7 ms·

> With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. You can only "have faith". If your spiritual leader or holy book tells you the world is a certain

by vec 8y ago

> With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. You can only "have faith". If your spiritual leader or holy book tells you the world is a certain way, you can only believe it, or disbelieve it, you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views: Believe this because I tell you to! There's a few thousand years of Talmudic scholarship you might want to read up on, just to pick one of the more obvious from among the many counterexamples. Almost every religion is a much broader and much more intellectually diverse intellectual project than their respective fundamentalists would like you to believe.

mfoy_ 8y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai. Just because people spent a long time debating the interpretation of their holy book (and accompanying oral tradition) does not make it any less grounded in the supernatural, at the end of the day. Followers still have to either believe it, or not, where "it" is that some divine revelation inspired those original sources.
- vec 8y ago
  You're not wrong, per se, but you are parroting the fundamentalist party line. Maybe I've just got a unique perspective on the issue (I'm a Unitarian Universalist; everyone at my church respects my atheism as a sincere and personally fulfilling spiritual journey and a valuable perspective within the community at large), but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest. Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally but least importantly "how does the world work?". And science indisputably provides better answers, which is why many theological schools of thought are more than happy to cede their authority in the topic. It free them up to focus on the more important question: "given the world, how best should we live in it?". It turns out that narrativizing and anthropomorphizing the world around us provides an immensely powerful framing device for thinking critically about community values and for approaching consensus on what those values should be, both across cultural lines and between generations. In other words it doesn't really matter whether the Torah was divinely inspired or not. It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.
  - all2 8y ago
    > but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest. I agree. I take a fundamental interpretation approach to the Bible. I firmly believe that science must jive with my belief-set. If it doesn't, there are serious questions that I need to answer. Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible. I don't purport to know everything, nor do I think I'll ever manage to answer all the outstanding questions. I also don't claim correctness on either side of the question. What is important for me is cognitive resonance. > Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally [...] No. I would counter that religion (in general) seeks to answer the "why" of it all. > It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less. "Seek and you will find..." in this case, we go looking for answers and eventually, (sometimes) in matters that can't be handled scientifically, we settle on suitable answers.
    - jimbokun 8y ago
      "Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible." It's not clear the Bible has much to say about these at all. Fundamentalists insist that it does, but there are many other strands of Christian thought that disagree.
      - all2 8y ago
        And thus more questions. One of the axioms I struggle with in these sorts of discussions is the idea of Truth, or ground truth, or absolute truth: this idea that there is some complete representation of reality that possesses is-ness (it exists and we perceive only a small piece of it). If we assume there is a ground truth (as an axiom, inductively suggested by persistent results from physical experimentation), then we still can say nothing of the God that created it (this, all of this expansive and perplexing existence). In fact, science as it stands cannot answer questions that we cannot test. How do you test for the existence of a being that is not a part of what we live in? Even if the God overlaps with our existence (a core tradition of Christianity being omnipresence) what test can we leverage to show He is here? All of this leads to the dispersed opinions of many, many people. We have supposed two things so far: there is a God, and there is some absolute representation of our universe (above I called it existence). Given ground truth, how might we approach the texts that are said to explain God? As a society (my guess is many people do this) we tend to overlay what we "know" onto things we don't understand. For example, in Genesis we have words like erev and boker which are translated consistently as "morning" and "evening". But its ancient Hebrew, we don't actually have the meaning as it was intended. We have lost the societal context that informed the deeper meanings of those words. So we guess. We think they mean morning and evening. But that's at best ambiguous. They could mean "order" and "disorder", as they are used in other contexts to mean that. I'm sure I could meander about and come up with a logically sound chain of interpretations, but I only left this here to illustrate just how difficult the interpretation of simple things can be.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  > Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai. If you're Orthodox, both the written Torah and the Oral Torah (Talmud) were capital-R Revealed by a supernatural authority at Mount Sinai. Yes, the study notes for the book were revealed with the book. If you find this confusing, well, go pick up Rudin's Principles to Mathematical Analysis.
  - Miltnoid 8y ago
    And so it came to pass that Rudin Revealed both baby Rudin and big Rudin, and it was good.
    - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
      That was, inadvertently, pretty funny, although I was more referring to the way that you usually wouldn't tell someone, "Oh, just go read Rudin" if they really wanted to understand analysis. Instead, you'd give them Rudin and an entire semester's worth of lecture notes and recitation sessions -- which is how we actually educate people.

