Choices

[RestlessSoul]

Not in me, I've been a life long atheist as I've not seen anything approaching objective evidence for any deity, and since I am a subset of all, that's a demonstrably false claim.

It's only demonstrably false if we - and indeed, you - are convinced that you are a reliable source of information about your own true nature.

 

[RestlessSoul]

I suppose -what was his name - Job? needed to have his family killed, and needed to be sick, he needed all that stuff to be refined - just like Abraham needed to marry another wife, and needed to then tie his kid up to kill him etc.

But some people do not need to be "refined", some live relatively pain-free privileged lives... perhaps if God had "tested" them they would not die prideful entitled pigs? Did they receive their blessings because they are more faithful? Had their prayers answered as God loves them more? Do you understand how sick that belief sounds to people like me?

Other people live with abuse, sickness, all to "refine" them I am told... it is "demanding" to request priests not abuse kids I suppose?

Not loving, not just, no God. Best to just chuck it up to natural laws than tell cancer patients God is "testing" them, or to believe rich people are blessed.

It seems you have had negative experiences of religion, that have driven you away from God. Religion may very well have failed you, for there are a great many misguided, and sometimes plain dishonest and unscrupulous, practitioners of religion. But I would respectfully suggest that it is people, and perhaps fallible institutions created by people, that have let you down, not God.

As for the Book of Job, it seems to me that the whole point of that story is that there is no answer to the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" We can choose, in times of suffering, either to reject God, or to turn to Him for strength and support as we are battered by the storms of life.

In Luke's Gospel, when Christ was in the garden awaiting the suffering to come, he asked his Father to take the cup from his hands, but hevalso said, "Thy will be done". The cup wasn't taken from his hands, he had to endure the suffering and accept his fate - perform his dharma, if you like - but an angel was sent to comfort him. He did not have to bear his suffering alone. (Luke 22:42-44)

Maybe it is Christianity you have turned your back on, or which you feel has turned it's back on you. Fair enough. There are other routes back to a loving God, should you choose to explore them.

 

[BilliardsBall]

The purpose of this OP is to explore our Choice of Faith, is it a choice, is it not?

I have read in other OP's on RF where people say it was not a choice, that their Faith was a natural process that required no choices.

To an extent I agree, as I see God has created us all in the same image, with the same potential of Spirtual Virtue.

On the other hand I see we need education to find that potential and that if we go it alone thinking we do not have a choice, then it may be we miss many choices that are available. My guess is, as I am yet to do so, is that if I searched all the Holy Books, we would find the advice, that to embrace faith, one must make a choice between what was offered by God, over preference to ones own ways. I do know the Bible offers that as a choice to be 'Born Again' from the flesh to the spirit.

As a Baha'i there is clear guidance as to how God offers it is a choice, this is one such passage.

"O My servants! Through the might of God and His power, and out of the treasury of His knowledge and wisdom, I have brought forth and revealed unto you the pearls that lay concealed in the depths of His everlasting ocean. I have summoned the Maids of Heaven to emerge from behind the veil of concealment, and have clothed them with these words of Mine -- words of consummate power and wisdom. I have, moreover, with the hand of divine power, unsealed the choice wine of My Revelation, and have wafted its holy, its hidden, and musk-laden fragrance upon all created things. Who else but yourselves is to be blamed if ye choose to remain unendowed with so great an outpouring of God's transcendent and all-encompassing grace, with so bright a revelation of His resplendent mercy?"

Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 327-328

Does your Faith have such guidance?

Is a faith and all we do in that faith based in choices we have made?

And/Or

Can we have a faith without making choices?

So all the best and it will be interesting to ponder the replies people offer.

Regards Tony

Biblically, faith is a synonym for trust, and God shows Himself trustworthy to those looking for a pure object for their trust.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

I would say that we have to choose and that God gave us free will so we could choose to believe or not believe in Him, but that does not mean everyone will be able to choose to believe in Him.

I would say that we have to choose whether to believe by faith or by evidence, and that evolution gave us the capacity to reason, but that doesn't mean that everybody will develop that capacity sufficiently to be able to not believe in gods.

