Why Atheists Get the Idea of "Faith" Wrong

[No Robots]

Everyday, we use tools to help accomplish our objectives. Did we invent these tools? No? Then why disparage the use of tools that help us improve our lives, howsoever old or Jewish they might be?

 

[No Robots]

Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Macedonia, Rome, Germania: all empires of dust. Only the Jews remain. What’s more, these empires of dust have turned into Judaism via the Gentile versions of Judaism: Christianity, Islam and socialism. Why is that? Is it because within Judaism there is the key to human development? I certainly think so.

 

[bilby]

Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Macedonia, Rome, Germania: all empires of dust. Only the Jews remain. What’s more, these empires of dust have turned into Judaism via the Gentile versions of Judaism: Christianity, Islam and socialism. Why is that?

Because you very carefully and painstakingly built your question to arrive at that answer.

Is it because within Judaism there is the key to human development?

No. No it isn't.

I certainly think so.

That's obvious, but a searing indictment of your painfully self-serving epistemology.

 

[No Robots]

Oh, yeah, I do have one Scotsman on my list: John Macmurray. His book The Clue to history provides the analysis demonstrating the superiority of Judaism over the Gentile empires.

 

[abaddon]

Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Macedonia, Rome, Germania: all empires of dust. Only the Jews remain. What’s more, these empires of dust have turned into Judaism via the Gentile versions of Judaism: Christianity, Islam and socialism. Why is that? Is it because within Judaism there is the key to human development? I certainly think so.

Most of the ideas in the quotes you provide are Greek. I think Waton was a kabbalist? That's jewish mysticism but it's heavily influenced by greek mysticism (via neoplatonism).

Whitehead said that western philosophy is footnotes to Plato. I think it's more true of western spirituality. Kabbalism, Sufism, Christian contemplatives (from Dionysius to Eckhart to Boehme to Blake), the hermetists, theosophists, and on and on... they're all basically platonists.

My impression is the Greeks informed western civilization more than anyone else. Modern science is born out of the renaissance (and then the enlightenment), which was by and large a revival of Greek thought after the Christian middle ages.

 

[No Robots]

^Take a look at Macmurray's book. It might help you see things in a different light.

 

[steve_bank]

What 'Jewish' tools do you mean?

What do you mean when you say Jewish and Jews?

Our western intellectual tools trace back to Greece. Our political systems trace back to Rome and Greece.

Western Christianity traces back to the Romanzed amalgam of early Christians.. It was Constantine who fostered the unification of Christian theologies.

Jewish civilization failed. Persian , Hindu ,Chinese and Egyptian cultures have existed through today. I'd say modern Israel is making the same kind of mistakes Jews made 2000 years ago.

You seem to have a simplistic shallow image of Jews.

 

[DBT]

The Power of Faith....

 

[steve_bank]

Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Macedonia, Rome, Germania: all empires of dust. Only the Jews remain. What’s more, these empires of dust have turned into Judaism via the Gentile versions of Judaism: Christianity, Islam and socialism. Why is that? Is it because within Judaism there is the key to human development? I certainly think so.

That is just plain non sense.

Civilzation evolves. I wtached a series that came out of UCLA on the histry of wetern civiklization.

The patern always repeats. Cvilzations and assimaltion lead to cross polization of ideas. Lteravcy and knowldge grows in the process. Civilizations fall and some new synthesis evolves.

Langaugae and ideas evolve.

Israeli Jews are clinging to an ancient myth. Netanyahu is emblematc of the coservve Istelis who think they have a biblcl mandate to possess Palestine and make the west bank Jewish.

The threads leading to modern math, science, engineering, and mdicnce are cleary traceable.

India, Greece, China, Egypt and others are all in the path. It never developed in the Americas.

The rise of European science was fed by Persia and Arabia. While Jews have and do contrbute to science and math, there are no significant Jewish-Hebrew contributions from the ancient past.

And by Jewish I mean the original nomadic tribes through the fall of Jerusalem 2000 years ago.

Today there are about 15 million Jews roughly split between the USA and Israel.

I am not anti Jewish, but this flip side to antisemitism is strange.

I forget the author. An Israeli academic wrote a book saying the myth modern Israel is based on is false. The myth that modern Jewish represents a continuous chain back to ancient biblical times.

 

[No Robots]

The principal advantage of Judaism over other thought systems is that it has a concept of human destiny. In Judaism, history is a process through which nature rises in mankind to the level of the intellect, ie. the intellectual love of god, in which the soul recognizes itself as god.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Equivocation.Trust in the proven reliability of someone or something you deal with regularly is not the same as believing in the existence of God because it is written in the bible, quran or gita, etc, regardless of using the word 'faith' in both instances. The former is not the same as the latter, yet some call both 'faith.'

It's the same understanding of faith if the religious person sees God as having proven reliability and as a person whom they deal with regularly. In fact, almost all of the religious see God that way.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Atheists tend to see the idea of faith as weak, irrational, and the product of religion only while many of the religious think faith is quite sensible, universal and strong. I think that on this issue I must side with the religious. Faith doesn't need to be "blind," lacking in logic and evidence but can just as easily be supported be supported by sound thinking. Faith is essentially the trust or confidence we place in a conclusion. As such, it is not necessarily religious. So, for example consider a climatologist who has studied the melting ice in Antarctica. She gathers a lot of data regarding the reduction of ice there and compares it to the increased CO2 in the atmosphere over the past decades. Based on the evidence available to her she concludes that yes, rising levels of atmospheric CO2 is causing the ice to melt in Antarctica. The confidence she places in that conclusion is her faith.

So we all have a certain level of faith, and there's nothing wrong with that. Having logic and evidence isn't enough. At some point we need to put our brains in gear and judge if it's enough to trust our ability to see the truth. That's faith, and it's unfortunate that many atheists have made it "the new f-word."

Basically equivocation. Faith can mean trust, but religious faith - by definition - requires suspension of disbelief. Some may say that is weak and irrational.

Whose definition is that?

 

[Shadowy Man]

Equivocation.Trust in the proven reliability of someone or something you deal with regularly is not the same as believing in the existence of God because it is written in the bible, quran or gita, etc, regardless of using the word 'faith' in both instances. The former is not the same as the latter, yet some call both 'faith.'

It's the same understanding of faith if the religious person sees God as having proven reliability and as a person whom they deal with regularly. In fact, almost all of the religious see God that way.

One of if not the most critical aspects of science is the removal or at least the mitigation or minimization of bias. The person has to be removed as the measurement device. I have never seen this done for religion.

 

[DBT]

Equivocation.Trust in the proven reliability of someone or something you deal with regularly is not the same as believing in the existence of God because it is written in the bible, quran or gita, etc, regardless of using the word 'faith' in both instances. The former is not the same as the latter, yet some call both 'faith.'

It's the same understanding of faith if the religious person sees God as having proven reliability and as a person whom they deal with regularly. In fact, almost all of the religious see God that way.

How do they deal with God in the same way that they deal with the people or things in the physical world?

 

[Shadowy Man]

Equivocation.Trust in the proven reliability of someone or something you deal with regularly is not the same as believing in the existence of God because it is written in the bible, quran or gita, etc, regardless of using the word 'faith' in both instances. The former is not the same as the latter, yet some call both 'faith.'

It's the same understanding of faith if the religious person sees God as having proven reliability and as a person whom they deal with regularly. In fact, almost all of the religious see God that way.

How do they deal with God in the same way that they deal with the people or things in the physical world?

If you believe that god created everything you see then by seeing things. If you believe that god oversees events then by seeing events happen. Because this happens all the time it bolsters their belief that god made it all happen. Logical, yes?

Just like physicists believe Newton’s law of gravitation by seeing things fall down, right? How is it any different??

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Equivocation.Trust in the proven reliability of someone or something you deal with regularly is not the same as believing in the existence of God because it is written in the bible, quran or gita, etc, regardless of using the word 'faith' in both instances. The former is not the same as the latter, yet some call both 'faith.'

It's the same understanding of faith if the religious person sees God as having proven reliability and as a person whom they deal with regularly. In fact, almost all of the religious see God that way.

One of if not the most critical aspects of science is the removal or at least the mitigation or minimization of bias. The person has to be removed as the measurement device. I have never seen this done for religion.

I suppose that's true, but it's irrelevant to how faith is understood by the religious. Even though the religious put themselves into the mix, for them they have evidence and reason for God.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Equivocation.Trust in the proven reliability of someone or something you deal with regularly is not the same as believing in the existence of God because it is written in the bible, quran or gita, etc, regardless of using the word 'faith' in both instances. The former is not the same as the latter, yet some call both 'faith.'

It's the same understanding of faith if the religious person sees God as having proven reliability and as a person whom they deal with regularly. In fact, almost all of the religious see God that way.

How do they deal with God in the same way that they deal with the people or things in the physical world?

I don't recall saying that the religious deal with God in the same way that they deal with the people or things in the physical world. They just think they have a faith based on enough reason and evidence to convince them.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Equivocation.Trust in the proven reliability of someone or something you deal with regularly is not the same as believing in the existence of God because it is written in the bible, quran or gita, etc, regardless of using the word 'faith' in both instances. The former is not the same as the latter, yet some call both 'faith.'

It's the same understanding of faith if the religious person sees God as having proven reliability and as a person whom they deal with regularly. In fact, almost all of the religious see God that way.

One of if not the most critical aspects of science is the removal or at least the mitigation or minimization of bias. The person has to be removed as the measurement device. I have never seen this done for religion.

I suppose that's true, but it's irrelevant to how faith is understood by the religious. Even though the religious put themselves into the mix, for them they have evidence and reason for God.

Yes. We agree that both scientists and the religious have *reasons* for their beliefs. We just disagree that the reasoning is similar enough to justify the use of a single word to accurately describe both.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Two propositions:
1- The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation
2- Kepler's 3 laws of planetary motion
Which proposition would most likely be accepted, after proper study and clarification, by a university-educated Muslim, LDS elder, Buddhist, Baha'i follower, Jew, Shintoist, Hindu, (and let's throw in an atheist, why not)?
Why would one proposition win acceptance, and not the other? How are the propositions different? Is there any similarity in their development and stature?

 

[steve_bank]

It depends on the person.

The RCC has always been an odd mix of theology and science. From a bio I read of Galileo initially the pope was his ally. It was the intelectuals-academics who made a living teaching orthodoxy to the upscale families that were his initial antagonists.

A Jewish rabbi Moses Maimonides from around the 15th century wrote when interpretation of scripture and science conflict interpret ion of scripture has to change.

Newton was a theist with ideas contrary to orthodoxy, something to do with Trinity. I think he invoked god of the gaps at times.

What I saw in engineering is that Christians can compartmentalize faith and science. A creatioist can be a very god engineer applying science.