Quote:This discussion is growing further and further from the practical way this whole thing plays out.
How do you know how this thing plays out in my life? I'm not Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. You don't watch my day to day living. You have no idea how it plays out in my life.
It seems you have a lot of preconceived notions about a lot of things. Maybe you should open YOUR mind- just a little bit.
Quote:The way this actually plays out in life; the moment when a quest for faith comes in conflict with a quest to understand nature is usually when faith asks the individual to stop. Stop asking questions.
I have never stopped asking questions. I can never remember being asked by anyone to stop asking questions. In fact, not to brag, but at the last public highschool I taught at which was ranked 52 of public highschools in the US and had 1600 students and an incredibly accomplished and diverse faculty - I was given the distinction of having been voted by students and faculty an example of a 'lifelong learner'.
No big deal to you maybe, but I was pretty proud of that - especially that I had seemed to convey the NEED for that to the students.
It's in my personnel file - you can check
Quote:When the person who has studied nature is interested in what faith has to offer, they are asked to forget what they have learned about the universe and simply have faith.
Wrong, in my case. I am fully able to have faith and understand and believe in evolution. And I have never been asked to forget anything I've learned anywhere by anyone
Quote:and if I had questions about the universe pursuing those questions are not welcome in a faith.
Do you even go to gatherings of any sort where people of any faith discuss these things? Or are you basing your impressions on what you read in the newspaper about rabid, creationist, right wing christianity?
Talk about not questioning...
You're simply wrong (in my case) and in many others I would venture to guess. I won't make blanket generalizations as you seem wont to do.
Quote:if I had questions about the universe pursuing those questions are not welcome in a faith.
Really? Where has this happened to you? Specifically what faith and in what church?
Or do you just KNOW that it would happen in every faith and in any faith-based gathering? And also that it happens to EVERYONE....
So who's the one who's not questioning?
Quote:You've got it for now? Got what?
Most of the relevant science-based information that's been discovered about the origins and history of the earth in the past century. I have also asked questions and had them answered by people who have PhD's in geology and biology and physics (whom I happened to interact with on a daily basis in my job) and listened to their answers.
And guess what - I BELIEVE what they told me. I READ what they gave me to read and I even UNDERSTAND it.
And I don't find that it contradicts even one single bit of my FAITH at all. These facts and my faith live happily side by side within me.
You don't even know what my faith IS...and you're telling me I can't have it and believe the facts.
How arrogant!
Quote:It is not that a disinterest in understanding nature makes a person boring, but rather a non-interest in knowing the implications of nature on man and its creations that make a person intellectually neutered.
I'd venture to say that I've studied and observed nature at least as much as you have - probably more because I grew up in it and still experience it (by choice) on a daily basis (another one of my NEEDS that you would probably deny is a NEED) and I've lived twice as long as you have.
Get a clue Diest.
Quote:How does a faith being long lasting give it value if it is wrong?
How can a faith be "meaningful" if it is factually wrong?
Those are actually good questions.
But those were your descriptor- long lasting and meaningful- not mine.
I was just quoting you.
I think that's a topic for another thread though.
Quote:Ack! More origins of the universe! The topic is much more diverse than just that.
Of course it is, and extremely interesting. I sat in an Earth Science course a few years ago and learned a lot - but in my mind- and I think it's commonly agreed, we've collected data that has answered many, many questions. But the outstanding and unanswered, and most interesting question (to me, maybe not to you) is still - how the whole thing was set in motion. The origin.
Quote:What makes you think we can have no definitive answer?
I don't think we can't. I just know that right now we don't.
Quote:Is this what faith says?
Not mine.
Quote:Is this what you believe of science?
No, I'm amazed at the advances that have been made in science and technology.
Quote:I'm just curious. Are you under some assumption that intellectually religion has science at a stalemate?
No.
Quote:I'm not telling people to put down their guitars at the open mic night. I'm not telling them to huddle up so we can talk about the origins of the universe. I'm saying that to reject science and logic for faith is intellectually shallow.
I know many people of faith who don't do that and never would.
Again, I think you have a false and unilateral view. Or maybe it has to do with you living in the south or Bible belt. Who the heck knows.
I have never found this is be a necessity in any of the places I have lived.
Quote:Your motive for pursuing faith and the pursuit to understand people are not one and the same. They are two different quests, and even they can conflict much like science and faith can conflict.
Wow Diest, you seem to know more about me than I know about myself.
