I’m curious how much of the traffic here is people with religious beliefs.

There’s no rule against it. I just want to understand better. I’m not interested in debating or criticizing anyone’s choice to visit the comm or practice religion.

My questions:

  • Do you practice or otherwise hold some sort of faith? What kind? Is there a comm for it?

  • What are your thoughts on this (c/Atheism) comm? Do you visit because threads appear on your front page, or do you subscribe/visit intentionally? Why do you click on the topics / what kinds of topics do you click on?

  • Do you comment when you read threads here, or are you more of a lurker?

  • Is there anything you would like to express to the members of this community?

Thank you in advance for any responses.

  • p3n@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Sure, thanks for asking. Sorry for the book, but I wanted to provide a thorough answer.

    Let me start with religion. This can refer to some kind of belief in God or more vaguely in “the supernatural”. It can also refer to certain rituals and practices associated with those beliefs. I see many people associate it with “organized religion” which seems to have strong negative connotations (for good reason), as being, phony, disingenuous, a scam, manipulative, a power play, etc. You can find these definitions in various dictionaries, but I use the definition that dictionary.com provides: noun a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe…

    I can’t speak for other people because I don’t know what it is like to be you, or know how you perceive the world. I can only assume that we have similarities based on a shared human condition. I don’t see how it is possible to live without either explicitly accepting a fundamental set of beliefs, or at a minimum, implicitly validating them with my actions (which may actually be a truer indication of what I really believe). Regardless, either ignoring a set of beliefs or espousing them isn’t going to make them more or less true, which is ultimately what matters.

    In our current society, it seems to be accepted that science and religion are diametrically opposed and cannot co-exist. I have observed, especially on the internet, that if I espouse to be religious, then it is assumed that I believe in flying spaghetti monsters and think the earth is flat. I believe that intellectually honest people will find that they are actually in more similar circumstances than they realize. It would be foolish for me to disregard scientific observation and experimentation, but it would be equally foolish for me to disregard the limitations of those observations and experiments:

    • It is impossible to take a zero-trust approach with science (never trust, always verify). I don’t have access to a Large Hadron Collider to observe the Higgs boson for myself. I don’t have access to the LUX-ZEPLIN to experiment with dark matter. I don’t have access to the LIGO Lab to observe gravitational waves. I trust that these experiments are conducted correctly and that their findings are correct, but by doing so I am placing my faith in the scientists performing the experiments. I do so also knowing that complete objectivity is impossible. I have a personal bias. My own life experience and observations skew the way I see the world. I assume this is the same of other people, scientists included.

    • Even if I had access to all the equipment necessary, and dedicated my entire life to scientific experimentation, I would only be able to conduct a tiny fraction of experiments necessary to explore just a few of the questions about the nature of the universe. At the end of my life, I would likely have more questions about the universe than when I began.

    • Even if I had the time, ability, and equipment necessary to conduct all necessary experiments to explore my questions about the universe, I would be making a fundamental assumption that I am actually able to observe everything. I have no idea if there are other dimensions that I will never be able to observe or experiment with. I simply have to accept by faith that these do or do not exist.

    • Even if I assumed that everything is observable, and I had the capacity to conduct all necessary experiments, I would still have an impossible problem from a practical standpoint: I need to make decisions on a daily basis. I don’t have a lifetime to wait and scientifically determine the nature of the universe before I make a decision about how I want to live my life. I am living it right now. The fundamental truth about the universe matters in the decisions that I have to make right now.

    This is why faith is a necessity. I look around, and I see that I am just one of over seven billion people on this Earth, and that Earth is just one of eight planets orbiting our Sun, and that our Sun is just one of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, a galaxy that is so vast, even travelling at the impossible speed of light, would take me thousands of lifetimes to traverse, and that galaxy is just one of possibly trillions of galaxies in what is just the observable universe. One thing is for sure. I am very small, in every sense of the word. To sit here, and read this paragraph again, and then think that I really know-it-all would make me one of the most arrogant beings in the universe. I know very little, and I live by faith.

    • possibly a cat@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      A thought-provoking thesis, thank you.

      What mechanism prevents a lack of faith, though, in your mind? Is it that not having some faith in something would lead to decision paralysis? Do you not consider it possible to navigate life though statistical confidence/lack of confidence as opposed to conviction? Or is it that such an approach still falls under what you identify as a type of faith?

      • p3n@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        A thought-provoking thesis, thank you.

        Sure, thanks for the discussion.

        What mechanism prevents a lack of faith, though, in your mind?

        I think a lack of faith, in the sense of doubting what I believe or what I have placed my trust in, is a natural reaction to uncertainty. What I was clumsily trying to describe is that: Because I lack fundamental knowledge of the universe, I must constantly make decisions based on incomplete information. This requires me to place trust in something or someone external from myself.

        Is it that not having some faith in something would lead to decision paralysis?

        I think the point I was trying to make is that, even if I don’t consciously acknowledge my decisions, by just living life I am implicitly trusting in a truth about reality. To give an analogy, imagine three people are walking across a frozen pond covered in snow:

        • The first person checks to see if there is ice underneath, and then measures the thickness of the ice, decides that it will hold them, and walks across
        • The second person sees that there is ice underneath, but doesn’t measure it, and just decides to walk across
        • The third person has no clue there is ice there, and walks across the frozen pond

        The first person has faith in what they have observed and trusts that the ice will hold them. The second person just has blind faith in the ice and trusts that it will hold them. The third person is completely ignorant and doesn’t even realize they are walking on ice. While the third person isn’t technically “trusting” the ice, they are living their life in a way that depends on the ice just as much as the other two. What ultimately matters is the truth about whether or not the ice will hold. This truth matters regardless if I am ignorant of it, trust it blindly, or trust it because of my observations.

        Do you not consider it possible to navigate life though statistical confidence/lack of confidence as opposed to conviction? Or is it that such an approach still falls under what you identify as a type of faith?

        As a Poker player, I can appreciate this train of thought, but I wouldn’t want to try to live life based solely on some kind of statistical calculation. I think if I tried to calculate an expected value for living life according to the probability of a worldview, then I would end up in a Pascal’s wager type situation: Even if I was 99.99999% certain that the universe is finite and impersonal, bringing any percentage possibility of eternity into the calculation would swing the value completely in that direction.

        As far as categorizing this as faith, I would place this in the same category as my statements about science: it would be foolish for me to ignore statistics and other branches of mathematics, but it would also be foolish of me to ignore the fact that even mathematics is based on axioms and may be incomplete.

        I don’t want to give the impression that I think life must be lived by blind faith; my worldview is based on a combination of experience, observation, and intellection. However, I do want to dispel the notion that if I were an atheist, I could have a complete worldview that doesn’t require any faith. I don’t mean this as a slight to atheists, but rather an argument that both “religious” people an atheists share the same human condition which is surrounded with uncertainty.