by vec 8y ago

mfoy_ 8y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai. Just because people spent a long time debating the interpretation of their holy book (and accompanying oral tradition) does not make it any less grounded in the supernatural, at the end of the day. Followers still have to either believe it, or not, where "it" is that some divine revelation inspired those original sources.

vec 8y ago
You're not wrong, per se, but you are parroting the fundamentalist party line. Maybe I've just got a unique perspective on the issue (I'm a Unitarian Universalist; everyone at my church respects my atheism as a sincere and personally fulfilling spiritual journey and a valuable perspective within the community at large), but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest. Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally but least importantly "how does the world work?". And science indisputably provides better answers, which is why many theological schools of thought are more than happy to cede their authority in the topic. It free them up to focus on the more important question: "given the world, how best should we live in it?". It turns out that narrativizing and anthropomorphizing the world around us provides an immensely powerful framing device for thinking critically about community values and for approaching consensus on what those values should be, both across cultural lines and between generations. In other words it doesn't really matter whether the Torah was divinely inspired or not. It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less.
- all2 8y ago
  > but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest. I agree. I take a fundamental interpretation approach to the Bible. I firmly believe that science must jive with my belief-set. If it doesn't, there are serious questions that I need to answer. Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible. I don't purport to know everything, nor do I think I'll ever manage to answer all the outstanding questions. I also don't claim correctness on either side of the question. What is important for me is cognitive resonance. > Religion, broadly speaking, aims to answer a variety of questions; most foundationally [...] No. I would counter that religion (in general) seeks to answer the "why" of it all. > It's the grain of sand that the Talmudic pearl accreted around, no more, no less. "Seek and you will find..." in this case, we go looking for answers and eventually, (sometimes) in matters that can't be handled scientifically, we settle on suitable answers.
  - jimbokun 8y ago
    "Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible." It's not clear the Bible has much to say about these at all. Fundamentalists insist that it does, but there are many other strands of Christian thought that disagree.
    - all2 8y ago
      And thus more questions. One of the axioms I struggle with in these sorts of discussions is the idea of Truth, or ground truth, or absolute truth: this idea that there is some complete representation of reality that possesses is-ness (it exists and we perceive only a small piece of it). If we assume there is a ground truth (as an axiom, inductively suggested by persistent results from physical experimentation), then we still can say nothing of the God that created it (this, all of this expansive and perplexing existence). In fact, science as it stands cannot answer questions that we cannot test. How do you test for the existence of a being that is not a part of what we live in? Even if the God overlaps with our existence (a core tradition of Christianity being omnipresence) what test can we leverage to show He is here? All of this leads to the dispersed opinions of many, many people. We have supposed two things so far: there is a God, and there is some absolute representation of our universe (above I called it existence). Given ground truth, how might we approach the texts that are said to explain God? As a society (my guess is many people do this) we tend to overlay what we "know" onto things we don't understand. For example, in Genesis we have words like erev and boker which are translated consistently as "morning" and "evening". But its ancient Hebrew, we don't actually have the meaning as it was intended. We have lost the societal context that informed the deeper meanings of those words. So we guess. We think they mean morning and evening. But that's at best ambiguous. They could mean "order" and "disorder", as they are used in other contexts to mean that. I'm sure I could meander about and come up with a logically sound chain of interpretations, but I only left this here to illustrate just how difficult the interpretation of simple things can be.
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai. If you're Orthodox, both the written Torah and the Oral Torah (Talmud) were capital-R Revealed by a supernatural authority at Mount Sinai. Yes, the study notes for the book were revealed with the book. If you find this confusing, well, go pick up Rudin's Principles to Mathematical Analysis.
- Miltnoid 8y ago
  And so it came to pass that Rudin Revealed both baby Rudin and big Rudin, and it was good.
  - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
    That was, inadvertently, pretty funny, although I was more referring to the way that you usually wouldn't tell someone, "Oh, just go read Rudin" if they really wanted to understand analysis. Instead, you'd give them Rudin and an entire semester's worth of lecture notes and recitation sessions -- which is how we actually educate people.