I have of late used this thread to vent what some may see as "anti-religious" thoughts.

I would argue that they are not "anti-religious" per se, only anti-dogma. (Which, for those wondering, pits me against atheists and their ilk too.)

However I want to apologize, since I do realize it can be tiresome.

I want to explain the reason why though, so perhaps you can understand why I have been pestering you all.

This is basically the only place where I can express myself in that way. On the internet anyway.

My family is super religious. My aunt, uncle, cousins, mom and dad and grandmother are all very "strong" Christians. I was once like them, as some of you may know.

Thus, when I came to doubt and essentially stopped believing (in anything), I sensed it was not wise to inform them of that.

Call me a coward or whatever, but there is a reason, more than one reason:

My brother recently came out as homosexual. This shocked/devastated my parents (go figure) and my brother is openly NOT a Christian, though he lives at home with them.

So they basically live in constant "worry" and "pain" for him. Always praying for him etc. It's really sad. I noticed after he came out that they started paying a lot more attention to me.......... the "successful son."

Yes that is fucked up, I do not dispute that. I don't think they are doing intentionally though. It's not like they hate my brother now or anything.

But anyway I now feel more pressure to be their son that they didn't mess up on.

So I don't want them to know I'm not a virgin, or that I eschew Christianity as uninformed dogma, or that I am fairly liberal... or that I listen to gangsta rap... lol the list continues.

So this means that I can only talk about these things with my friends, my brother, or you.

Twitter and Facebook are out though, because my family is on Twitter and Facebook (sometimes, I think, just to keep tabs on me).

So that's why. Sorry. The reason I wrote this thread is because I was about to create a rant thread called "Just because there are a lot of earthquakes doesn't mean Jesus is coming," but I realized that was over the line lol. So I made this thread instead.

Hope no one is annoyed.

Oh yeah, another, maybe more selfish reason for not spilling the beans is that they are kind of paying my tuition... and you never know what might make them decide to stop... or attach strings... etc.

:gets up from reading Aquinas:

oh sorry was reading some well-reasoned philosophical arguments, what were you saying about uninformed dogma there

I didn't catch it

wellp anyway, got some reading to do...

Well reasoned is right, I agree. Perhaps uninformed is the wrong choice of words. "ignorant" would be better.

Read Sextus Empiricus if you want to figure me out.

Rant away, Thucy. We are your friends here and your rants are more coherent than some (mine included), so again I say rant away!

Those of us here that are Christian will pray for you and your family. If there is no God then it will not do anything, if there is it may help.

As a Christian I think it is important to encounter those who challenge us to be informed in our dogma and to find reasons to believe. We may never come to agreement, but let us see how we can challenge one another.

Ignorant?

Projecting, eh? Oh well.

Do you know any philosophy that isn't obsolete?

You're not annoying Thuccydides. Although, some people in the religious threads are. *ahem* ottovanbis.

"I would argue that they are not "anti-religious" per se, only anti-dogma. (Which, for those wondering, pits me against atheists and their ilk too.)"

I don't understand this. In what sense are atheists dogmatic? I'm not definitely sure that God does not exist. I can never say for sure that he doesn't, and in that sense I am philosophically agnostic... but the point is that this is true of anything supernatural such as dragons and goblins and Flying Spaghetti monsters. I can never say with philosophical or scientific certainty that they do not exist, and in that sense I am agnostic toward them as well. However, for all practical purposes, I live my life without gving them the credence of possibility because there are simply an infinite number of things I can never know for sure do not exist and it is just not worth my time. For practical purposes I am atheist toward God, flying carpets, Thor, etc. I think most people who identify with atheism agree with me, and I have the feeling that you also agree with this reasoning.

Agnostic != atheist, hth

If people are offended by theological debates, it is exceedingly easy to turn one's computer off. I agree with Draugnar...RANT AWAY.

Well what I mean by atheist, Chrisp, is the strict definition of:

"One who professes certainty that there is no God."

Technically, with regard to my views on God, I am a strong agnostic, which lines right up with my overall Pyrrhonic Skepticism, which is to say:

We cannot know if there is a God or not. Neither I nor you can know.

