The Concept Of Being "God Fearing"

[buttslinger]

You guys are overthinking this.
There is a pivotal moment in all Religions where you "step out of your skin suit" and become aware God, and the path to God.
The path and the God are universal for everyone, and while the goal is suddenly very easy to understand, the work is just beginning. The Mountain doesn't come to Mohammed.
The path, and God, are not seen with visual light, they register by their actual energy.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

[trish]

You guys are overthinking this.
...The path, and God, are not seen with visual light, they register by their actual energy.

You're under-thinking this.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

That I can believe. Horatio was a protestant humanist. The only ghost in his philosophy was the Holy One.

[buttslinger]

You're under-thinking this.

The man says you gotta give action to get action.

[Stavros]

For me, Christopher Hitchens was the far superior commentator on the failings of Abrahamic religions. I quote:
“Here is the point about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true - that religion has caused innumerate people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.”

The quote from Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great. Religion Poisons Everything illustrates the weakness of Hitchens as an intellectual, a man who in the course of his lifetime claims to have been a Trotskyist in his youth and by middle age endorsed regime change in Iraq, possibly because of his association with a Shi'a crook callled Ahmad Chalabi, a most unusual friendship to have for a rationalist like Hitchens. A man who dismissed religion but was married in a Greek Orthodox church, who, in effect, smoked and drank himself to death as if life had no real meaning or purpose if it was not shrouded in smoke or dunked in booze -hardly a role model for rationalists.

Among the confusing statements that Hitchens makes in order to justify his relentless attacks on religion, one finds the following -
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.
-The problem with reason is that Hitchens is unwilling or unable to recognise that to many believers, their religion is entirely rational, indeed, to such people not to believe that God created the heavens and the earth is irrational -what to Hitchens is a sequence of events that (presumably) starts with the Big Bang to others is the work of God, or, without God meaningless chaos.

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul.
-It seems almost incredible that Hitchens can make this statement and conveniently ignore the extent to which the authors he mentions relied on 'the mythical morality tales of the holy books' for their language, their metaphors, their stories - does he think George Eliot got the Zionism of Daniel Deronda solely from political pamphlets? Tolstoy's religious faith is wished away for what reason? Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, he was a regular church-goer both in Stratford and in London and for a time lodged with Huguenot refugees from France, and there are numerous allusions to the Bible and Christian morality in the plays, particularly As You Like It, and The Tempest. Hitchens wants to dismiss religion and its texts, yet allows them to re-enter his cultural life through the literature of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, through the music of Bach and Beethoven without seeing a contradiction in any of this.

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.
-Where does Hitchens think ethics come from? From the same mental processes and social interactions as religion, is the answer, from devising ways in which to explain who we are, how we got here, and what the purpose of our lives might be. Incredibly, there is no disputing the vast numbers in history murdered or ostracised or injured by religion, but Marxism and the crimes committed in its name have been just as bad, perhaps because the rationalist Marx larded so much of his text with allusions from secular and religious literature? (cf SS Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature).
The place rationalism plays in mass murder has been evident since Plato's Republic where the philosopher presents an eminently reasonable case for a dictatorship, benign or otherwise, but still a dictatorship. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan also uses reason to argue for an absolute ruler who guarantees the security of the population through a 'state of government' but who is assumed to act in so perpetually rational a manner that no dispute could ever disrupt the practice of government (or else!). Lenin's creation of the vanguard party uses rationalism to create a ruthless political machine in which the centre issues commands that cadres pass on to the 'masses', a machinery of indoctrination, ostracism, segregation, oppression, incarceration and death that Stalin used to slaughter his way through history.
Just as Hitchens is correct to claim a weakness of religion is [its] sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need, the Communist Party played the same role as the source of absolute and unchanging facts.

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness.
-Did not Hitchens hit the bars of London and New York as often as he could to drown his inner demons?

We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine
-But atheists value the work of Charles Darwin higher than that of say, Cardinal Newman; and Hitchens I suspect did have a hierarchy of his 'greats' in which Shakespeare ranked higher than Ben Jonson, so his own rationalism consists of a hierarchy, and it is policed -by Hitchens and people like him.

I could go on at length about this mildly interesting man, but it does not really grapple with the way in which thought and behaviour has evolved over 4 million or so years or however long it has taken for humans to emerge and become so articulate. It is absurd to deny the moral cosmology that emerged probably in the Neolithic period as the foundation of human thought, from it we have religion and science, and I agree that organised religion -like organised politics- presents as many problems as it solves, but these are challenges to be met head on, not to be dismissed because one dislikes the manner in which some people kill and their reasons for it. I am sure even Hitchens would agree that human societies have systems of punishment and reward related to human behaviour, whether the judgements of what is good or bad behaviour is endorsed by reigion or 'secular' law (if there is such a thing).

Because Hitchens, endorsing regime change in Iraq, fatally endorsed acts of violence which in other contexts he is appalled by, as if it mattered how Abdul lost his head rather than that he lost it at all, and if it was chopped off so Hitchens could sleep more soundly, so be it?

A sizable chunk of Hitchens screed can be found here-
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...verything.html

[broncofan]

-Where does Hitchens think ethics come from? From the same mental processes and social interactions as religion, is the answer, from devising ways in which to explain who we are, how we got here, and what the purpose of our lives might be.

That was a very powerful and thorough argument. But I think we should consider at least one difference between secular ethics and religious ethics. A secularist may latch on to certain bad ideas and have difficulty letting go of them, but there is nothing to keep him from revising his views in the face of new evidence or changing conditions.

The authors of holy books may have thought about ethical issues in a sincere way, but they decided to take the Machiavellian approach of creating allegories and adopting rules that are supposed to be the word of God. So, the only thing someone who inherited this doctrine as part of their tradition can do is ignore what they don't like. Their answer for laws that do not make sense but are the word of God is cognitive dissonance.

[Stavros]

That was a very powerful and thorough argument. But I think we should consider at least one difference between secular ethics and religious ethics. A secularist may latch on to certain bad ideas and have difficulty letting go of them, but there is nothing to keep him from revising his views in the face of new evidence or changing conditions.

The authors of holy books may have thought about ethical issues in a sincere way, but they decided to take the Machiavellian approach of creating allegories and adopting rules that are supposed to be the word of God. So, the only thing someone who inherited this doctrine as part of their tradition can do is ignore what they don't like. Their answer for laws that do not make sense but are the word of God is cognitive dissonance.

Yes and no. The problem is that people are turned on, or turned off by the certainty of religion and the proposition that everything we need to know is already known and written down for us, and that nothing can change. We are led to believe that it is the capacity for new thinking and change that enables Science to progress, yet a substantial part of scientific knowledge is based on the same principle that we have established facts about the world we live in and that they cannot change, or that if they did it would be because of some hitherto unexpected phenomenon -gravity would be an example.

Repetition establishes facts, to a degree, the orthopraxy of religion may be more conducive to 'social control' as the faith itself, just as science repeats itself until something goes wrong. In both cases, pragmatic behaviour violates rules and often, over time, changes what are supposed to be rules that cannot be changed. Murder and infidelity both take place in violation of Christian, Judaic and Islamic laws, the best a human can do is make an excuse and apologise, or not as the case may be, and take their punishment.

On a deeper level, it is clear that modern societies do not obey religious law -Jews no longer stone adulterers to death, and even in those Muslim countries where this happens, it is rare and I believe most Muslims think it is simply wrong. The science that explains homosexuality to be irrational is almost impeccable -if everyone were homosexual, the human race would die out. The prospect of life being freed from the conception-gestation-birth process anchored in the womb and moved to a test-tube or laboratory may remove the fixed certainty that for life to exist one needs a man and a woman.

Science relies on fixed categories or it cannot function, just as you assume the car you parked outside last night will work when you turn the key this morning. The fixed reality of gender has been challenged, successfully I think, since the 1960s but primarily at the level of social role where the definitions of homosexuality for example, have changed, and where the concept of being transgendered is different from being intersexed, which one may say is a scientific rather than a social category to explain anomalies in the formation of the human. But consider the fracas over Germane Greer's consistent attacks on transexuality and what it means to be female, or 'feminine' -is Greer arguing for a science that does not and indeed, ought not to change just to accommodate a minority of people who 'choose' to swap genders?

Science and religion are not far apart as some think, rigid thinking is found in both. 'Immutable laws' are found in both. Fanatics and fierce debates with denunciations and character assassinations are found in both, and just as the founders of modern science were arrested by the religious state, often ended up in gaol, or burned at the stake, science has subjected humans to appalling cruelty in the laboratories of the Third Reich, and only some of it was driven by the bogus science of race.

Thus science replaces religion, Darwin is to science what Moses was to religion. And so on.

[trish]

Yes and no. The problem is that people are turned on, or turned off by the certainty of religion and the proposition that everything we need to know is already known and written down for us, and that nothing can change. We are led to believe that it is the capacity for new thinking and change that enables Science to progress, yet a substantial part of scientific knowledge is based on the same principle that we have established facts about the world we live in and that they cannot change, or that if they did it would be because of some hitherto unexpected phenomenon -gravity would be an example.

In other words, we have well substantiated claims about world which we are reluctant to modify unless further investigate of the world warrants a revision.

You mention gravity as an example. Newton’s inverse square law was such a success, it became the paradigm example of a scientific theory. It quantitatively predicted the orbits the planets, the moon and other satellites, a number of astroids, the rise and fall of the tides and more...with one exception: the rate of advance of Mercury’s perihelion. The prediction was off by 40 seconds of arc per century. The inverse square law was not abandoned, but explanations were sought. Irregularities in the Sun’s gravitational field within the orbit of Mercury due perhaps in irregularities in the Sun’s shape or distribution of mass. Perhaps there were undiscovered planetoids perturbing Mercury’s orbit. Newton’s inverse square law was bested when Einstein’s theory of gravitation accurately retrodicted the advance of Mercury’s perihelion. Do we now take Einstein’s theory to be established fact instead of Newton’s? What has been established is the domain of Newton’s applicability. What has not yet been established is the domain of applicability of Einstein’s theory.

On a deeper level, it is clear that modern societies do not obey religious law -Jews no longer stone adulterers to death, and even in those Muslim countries where this happens, it is rare and I believe most Muslims think it is simply wrong. The science that explains homosexuality to be irrational is almost impeccable -if everyone were homosexual, the human race would die out. The prospect of life being freed from the conception-gestation-birth process anchored in the womb and moved to a test-tube or laboratory may remove the fixed certainty that for life to exist one needs a man and a woman.

This reminds me of the Shakers who believed intercourse to be sinful if the intent was pure for procreation. Needless to say, there are no more Shakers in the world. I’m not aware of any modern science that maintains homosexuality is irrational. It would be rational to maintain that if we value the continuation of the human species, then some people have got reproduce; but that claim involves a value judgment that lies outside the principles of the biological sciences. I know of no scientific principle in physics, biology, anthropology etc. that says, “The continuation of the human species is to be valued.”

Science and religion are not far apart as some think, rigid thinking is found in both. 'Immutable laws' are found in both. Fanatics and fierce debates with denunciations and character assassinations are found in both, and just as the founders of modern science were arrested by the religious state, often ended up in gaol, or burned at the stake, science has subjected humans to appalling cruelty in the laboratories of the Third Reich, and only some of it was driven by the bogus science of race.

Thus science replaces religion, Darwin is to science what Moses was to religion. And so on.

There are certainly examples of scientists and preachers who are rigid thinkers, unwilling to give up principles which in their eyes are immutable for one reason or another. There are profiteers, con-men, criminals and bigots in both worlds. Both science and religion, perhaps unwittingly, provide platforms that make it easy to for such rogues to operate their scams and perpetrate their crimes. I take it we are not talking about these sorts of exceptions (although this may leave some of the ‘new atheists’ out of the discussion). As you said above, religious practices have changed and as I’ve mentioned, so have some scientific principles at a fundamental level. One difference, however, is that its seems very difficult to override sacred text. Theologians may have very progressive ideas. As far as I know, there may be books and papers by theologians that explain why stoning adulterers is not what God has in mind for modern practitioners of the faith. But it’s the Bible that most practitioners and ordinary preachers read, teach and quote; and so the naive practitioner is faced with a quandary -a contradiction between scripture and practice- which she has to work out on her own. On the other hand, there are very few astrophysicists today who still read Newton. More biologists probably read Darwin, but more with historical interest than scientific: for there are more modern sources that lay out more modern arguments upon which modern biologists are more reliant.

[broncofan]

I am of course glad that Jews don't stone people to death and that not many Muslims support the practice. Any exception to a rule that imposes a cruel result should be considered a net positive. However, I have not heard the explanation by Jews or Muslims as to why they should not follow a practice that is commanded by their religious doctrine and presumably endorsed by the deity whom they worship.

I cannot understand how someone can practice a religion with a fully formed doctrine, complete with history and direct interactions between ancient figures and their deity and believe only some of the claims are true.

When a law is passed by a legislative body and legislators are asked what they meant, you have the difficulty of divining the opinions of dozens of legislators.They each might have had a different subjective understanding of what they passed. With scripture you have the opinion of one entity that matters but he does not exist and has not made a single appearance to arbitrate.

But often it's not even a matter of the text being unclear; people simply don't want to follow provisions that have aged badly. And there is the cognitive dissonance. They must hold beliefs that contradict each other. What they follow is the word of God, God is omniscient, and he also commands things that are unwise. And if they choose not to believe their doctrine embodies the word of God, then what is superior about this bill of goods as a moral philosophy given all the baggage it comes with?

As for science, I love to read about it, but I have very little formal study of the subject. But I feel that what makes something a science is that it is testable, and a lot of the reasoning is inductive or based on observation. A theory may be developed based upon what is observed, but if there are phenomena that challenge the theory it may then be considered a useful but incomplete description of nature. It must be refined until it describes every anomaly, or scrapped if the data supporting it were misinterpreted or some other theory better explains them. At no point in the process should someone close their eyes to contradiction or allow their beliefs to be unchanged by something that challenges their original theory.

[Stavros]

In other words, we have well substantiated claims about world which we are reluctant to modify unless further investigate of the world warrants a revision.

You mention gravity as an example. Newton’s inverse square law was such a success, it became the paradigm example of a scientific theory. It quantitatively predicted the orbits the planets, the moon and other satellites, a number of astroids, the rise and fall of the tides and more...with one exception: the rate of advance of Mercury’s perihelion. The prediction was off by 40 seconds of arc per century. The inverse square law was not abandoned, but explanations were sought. Irregularities in the Sun’s gravitational field within the orbit of Mercury due perhaps in irregularities in the Sun’s shape or distribution of mass. Perhaps there were undiscovered planetoids perturbing Mercury’s orbit. Newton’s inverse square law was bested when Einstein’s theory of gravitation accurately retrodicted the advance of Mercury’s perihelion. Do we now take Einstein’s theory to be established fact instead of Newton’s? What has been established is the domain of Newton’s applicability. What has not yet been established is the domain of applicability of Einstein’s theory.



This reminds me of the Shakers who believed intercourse to be sinful if the intent was pure for procreation. Needless to say, there are no more Shakers in the world. I’m not aware of any modern science that maintains homosexuality is irrational. It would be rational to maintain that if we value the continuation of the human species, then some people have got reproduce; but that claim involves a value judgment that lies outside the principles of the biological sciences. I know of no scientific principle in physics, biology, anthropology etc. that says, “The continuation of the human species is to be valued.”



There are certainly examples of scientists and preachers who are rigid thinkers, unwilling to give up principles which in their eyes are immutable for one reason or another. There are profiteers, con-men, criminals and bigots in both worlds. Both science and religion, perhaps unwittingly, provide platforms that make it easy to for such rogues to operate their scams and perpetrate their crimes. I take it we are not talking about these sorts of exceptions (although this may leave some of the ‘new atheists’ out of the discussion). As you said above, religious practices have changed and as I’ve mentioned, so have some scientific principles at a fundamental level. One difference, however, is that its seems very difficult to override sacred text. Theologians may have very progressive ideas. As far as I know, there may be books and papers by theologians that explain why stoning adulterers is not what God has in mind for modern practitioners of the faith. But it’s the Bible that most practitioners and ordinary preachers read, teach and quote; and so the naive practitioner is faced with a quandary -a contradiction between scripture and practice- which she has to work out on her own. On the other hand, there are very few astrophysicists today who still read Newton. More biologists probably read Darwin, but more with historical interest than scientific: for there are more modern sources that lay out more modern arguments upon which modern biologists are more reliant.

I do not disagree with what you say, perhaps I am trying to suggest that reverence is a factor here, that the reverence that is shown to science and what it has achieved, and what people believe it can achieve, can replace religion as a form of emotional and intellectual security. If not in 'the certainty of the resurrection', the certainty that these pills will stop the pain, that if I contract a disease, there will be a cure. It is coincidental that in the latest Times Literary Supplement (October 23 1015) Martin Kemp reviews Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question. Finding Nature's Deep Design and calls it 'a magnum opus on the secular theology of modern physics', refers to Wilczek's discussions of bosons, muons, gluons, leptons and electrons as being part of a 'Noah's Ark of particles', perhaps inevitably referring to Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Einstein as 'prophets'. Perhaps the other issue is how do core theories in science change, if at all, compared to core theories in religion? