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> My perspective is that atheism is not a lack of worship, but a lack of faith. Can you define what you mean by "faith"? * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z4

• thomastjeffery 5y ago
  Faith was always described to me as a belief in something that cannot be proven. In my experience, however, especially in terms of Christianity, faith is a belief in something that cannot be proven, and - crucially - can be disproven. To put it more clearly, faith detaches a claim from reality, and puts it into a realm above criticism. As a small example, the idea that the first human male was created directly by a deity contradicts the existence of early hominids, cannot account for retroviral DNA sequences present in both humans and apes, etc. St. Thomas Aquinas was an excellent philosopher, whose contributions to human thought will likely continue to be studied for generations to come; whether or not they are based in reality or abstraction. My disagreement with Aquinas is that the ideas of Christianity that are based in the abstract are expressed as literal fact, even though such "facts" and their origins are deeply contradicted by evidence. There is a name for the inability to criticize Christianity for contradicting with evidence: "faith". My experience with faith is a little closer to this century: Mormonism. A flavor of Christianity invented by Joseph Smith, who founded his church in upstate New York in 1830. As a decedent of several Mormon "Pioneers", I was raised in that church. I had deeply held faith in its claims, and even "served" a mission; going door-to-door sharing my beliefs with anyone willing to listen. Later on, I learned a more complete history of the Mormon (LDS) Church, and for the first time applied critical thinking to what I had until then held out of reach with "faith". If you want a picture of what this experience is like, I would recommend this heartfelt letter[1] to a stubbornly faithful spouse. It both expresses the emotional journey of leaving the Mormon faith, and provides detailed information and context on the subject. I haven't spent as much effort deconstructing Christianity on the whole, but there are no doubt similar resources available to the subject. Suffice it to say, after becoming familiar with faith, I see the same pattern applied with all religion. [1] https://www.letterformywife.com/the-letter https://www.letterformywife.com/the-letter
  • geoduck14 5y ago
    With all respect to Mormons and LDS. It is not a flavor of Christianity
    • thomastjeffery 5y ago
      I walked around with a King James Bible every time I went to church. I spent a year learning about The Old Testament in seminary, and another year learning about The New Testament. The Book of Mormon itself directly quotes the King James Bible, errors included. It absolutely is a flavor of Christianity, no matter how unappetizing you find it. The entire story in The Book of Mormon is about Jews who fled the old world, settled the Americas, and worshiped Jesus. The only substantive divergences from Christianity that Mormonism has are additions. But go ahead and detach my criticisms from your religious belief. After all, that is what faith is all about.
      • throw0101a 5y ago
        You start getting into 'no true Scotsman' arguments at this point. Is the only "true" Christianity that which professes the Nicene Creed? Teaches the Real Presence? Other? However, just because the Mormons are using the same words (from the same book) does not necessarily mean that they have the same theological concepts: > This brings me to an example which does involve error of a sort sufficient to make successful reference to the true God doubtful. In the post on Geach linked to above, I cited the 2001 decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that Mormon baptisms are not valid even though they seem at first glance to make use of the correct Trinitarian formula. The reason for the decision is that the Mormon conception of God is so radically different from the Catholic one that it is doubtful that the words truly invoke the Trinity. It is not Trinitarianism per se that is the issue, though, but rather the radical anthropomorphism of the Mormon conception of God. As an article in L'Osservatore Romano summarized the problem at the time: […] > The Mormon conception of deity, then, makes of God something essentially creaturely and finite, something which lacks the absolute metaphysical ultimacy that is definitive of God in Catholic theology and in classical theism more generally. Even Arianism does not do that, despite its grave Trinitarian errors. To be sure, Arianism makes of the second Person of the Trinity a creature, but it does not confuse divinity as such with something creaturely. On the contrary, because it affirms the full divinity and non-creaturely nature of the Father, it mistakenly supposes that it must deny the full divinity of the Son. It gets the notion of divinity as such right, and merely applies it in a mistaken way. Mormons, by contrast, get divinity as such fundamentally wrong. Hence their usage of “God” is arguably merely verbally similar to that of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, et al. They can plausibly be held not really to be referring to the same thing as the latter, and thus not worshipping the same God as the latter. * https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/christians-muslims-and-reference-of-god.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/christians-muslims-... There's some 'inside baseball' differences on what people's practical day-to-day beliefs are, and what the actual theological underpinnings are. Most folks will not know about them.