What kind of objective evidence do you think could be procured for God?

None, if no such thing exists. Here's where we separate those that require sufficient evidence properly understood to believe, from those that don't.

Can people of faith and those with no faith agree on the virtues we need to implement as one people on one planet, is that possible?

Not if some are coming to them by reason and others are taking them from a book. For example, people are being taught that faith is a virtue, when faith is clearly destructive in the areas of climate change, elections confidence, and vaccines. Reason brings us to different conclusions in each case.

Faith- like many things- is something we develop. For the young and impressionable, any humans close to a person can have a significant impact on their development. As we progress through life and become wiser and more attuned to the world around us, we become more responsible for our own development, as it is guided by own thoughts, choices and experiences in life.

If by faith you mean what I do - unjustified belief, or the willingness to believe what you are told - then no, that is instinctual and innate, a survival tactic. Children need to simply obey their parents and elders, those that don't being more vulnerable due to their own poor judgement. As we progress through life, if we are taught critical thinking skills and embrace and master them, we become less interested in the things others believe and choose what we will believe ourselves according to our own judgment, not faith.

I was a Christian at 20, a secular humanist by 30, and have remained an agnostic atheist since. That was my development. That's the direction that additional experience and intellectual growth took me. Before then, I was letting other people tell me what to believe, and I learned that they were wrong. As @idea indicated at Choices , I learned that the promises of the faith were empty, and that I could make better decisions about what was true about the world, what was good and right, and how to think and act than others that I was taking that from on faith.

Faith in the unseen or the divine is wired into us.

I guess it took twenty years for the wiring to take effect in me, and ten years later, it shorted out. Faith in the unseen and divine was a choice I made, not something I was instinctively compelled to do. I had already been to university for a year, and had developed some critical thinking skills before entering Christianity, so in order to participate, I had to agree to suspend disbelief. I thought of this religion as a pair of shoes that I needed to walk in to see if they would become more comfortable with time. I didn't see how the religion could be correct given the the lack of evidence for the supernatural, but I also understood that that might be my shortcoming, and that I simply had to try this religion empirically to see if it began to make more sense with time. It didn't, and it didn't deliver on its promises, so I changed shoes. I would say that I was never wired for theism. I certainly am not now.

For some of us, a life without faith, or transcendent belief, would be hollow and meaningless, a life half lived. So yes, many of us choose faith in a power greater than ourselves, over the notion that life has no purpose beyond the satisfaction of material desires which only leave us empty any way.

I don't think you can know how much more satisfying life can be outside of religion if you haven't matured outside of it. When I think back to my religious days, religion occupied most of my life. Removing it made room for other things that were more satisfying. I think that had I been satisfied with the religious life, I would still be there, and would also see the removal of religion as the loss of much of me. If I were to imagine the atheist existence by excising that part of me, I would also feel that much of me was missing and that life would be empty. But that's because you misunderstand what has replaced all of that, and what it can do for a life. This is no doubt why you call this life empty.

Here's a very disconcerting comment I see from many theists: without their faith, there would be nothing to love for, that life would be meaningless, meaning that only their hope of an afterlife gives their lives any purpose. Really? You can't find value in life if it's not a waiting room or a staging area for something better? That person has had his attention diverted too well from our common reality to an imagined life of pie in the sky, missing what goes by him, disconnected from it, unable to see value in the things around him.

If one lives life as if he were at a bus stop waiting for a ride to heaven on a bus that may never come, well, I hardly call that a meaningful existence. The guy who tells me that his life would be meaningless without the hope of that bus is the one left empty by his choices.

And sadly, what such people are looking forward to seems just as meaningless as waiting at the bus stop to get to it. The paradise they describe is one of nonstop applause for a deity.

Likewise with those who indicate by their questions to atheists that they don't see why we aren't wilding marauders without faith in God. Once again, they tell us about themselves, that they have no inherent sense of right and wrong to restrain them from savagery, no internal moral compass. And they project that onto the atheist, unaware of how one develops morally outside of religion, and how different it is.

