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Aswad -> RE: Spiritual Compatibility (4/28/2007 5:15:30 PM)
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Okay, I'm probably going to go down in flames for this one, but here goes... please try to keep an open mind when reading this everyone, and assume good faith.
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ORIGINAL: Suleiman
Born Agains - those who have newly converted or newly reaffirmed their faith - are the most annoying. Born Again Pagans actually irritate me more than their christian counterparts. A born again or fundamentalist christian is expected to go out and try to convert people. Born again pagans or wiccans often do much the same, along with happily attacking other faiths - especially christianity - while claiming to be open minded about and accepting of other people's beliefs.
I'd have to agree with that. A lot of Christians annoy the heck out of me, but not nearly as much as their equivalents in the Pagan communities. Adding hypocrisy to dogmatism, while condemning both of these, is frequently the last drop with regards to my patience.
But I'll point out that there is one other group of born-agains that annoys me more: the born-again atheists. Nowhere have I ever found as devout believers as these; they are absolutely blind in their faith in "science" (which would be mostly fine by me, if they understood actual science, hence the quotation marks), as absorbed in their dogma, and as hypocritical. They're fanatically bent on converting everyone else to their own beliefs, frequently spouting that any faith but their own should be banned, as well as often proclaiming tolerance, open-mindedness and a profound dedication to (e.g.) humane-ethics, while being the most intolerant, close-minded people I've ever come across in truth, as well as spending far more time fighting other faiths than living by the tenets of their own.
Agnosticism, or whatever it's called these days, is an absence of faith. Atheism is the presence of a secular faith, or counter-faith if you will.
It seems to me that a lot of people start out getting their lives and/or minds messed up by religious fanatics, and then convert to their concept of the opposite of that faith, just as fanatically as the people who messed them up in the first place, before starting to propagate the injustice that was visited upon themselves, as if two wrongs would make a right. It usually goes one of two ways: either they convert to atheism, or they convert to some appropriate inversion of their original faith. Which it is will generally depend on their subconscious ideas of what would be the greatest inversion.
Of course, frequently, this inversion is generational. I've seen families where the first generation is strictly religious, leading to the children becoming atheist in opposition and being equally strict about their children being atheist, leading to the grandchildren becoming religious again in opposition to their oppression.
To the born-again atheists credit, however, I have yet to see this chain start with atheism, but there is a definite propagation of the same mindset, just with different faiths.
This kind of brings to mind what Nietzsche said about master and slave morality...
The master creates values, and deems them good. Whatever is harmful to him/her is bad in itself. There is no intrinsic concept of evil, as such, at least in Nietzsche's opinions.
The slave, however, starts from what is "evil", derived from their opposition to their oppressors and the values those hold. A sense of good arises as a complement to evil, not by itself, and tends to focus somewhat on utility.
I definitely get a sense of this bit going on with certain atheists, although I'd be quick to point out that many religions also appear to start from "evil" and work their way from there.
The Abrahamic faiths certainly seem to do this, for instance. They start out of opposition to their oppressors in Egypt, and Leviticus deals (to a large extent) with defining the tenets of the faith in terms of opposition to the faiths, values and practices of the surrounding lands.
That said, I subscribe to a personal form of the Judeo-Christian faith, with some gnostic elements, but believe that any "vertical transmission" (divine inspiration) has been severely watered out, if not lost, along the path of "horizontal transmission" (the scriptures and religious organizations). In my view, the Bible has to be interpreted as a flawed and incomplete translation of a document targetted at the masses of prehistoric times, not as a literal guide for the spiritual individual in the modern age. Anyone hoping to get in touch with the faith through the Bible, will have to sort through the cultural context of the time, the compromises made to give it some positive impact rather than none, and the literal integrity of transmission (vowel points, translations, redactions, consensus on selection of scriptures to include, etc.). A formidable task, as such.
My "strongest" spiritual experiences haven't been in a religious setting at all.
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Either way, rote recitaion of dogmatic views without any deeper understanding is what really bugs me.
Me too, whether it is secular dogma, Christian dogma, Pagan dogma, or any other form. I have no problem with agnostics, and very little problem with atheists who have a solid grasp of scientific method, philosophy and logic, but presentation without content is still just window dressing.
In this regard, I'd say James Randi is a modern day prophet, of sorts. Rather than try to reach out to the masses with scientific method, philosophy and logic, which I'm sure he realizes the futility of as well as I do, he tries to replace their existing faiths with another kind, one that is tended to by the "religious" (in a secular sense) leaders that he has the most faith in. Unfortunately, the message of science is frequently lost on the masses, so he's just trading one problem for another. Kudos for what he has done for the atheist faith, though; few evangelists have been as successful in reaching the masses.
The million dollar (or whatever it is now) challenge stands as a sort of Ark of the Covenant for the atheist faith. It is something many people with no grasp of the science involved place great faith in, but which is not usually subject to closer inspection. Few of the people who have brought it up when debating with me have been aware of the stringent non-scientific requirements involved; the need for full disclosure including identity, the requirement that you pay the associated costs of subjecting your claim to his tests, and so forth are things they rarely consider.
I'm not positing the existance of provable supernatural phenomena as a part of this argument. I'm just saying that even if they were to exist, his challenge would most likely go unmet. Let's say you could cure cancer, as a hypothetical case. Would you have the finances to pay for the equivalent of a phase 3 trial, which is what it would take to prove it to medical science? And, if you did, would you agree to make the fact known to the world, so every hopeless case around, or their families, would come knocking down your door, trying to cart you off to wherever to heal "everyone"? There are other issues too, but I think these should suffice.
Quite simply, if such phenomena were to exist, they could not be commonplace, or we would have proof by now. And if they aren't commonplace, then the supply (whether it be time, energy, money or whatever) is far less than the demand, making a million dollars worth exactly zilch in terms of quality of life subsequent to exposure.
To my mind, atheism qualifies as a faith- the scientifically unprovable belief in the absence of something- whereas agnosticism is just the absence of faith. It's a valid faith, to be sure, but a faith nonetheless. And one whose adherents can display all the good and bad qualities found among adherents of other faiths, and whose leaders and organizations have the same positive and negative qualities to them as the leaders and organizations of other faiths.
Anyway, just my 2 cents. Sorry if I wasn't very clear here; this topic seems like it might be prone to blowing up, so I didn't feel like investing as much effort as usual in it until I see if it does.
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