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  1. Atypical is offline
    05-15-2011, 04:37 PM #1

    The Sense and Morality of Agnosticism

    Sunday 15 May 2011
    by: Vincent Bugliosi, Divinity of Doubt: The God Question

    I can say with relative confidence (because what I'm saying, at least it would seem, has to be true) that there is only one necessary religion that has any merit to the people who inhabit this earth, and that's the Golden Rule: "Whosoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" (from the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7:12). To treat others as you would want them to treat you (the only obvious exception being when acting in any kind of self defense) is the highest, most noble form of human behavior and the basis of all morality. No matter what some papal encyclical says; no matter what some bishops conference says; no matter how many sacraments of the Catholic church there are or chapters and verses in the bible or thick and complex books by theologians or Sunday school classes and sermons by pastors; no matter how many heated arguments there are about God, Jesus, and religion; no matter how many pilgrimages there are to Mecca, Jerusalem, and other holy places; no matter how many thousands of hours Jewish scholars struggle over the meaning of the Torah; no matter how many multimillion-dollar churches and synagogues and grand cathedrals to Christ are constructed, nothing can ever change that simple reality.

    "When I do good, I feel good," Abraham Lincoln said. "When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion."

    What can any church, religion, priest, minister, rabbi, theologian, seminary, religious book, or college course teach you beyond the Golden Rule that has any value? Anything else has to be man-made piffle.

    If we must have religion, the seminal test as to the value and merit of any religion worth its salt has to be not what you believe, but what you do -- that is, how you treat your fellow man. Yet in the thousands upon thousands of books, and billions upon billions of words that have been written, particularly about Christianity and the bible, what percentage of these books do you think are devoted to the only thing that counts -- the Golden Rule?

    The second reality is that, if there is a God and a heaven after our life on earth, no God who demands of those whom he created that in order to get to heaven they do something here on earth different from leading a life of the Golden Rule is worth spending one second in heaven with, much less eternity. If his main requirement for getting to heaven is not that we treat our fellow man fairly and decently, but we be born-again Christians who accept Jesus as our savior and that we love him more than anyone else with all of our being, then, as indicated earlier, who in the hell would want to spend eternity or even one second with someone who is so unbelievably self-centered and vainglorious?

    That type of God is not worth a tinker's damn.

    The word faithis a euphemism for hope and speculation. Indeed, the definition of faith is belief in the unknown. And if I may borrow a cliched term, I, for one, have never had much faith in faith. Since faith is an acknowledgment that the truth is unknown, it is nothing more than wishful thinking, and the wish is no evidence of anything beyond itself. Yet so many religious people take their wishes for reality. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, faith is the first refuge of an idle or apprehensive mind, a condition that, though perhaps mentally and emotionally nutritious, is not intellectually sustainable.

    When devout Christians feel inadequate, in conversation or debate, in justifying their belief in God, they very frequently retreat by saying, "You have to have faith," saying this in the sense that faith is something that one should have, as if it's the proper and right thing to do. But I wonder if they have ever stopped to ask themselves why. If they are truthful with themselves, is it because they need there to be a God to give purpose to their life and mitigate their fear of death? But if so, is that really an intelligent justification for believing there is a God merely wanting or needing him to exist to make them feel better?

    I certainly do not mean to denigrate the value of faith. Faith has lit candles of warmth and softened pangs of fear and despair throughout human history. As nineteenth-century German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine said, "Human misery is too great for man to do without faith." Tolstoy went so far as to proclaim that "faith is the force of life." It's just that the comfort and solace, even strength, of faith should never be confused with the existence or nonexistence of the object of that faith. Faith and its object bear no relation to each other, though if one were to believe the great religions of the world, faith in God and God should be listed as synonyms in the dictionary. Religion even goes so far as to say that faith is itself virtuous. But under what conceivable theory?

    Christianity, since its origins, has tried to infuse faith with a substance it does not have, calling it something it is not in a transparent attempt to change its nature. But as Lincoln pointed out, calling, for instance, the tail of a dog a leg doesn't change the number of legs a dog has from four to five. This is why the apostle Paul only succeeded in revealing that he knew faith is as substance less as the froth of a vapor when he felt the need to come up with this embarrassing articulation in his letter to the Hebrews: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen" (Hebrews 11:1). But we know that faith is only the dream of things hoped for, the imagining of things unseen.

    How or why should someone have faith in something for which there is no evidence? But if we must have faith, shouldn't we have faith only in that which does not do violence to our common sense and reason? Why should we want to see, by faith, what the eye of reason rejects?

    Being as helpless and impotent as we are in understanding the meaning of our existence, the majority of mankind turns to organized religion for answers, while a much smaller number of humans turn to learned religious writers and theologians. But all we ever get from any of these sources is unintelligible and/or absurd answers to insoluble mysteries. God, if there is a God, would have all the answers. But he is waiting for us, if at all, outside the reach of our minds -- our finite minds cannot comprehend that which is infinite (or as Einstein put it, "The problem is too vast for our limited minds") -- and that is why the effort of religion and theology to define and explain God is inherently futile. Thus, my agnosticism.

    Is the conclusion of agnosticism no more than an intellectual exercise? Can it have any value to the human condition? Perhaps. I believe there is an ethical dimension to agnosticism that has the potential, to the degree it is embraced, to make man more honest. We know that untruthfulness, dishonesty, deceit, hypocrisy, and pretense are so much a part of life that we almost expect these things in our daily living and find it refreshing when we see their absence. And it's not too likely this will ever change. But if man can ever at least hope to reduce the level of dishonesty in his existence, there perhaps is no better place to start than in his relationship with God.

    The above is an excerpt from the book Divinity of Doubt:The God Question by Vincent Bugliosi.

    ____________________________________________

    The author is the lawyer that prosecuted Charles Manson, amomg other noteworthy accomplishments.

    There are legitimate and interesting arguments against agnosticism vs outright atheism and about the real merit in the 'Golden Rule'.

    They can be explored later - or elsewhere.

  2. SiriuslyLong is offline
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    05-15-2011, 07:55 PM #2
    Great article. Thanks for the post. First politics, now religion. Now all the rules of making good company have been broken lol.

    As you know, I believe myself to be agnostic: the truths of the world are unknowable. What is the universe and how was it created? How did intellegent man orginate? (republicans............ duh. Just kidding). For some reason, I don't think death will help me answer these questions. Candidly, if it was, I'd kill myself to know.

    I've stated that faith is a beautiful thing. I have faith... but it's not in any religion. It's in me and my (extended) family. I'm not trying to be a jackass. My reasons are captured above. There is right and there is wrong and little interpretation is required (or should be). What group would you want to be intimately associated with?

    My primary reason for being agnostic is that one group is awfully wrong (christians, jews, buddists....) while another is right, and the consequences of being wrong are pretty dire. I don't believe that. There is a golden rule, and I think it to be more expansive than Matthew 7:12.

    If reconizing the existance of God is a requirement for a pleasent afterlife, then I'm screwed. I accept it.

  3. Atypical is offline
    05-15-2011, 08:30 PM #3
    The truths of the world are not unknowable. Although not everything is known now, I am confident in the future possibilities. Science is working diligently to explain what we don't know. And holes do not mean a god exists. We just don't know.

    To those that feel they need to have a supernatural explanation for life I offer the following:

    If you really know the magnificense of the cosmos and how it works, there is no need for a extra-normal explanation.
    Additionally, NEVER accept or seek a supernational expanation when 'ordinary' explanations suffice (Occams Razor).

    I have known Dr. Paul Kurtz personally. He is one of the leaders of the atheist and skeptical movement. Magazines he started are Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer. Once I was with him at an interview on a radio station. He was asked what would you say if after you died, God said, "why didn't you believe in me?" His response was, "you never gave me enough evidence"?

    That was the best answer, I believe, that anyone could give.

    Additionally, there are HUGE holes in religious belief. Absurd really. Like, if god is so all-knowing, why wouldn't he know that a person had lived a good and decent life, but just didn't believe. Wouldn't that prevent a bad outcome? If not, he's an a-hole.

    And, thanking god for being spared death in a plane crash. Never mind that god f'd everone else. Nice guy.
    Last edited by Atypical; 05-17-2011 at 08:04 PM.

  4. SiriMonkey is offline
    05-15-2011, 08:35 PM #4
    Start talking about sex and this group is really doomed.

    Forgot, SRK has that covered in his STOP TRADING thread.

  5. Atypical is offline
    05-15-2011, 08:48 PM #5
    There once was a women who wroten
    That talking about sex is verboten
    If you say anything nasty or slutty
    I will control you in my hands like putty

  6. SiriMonkey is offline
    05-15-2011, 08:55 PM #6
    Not me. My lips are sealed.

  7. SiriuslyLong is offline
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    05-17-2011, 01:19 PM #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Atypical View Post
    The truths of the world are not unknowable. Although not everything is known now, I am confident in the future possibilities. Science is working diligently to explain what we don't know. And holes do not mean a god exists. We just don't know.

    Anyway, you're on the right track. And that will be the last time I say that to you.
    I see your point. I left that last line in there so you couldn't edit it out.

  8. Atypical is offline
    05-17-2011, 01:20 PM #8
    Verrry clever.

  9. SiriuslyLong is offline
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    05-17-2011, 01:28 PM #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Atypical View Post
    Verrry clever.
    You're on the right track. And that will be the last time I say that to you.

  10. Atypical is offline
    05-17-2011, 01:31 PM #10
    Damn! Foiled again.