It seems you have had negative experiences of religion, that have driven you away from God.

Apostates get that a lot. Can you not conceive of an alternate explanation? I just gave you one. I didn't have an experience that drove me from God. I just stopped believing, or possibly I should say trying to believe.

it seems to me that the whole point of that story [Job] is that there is no answer to the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

That's an odd comment for somebody who believes in the God of the Bible. If you use that story as the source of your answer to that question, it has to be because God is willing to trifle with a life. The story reminds me of a kid telling another kid, "Watch me kick this ant hill."

The story means whatever you want it to mean if you're willing to embellish it. I participated in a thread on this topic once, and got three different answers from three believers about what that story was about and why it appeared in the Bible. One assumed that God was teaching Job a valuable lesson, but couldn't articulate what that was. Another said that Job was being punished, but couldn't say why. After all, he is described as an upright, pious man. The third I've forgotten.

That's how faith works. The faith-based thinker assumes that there must be some wisdom, some message there, or the story wouldn't appear in the scriptures, and so he is forced to reconcile what what appears to malicious and immoral behavior by the deity with the idea that somehow, what God did was loving and just, so he makes up something to reconcile the discrepancy between appearance and what he believe by faith instead. The skeptic has no reason to do that, looks at the story, and sees it as some kind of Twilight Zone episode. Who remembers the kid played by Billy Mumy with paranormal powers and who was a bully to the adults around him because he could be, causing them to feign admiration for the boy and to praise him. How is this different?

 

[firedragon]

I guess it took twenty years for the wiring to take effect in me, and ten years later, it shorted out.

Did you do some research about how you were born and how you were wired? Others have.

 

[Sheldon]

It's only demonstrably false if we - and indeed, you - are convinced that you are a reliable source of information about your own true nature.

Ah yes, I forgot the theists grandiloquent penchant for proclaiming to know better then me what I think. If you are prepared to leap to those kind of desperate rationalisations then no fact will dent any claim, but I know no deity is "in me" nor has ever been, and I have encountered many atheists who have asserted the same, and we are a subset of all, the claim was and is demonstrably false.

Though I have to take a moment here to acknowledge the hilarity of theists pretending unevidenced claims for personal experience represent evidence for a deity, but then hilariously then refuse to accept the word of an atheist for what they themselves think.

 

[Sheldon]

As for the Book of Job, it seems to me that the whole point of that story is that there is no answer to the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

Nonsense, the story unequivocally demonstrates a sadistic and indifferent deity testing the faith of one of its sycophantic followers, with an endless and egregious line of cruel persecutions, in order to win a wager with the devil.

If such a deity existed I would absolutely want nothing to do with it, luckily there isn't a shred of objective evidence it exists at all.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Did you do some research about how you were born and how you were wired? Others have.

You're an expert or professional in obstetrics, gynaecology, and neurobiology then?

 

[Trailblazer]

To me COMPLETELY UNKNOWABLE means COMPLETELY UNKNOWABLE, so ' a subordinate form of knowledge' must just a fancy way of saying : pretending to to know that god exists. It's impossible to know that something COMPLETELY UNKNOWABLE is real. You completely invalidate the meaning of completely unknowable by trying to suggest otherwise.

Sorry, but that is the fallacy of black and white thinking. We can know 'something' about God but not much, and we cannot know the Essence of God. That is what wiki site means by COMPLETELY UNKNOWABLE.

The Black-or-White Fallacy is the provision of only two alternatives in an argument when there are actually more options available. ... It's also sometimes called the Gray Fallacy, between black and white options, or the middle-ground fallacy, after a middle ground between two warring camps.
black and white fallacy examples in politics - nazwa.pl

 

[Trailblazer]

Some things are fate, some things involve work and personal choices. Empowering to realize how much we do control our own life and mindset. Off to work

Yes, that is very true. Some things like accidents, injuries and diseases are just our fate and not what we would have chosen but most things come about as the result of our free will choices and actions. Moreover, even what has been pre-ordained cannot unfold without our own volition.

