seebs
God Made Me A Skeptic
- Apr 9, 2002
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Is it possible for me to be converted with the following condition?
Yes.
That people are generally good.
I believe this. I also believe people are generally fallen; I also believe people are generally being redeemed. To ignore any one of these is problematic. To deny evil is to deny the potential for redemption. To deny redemption is to despair. To deny good makes the whole thing a joke.
That to have proof is better then to believe without proof.
In the sense of "belief" as in "assent to propositions", I agree.
That said, there are a number of things I believe without proof, and indeed, nearly everything I believe is contingent on things that I cannot prove.
Sometimes, you have to punt. But yes; always look for good evidence first.
That logic and reason should be at the core of how the world is viewed.
This may be the hardest one. What do you do on things that logic and reason can't answer? If you reject them out of hand, then you're not gonna get very far on anything. If you take logic and reason as far as they will go, but no farther, and accept their limitations, they make an excellent core strategy.
That fear should never guide decisions.
Amen!
That new ideas should be examined.
That old ideas should be changed if they are found to be wrong.
Absolutely agreed on both parts.
The condition is that no part of your attempt to convert me can override any of these tenets. The other option is to show that the tenet you override is not worth being a tenet. I ask this because every attempt to convert me has failed with this condition.
Well, I'm not much of one for "trying to convert people". You get to make up your own mind.
I can tell you that I pretty much agree with your tenets, and that I have ended up as a fairly zealous Christian.
The big questions, I think, are:
1. Why be Christian?
2. Why believe in God?
The answers to these are closely related. And no, neither is "some guy said so."
I am not very comfortable with unproven claims. I was raised by feral mathematicians, and I consider empirical evidence a poor substitute for real knowledge, which comes in the form of formal proofs. Empiricism might tell me what is; proofs tell me what can be.
This leads to a problem. How do I know anything? What do I make of my experiences? It is useless to deny that I have experiences; I have them, they are directly present, and all that's really at issue is how to interpret them. The interpretation which seems to have naturally arisen before I was even thinking about the question is that the sensations I have are in some way related to things external to me, most of the time. There are exceptions; sometimes I hear a high-pitched noise in one ear, or experience mild itching when nothing is touching me. Sometimes I dream.
Nonetheless, by and large, my conclusion has been that my experiences are of things. I further confirm this in two ways. First, I check for consistency of my experiences; second, I check them with the experiences of other people.
One category of experience, called "the numinous" by C. S. Lewis, is the thing that happens when people have religious experiences. I have some experiences like this; more sometimes than others. Since my general policy is to treat experiences as though they are experiences of something, I assume that something is happening. But what?
Most religions seem to have developed out of an attempt to answer this question.
A central theme of my experiences of whatever-this-is has been healing and compassion. I am not naturally a kind or patient person, but through some thing greater than me, I have become kinder and more patient. I know what it is like to have self-control, and I know what it is like to be stopped by something other than me, and sometimes, when I have experienced that sickening dread, the knowledge that I lost the leash again and I am about to do something I will always regret, I have found that it didn't happen, and a Presence was with me.
Over time, I have come to have a sense of what this presence is like. I have found that I know people in many religions who share this experience, although their words to describe it vary.
Of the various religions out there, I accepted Christianity, because I found that I recognized the person of Jesus in the Gospels as the One who has been with me. I am reasonably sure that the term "God" is an attempt to explain this experience, and I find that this experience is reflected in the Gospels. This is enough to make me a Christian.
I don't even understand attempts to convert people based on threatening them with God. When I was six, do you think you could have frightened me into going home, by telling me that if I didn't go home, my mother would come for me? No. (I know that some people would have been frightened by those words; it terrifies and saddens me.)
God is love, and perfect love casts out fear. Fear is not a motivation to do the right thing.
Pragmatically, supernaturalist or not, the teachings of Jesus work. There is a strange and even terrifying power in the way that loving your enemies transforms your experience of them. It is a thing of wonder. I can never go back.
Some of this, you will note, is rather more experiential, and rather less rigidly argued, than you might think appropriate from your tenets. This is because the question of value is inherently beyond the scope of logic. You can reason from a value judgement to a course of action, but you cannot reason to a value judgement; you must always start with one.
Hope this helps!
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