Irrationality,
I am not sure what's irrational of what I am trying to explain to you. Please advise.
I once taught economics. I would tak myself blue in face trying to explain the marginal principle. One student referred to the discussion as giberish.
It was as if they unable to draw a link between concepts and what they already knew to be true in their daily lives. You have the same problem.
You asked does God exist. You live in the same world as me and have access to the same information I do, but you're not able for some reason to
observe an event that is known to have occured and explain, even partially, how it relates to everything else. Its all linked together. Some people
can see this but you see only a world of chaos where one thing has nothing to do with another.
For example, the concept of Love even confounds you. You want to reduce it to physical or chemical phenomenon or even psychosis, while you could go
even deeper and explain it as interactions of sub-atomic particles. This reveals that even when you explain things outside of a religious framework
you've chosen to put limits on your own ability to understand. It really doesn't seem like you're searching for the truth but only trying to
justify confusion, while trapped inside of a box.
In a world of Infinite possibilities, Irrationality is certain. When you are truly outside of the box, dealing with irrationality is to be expected
and embraced.
Around the same time I developed my working definition of Evil, I developed a theory concerning abnormal and/or irrational behavior. It's as follows:
If a person from time to time does not knowingly do something totally irrational, it implies that every decision one makes is rational. So, if every
decision one makes is rational, then why do people make mistakes? The simplest answer is that sometimes the irrational decision is the correct one.
Since you are into occam's razor you can appreciate this.
New ex-Christian who is lost in his own freedom and uncertainty., page 10
privacy
reply posted on 3-9-2008 @ 09:28 AM by Icarus Rising
reply to post by TruthParadox
God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He does not cause us confusion, we cause ourselves confusion with our limited perspectives. We have trouble thinking in terms of outcomes and seeing the end from the beginning. We simply don't understand the big picture most of the time, and we need to rely on God to reveal His truth to us as it is needed to achieve His will for us. Paradoxical.
God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He does not cause us confusion, we cause ourselves confusion with our limited perspectives. We have trouble thinking in terms of outcomes and seeing the end from the beginning. We simply don't understand the big picture most of the time, and we need to rely on God to reveal His truth to us as it is needed to achieve His will for us. Paradoxical.
reply posted on 3-9-2008 @ 09:37 AM by Good Wolf
reply to post by bruxfain
Alright, chill out man.
What your proposing has too many assumptions to be spouted as truth when the much simpler and less assuming atheist take on the Cosmos is the more rational option
That's the point of Occam's Razor.
But, you seem to forget that I'm not atheist. I havn't said there is no God, I have said that I think it's less likely, but I never said there was no God. So in that uncertainty, what do I have to rely on to ensure my best chances of finding the truth? Occam's Razor, which right now dictates that I lean towards atheism, anything else is irrational and would likely be biased.
[edit on 9/3/2008 by Good Wolf]
Alright, chill out man.
What your proposing has too many assumptions to be spouted as truth when the much simpler and less assuming atheist take on the Cosmos is the more rational option
That's the point of Occam's Razor.
But, you seem to forget that I'm not atheist. I havn't said there is no God, I have said that I think it's less likely, but I never said there was no God. So in that uncertainty, what do I have to rely on to ensure my best chances of finding the truth? Occam's Razor, which right now dictates that I lean towards atheism, anything else is irrational and would likely be biased.
[edit on 9/3/2008 by Good Wolf]
reply posted on 3-9-2008 @ 09:59 AM by Good Wolf
reply to post by Simplynoone
I see where your coming from. But I disagree with what those passages imply in this situation. I don't see that doing an internal investigation for God can make me worse of than what I was before.
This is like for a once-saved strumpet who goes back to the whore house once she dropped God.
This is different because never before has God been so important to me.
"New ex-Christian who is lost in his own freedom and uncertainty"
I know where I've come from and I'm not going back. My uncertainty means I don't know my destination.
The old me (I call Paul) has been dead for years and he isn't coming back.
And yes you seem to genuinely care, that's why I friend'd you.
I see where your coming from. But I disagree with what those passages imply in this situation. I don't see that doing an internal investigation for God can make me worse of than what I was before.
2 Peter 2:22 (King James Version) King James Version (KJV)
22But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.
This is like for a once-saved strumpet who goes back to the whore house once she dropped God.
This is different because never before has God been so important to me.
"New ex-Christian who is lost in his own freedom and uncertainty"
I know where I've come from and I'm not going back. My uncertainty means I don't know my destination.
The old me (I call Paul) has been dead for years and he isn't coming back.
