^ I’ll echo that sentiment.
Are there any liberals who are not against religion? I put forth this question in an earlier post and the only answer I got was Edmund Burke. I also checked up on Milton Friedman. He was religious as a child, but gave up religion “altogether.” My guess is that he did not give his children religion. While he was in favor of the free market, he did not understand economics.
The terms theism and atheism are not meaningful. We know that God exists from metaphysics. There is no need to make a decision about God’s existence, just as there is no need to decide whether humans are responsible for their actions. The only decision that has to be made is whether God has communicated himself to mankind.
Liberalism was a political movement that began with Machiavelli and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Liberals are the people who participated in the movement. David Hume, John Locke, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx participated in that movement. What made them liberals? What did they have in common? This is the question my essay answers. David Hume, by the way, was the one who invented the “Who made God?” argument against God’s existence. John Locke said we could never be sure a miracle happened.
There came a time when the likes of John Locke stopped advocating small government and became communists. This occurred because advocating laissez faire stopped satisfying their emotional needs.
Let me try this from another angle: You’ve said God is an infinite being. What does it mean for a being to be “infinite”?
Ah, I see, so those who profess to not believe in god are simply lying, because it is metaphysically impossible to not believe in god. Isn’t that quite the rhetorical trick… Your opponent can’t even argue his position, because he first has to argue that he actually can believe his position.
Theist liberals: A.R.J. Turgot, Frederic Bastiat, Lord Acton, Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, not to mention a huge number of contemporary scholars with the Mises Institute, the Acton Institute, and other organizations.
“Liberalism was a political movement that began with Machiavelli and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Liberals are the people who participated in the movement.”
Only according to your pet definition, which again can only serve to confuse. If you won’t use “atheism” for the lame reason you cite above, use “secular humanism”.
There are two ways to explain the concept of an infinite being:
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You exist and I exist, but I am not you and you are not me. We are two different beings. In other words we are finite beings. An infinite being is not finite.
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A finite being is a metaphysical composition of two incomplete beings: essence and existence. The essence of a finite being limits its existence. An infinite being is a pure act of existence: existence with no limiting essence.
A better term for people who have contempt for religion is humanist. Humanists believe we should serve mankind, rather than God. The adjective secular is attached by religious people because calling someone a humanist sounds like a compliment. Another reason for the adjective is that there are so-called religions, like Reconstructionist Judaism, that are humanistic. We can call these people religious humanists.
Some people are in favor of displaying the Ten Commandments (conservatives) in court houses and some are not (liberals). My point is that liberals are humanists. Conservatives are mistaken in thinking of liberals as being for big government. They are now for big government, but in the 19th century they were in favor of small government.
I’m afraid I still don’t understand what those words refer to in (1) and (2).
No, “secular” was historically appended to “humanism” so as to distinguish it from the earlier Christian Humanist tradition of More and Erasmus.
The humanism of Erasmus was a reference to his interest in Greek philosophy and other intellectual pursuits. I don’t know when the word started to be used to describe people who believed in serving mankind.
Political fanatics such as fascists and communists are serving mankind?
My personal view of God is that it is an emotional reaction, quite similar to fear. If a wolf jumps out from behind a bush you react without conscious thought, your adrenaline rushes and you tense up, and so forth. God is an emotional reaction to the human condition but played out over a longer time frame. The adrenaline rush and muscle tensing helps us cope with the wolf, and the concept of God helps us cope with the incomprehensibilty of the universe, life and death. Both reactions are advantageous in some respects, the fear reaction helps you stay alive, and the God reaction brings psychological comfort and perhaps belonging.
The attempt to ‘reason’ the emotion ex-post, is a painful experience to watch and a massive waste of time for all concerned.
The way we cope with the “incomprehensibility of the universe” is to assume that the universe is not incomprehensible. The reason science developed in the West and not the East is that Western philosophers believed God created the universe. Hence, the universe is intelligible and it makes sense to try to understand it.
The Chinese, by contrast, were just as advanced as the West in technology. But they were not interested in science because they felt that the universe was not intelligible.
Political fanatics think they are serving mankind. I don’t think any members of the Communist Party in America got rich:
According to a well-known remark attributed to G. K. Chesterton, “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” But this was not true of the Jewish immigrants who came to America from Eastern Europe. Almost all of the young intellectuals and political leaders among them had stopped believing in the God of Judaism, but it was not “anything” they now believed in—it was Marxism. (Norman Podhoretz, Why Are Jews Liberals?, New York: Random House, 2009, p. 280)
By incomprehensibility of the universe I simply meant that although parts of our universe are comprehensible, the REALLY BIG questions are not at the moment comprehensible, and may never be. The human race may become extinct in a billion years time without our species ever being able to answer all of the questions raised by the human intellect. In fact it would be reasonable to assume that if we are able to answer the unanswerable questions currently in debate, it will result in a further set of questions that no one at the present has even considered asking.
