Note: I have gone on record I'm a non-denominational Protestant, yet I do not actively hate anyone of any faith or no faith, but I wanted to explain why I cannot buy into the tenets of several belief systems in particular and why from a personal perspective.
Atheism: While this is technically the absence of faith or denial of a higher power, I'm covering this first just to cover all the bases.
My reason for not buying into atheism is that, if you apply logic, it has a pretty hopeless message. Apparently, we live, die, and that's it. Our memory may exist for future generations, but if humanity as a whole dies out, our existence ceases to matter.
I can understand agnostics a little better than I do atheists, but flat out saying we were born, will die, and that's it for our existence is one of the most fatalistic things I've ever heard, and I refuse to believe human life is that pointless.
Scientology: Let's pretend I don't believe L. Ron Hubbard was a lying fraudster, which I'm absolutely convinced of, so instead, let me just point out the inconsistencies with pure logic.
Scientology was preceded by Dianetics, which was pseudo-psychology invented before it became the basis of religion, and the actual backstory of Scientology itself has no backing whatsoever in any objective historical sense. Most other belief systems at least have some form of objective historical basis, but Scientology does not even have that.
When the foundation is that shoddy, how am I supposed to swallow anything else about it?
Buddhism: Don't get me wrong, I do find some of Buddhism's tenets admirable, and many emphasize virtues many Christians would find laudable. I even admit praise for its emphasis on the denial of vices and folly and rising above that which makes us petty and venal.
My problem again goes back to logic. While it's well and good to follow it on this Earth, if humanity ceases to be, and in fact, Earth itself ceases to be, what benefit arises from its teaching anymore?
Hinduism: It's a great source to mine for mythology and fiction, admittedly, but as a faith, you are required, upfront, to believe a lot of things that have been endlessly retconned over and over again over centuries, not to mention it a pretty India centric faith, Buddhism made better inroads elsewhere because Hinduism was pretty much tailored for one specific geographic location.
Islam: Islam has a problem with basic logic that I cannot resolve. It claims Jews and Christians have an imperfect version of God's revelations, but the inconsistencies pile up fast.
First off, the very beginning of the Qu'ran says humanity was created from a clot of congealed blood, whereas the Torah and Bible cite we came from dust. Also, for a religion that claims Abraham as a patriarch, it sure has a lot of naked contempt of the Jews and a lot of advocacy of putting nonbelievers to the sword, whereas Jews mostly set themselves apart from others on God's instructions, and Christians merely exported the basic tenets of Judaism minus the Jewish specific parts because the religious franchise was made available to Jews and Gentiles equally.
Islam rolls all that back and makes conversion an even MORE exclusive experience than the things it claims precedes it.
Mormonism: Logic makes this one easy to skewer. It's basically the Bible with a lot of fanfiction attached that cannot be backed up by archelogy or any other branch of history, and it introduces a lot of concepts neither Judaism or Christianity ever countenanced or supported.
My late grandfather said he didn't believe it but it had a good backstory, and I agree. It's entertaining in a fictional sense, but I in no way can buy into its legitimacy because all we have is Joseph Smith's word for it, and even other non-Christian faiths bring more to the table for the verifiable historical fact than that.
I could go on about other, more minor faiths, but the short version is that while faith is a key component of all of them when I try to reduce them to logically provable stuff, Judaism and Christianity at least have provable continuity and a high level of consistency.
I won't claim they are perfect and that they don't have mysteries or inconsistencies, that would be arrogant and foolish, but at the end of the day, I'm a Christian besides faith in the creed because it has the least amount of inconsistency compared to its competitors based on the available evidence, and I'm convinced Christianity logically follows from the foundation of Judaism.
> I'm a non-denominational Protestant
ReplyDeleteAh, that answers one thing I wondered about when making an earlier comment!
>I do not actively hate anyone of any faith or no faith
Good to know!
>I wanted to explain why I cannot buy into the tenets of several belief systems in particular and why from a personal perspective.
Does this mean you do buy into tenets of belief systems other than Protestantism? Or that you don't, but you ESPECIALLY exclude some with more extreme doubts?
>Atheism: While this is technically the absence of faith or denial of a higher power, I'm covering this first just to cover all the bases.
A bit of a semantic nightmare, I remember long chats about various interpretations of what it meant, and phrases like "explicit atheism" v "implicit atheism" being bandied about, for example.
>My reason for not buying into atheism is that, if you apply logic, it has a pretty hopeless message. Apparently, we live, die, and that's it. Our memory may exist for future generations, but if humanity as a whole dies out, our existence ceases to matter.
I don't think that a lack of belief in a god/deity necessarily means someone also must outrule the possibility of life after death. It seems like someone might believe in ghosts/afterlife just without deific oversight?
>I can understand agnostics a little better than I do atheists,
Again I think that comes down to definitions. If theism is a belief that a deity exists, and gnosticism is personal spiritual knowledge (as opposed to faith) then it seems like agnosticism should imply theists who operate on faith rather than gnosis (direct godly knowledge).
The term agnostic seems to assert that godly knowledge must exist (thus it is something to lack) which is why it seems strange, etymologically speaking, how it is used to represent the idea of someone asserting some kind of middle "maybe a god exists, maybe a god does not exist" stance...
Particularly since it seems to imply, in taking up that neutral territory, that "atheism" must be explicit/guaranteed (ie "god can't exist" or "I know god doesn't exit") rather than a simple lack ("without") which I thought the "a-" prefix was meant to represent.
I get a feeling that in certain communities that extremists seem to lead them and try to redefine terms and common usage to exclude moderates, which is pretty frustrating.
ReplyDelete>flat out saying we were born, will die, and that's it for our existence is one of the most fatalistic things I've ever heard, and I refuse to believe human life is that pointless.
I try to be open-minded, so as sad as this idea is, I feel compelled to keep my mind open to that dark possibility, however occasionally depressing that pessimistic attitude can be.
At the same time, anyone guaranteeing "that's it" I think is making a logical mistake, because there is always a possibility of aspects of reality existing which we lack the ability to perceive/detect with our present technologies, and there is never any guarantee that we will expand our senses/technologies enough to fully perceive all aspects of the universe.
I take the approaches of both "we can't 100% know there is life after death" and "we can't 100% know there isn't life after death" and reject either 100% assertions and 100% denials.
Whatever the odds are in the middle might be where conversations could be had, though I really don't know how to assign numbers to it. I think it is clear though that as technology expands, for there to continue to be voids in evidence, we must conclude that either the supernatural becomes increasingly subtle so as to escape our documentation, or else it was ALWAYS subtle.
If it was always subtle, then either our abilities to perceive used to be better and have decreased, or else our previous assumptions on the supernatural may have involved a lot more faith/guesswork/speculation than now. Which leads me to question the amount to which we might be inclined to rely upon previous centuries' declarations about this compared to measurements we might taken at present time which might be more accurately understood.