State

Rabbi David Wolpe out in LA has written a book that it does. Does Faith Matter?

He's interviewed in a rollickingly good interview by Dennis Prager: Radio Show

Key insight: "Atheism, wrote the Preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, is the theoretical formulation of a discouraged life. That is too often true. God must not exist because things have not gone as I expected them to go."

Who hasn't had a tough life?

godef

Isn't this all backwards? I thought this is why people clinged to religion (aka "born again") rather than moved away from it.

__________________
See you at Super Bowl XLVI!

PatsFanInVa

This is why you're not a rabbi Godef

The discouraged other, evidently, is in the eye of the beholder.

Wildo7

Does genocide matter? Does Racism matter? Does stupidity matter?

Umm yes, what does that mean then? Rephrase the question if you aren't just looking for false affirmation through leading questions....

PatsFanInVa

It's worth noting that atheism toward the natural world -- interpreting "atheism" to mean functional disbelief in supernatural forces -- is the only means of honest inquiry.

That is to say, if I mean to ask where something came from, I must rule out that the answer is "God did it!" (or the same answer, substituting some other supernatural being.) Otherwise the journey of discovery would be a brief one indeed.

So one could easily phrase any theistic hypothesis -- in the scientific world -- as a crisis of confidence in our own curiosity and combined powers of reason.

This is why I am a firm believer in the border of the objective and the subjective as enormously important in one's own religious development. One cannot construct a house of cards, if one is intellectually honest, ceding whatever is currently known to science, and whatever is not known to God, the so often mentioned "God of the gaps."

As to the inner life -- the very existence of which I do not find sufficient explanation for anywhere -- that is another story. No explanation of the existence of the subjective has yet been drawn from the examination of the objective that remotely satisfies my curiosity yet.

But its not so much the inability of the objective to explain the origin of the subjective that is my point; rather, it is the greatly limited ability we each have of even positing the subjective to another subjective actor, never mind claiming for it a place in the objective.

Work time.

PFnV

Wildo7

^^^ If you shine a light through a bunch of differently shaped crystals, the light is going to be refracted and absorbed by each crystal depending on their individual composition. That doesn't change the nature or "truth" of the light itself though.

Edit to add: Maaaaaaaaaaan.

PatsFanInVa

And you are prepared to say that the photons, or the crystals, are aware of this, maaaaan?

Wildo7

I'm saying that if the crystals were self aware, then there own distorted (subjective) interpretation of the photons has no inherent merit. The photons do not change, just like whatever the universe/world/whatever information we take in subjectively doesn't change the reality of it.

PatsFanInVa

So you're redefining reality as purely consisting on the objective reality outside yourself, and urge that others do likewise?

This has the disadvantage of disregarding 100% of your own experiential evidence to the effect that your subjective reality does, in fact, matter. Not only does it matter, it is the only empirically unassailable fact, the one requiring no leap of faith. Cogito ergo sum and all that.

The fact is that of course the subjective world of the billions of people on earth (and probably quite a few of the animals), matters. For any of these individuals it is the basic fact of their lives. The objective world can make those lives very short, of course. Hence the traditional lack of navel-gazing among prey animals in the presence of a predator.

That subjective existence is, however, one's subjective reality, so there is a gaping chasm between the objective and the entirety of reality, whether or not one is of a religious bent.

tanked_as_usual

faith is only important when you need it.........

but when you're busy behaving like a pig, its the furthest thing from your mind