Nor can we know anything else... lol. To say something otherwise is not stupid, just ignorant.

I do not claim to be more enlightened than anyone. That is one of the beauties of skepticism, that I am only claiming we are both equally ignorant. Not just equally ignorant though, also TOTALLY ignorant are we all.

Anyway Sextus is definitely not obsolete. All the "responses" to skepticism either miss the point, or end up affirming it.

For example, Aquinas responds by saying that though we cannot say we *know* something, we can say for certain that something *appears* to us in a certain way.

He says that's a way to "refute" skeptics but I actually agree with his point totally. All we can say is that things *appear* a certain way. And that's okay.

lol well thanks for the support yall.

i will try to stop though... they really don't go anywhere.

i also appreciate the sentiment contained in "we will pray for you." so thank you.

though I personally believe there is no way to tell whether that will negatively, positively, or neutrally affect me, and by how much, i do appreciate your good intentions.

:)

Acosmist, was that meant to be a riposte to Chrispminis?

Acosmist, yes that's true in philosophical language. However, in every day use of the term it is not used like that. When someone describes themselves as agnostic it usually means they have some wishy washy opinion of God, and oh sure maybe he's up there maybe he's not sorta thing. When someone describes themselves as an atheist, they don't mean to make the assertion that they *know* that God doesn't exist. They just mean to differentiate themselves from agnostics in the practical sense because they don't feel it worth it to act as though the possibility of God existing were any more likely than the possibility of an invisible pink unicorn existing, and so treat them with equal respect, that is, none. In forms and surveys I always describe myself as an atheist agnostic.

Chrispminis - You have misappropriated the definition of an atheist then. The definition pretty clearly states that an atheist is someone who denies the existence of God:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/atheist

Thucydides - I had to look up Sextus Empiricus (had not heard of him), but I find skepticism in most of its forms to be rather useless and mostly just a way to justify doing whatever you feel like because we can't really know anything (to be brief about it). Part of the problem with skepticism is also that it contradicts both common sense and the way people tend to function. We do in fact believe certain things and act as though we do, and since skepticism can't really be lived, that more or less invalidates it as a useful philosophy.

"Well what I mean by atheist, Chrisp, is the strict definition of:

'One who professes certainty that there is no God.'"

Then I would agree with you. That's simple foolishness, but I will say that I do not know any atheists who actually believe with scientific or philosophical certainty that God does not exist. I got the sense that you were trying to distance yourself from the more recent atheist movement sparked by Dawkins, Hitchens and the like, and that's fair enough because they are certainly forceful with their views, but in the philosophical sense they are not actually dogmatic, nor do they believe that they know for sure that God does not exist.

How can you be sure that you can't be sure of anything if you're a skeptic?
How can you know that you can't know how things are?

"Chrispminis - You have misappropriated the definition of an atheist then. The definition pretty clearly states that an atheist is someone who denies the existence of God:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/atheist"

nola, words change their meanings all the time. I would say this instance is because agnostic has become such a watered down term by people who identify themselves as agnostics that atheists seek a distinction, though thay may be philosophically agnostic, they are for all practical purposes, atheists in the sense that they do not behave as though God exists or might exist any more than you behave as though fairies might exist.

The attack on skepticism that it is "useless" is baseless from a skeptical point of view, given that you cannot judge what is "useful" and what is not.

The Chinese skeptic Zhuangzi puts it rather eloquently. He asks if there is a way to know whether we are like lost children away from home, avoiding death because we have forgotten that death is home.

So yeah, you could say skepticism says, "well yes, maybe killing yourself is the best thing."

But Sextus doesn't just leave it there. He APPLIES skepticism. This may sound funny at first but it is a thought process I developed on my own, read in him, and so you can imagine that I instantly fell in love with the ancient Greek who I discovered thought just as I do.

It goes like this: We look around. We don't know what is and isn't; the nature of things.

So we go off appearance, and suspend judgment on whether something is good or bad, accurate or not. Thus we allow ourselves to be guided by what appears to us to be normal.

In my case that involves going to church on Easter and not killing people and filling out my census form and going to Africa to help the poor.

I will never tell anyone, though, that I KNOW I should do this. It's basically just the wisest thing to do, going off the axiom that I may as well do the most simple thing, the most intuitive thing. That may not be true, but like I said it's the best I can think of.

Thus suspending judgment and living by intuition and common sense, in the end, brings what Sextus describes as "quietude" or peace of mind. Maybe it doesn't always do that, since I can't KNOW if it does, but for right now I experience quietude.

This is why I often chuckle when people talk about finding Jesus to achieve peace in life.

No way Jose. There are much simpler ways to find peace.

Regarding atheist/agnostic.

I do consider myself to be atheist, because I consider it much more likely than not that god exists.

I also consider myself to be a 'gravitationalist', because I consider it much more likely than not that gravity exists.

No statement of categorical (as opposed to hypothetical) fact is 100% certain, so to demand it for the title "atheist" is not reasonable. A good definition is "someone who thinks that the chance that there is a god is vanishingly small"

"How can you be sure that you can't be sure of anything if you're a skeptic?"

The question is a common one, and it divides skeptics.

In the case of my brand, Pyrrhonism, I do not claim to KNOW that nothing can be known. But importantly, I do not claim that nothing can EVER be known. I remain in a state of inquiry, suspending judgment.

Okay Ghostie I'll give you that but you should know that I also think that pretending to know the chances of something being true is also dogmatic.

It's dogma in the end.

Lol.

Anyway I'm antagonizing you guys with my skepticism so I'll go do homework now.

I reject skepticism as an axiom, so I can just ignore you :)

Anyway, as a skeptic, how can you make any of the claims you've made above, including the claim that you are a skeptic?

I do have to agree with Thucydides on one note here. For an atheist (using our "looser" definition here) to try to assign a "probability" that God exists is pretty hilarious. On what is that probability based, exactly?

I can't make the claims in that they can't be proved by logic per se.

In the world of appearances, it appears to me that I can and have used language to explain skepticism to them and allow them to realize that nothing is known, however I do not know if this actually works or not, or if I am actually talking.

All I know is that I have reflected inside myself and come to decide that nothing is known.

I used to hold the line at I think and I am and that's all I know, but now that I have seen that even "I think, I am" can be called into question (Hume), I retreat, as I always should have, to pure pyrrhonism.

@nola, are you willing to make any statement of that nature, for instance, "the chances that gravity does not exist are vanishingly small"

TGM - Sure. Gravity, as we have defined it, exists. God exists, and I believe this to be true with not only my faith but my logical certainty, so I would assign a probability of 100% here. Do you happen to have a probability for the existence of God, or will you admit that using just science (or whatever reason you don't believe in God), that you have no idea whatsoever and so to assign a probability makes no sense (and thus you don't know, which is the defintion of agnostic, by the way)?

Also, I will not be responding for a while as I have to go somewhere, so I will see you all later.

nom, nom, nom, nom, nom...

wait, you're the good brother in the story of the prodigal son, if your brother comes back to the good side think of all the praise it will land him!!!

You need to out do him in your prodigalnessity so when you come down to a normal healthy civil level you can be hailed the returning hero AND live a normal healthy, eh, non-extreme 'christian' lifestyle.

dude if i ever go back to the 'christian' lifestyle i will die.

intellectual starvation can kill a man's soul you know

besides my plan is to spend the rest of my life in africa, fat lot of influence they can have once i'm there lol

im sorry to hear that thucy

@nola, basically it's Russell's teapot for me.

"dude if i ever go back to the 'christian' lifestyle i will die.

intellectual starvation can kill a man's soul you know"

You mention 'lifestyle' as if your parents' way of living is the Christian way of living. No one is perfect, and by your perspective of your parents, I can tell that they are not. Was that a typo or do you believe the beliefs to be intellectually stumping in addition?

Im christian. dont let the name confuse u.

It's not really a probability thing. It's just that you can't prove whether or not God does or does not exist, but the same is true for an infinite number of things. You can't prove that invisible cloud people do or do not exist. It's just not worth it in the practical sense to give any consideration to such questions as there are an infinite number of them. I give the existence of God no more credence than I, or any theist, do mermaids or Cerberus. This is not dogma. It is dogma to make an assertion that God exists (or does not exist), and worse yet to make one with no real evidence, and yet even worse to then to derive real value judgements and say that abortion is wrong because somehow I know that the God that I cannot prove exists (or does not exist) says so.

Yeah, I'm not claiming a probability either.

It seems to me that for many people religion's position in our culture results in them demanding a level playing field between the believer and the non-believer; between the position of true beyond all reasonable doubt and false beyond all reasonable doubt. No such level playing field exists.

You accept your beginning, or the beginning of the matter you're made of, as something not worth thinking about? That's the difference between mermaids and God. God, the Big Bang Theory, etc., have potential because they're all theories on how life began. Whereas mermaids..., well...not so much.

You must envisage these things. You can make a decision like Thuccydides has--that it cannot be explained, but at least give it some thought!

ZaZa, of course that's an amazing question, but you have to realize that I could just as easily say that I believe that a tiny dragon created the universe. The Big Bang theory is at least related to scientific observations of an expanding universe and extrapolating into the past. Perhaps more importantly is that yes, it's a question worth considering, but can you say that you know the answer? And then say that the answer clearly justifies the Crusades? I mean, there's a clear disconnect here. I'm saying I'm an atheist for practical reasons, but am, strictly speaking, philosophically an agnostic.

"somehow I know that the God that I cannot prove exists (or does not exist) says so." - If i have a concept of an infinite God, one which is capable of creating the universe, then while i don't know if it exists I do know i'm incapable of understanding it, or what it means for the world, or if it thinks something is good or bad.

That is my big problem with the idea of an infinite God (you can argue for yourself what i mean by the term infinite God, and whether the Christian God counts as one, but i think it is inherent in the term that a finite human (ie me) can't come close to fully understanding the motives of such a creature - Yes i am saying i can concieve of a God which i don't fully comprehend - in fact i can't concieve of any other thing worth calling God)

So i can't tell you what that God says - only what other men have claimed to hear it saying. I can't tell you what that God thinks on certain issues, because it is beyond me (and i think anyone who tells you they understand God is misunderstanding the nature of hte concept)

If I can't prove/disprove that this God exists is of no importance because If it does exist i can tell you very little about what it wants- All I can do is try to make my own value judgements about the world I live in.

I think previous comments about Dogma are that some individuals don't make their own value judgement (call it laziness if you will) and instead accept what they have read/heard. (and laziness is of course a great invention, it forces us to find lazier ways of performing simple tasks...)

@Acosmist: When someone is so desperate that he goes to a Diplomacy-related forum for honest expression (!), you should have nothing but compassion for him. If his soul is at risk, even more so...and if he's your enemy, yet more. St. Thomas would tell you to put down your book and then smack you upside the head.

I really never understood why humanity has wasted so many thoughts and brain power to something non existant.
If he is out there, let him prove it.
I ll go one step further and state that even if there was a god, we would have to destroy him.

hellalt, I think by definition we could not destroy God, or he wouldn't be God.

I'll take a step by saying that I'm glad that God doesn't exist. =)

@pastoralan:
Right on!

@Thucy: well... I'm glad to help in anyway I can.

Since it seems that it would do your faith no good anyway, not telling your parents spares them a measure of anguish, which is good.

hellalt: You suggest an answer to the question: "if God is real, why doesn't [he] just make [his] existence obvious?" It's so that people like you can live without feeling the need to destroy God.

pastoralan maybe it's my English but I think there is something highly contradictory in your message and therefore I cannot understand what you mean.

@hellalt - Look up St. Thomas Aquinas to understand PastorAlan's comments.

Well. Anyway.

Just to be clear my definition of "dogma" is any claim about the world that is presented as fact, but that cannot be known.


Thus most sentences that contain a conjugation of the verb "to be" are dogma, unless the question is analytic, versus synthetic. (For instance my definition of "dogma" is analytic, and thus you can't say that my *definition* is dogmatic. That's because it's just a definition, and isn't a claim about the world.)

But anyway. Yeah in my view it is probably best not to tell them, at least not until I'm a financially independent adult. And even then I'll most likely make it seem like a recent thing. Kind of messed up that it has to be that way, but I can't think of anything else.

My Karma has ran over my dogma.