Music Banter - Are you religious?

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Karma basically means that if you are a bad person or do bad things, eventually it will catch up to you and bad things will happen to you as well.

Fate basically means that control is not in my hands. Fate and destiny... Like there is a master plan and I'm just along for the ride.

I can't be bothered because all of those things are unrealistic to me. Praying? So if I just close my eyes and wish for things, they will magically happen? I've seen way too many bad things happen to great people to believe in a God or religion. I've seen too many people get shafted who didn't deserve it.

When I see things like kids suffering through cancer... or parents get killed in accidents and a kid is left without parents. Or I see the cultures of other places, where it is difficult to even get safe drinking water... How can I possibly believe in anything. there is far too much unneccessary suffering and pain in this world to believe in a God.

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Originally Posted by Dirty (Post 945969)

Karma basically means that if you are a bad person or do bad things, eventually it will catch up to you and bad things will happen to you as well.

Okay, this one I'll give you, mostly because trying to define "good" and "bad" is how we got into this mess to begin with. In the interest of taking a new road...

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Fate basically means that control is not in my hands. Fate and destiny... Like there is a master plan and I'm just along for the ride.

Control of what, exactly? Is it something you actually have control over?
And, as a separate question, what leads you to believe in the absence of such a plan? (Is it the presence of suffering you talk about below?)

I feel like your main point in the last couple paragraps is here (correct me if I'm wrong about that)

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there is far too much unneccessary suffering and pain in this world to believe in a God.

So ok, without denying such suffering exists (cos one can't do that), why are the ideas of suffering and god mutually exclusive in such a way?

(BTW, I'm probably off for a bit, but I'll be back later. Oh and sorry for getting snippy there. I sometimes forget that the whole world isn't always privy to a lot of the leaps I take in my head and it's unfair to get frustrated at someone else for that.)

The whole 'define good and evil thing' is just being looked into to much... It's pretty damn obvious what is good and evil, we all DO share those common ideas and thoughts that things like murder are evil.

When I talk of fate and destiny, I am referring to control of where I end up in life. Some people believe that everything happens for a reason. My mother and I have got in arguments about this because I think its crazy. For example, when some people meet and eventually get married, they will say it was fate. It was destiny. That they were going to find each other no matter what decisions they make because it was their fate to do so. There was a worldly plan for it to happen.

This makes your independent decisions irrelevant. Of course your decisions matter. I believe in coincidence! I don't believe in a master plan, because if there is one, then it is not a positive one. It is not a good thing that people are born with serious deformities and diseases. It is not ok to me that people starve. Or that in some countries there is struggle just to get water. Some people barely have clean, safe air to breathe. So if there is a master plan out there, and something behind the plan (AKA a God), then I don't want to support it. I want nothing to do with it because it isn't fair and it's not positive.

Like I said, I have witnessed too many bad things happen to people who didn't deserve it to believe there is a God. Because what good can possibly come from a child dying of cancer?

Suffering and a God go hand in hand. Because a persons God will get all the credit in the world when something great happens, but takes little blame when something bad happens. It depends how you view the situation. An example: Someone has a bad disease and they eventually become cured. For some, the reaction is "Thank God I am cured! He answered my prayers!!!" For me, the reaction is "I'm glad I'm cured, but why the hell did I even get the rare disease and have to suffer int he first place??"

If someone is battling cancer, everyone will pray that they survive. If they do survive, then praise God!!! And if they die? ...Well then God wanted them to be in a better place! I can't subscribe to thoughts like this where God strictly receives praise and no blame for things, even though so much pain and suffering exists everywhere

Quote:

Originally Posted by Janszoon (Post 945100)

Why does there have to be a point?

The irony of your question is it's actually the religious viewpoint that rob life and death of their significance, not the irreligious viewpoint.

Basically you just can't think of a point. And I can't stand it when people answer a question with a question.

The problem I have with ALL religions is their fundamental reliance on faith. My definition of faith is "the purposeful suspension of the application of reason and evidence to belief", and to me, that makes faith an unacceptable prerequisite of religion. Faith pisses on all the progress we've made in science and morality, and that some people consider faith a virtue is truly astounding.

Has anyone seen Religulous?

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Originally Posted by Nine Black Poppies (Post 945941)

I see what you're getting at and it's a legitimate criticism that had me stewing for a bit.

The counterpoint I've come up with has a couple different parts, but they're very interconnected (heh) so I'm going to try and put them in a way that makes sense but I'm not sure how clear it'll come out.

Basically, the parts are:
1. In the idea of total interconnectivity, you can't totally separate the whole from the self--what's good for one is good for the other
2. Any perspective we might have isn't a complete picture because we're fundamentally unable to be objective or contain all the relevant information

Consider the ill-fated good people you talk about and how many of them are self-defined as happy, despite their negative circumstances (see also: "Man's Search for Meaning" by Frankl or the biblical parable of Job) and, on a similar wavelength, the malaise prevalent in those we might consider socially fortunate (see: most American literature from the mid-20th century on for examples).

The kind of social hypocrisy that you're talking about is a fundamental to the necessity of evil to exist for there to be will. In cause-and-effect type terms, I think of it like... um. I can't remember the name for it, it's a calculus thing--the line that eternally approaches zero without ever reaching it. We're constantly evolving, trying to resolve the equation of our existence in a moral dimension, but it's a perfectly imperfect system (such is the nature of the infinite)--for us to have a moral choice, we must be able to choose evil sometimes and because we're imperfect we sometimes do. This falls in line very directly with the idea of a JudeoChristian God.

The idea in Judeochristian theology is that there is some kind of ultimate reward that allows for virtuous suffering in this life to be rewarded in another iteration of existence. Frankly, I don't know how to speak to that. I don't think there IS any way to speak to that outside "mythology" because we have no empirical evidence of what experience might or might not exist after death as we understand it. I could start talking about multidimensionality and the nonexistence of time as they could potentially relate to consciousness (there's that tangent again), but it'd be hypothesizing at best. As an aside, focusing solely on empiricism to understand the universe is fatally flawed, but that's a topic for another day.

I dunno if I really addressed what you were saying--I'm kind of thinking as I go here. I'm curious what your thoughts are. Thanks for engaging on my level. Also, Dead Can Dance? Nice.

After reading your recent posts, I think I'm beginning to understand what you are really trying to say. If I'm not wrong, the heart of the matter is: "omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent". An individual infinite entity cannot be omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent at the same time. He/she couldn't exist, since his/her attributes would be self-contradictory. It's metaphysically impossible. So then you wondered: what could be omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent at the same time?

Regarding interconnectivity and its related ideas, they aren't new to me, actually. I've heard of them sometimes. In Italian and Spanish (and probably in other languages too) the word for coincidence (casualità and casualidad, respectively) is very similar to that for causality (you only have to swap two letters). So some Italian and Spanish-speaking authors have made a pun and said that "coincidences (casualità, casualidades) are actually causalities (causalità, causalidades)". Also, I've heard of chaos theory (and the butterfly effect, etc...) applied to philosophy and social sciences, although only superficially. I've got to read more on the subject. In fact, I have a book (an essay) about it (Chaos and Order by A. Escohotado; it's not translated into English) but I still haven't read it (I'm lazier than a marble plane). Anyway, I think everybody can understand that what you said about the consequences (sometimes unexpected) of our actions. Even things like those shown in the film Babel are possible.

Finally, if we introduce morality into the system... whew! Everything becomes even more complicated. It's so... relative? chaotic? I don't know... it isn't clear to me. I have to study it carefully. However, and despite my limited knowledge on philosophy, some points remind me of Stoicism and Seneca. Am I right? :)

I'll live my life believing in nothing, I just wasn't raised to believe anything, and don't feel a need to have something to believe. I just don't really care to be honest.

Went to church ever since 3, but now that I think about it, it was a HUGE waste of time.
Atheist