“And now, concerning thy question regarding the creation of man. Know thou that all men have been created in the nature made by God, the Guardian, the Self-Subsisting. Unto each one hath been prescribed a pre-ordained measure, as decreed in God’s mighty and guarded Tablets. All that which ye potentially possess can, however, be manifested only as a result of your own volition. Your own acts testify to this truth.”
Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 149

 

[RestlessSoul]

I would say that we have to choose whether to believe by faith or by evidence, and that evolution gave us the capacity to reason, but that doesn't mean that everybody will develop that capacity sufficiently to be able to not believe in gods.



None, if no such thing exists. Here's where we separate those that require sufficient evidence properly understood to believe, from those that don't.



Not if some are coming to them by reason and others are taking them from a book. For example, people are being taught that faith is a virtue, when faith is clearly destructive in the areas of climate change, elections confidence, and vaccines. Reason brings us to different conclusions in each case.



If by faith you mean what I do - unjustified belief, or the willingness to believe what you are told - then no, that is instinctual and innate, a survival tactic. Children need to simply obey their parents and elders, those that don't being more vulnerable due to their own poor judgement. As we progress through life, if we are taught critical thinking skills and embrace and master them, we become less interested in the things others believe and choose what we will believe ourselves according to our own judgment, not faith.

I was a Christian at 20, a secular humanist by 30, and have remained an agnostic atheist since. That was my development. That's the direction that additional experience and intellectual growth took me. Before then, I was letting other people tell me what to believe, and I learned that they were wrong. As @idea indicated at Choices , I learned that the promises of the faith were empty, and that I could make better decisions about what was true about the world, what was good and right, and how to think and act than others that I was taking that from on faith.



I guess it took twenty years for the wiring to take effect in me, and ten years later, it shorted out. Faith in the unseen and divine was a choice I made, not something I was instinctively compelled to do. I had already been to university for a year, and had developed some critical thinking skills before entering Christianity, so in order to participate, I had to agree to suspend disbelief. I thought of this religion as a pair of shoes that I needed to walk in to see if they would become more comfortable with time. I didn't see how the religion could be correct given the the lack of evidence for the supernatural, but I also understood that that might be my shortcoming, and that I simply had to try this religion empirically to see if it began to make more sense with time. It didn't, and it didn't deliver on its promises, so I changed shoes. I would say that I was never wired for theism. I certainly am not now.



I don't think you can know how much more satisfying life can be outside of religion if you haven't matured outside of it. When I think back to my religious days, religion occupied most of my life. Removing it made room for other things that were more satisfying. I think that had I been satisfied with the religious life, I would still be there, and would also see the removal of religion as the loss of much of me. If I were to imagine the atheist existence by excising that part of me, I would also feel that much of me was missing and that life would be empty. But that's because you misunderstand what has replaced all of that, and what it can do for a life. This is no doubt why you call this life empty.

Here's a very disconcerting comment I see from many theists: without their faith, there would be nothing to love for, that life would be meaningless, meaning that only their hope of an afterlife gives their lives any purpose. Really? You can't find value in life if it's not a waiting room or a staging area for something better? That person has had his attention diverted too well from our common reality to an imagined life of pie in the sky, missing what goes by him, disconnected from it, unable to see value in the things around him.

If one lives life as if he were at a bus stop waiting for a ride to heaven on a bus that may never come, well, I hardly call that a meaningful existence. The guy who tells me that his life would be meaningless without the hope of that bus is the one left empty by his choices.

And sadly, what such people are looking forward to seems just as meaningless as waiting at the bus stop to get to it. The paradise they describe is one of nonstop applause for a deity.

Likewise with those who indicate by their questions to atheists that they don't see why we aren't wilding marauders without faith in God. Once again, they tell us about themselves, that they have no inherent sense of right and wrong to restrain them from savagery, no internal moral compass. And they project that onto the atheist, unaware of how one develops morally outside of religion, and how different it is.



Apostates get that a lot. Can you not conceive of an alternate explanation? I just gave you one. I didn't have an experience that drove me from God. I just stopped believing, or possibly I should say trying to believe.