Quote:Faith will tell a Christian that homosexuality is a sin/amoral . A quest to understand people has lead great minds in psychology to think that homosexuality has natural origins; that it is not a choice. If it is not a choice, how can it be sin? If it is natural, and yet still a sin somehow to choose to live as a homosexual, then the person is defying the nature that god gave them. Again, faith conflicts. In this case it conflicts internally with it's own logic.
Yes, certainly. As I said in the last post, each quest for faith has an objective and directive as individual as each person on that quest.
I don't believe homosexuality is a sin. I also don't believe it's my role to focus on what others do that may or may not constitute a sin.
I monitor my own behavior and actually, 'sin' is a word I don't use or see very often.
Not really a concept I embrace.
Maybe you should reexamine what you know about ALL FAITHS and the practices of ALL SEEKERS OF FAITH...
Quote:Thats for you to sort out, but I don't expect you to challenge your current comfort zone.
Why not? Do you know me that well? Interesting because you've never met me. Or do you think that all people who have any faith at all in anything have a particular comfort zone and want to stay there?
And you know this how?
My question is why you find it necessary to communicate in such a derisive and derogatory tone?
My faith would not allow me to treat or talk to another person that way.
Quote:What other aspects of who you are would you give up? How far would you take this? At what point would you draw the line? At what point would you be satisfied in knowing that holding on it faith and letting other things go in your life that you valued was NOT worth it?
Theoretical question but interesting. I'd have to think more about that. Maybe a good idea for another thread (generalized though to embrace more and different conceptual entities- explaining this whole faith thing to people who haven't experienced and don't understand what faith is or means to someone gets BORING....(kidding - but it does feel sort of futile)
Quote:
I'll ask you a personal question. If it's too personal, I understand.
Have you ever lost your mother or father?
Not yet.
Quote:I have only known a world with both of them. I cannot imagine my world without them. If either or both was gone, I would feel a certain emptiness. I would feel much like you've expressed what your loss of faith would (as you imagine at least) feeling like. In the face of all of that, I know that day will come. I know there will be a day that I will have to know a world without them. I fully admit that I am not prepared for that day, but I am forced to accept that come that day or some day to follow it, I will and must survive. More than survive, I will need to thrive.
Yes. My mother and father are why I have faith, in anything, especially myself. I can't even express to you how gifted I feel to have been born to these two specific people.
They have given me everything and just continue to give.
I will lose them sooner rather than later now, I know that and it's a wrenching thought to me. It makes me cry, right now, just thinking about it.
But I wouldn't be able to denounce my faith to keep them with me. It would be like saying to someone, 'I don't have freckles.' I DO...I just do.
Quote:I cannot understand how the absence of faith could ever compare to a loss such as this, and how if we can live and thrive even after such a loss as that, how it can even be entertained that a loss of faith would be something that we could not only get over, but thrive in spite of.
It has something to do with hope for me.
And I can never give up hope - it's ridiculous I know.
My son says to me - 'You are just fucking TENACIOUS..' (when he gets frustrated with me).
And I am - I know that.
But one thing I'm not is ignorant.
Quote:Aside from the joke, do you disagree with this statement?
No, I agree it can have the same affect as a mood enhancing drug. But it's natural (to me).
No harmful side effects (for me).
But my dose is moderate and informed by information, observation and rational and intelligent care.
Quote:I'm not saying a discussion of feelings/emotions is off limits here aidan. But lets be clear, those things are wants. I would never say wants are trivial or that they aren't important, but even importance is a subjective measure.
And a NEED is subjective. Determined by what one does or doesn't have. My Brain produces enough serotonin and dopamine, so I don't NEED antidepressants.
But I talked to my friend last night, and her brain doesn't work as mine does.
To save her life - not just to get through it - to save it - she NEEDS something different than I do.
Quote:Just stop screwing up the science standards in our schools.
Yeah, well, again- you say you lived in Missouri and Virginia. I taught for twenty years in public highschools in six different states on the east coast - one in the south, although it was in Chapel Hill, which is a fairly cosmopolitan town as far as the south goes- and I never heard a word of Creationism even breathed in a science classroom.
I think it's much less widespread than people perceive.
And as the whole tenor of the political and educational culture begin their shift, I'm sure we'll be less and less inundated by inflamed articles about it in the press.
Quote:I promise you that I could never tell you or another person what they were, and you could figure it out.
Not from reading/speaking with them on the internet.
I think self-reporting (even if it's dishonest- that tells you something in itself) is essential in terms of gaining a deep and thorough understanding of a person.
