive.

[vanlose kid]

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[alwyn]

sorry about the double post, I'm neither sure how it happened, or how to edit it out. Mods?

[JackRiddler]

vanlose:

I'm not certain we share the same definition of faith, so before we get too much deeper, let's ask a first question:

1) What is faith?

To me the word makes sense as distinct from other forms of belief only if it signifies propositions held in the complete absence of perceived empirical evidence, or reported empirical evidence that one trusts based on prior experience (such trust is not faith), or logical inference proceeding from such evidence.

Propositions held on faith come from nowhere other than a say-so.

I hasten to add that all empirical evidence ultimately can only be taken as it is perceived, of course. If you perceive a manifestation of the divine, for example, then that's no longer faith; it is experience. If God talks to you, that's not faith, whether or not the experience is "real."

An example of faith by this definition would be believing that the events or gods described in a scripture are real, in cases when said events seem to violate the reality of everything one has ever actually witnessed (a burning bush that speaks). If you see a burning bush talking, that's not faith, even though others will have trouble believing you afterwards. If you think Moses spoke with such a bush, that is faith.

I don't believe in absolute definitions, however; the line between reasoned trust in reported empirical evidence and faith in such a scripture is not absolute, and I have to allow for a large area of unavoidable ignorance wherein some faith may be necessary. But my preference is to minimize pure faith, because it can say anything.

(I think those who successfully draw absolutes set up categories that are useful only up to a point, and then must break against some new perception of reality. Wittgenstein's complete systems and serial abandonment thereof go together.)

Love

Now I have brought up the semantics because your example of love loses me altogether. Love is a direct experience that we feel. Although internal, subjective and not measurable, we know it to be there, and we share the experience of love with others who report feeling the same thing, regardless of whether we know exactly what it is. Thus love is perceived empirical evidence. It is not an act of faith, and I don't care to give faith any credit for it. It is a real experience with a clear physical component.

I can understand of course that if one has never experienced love, one might think everyone who has exprienced love is somehow deluded and feeling it solely on faith. Except almost all of us have experienced love as a reality, and know this to be untrue, and even those who have never experienced love will tend to accept that it exists based on the reports from others.

The second question I have to ask is, when you yourself say faith, then faith in what?

Please answer that. Faith-based propositions vary. Some conflict directly with each other. You're not really making clear, at least in this thread, which faith based propositions you hold yourself, and which you do not. Surely you don't think all propositions from faith are equally true or real, so how do you make this distinction? And why is your way of distinguishing among conflicting faith-based propositions superior or preferable to that of someone whose faith tells him the opposite and puts him at complete odds with your faith?

One thing I do see is that once people stop being hunter-gatherers (a state in which everything is equally natural and divine and unquestioned) and enter the period of civlization, sets of faith-based propositions organized as religions arise, and serve primarily as instruments of power for class, of oppression, control, and sowing ignorance.

There may be no objective moral calculus, but I don't see at all that faith provides one either. Nor would I agree that the absence of an objective moral calculus leads to the necessity of faith, that sounds to me like wishful thinking. If this is what you are saying: we must have a moral order, there is no objective moral order, but we can have faith that there is such a moral order, therefore faith is necessary and valid -- then I consider that to be both fallacious and superfluous.

I think instead that the limits of life on the planet, the beauty of living, the natural and observable drive to love and create, and enlightened understanding of mutual interest can often combine to overcome the darker drives and provide something in the way of a moral code that is workable enough; in fact these are the only things that have ever worked consistently to engender the behaviors we probably agree are moral.

I happen to think, based on observation, that human nature contains a variety of moral as well as creative drives that (dependent on conditions) can cause us to live well with each other. Faith alone would never do that.

I agree with the following passage from Jean Bricmont, who probably gets at what I'm trying to say more effectively:

Sometimes people defend religion on the grounds that it helps us to act in a moral or even a progressive way. What progressive Christians will tell you is that Jesus helps them to take a "preferential option for the poor". But the logic of that argument is very odd. Suppose somebody advocates land reform, in order to help the poor. If he is a Christian, he has to show that God exists, that Jesus is His son, that the Gospel adequately reflects His words and, finally, that a suitable interpretation of those words lead to support for a land reform. Nothing in the Gospel tells you how to distribute the land, whether to compensate the owners or not, which acreage should be affected, etc. These issues all have to be settled without the help of God. And, after all, not even neoliberal economists claim to be against the poor -- in fact, they usually claim that their policies will help the poor more than anyone else. So, all the substantive issues have to be solved without the help of religion and the latter only provides "motivation". But it seems to me that the detour through God and Jesus is so long and unprovable that, if people who claim to find their motivations there didn’t have them anyway, they wouldn’t acquire them because of that detour.

http://counterpunch.org/bricmont11142008.html

[Code Unknown]

Please note that a personal experience of divine revelation, as with the proverbial burning bush, is no longer faith; it is may be an empirical experience of a higher power, a self-delusion, or the lie of a salesman, but it is no longer based only on a belief of the mind.

Interesting claim... although you could also say that that was faith that one wasn't delusional about such an experience.

Russell spent the best part of his life trying to prove to himself that he was right to believe that 2 + 2 = 4. (gödel drove the last nail into that coffin.) yet held that people who had faith were wrong since they had no proof.

They may have such excellent intuition that they guess right, or they may have faith in something that serves them and others well. (Depending on your philosophy, those two might be distinct, contradictory, or pretty much the the same.) But yeah, otherwise, I have to agree. Those who invoke faith alone to make a given claim are not wrong, they're just baseless in their attempt to communicate with me (or with Russell). Unless I happen to already agree. And if I don't, saying it is so won't convince me. See?

Very well put. I've been trying to explain that to my mother for quite a few years now.

[Code Unknown]

I'm reminded of that scene in Hannah and Her Sisters, the Woody Allen movie... Woody's character is suicidal, and tries every path to wisdom, every religion. Eventually, he winds up in a theater showing a Marx Brothers movie and realizes, "you know, it's not *all* that bad" and finds his reason to live.

Reasons for living don't get much more pathetic than that, IMO.

cf. http://www.mr-agreeable.net/story.lasso?section=Reaper&id=56

[marmot]

hey marmot, thanks. you ever read this?

I haven't. However, I'm having a girlfriend come out from West Virginia to visit tomorrow and she's all into the Desert Fathers. I'm checking with her to see if she has this book. There's a good chance she does.

If you care to share: What's your appreciation of the Desert Fathers?

[JackRiddler]

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Code: thanks for kind words.

Please note that a personal experience of divine revelation, as with the proverbial burning bush, is no longer faith; it is may be an empirical experience of a higher power, a self-delusion, or the lie of a salesman, but it is no longer based only on a belief of the mind.

Interesting claim... although you could also say that that was faith that one wasn't delusional about such an experience.

Damn you! There you go complicating a good, solid, simple definition. I'm going to try to simplify it by saying the one who saw god knows he saw god even if he didn't, and it's faith for the rest of us whether he's delusional or not.

Pondering this will bring us back inevitably to the question of perception, all of which can be delusional. The Matrix, you know? All that Kant stuff.

So yes, there's a fundamental necessary faith underpinning all that we take as perception of mind and the world, without which we can't even move and think at the same time.

But that's not usually the faith invoked when people speak on behalf of "faith," is it? They usually have a more specific proposition set in mind: faith in the god or moral order they advocate as true, without which they cannot persuade unbelievers to also advocate it as true. In a reductionist view, faith as a mode of hegemony over the belief of others.

(Analogous to value and derivative of value? Never mind...)

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