That's an odd comment for somebody who believes in the God of the Bible. If you use that story as the source of your answer to that question, it has to be because God is willing to trifle with a life. The story reminds me of a kid telling another kid, "Watch me kick this ant hill."

The story means whatever you want it to mean if you're willing to embellish it. I participated in a thread on this topic once, and got three different answers from three believers about what that story was about and why it appeared in the Bible. One assumed that God was teaching Job a valuable lesson, but couldn't articulate what that was. Another said that Job was being punished, but couldn't say why. After all, he is described as an upright, pious man. The third I've forgotten.

That's how faith works. The faith-based thinker assumes that there must be some wisdom, some message there, or the story wouldn't appear in the scriptures, and so he is forced to reconcile what what appears to malicious and immoral behavior by the deity with the idea that somehow, what God did was loving and just, so he makes up something to reconcile the discrepancy between appearance and what he believe by faith instead. The skeptic has no reason to do that, looks at the story, and sees it as some kind of Twilight Zone episode. Who remembers the kid played by Billy Mumy with paranormal powers and who was a bully to the adults around him because he could be, causing them to feign admiration for the boy and to praise him. How is this different?

Hm. seems to me, you make a lot of assumptions about believers, based on your own experiences. I suppose we all do that to some extent, view other people's lives through the prism of our own experience. Maybe you could bear in mind though, that your particular American experience of religion is not typical of most of the world. I grew up in a secular society where religious observance is a minority activity, certainly in this century.

Anyway, to address a couple of your points; I'm not waiting for a bus - I rely on faith in God to give value to my experience of this world; the next life, if there is one, can take care of itself.

When I say my life would be meaningless without faith, it's my life I'm referring to. I know from my own experience, whit it is to live with faith and without faith, and I certainly know what emptiness feels like, as well as what faith in a loving creator feels like.

If you have found meaning and purpose in your life without need of a spiritual dimension, I'll take your word for it that you are content with that, and not even ask what you are doing on a forum that has 'Religious' in it's name..

As for The Bible, as with all works of literature, the many books within it have been subject a huge variety interpretations; I merely offered my interpretation of Job for another poster's consideration. In terms of what the writer's intentions were, I'd back the veracity of my interpretation over yours any day, but we don't even know who the original writer was, so he won't be settling that dispute. You are free to read the story any way you want. It's far from being one of my favourite texts in any compendium of literature.

 

[firedragon]

You're an expert or professional in obstetrics, gynaecology, and neurobiology then?

Nope. Are you? Its great if you are, but I dont think that's relevant.

 

[Trailblazer]

I would say that we have to choose whether to believe by faith or by evidence, and that evolution gave us the capacity to reason, but that doesn't mean that everybody will develop that capacity sufficiently to be able to not believe in gods.

I would say that we have to choose whether to believe by faith and evidence, and that God gave us the capacity to reason, but that doesn't mean that everybody will develop that capacity sufficiently to be able to believe in God.

“I have perfected in every one of you My creation, so that the excellence of My handiwork may be fully revealed unto men. It follows, therefore, that every man hath been, and will continue to be, able of himself to appreciate the Beauty of God, the Glorified. Had he not been endowed with such a capacity, how could he be called to account for his failure?”
Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 143

There can be no objective evidence for God even if God exists. Here's where we separate those that require sufficient evidence properly understood to believe, from those that don't.

There can be no objective evidence for God even if God exists. Here's where we separate those that understand that there can be no objective evidence for a immaterial entity that can never be observed from those who do not understand that.

 

[Sheldon]

Sorry, but that is the fallacy of black and white thinking. We can know 'something' about God but not much, and we cannot know the Essence of God. That is what wiki site means by COMPLETELY UNKNOWABLE.

The Black-or-White Fallacy is the provision of only two alternatives in an argument when there are actually more options available. ... It's also sometimes called the Gray Fallacy, between black and white options, or the middle-ground fallacy, after a middle ground between two warring camps.
black and white fallacy examples in politics - nazwa.pl

It is also referred to as a false dichotomy fallacy, but the post you quoted didn't contain the fallacy. He was pointing out that the phrase completely unknowable deity, negated any possibility of knowing anything about it, which is true.

You could present an argument that a deity exists that is not completely unknowable, but you'd need to evidence the assertion, which no one has done beyond bare subjective claims for personal experience. However you cannot argue that a "anything can be known about a completely unknowable deity," that's an oxymoron.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Nope. Are you? Its great if you are, but I dont think that's relevant.

Me, not likely, but why say anything about our wiring - as if it proven that we do have some kind of God-circuit, when some general area or areas as to dealing with beliefs of this kind is more likely. Unless you didn't mean this.

 

[Sheldon]

Yes, that is very true. Some things like accidents, injuries and diseases are just our fate and not what we would have chosen but most things come about as the result of our free will choices and actions. Moreover, even what has been pre-ordained cannot unfold without our own volition.

Please demonstrate some objective evidence for your claim that anything is "preordained"? Accidents and injuries are not remotely preordained, they are caused by a series of events, sometimes they may be outside of our complete control but that doesn't make them remotely preordained or fate, and diseases are not preordained, they are explained by evolutionary science.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Did you do some research about how you were born and how you were wired? Others have.

Of course, not the least of which was experiencing life. You said, "Faith in the unseen or the divine is wired into us." All one need see is that there are people that have never had religion and have never been drawn to it.

But yes, I'm well versed in psychology. It's really my principal area of interest on these threads - understanding how people think. If you've read and remembered my posting, you might agree. And I've come to some new insights in the last year or two

What is hard-wired into us is the tendency to assign agency to events, hence we have the gods of the trees and grass and wind, and hence we have the muses to account for creative ideas appearing in our psyches. We innately assume that something conscious is responsible for the changing phenomena we witness.

It comes from early evolutionary roots, where a deer or a fish that interpreted movement as caused by an conscious, intentional agent had survival value. Making a Type 1 error just means running for nothing. Making a Type 2 error could be lethal.

Also, we have a tendency from childhood to accept patriarchal, hierarchical models of reality based on seeing parents and other elders, recognizing their superiority in providing direction, and predisposing them to submit to that authority. Dogs are bred to remain in this state, perpetual puppyhood, perpetually docile and submissive to human beings.

Unfortunately, many people are raised that way, kept from developing critical thinking skills, believing in magic, and seeing morality in terms of being supervised and punished - psychological juvenilization.

These are easily coopted by those who wish to control people - people who want to tell others what the great father in the sky told them He wants them to do, and to bring tithes. Dawkins likens it to the moth and the flame. Nature has gifted moths with a navigation system that hones in on the fixed stars and uses them to navigate. When the light source is so far away, the light the moth receives comes from a constant direction as long as it flies straight, since the light rays are essentially parallel.

Fast forward to the advent of the lightbulb, which is a close light source that sends light beams out radially, meaning the beams are no longer parallel, and the navigation system that evolved before lightbulbs becomes coopted by a later development, causing the poor moth to spiral around the light source. It would be a mistake to say that because this behavior is hard-wired into the moth, the moth was meant to behave this way. It wasn't. Nor was man given a God program. The naturalistic understanding of the ubiquity of religion in human societies is that we were given other programs that provided survival advantage before language or god concepts existed, and which were coopted by those who now exploit that proclivity to their own benefit.

The idea that there is a god program in man makes no sense unless a god programmed man, and there is no reason to believe that happened. If it didn't, that proclivity for religion needs another explanation, like the one above.

 

[firedragon]

Me, not likely, but why say anything about our wiring - as if it proven that we do have some kind of God-circuit, when some general area or areas as to dealing with beliefs of this kind is more likely. Unless you didn't mean this.

I dont know about biological or neurological wiring mate. No clue.

I am talking about social research.

 

[firedragon]

Of course, not the least of which was experiencing life. You said, "Faith in the unseen or the divine is wired into us." All one need see is that there are people that have never had religion and have never been drawn to it.

Can you prove it by quoting research?

 

[Mock Turtle]

I dont know about biological or neurological wiring mate. No clue.

I am talking about social research.

Ah.