And yes you seem to genuinely care, that's why I friend'd you.
reply posted on 3-9-2008 @ 11:46 AM by AshleyD
reply to post by Good Wolf
Jesus said something that has a deeper meaning than it first appears. He said ask and you will receive, seek and you will find. In other words, there are two ways to find Him:
1). The easy way: Just believe, ask, and receive.
2). The hard way: Seek, research, dig, and find.
I took the second option and my conversion took several years of looking into the evidence before finally accepting Christ.
You're not alone, Good Wolf. Two examples: One were the Bereans mentioned in the New Testament who didn't swallow the Gospel without question. They compared what they were being taught to the Old Testament scripture, questioned, researched, and contemplated the message before accepting it. Then one of the early church fathers, Hegesippus, didn't accept the Gospel immediately either. His writings show him traveling throughout Rome and Greece interviewing witnesses, comparing texts, looking through government records, and all sorts of other things before finally accepting the Gospel account as fact. We're also told a wise man judges all things and are told to use reason in the Scriptures. So, questioning is fine.
There is also evidence. There is prophetic fulfillment that passes the test of falsifiability and the scientific method, undesigned coincidences in the Bible that point towards a divine authorship (the Torah codes, the Gospel embedded in the genealogies of Genesis, the meaning of numbers written all throughout the Old and New Testaments, etc.), historical documents and archaeological discoveries that confirm some of the most outlandish and hard to believe Bible stories on a historical level, scientific foreknowledge in the Levitical laws and writings, the Gospel embedded in astronomy and astronomical phenomenon coinciding with highly important events of Christianity, etc.
Like you, Good Wolf, I had to have evidence instead of blind faith. It was the long way but it was worth it to me in the end because I no longer have any doubts- not a smidgen. Compounded by several supernatural experiences, God and Jesus are as real to me as my own body. It can be frustrating sometimes to be constantly met with ridicule when you have the truth but that is the way it goes and the way we warned by Jesus Himself it would go.
As for your concerns of the conflicts and contradictions: You need to resort to the actual Greek and Hebrew. The English and other translations will always have problems due to the fact such things are inevitable when a text is translated from one language into the next.
I could go on but it is going to be up to you. There is evidence and there are answers. If you want to seek instead of asking, then seek. You WILL find it.
[edit on 9/3/2008 by AshleyD]
Jesus said something that has a deeper meaning than it first appears. He said ask and you will receive, seek and you will find. In other words, there are two ways to find Him:
1). The easy way: Just believe, ask, and receive.
2). The hard way: Seek, research, dig, and find.
I took the second option and my conversion took several years of looking into the evidence before finally accepting Christ.
You're not alone, Good Wolf. Two examples: One were the Bereans mentioned in the New Testament who didn't swallow the Gospel without question. They compared what they were being taught to the Old Testament scripture, questioned, researched, and contemplated the message before accepting it. Then one of the early church fathers, Hegesippus, didn't accept the Gospel immediately either. His writings show him traveling throughout Rome and Greece interviewing witnesses, comparing texts, looking through government records, and all sorts of other things before finally accepting the Gospel account as fact. We're also told a wise man judges all things and are told to use reason in the Scriptures. So, questioning is fine.
There is also evidence. There is prophetic fulfillment that passes the test of falsifiability and the scientific method, undesigned coincidences in the Bible that point towards a divine authorship (the Torah codes, the Gospel embedded in the genealogies of Genesis, the meaning of numbers written all throughout the Old and New Testaments, etc.), historical documents and archaeological discoveries that confirm some of the most outlandish and hard to believe Bible stories on a historical level, scientific foreknowledge in the Levitical laws and writings, the Gospel embedded in astronomy and astronomical phenomenon coinciding with highly important events of Christianity, etc.
Like you, Good Wolf, I had to have evidence instead of blind faith. It was the long way but it was worth it to me in the end because I no longer have any doubts- not a smidgen. Compounded by several supernatural experiences, God and Jesus are as real to me as my own body. It can be frustrating sometimes to be constantly met with ridicule when you have the truth but that is the way it goes and the way we warned by Jesus Himself it would go.
As for your concerns of the conflicts and contradictions: You need to resort to the actual Greek and Hebrew. The English and other translations will always have problems due to the fact such things are inevitable when a text is translated from one language into the next.
I could go on but it is going to be up to you. There is evidence and there are answers. If you want to seek instead of asking, then seek. You WILL find it.
