I roll into this religious forum within the ilovephilosophy site and find over and over this provincial thinking that sinks to the bottom without fail. I mean why is it that every accusation against God has to make reference to the Bible?
I know we live in the west but when I came here, crazy me, I expected more.
yes, I notice this also. A phenomenon hardly limited to ILP. Some critics do focus on the Bible or on Christianity clearly. Others demonstrate there is no God or theism is irrational with arguments based just on Christianity. And also only certain branches of Christianity.
I watched a show “through the wormhole” with Morgan freeman asking the intriguing question of whether we created god or gof created us. It was mostly about psychologists and neurologists investigating what could be the reasons behind the near universality of belief in god or a higher power.
In one portion the addressed what I consider the Matrix Dilema. When a person asks, as so many have, whether belief in God is a justified belief, no one asks what belief is that some are justified and others are not. Neurologically belief the interpretation of signals. Do we have sufficient reason to believe in God? As much or as little as we have to believe in the reality of the world. More later…
So as I was saying, the show explored psychological, neurological and other reasons for the existence of belief. But they dealt with all belief. They didn’t simply chopped away at the Christian God. That is philosophical. The perspective so wide as to take in a proper glance of God.
By contrast, unfortunately, the board members simply revel about the facts they have discovered about the Christian god from the Bible. I see more nuances, tentativeness from experts of the bible than from these philosophers in this board. They take the fundamentalists positions and run with it. They refute their prejudice and they equate that with the Christian god.
I’m just saying…venting…
Most of the people on this board were raised in a culture where Christianity is dominate. It follows that drawing on their experience will be filtered through the christian religion. Globally, notions of god are all over the park, but one thing is constant: God represents the ultimate in “fixing” the universe. The concept creates the one unimpeachable, untouchable, constant that is forever and ever… And from that concept comes all the anthropomorphic attributes that allows the ego to believe that it too can persist forever and ever. The so-called universal belief in a god or higher being is the ego’s response to it’s inability to accept death as it’s dissolution. There just HAS to be more…
In the Religion Forum, most board members are not interested in philosophy. Their posts are a form of psychotherapy. They are working through feelings, thoughts and emotions about themselves, their parents, society, other people, etc.
Most philosophy, beginning with Plato’s ideas about a soul, has been physcological/religious. Even Nietzsche couldn’t escape this way of thinking. Epistemology, flourishing since the Enlightenment is psychology philosophized. My only frustration here is the lack of knowledge of contexts of sayings and writings and the belief that we can understand them without this knowledge.
From my perspective that happens due to the extreme degree that people have been encouraged to go change “those bad guys”. Thus just about everything you see concerning religion, government, and even science are efforts from someone trying to wave the flag of their “good guy” side in the face of those they have been convinced are the “bad guys”.
Very, very few people on any forum are actually interested in any truth concerning anything. On the philosophy forum it is often the agenda to convince the masses that there actually is no truth there is only “your foolish and false side and my righteous and unfalse side”.
There’s a good reason for this. People’s egos are substantiated by what they believe is right.
Challenges to these beliefs often cause the most irrational responses. And yes, it is difficult, but not impossible, to find those here who post without an agenda fixed on being right. I’ve seen many such posts, which is why I stay at ILP. I don’t have to be right, just heard. And i can learn something from even the most vitriolic response.
It follows, but you would hope that we had a culture within the forum of raising above, because philosophy, ideally, should beging with self examination. The concept of God is related to the idea of permanence and essense, but as an effect and not as a cause.
I agree. Fundamentalists take the Bible as the magical word of God, one and the same. Contrast this with the post temple jews whose Bible was a sign to be interpreted by a group of experts, not a ready message, literal and equivalent to language today. People quote the Bible left and right. Can they quote Maimonides every now and then? That is all I ask.
In a sense Nietzsche was right. Everyone is defending an agenda with a moral value. We have too many heroes trying to banish this ancient evil called “Christianity”.
Hard to pin point. First experience was Catholicism, but I never finished First Communion…it took me away from Sunday morning cartoons and my parents were not as devout as they perhaps should have been. Later, due to friendships in school, evangelical parents of those friends took me to their churches now and then. Later other forms of Christianity were explored by me while dating religious chicks. There never was a solid committment to any one version of Christianity however. By age 25 I discovered philosophy and the rest is history.
A noble sentiment… Self examination is difficult because the beginning illusion is that we can stand outside ourselves and look back in… Having abstracted self, introspection becomes an abstraction in itself, with all the obvious confusion. Further, that self examination is seen by religion as dangerous (unless it confirms religion) because one may look for God, and find him/her absent. It is much safer to question the attributes of a god than to question the place of a god as part of ourselves. As you have observed, there are a few, but very few…
It’s obviously symptomatic of a real phenomenon in the consciousness of this historical moment. We’re trying to sort it out. That’s what this forum is all about as far as I’m concerned.
