[quote]Perfectcircle wrote:
You haven’t come out and explained why you believe in the teachings that you have had. Why it is so deeply important in your life. These are the questions i was asking at the beginning. That is what i am looking to understand.
Instead of trying to pick holes in another’s thought process explain your own so i can understand why you think like you do.
[/quote]
Okay, but most of what I have to say to you is not going to be of much use to you. Words & logical argument & hearsay & exhortations only take one so far. As has already been said about a million times, there is no proof for God - and, it’s highly likely there never will be. Then again, as has been said a million times, this is a meaningless criticism, since you yourself believe in many things you cannot prove.
Now, please, PerfectCircle, what I am about to say to is not meant to be pejorative, but it’s the best example I can use, so please bear with me: explaining one’s religious experience to someone else is a little like trying to describe a color to someone who is blind. I can try to tell you what “purple” looks like; I can try to tell you how “purple” makes me feel; or how “purple” pervades virtually everything I see and do; or how “purple” has inspired by far and away the best minds in history, scientists included. But to a blind person, the color “purple” simply would have no resonance.
And I understand why it has no resonance, because for many years, in high school and college, I was the most virulent “atheist” I’ve ever known. (I am not saying you are - but I was.) Everywhere I went I said to my professors, to my clergy, to my parents, to my friends, to everyone who would listen to me: “God? God? Where’s the proof for God? WHERE? WHAT? THERE IS NO GOD! GOD IS A DELUSION IN YOUR MIND, A FABRICATION, Etc.” I railed against God and religion and the people who practiced it. Religion, I thought, was against sex, against thought and intellect, against freedom, against love, against progress.
In many ways this posture was what defined me intellectually. But it was wrong - so wrong that I can barely say those things without laughing now.
One might say I had a visceral anger and suspicion of religion, that I even felt downright righteous in denouncing it, as if I were working for the forces of good against the dragon of ignorance and superstition. Some reading this thread might recognize this in their selves.
However, what I was really doing was acting fanatically towards something I really didn’t understand. In other words, I was acting precisely like the very religious fanatics I thought I was fighting against; and I was embodying the very qualities I pretended to dislike in religion.
So how did I come to a different viewpoint? Again, there is no way to explain this. There have been so many forking paths. Let me try to provide one of those paths to you:
I had a near drowning experience off the coast of Guatemala, and spent more than 3 hours drifting without the sight of land anywhere around me. During that time I went through more emotions, and more “time,” than I can possibly explain or describe. It was as if I lived through centuries.
However, during that time I became aware of something - in the universe and in myself - so indestructible, something within that I knew could not be destroyed, like a candle that no wind, no matter how fierce, could extinguish. I KNEW this like I had never known anything before in my life. And that knowing is still echoing within me to this very moment as I tap here on the keyboard.
And yet, I cannot prove it to you; I cannot show it to you; and yet it’s all around me. Indeed, it’s more “REAL” to me than the iron I take upon my shoulders when I squat.
Since then, I’ve had many such moments. I won’t bore you with them unless you ask. They still come to me, even recently. Usually they have to do with death, or coming near death. Or being in an extraordinarily difficult, usually life-threatening, situation. But, increasingly, less so. Increasingly, I find those certainties everywhere I look and think and feel and touch.
And one way or another, they will come to you. I can’t say how. I can’t say when. But they will. Mark my words they will. You might choose to ignore them. You might turn your back. That’s your choice. But come to you they will.
Now, I’ve known an awful lot of people, both religious and secular, from heads of state to garbage collectors, from the desperate poor in developing countries to investment bankers and hedge fund managers in London/New York/Boston, from cardinals and professors to journalists. I come from an enormous family and - given my career - have a truly massive network.
And what I have gleaned from these people of diverse background - what “religious” people are like, what religion is, combined with my own personal experience - does not comport at all with the observations against religion on this thread. To tell the truth, from my perspective, what has been said against religion in this thread reads as rather silly and small-minded.
And that is why - for readers and for you - I have been trying the best I can to provide an alternative viewpoint. To my way of thinking, that alternative viewpoint is rarely, if ever, afforded to people, at least here in the US. Either they face ridicule about God from “atheists” or skeptics or secularists, or they are faced with fundamentalist wackos and whatnot.
Moreover, it seems to me that the charge of brainwashing goes both ways. Surely there are and always have been brainwashed “religious” folk. But the irony falls thick and fast on those who repeat the mantra that “only what has been shown to be scientifically true can possibly be real” - and on those who fume against something they have little experience or knowledge of. They too are evidencing brainwashing.
But, you see, this is a brainwashing so pervasive & so insidious that it just seems like common sense. And so that is why it seems that “religion” needs justification and explanation and “proof” but secularists do not.
What you might consider about this “common sense,” however, is that it is merely a couple hundred years old. We have 100,000 years of religious history behind us.
You might wonder (as I do) at the arrogance of asserting that all those great people - all those great artists, philosophers, thinkers, writers, playwrights, sculptors, painters, musicians, composers, poets - were deluded by, and inspired by, and dedicated their lives to something that we in our narrow little laboratories cannot prove to be true.
How parochial we broad-minded moderns are, aren’t we?