[edit on 9/3/2008 by AshleyD]
reply posted on 3-9-2008 @ 01:02 PM by FiatLux
reply to post by Icarus Rising
Are you talking about those who put the book aside and have gone off in search for their own answers? Please explain this more.
Are you talking about those who put the book aside and have gone off in search for their own answers? Please explain this more.
reply posted on 3-9-2008 @ 02:27 PM by rickyrrr
reply to post by Good Wolf
Since my background is similar to yours I can give you my thoughts and perhaps you can relate to them.
I used to be a "Born again Christian" and I decided to stop going to church in my 20's.
For me the idea of a "personal" God was never consistent with anything that I knew, throughout my entire life, although I used to hold some supernatural beliefs such as the belief in "a soul" or the afterlife. I also used to believe that "consciousness" was supernatural and that "free will" existed.
Because of exposure to science, philosophy and logic in college, I eventually found such beliefs to be hard to rationalize and eventually gave up on them.
Giving up on those beliefs was difficult not only because of the fear of the supernatural (death, for example) but also because it was not easy to switch out of the "support system" of friends and family. In fact, the social peer pressure was the strongest of the two things keeping me a christian.
So, if you care to read my present beliefs here there are:
1. There is no evidence of god and belief in god is triggered by fear and certain brain malfunctions that become obvious for some people with epileptic seizures, but can also be induced in "meditation" or prayer. These brain patterns are well understood. Besides that, all of the remaining belief in god is social conditioning, clearly evidenced by how many people believe in god but deep down know it's all BS. Whether god exists or not is not relevant as long as there is no evidence. I am not compelled to "promote" the non-existence of god, and I think atheists with an "agenda" who promote that god does not exist are full of BS just like religious people.
2. The experience of "death" is most likely like the experience of "not having been born" or put another way, no experience at all. It's nothing to be afraid of. The experience of leaving people behind is something I am afraid of as I have a family and I believe that they continue to exist if I die.
3. Consciousness is an illusion that results from having the ability to contemplate ideas about ideas, or the experience of recursive thoughts. Every single one of the outward signs of consciousness can be replicated given enough computing power. This belief is as of yet unproven because of the lack of computing power. A machine that thinks it's conscious is not only doable, it is what we people are.
4. All of our moral code is defined and maintained by evolutionary forces, but there is nothing else outside of the material, human world that can enforce or care for our morals. There is no "true" sense in which things are good or bad, but things are surely good for survival, including empathy towards other fellow human beings. Killing other people is bad because evolution has made us particularly caring for the lives of others as this benefits the species. If we really believed killing is bad in purely logical and absolute terms, then we would not feel more outraged when the victim of crime is a child, yet we do. Children have more survival value for the species and this is encoded inside us.
5. Science itself is guided by dogmatic beliefs, although the set of dogmatic beliefs required for science are also required to do anything, so it is perhaps the lowest possible number of dogmatic beliefs that can be held:
-Belief in some kind of "order" (an illusion created by our order seeking brains)
-belief that we can understand the rules of this order
-belief that the rules don't change from time to time or place to place
Goedel's incompleteness theorem demonstrates that our entire logic system cannot describe itself, so all of our knowledge is just conveniently self consistent, but not transcendentally special.
These summarizes my personal belief system, or as a friend of mine lovingly calls it my "BS". We all have BS.
-rrr
Since my background is similar to yours I can give you my thoughts and perhaps you can relate to them.
I used to be a "Born again Christian" and I decided to stop going to church in my 20's.
For me the idea of a "personal" God was never consistent with anything that I knew, throughout my entire life, although I used to hold some supernatural beliefs such as the belief in "a soul" or the afterlife. I also used to believe that "consciousness" was supernatural and that "free will" existed.
Because of exposure to science, philosophy and logic in college, I eventually found such beliefs to be hard to rationalize and eventually gave up on them.
Giving up on those beliefs was difficult not only because of the fear of the supernatural (death, for example) but also because it was not easy to switch out of the "support system" of friends and family. In fact, the social peer pressure was the strongest of the two things keeping me a christian.
So, if you care to read my present beliefs here there are:
1. There is no evidence of god and belief in god is triggered by fear and certain brain malfunctions that become obvious for some people with epileptic seizures, but can also be induced in "meditation" or prayer. These brain patterns are well understood. Besides that, all of the remaining belief in god is social conditioning, clearly evidenced by how many people believe in god but deep down know it's all BS. Whether god exists or not is not relevant as long as there is no evidence. I am not compelled to "promote" the non-existence of god, and I think atheists with an "agenda" who promote that god does not exist are full of BS just like religious people.
2. The experience of "death" is most likely like the experience of "not having been born" or put another way, no experience at all. It's nothing to be afraid of. The experience of leaving people behind is something I am afraid of as I have a family and I believe that they continue to exist if I die.
3. Consciousness is an illusion that results from having the ability to contemplate ideas about ideas, or the experience of recursive thoughts. Every single one of the outward signs of consciousness can be replicated given enough computing power. This belief is as of yet unproven because of the lack of computing power. A machine that thinks it's conscious is not only doable, it is what we people are.
4. All of our moral code is defined and maintained by evolutionary forces, but there is nothing else outside of the material, human world that can enforce or care for our morals. There is no "true" sense in which things are good or bad, but things are surely good for survival, including empathy towards other fellow human beings. Killing other people is bad because evolution has made us particularly caring for the lives of others as this benefits the species. If we really believed killing is bad in purely logical and absolute terms, then we would not feel more outraged when the victim of crime is a child, yet we do. Children have more survival value for the species and this is encoded inside us.
5. Science itself is guided by dogmatic beliefs, although the set of dogmatic beliefs required for science are also required to do anything, so it is perhaps the lowest possible number of dogmatic beliefs that can be held:
-Belief in some kind of "order" (an illusion created by our order seeking brains)
-belief that we can understand the rules of this order
-belief that the rules don't change from time to time or place to place
Goedel's incompleteness theorem demonstrates that our entire logic system cannot describe itself, so all of our knowledge is just conveniently self consistent, but not transcendentally special.
These summarizes my personal belief system, or as a friend of mine lovingly calls it my "BS". We all have BS.
-rrr
reply posted on 3-9-2008 @ 02:46 PM by FiatLux
reply to post by Simplynoone
I should have been a little more clear when I made the statement that I did not believe in what the bible says. It`s not the idea that I don`t believe in the book as a whole, it`s parts of it I do not believe. Yes, there are some things that may be true, but, there are other parts that do contradict themselves.
As far as setting it aside to search on our own, who are we to judge others for doing that? Isn`t it the old saying "Seek and ye shale find." "Knock and the door will open.". Does this mean we have to do all of our searching in a book? No, I don`t believe so in my opinion. I don`t judge people for putting ALL of their faith in the bible, if that is what keeps them happy in life, all the better. I don`t like it when others put people down for not believing in the same way that they do. I believe in a creator, and I didn`t have to find Gods existance in a book. I found God within me. So, does that make me wrong?
Who is to care, as long as we find God. Whether we find God within ourselves or a book, or in the person next door or even in the sky above or the Earth below. As long as we make an effort to search. God gave us the free will to grow spiritually on our own, without interference from others.
I should have been a little more clear when I made the statement that I did not believe in what the bible says. It`s not the idea that I don`t believe in the book as a whole, it`s parts of it I do not believe. Yes, there are some things that may be true, but, there are other parts that do contradict themselves.
As far as setting it aside to search on our own, who are we to judge others for doing that? Isn`t it the old saying "Seek and ye shale find." "Knock and the door will open.". Does this mean we have to do all of our searching in a book? No, I don`t believe so in my opinion. I don`t judge people for putting ALL of their faith in the bible, if that is what keeps them happy in life, all the better. I don`t like it when others put people down for not believing in the same way that they do. I believe in a creator, and I didn`t have to find Gods existance in a book. I found God within me. So, does that make me wrong?
Who is to care, as long as we find God. Whether we find God within ourselves or a book, or in the person next door or even in the sky above or the Earth below. As long as we make an effort to search. God gave us the free will to grow spiritually on our own, without interference from others.
reply posted on 3-9-2008 @ 03:07 PM by FiatLux
reply to post by rickyrrr
You speak of consciousness in this way.
3. "Consciousness is an illusion that results from having the ability to contemplate ideas about ideas, or the experience of recursive thoughts. Every single one of the outward signs of consciousness can be replicated given enough computing power. This belief is as of yet unproven because of the lack of computing power. A machine that thinks it's conscious is not only doable, it is what we people are."
So what you are saying is, we are not really aware of the things around us, or those things are all illuions?
You speak of consciousness in this way.
3. "Consciousness is an illusion that results from having the ability to contemplate ideas about ideas, or the experience of recursive thoughts. Every single one of the outward signs of consciousness can be replicated given enough computing power. This belief is as of yet unproven because of the lack of computing power. A machine that thinks it's conscious is not only doable, it is what we people are."
So what you are saying is, we are not really aware of the things around us, or those things are all illuions?
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