The point of all this is to say that I am quite able to accept that the human intellect has limits, your emotional need for certainty/comfort/belonging or whatever leads you to fill in the blank in an arbitrary manner by conjuring up God. After the concept is conjured up you then attempt to rationalise it, and enter into the pretence that it was rationality that led you to the concept in the first place.
It may also be worth considering why you feel the need to make yourself impossible to understand. Just look back for a moment at the way you have strung ambiguous concepts together, essence, free will, existence, being, infinite.. in such a way that your sentences could mean practically anything, or practically nothing. I could be wrong, but I have the feeling that you have never really thought deeply about each of these words and whether they correspond to anything in reality, or whether they are simply fulfilling the role of allowing you to hide behind them and preventing you from being ‘found out.’
It is quite true that one of the reasons I believe in God is to satisfy my emotional needs. Since God is the author of mankind and revelation, it makes sense that humans have an emotional need for a meaningful life.
It is also quite true that the fundamental categories of metaphysics may not have any content. The proof that an infinite being exists is based on the assumption that the universe is intelligible and that it is meaningful to talk about being, essence, existence, reason, finitude, free will etc. These concepts may have no content.
Most humanist/liberals do not make this point. What they say is that you can’t prove that God exists. They say that the proof of God’s existence is logically flawed. Richard Dawkins, for example, uses the “Who made God” argument. Karen Armstrong ridicules the 5 ways of Thomas Aquinas without mentioning the work done by Etienne Gilson in making the proof more rigorous and clear.
I believe in God. I believe however that God exists in a realm outside of logic. I accept that this position is illogical and nonesensical, and as such I accept the fact that I have no argument to defend myself with(I don’t care to waste time trying to defend myself). I believe any attempt to justify God’s existence by way of logic is a fallacy and violates the concept of faith.(Consequently I take issue with most naive theists). I am happy to agree to disagree with everyone, and I care not to dispute the point to anyone. Do you think I am reacting in fear Jhonny? Unreasonable? Absolutely. But how fear?
It’s odd because I never imagined myself as a fearful person, I doubt those close to me would describe me in such a way!
I tend to ignore theists who waste their time rambling on such issues on public forums, a naive belief that they are bravely out to save the world. I believe there are more productive ways to spend your time, especially if the intent is to “save” or “help” man kind. Learn economics for example, seek entrepreneurship, see the world through the eyes of a producer, an inherent servent.
Any how it’s been a several beers coming, and this is likely the most religious talk you’ll ever get from me!
As religion would appear to be a near universal activity/trait/belief within human society I have to assume that it is caused by another more basic human trait. As religion seems at its base to be an explanation of the unknown I have to assume that the cause of religion is fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown is of course an extremely useful trait in an evolutionary sense, it’s perfectly reasonable.
Religious faith is a positive response to revelation. It is both a decision and a gift from God. The existence of God is not a matter of faith, but of reason.
Many people assume that God does not exist because they were taught that by people they trust and admire. They forget that their beloved teachers are the same people that caused the horrors of the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was a Darwinist and a racist. It is naive to trust someone like him or those who admire him.
David, lets just make a few things clear:
Your logical proof of the divine is that our universe requires some kind of “Prime Mover” to get things started, some, as you put it, “infinite being”. This has many problems, because we don’t know enough about the structure of our universe, the nature of human conciousness, or the laws of physics to make such a statement that it is a priori that this infinite being exists. For the purposes of discussion though, lets say that your definition of “God” exists.
Please then, explain, how it logically follows that we know that:
- God is a conciousness that communicates with us.
- There is an afterlife.
- Relgious texts like the Bible/Koran/Torah are in any way divinely inspired.
- The existance of this prime mover should have any impact on how we live our lives.
You’re couching your entire arguement on the somewhat flawed but respectable position that “Creation requires a creator”, but then making all these logical leaps and tacking on thing revealed through “revalation”, and justifying them with your original logical proof of God. Your reasons thus far have consisted of the repetition of two arguments: “Historical events” and “People give bad reasons”. Put very simply, your entire point is one of these:
- Non sequitur (Latin for “it does not follow”), in formal logic, is an argument in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(logic