manofmanynames wrote:

Surely, faith, is often the sustaining of hope among poor and depraved communities through out the world, the last remaining refuge to starve off despair. 

In fact evangelical atheist are often motivated by faith, faith in a belief that mankind will ultimately be liberated by atheism, that the spreading of atheism, allows men to break off the chains that have been keeping the down, from being their true moral character. Faith is sort of like the fuel that keeps them foaming i mean going. It's faith, not derived by reason, or logic, but derived by the sure awe and allure they afford their own disbelief, to give it powers that it doesn't actually possess.

So remind my again MoMN: you believe in completely unfounded superstitions because atheists also believe certain things without evidence?

You: "Atheists have faith too!"

Me: "So...?"

 

Me: "Though I can't ultimately prove it, I hope that one day everyone in the world will be well educated and safe, thus making them very resistant to superstition. Apart from hoping, I also see in history, current social statistics, and my own personal experience, that such an outcome is not at all unlikely"

 

You: "Though I can't ultimately prove it, I believe that it is a fact of the universe that a man was born of a virgin and later rose from the dead and/or that I will live for eternity and/or I will be reincarnated and/or a man met the Arch Angel Gabriel and wrote down God's law, as dictated by said angel, and later flew on a winged horse to heaven. I choose to believe some of these claims while discarding the rest as obvious superstitions."

 

How is it that yours and my position are equally valid?

 

And furthermore, if you insist they are equally valid, how is that an argument for choosing your position over mine? They are equally valid remember?

 

 

 

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To Rising Sun

 

I think the heart of your question is in thinking of Holocaust survivors. Did their superstitious faith help them? Possibly, but if so how?

By strenghening their immune system through positive thinking?

If so, it isn't really their faith that's helping them, it's positive thinking, which of course could just as easily come about by thinking about seeing their family again.

If a group of dyed-in-the-wool atheists were rounded up in a concentration camp, do you think fewer of them would survive than a group of people who had some form of superstitious faith?

Or do you think that some would die and some would live, the ones surviving being a mixture of people in good physical condition, some that were just lucky, and some through shear force of will, spurred on in part by faith in a better tomorrow/faith in a love of their family/faith in the rightiousness of their cause, and the wrongfulness of their captors?

I think that there would be a mixture.

 

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If faith sometimes saves people in crisis then that is only relevant of lack of faith means a higher likelyhood of dying in a crisis.

Otherwise it simply means that sometimes, when people survive crisis, a strong willpower, spurred on by an arbitrary conviction, superstitious or otherwise, is part of the reason for them surviving.

Lack of faith could put someone in a position where they become despondent.  In that sense, they could end up contributing to their own demise because they lose the motivation to do what it takes in order to survive.  In other words, if you don't believe there is a chance  to get out alive, then this belief (or lack of faith that you can survive) could turn into a self-fulling prophesy in that you begin to sabatage yourself by giving up too soon.

 

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So your question is only relevant if you are prepered to believe that being atheistic makes you inherently more vulnerable as a person.

Judging from your comments you don't seem to be the kind of person who would make such a judgement, but if you are then you need to back that up with hard evidence, because I hope you can see how potentially offensive the implications of your question could be.

I am not here to judge anyone's worldview.  I am sorry if my belief in a higher intelligence, and that faith in a crisis could help a person survive, automatically means that I am judging atheists because my comment would imply that atheists might be more vulnerable in such a crisis.  This is not at all valid.  I am not purposely out to offend anyone.  This is a debate and as such I should be able to express what I believe.

 

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You seem like a friendly and openminded person so I don't think you really want to make that judgement. I think what you are really interested in is the question you posed later about, if faith has at some point saved somebody, like say a holocaust surviver, then is that faith bad?

To which my answer is: of course not. Faith is never bad in and of itself. It is only when faith leads you to make bad decisions that it becomes bad.

 

Let me give you an example from my own life, and one I think most people, atheist and theist alike can relate to.

 

A few years ago now I met a girl that I fell in love with and she with me, and we were in a nice, and very young relationship.

At the hight of passion I had faith that she and I were gonna last for ever, that we were perfectly capable of making it work, so to speak.

That is, I had faith in this, because I had no real evidence to support that notion, since our relationship was only six months in, but I still believed it.

So there you have it: I had faith because I had no evidence at all about the potential futures of our relationship, and yet I still believed in one specific outcome.

Mind you there was no evidence to suggest it wasn't gonna last either, so my faith was completely harmless at this point, and certainly served to make me happy at the time.

So a completely harmless, and indeed positive faith, that made me happy.

 

But of course the blissful young love didn't last forever, and the evidence soon started mounting up that she and I were probably gonna have a hard time making it work in the long term. She was alot younger than I was, and we were at very different stages at our lives, ultimately wanting different things, and this started manifesting itself in all sorts of ways. Her behavior changed, my behavior changed, our talks about the future changed, my friends and family started expressing doubts about the stability of our relationship and so on.

 

That is, I still had faith that we could, and would make it last, but now there was mounting evidence that that was not the case.

 

So now my faith was no longer harmless, because I was pained by the mounting evidence against it. I didn't let go of it, mind! I simply became more and more frustrated with the difficulty of holding on to it in the face of more and more evidence against it. I have finally let go of course, and that is a burden lifted from my shoulders, but it took me alot longer than the time it took for sufficient evidence against me to accumilate.

 

So as you can hear, it is certainly possible to have a faith that is in no way impeeding to your life, but it can quickly turn painful when the evidence against it starts showing up.

 

Had I been right about us, I wouldn't have suffered the pain of having an unfounded belief challenged of course.

But then, if we really had stayed together, the initial faith I had, would still have disappeared over time in the face of the positive evidence that we really were making it work, as I had originally assumed on no evidence.

If she had moved in with me, if we'd gotten engaged, had children, all the while affirming our love for eachother regularly, all of this would be evidence in favor of the two of us having what it takes to make it work and then it wouldn't be faith I had, but rather a reasonable assumption based on the accumilated evidence.

 

So that analogy has the following relation to religious faith:

 

It is certainly possible to hold a belief with no evidence that is not harmful to you in anyway, and may even bring you comfort and joy, like my belief in my relationship while it was still young and passionate.

 

But if there is mounting evidence that your faith is wrong, then it brings you internal discomfort and grief as you cling to it, and you are better off letting it go, because it really is unfounded, and always has been: that's the definition of faith after all: belief without evidence. So while it may not cause you harm while it is unchallenged, as soon as you begin to discover counter-evidence it will plunge you deeper and deeper into confussion and frustration.

 

And that's just the internal grief, never mind all the bad things an unfounded belief might bring you to do to others.

 

It is my oppinion that any faith worth holding on to doesn't stay a faith forever. Like I said about if me and my ex had stayed together I would have slowly gone from unfounded belief to reasonable belief as the evidence of a stable relationship would manifest itself over time.

 

Faith in superstitious claims necessarily only have one way to go, and that's down. That's why I oppose them: because I think it is unhealthy to remain faithful in any one thing for a lifetime. You either go from unfounded faith to evidence-based expection over time, or you let go of the unfounded faith, for your own sake as much as anyone elses.

I understand your situation as many of us have suffered the same fate when it comes to relationships.  We start out hopeful, but then our hopes are dashed as everyday life starts to take its toll.  Having faith that a love connection will work out is not a bad thing, because it provides a positive outlook.  But this has to be backed up by knowledge of what keeps relationships on the right track, hard work, and a strong commitment to each other.  If any of these are not present, all the faith in the world won't change anything.  Of course,  as time goes by the viability of the relationship, or the lack thereof, begins to mount based on real feedback (or evidence).  I am not saying we should discount our experiences in place of faith, but this also doesn't mean that we should not have faith that things will work out, and at the same time not be so naiive that if it doesn't work out, we are devastated because faith alone did not come to the rescue.  Not preparing for the worst, especially in this day and age, where so many relationships are in jeopardy, is foolhardy.  I am a very cautious person, and would never allow myself to be so faithful in something that has not stood the test of time, for this would be tantamount to suicide.   This reminds me of the lion in the Wizard of Oz who kept saying, I believe, I believe, I believe, but his faith did not help him when he had to walk down that hallway to meet the Wizard.  He was trying to calm himself down by trying to convince himself that there was nothing to fear, but he was scared out of his wits.  This is where having a strong faith might have helped him.  But his faith was overcome by his fear.

latincanuck wrote:

But i find it quite depressing to believe that we are the product of a god that only desires our worship (as so many gods and goddess desire our worship). Intern the natural explanation gives us such wonder about the us 

Whose us? Natural explanation of the mechanics of the universe gives who "such awe" and wonder?

This sort of dribble is by far one of the reason i find atheist to be a pathetic joke, disconnected from the world around them. Your "awe" and "wonder" is sort of like a taste preference, you may really enjoy the taste of shit, the rest of us have decided to pass. 

Stop trying to pass off your ugly ass wife as the most beautiful women in the world. 

What's weird is that you often hear Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens and other atheist characterize atheist of communist era Russia as being "religious", with their images of Stalin, without realizing that their own beliefs, the mastubortory fawning over all things science, and the supposed magical shit it can do, isn't all that much different

manofmanynames wrote:

What's weird is that you often hear Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens and other atheist characterize atheist of communist era Russia as being "religious", with their images of Stalin, without realizing that their own beliefs, the mastubortory fawning over all things science, and the supposed magical shit it can do, isn't all that much different

No I think they understand the similarity quite clearly. All three of them have referenced Einstein's and Hawking's "religious" appreciations for the mechanics of the universe. However, it is quite different in intent from Stalinist Russia, where worship of the nation-state was compulsory. Their respect for the wonder of the universe is born of free will and sober rationality. I'd also like to point out that their comparison of Russia to a religion is a redressing of the idea that the country was an atheistic state under Stalin and therefore all atheists are pinko muderers etc. Furthermore, the "magical shit science supposedly can do" (really?) has yielded what great things? I bet you can think of about ten right off the top of your head. On the other hand, worship of the state yielded ___? So it's pretty clear where the similarities end. 

That being said, do you really not see anything terrific in the natural mechanics of the universe? To each their own I suppose.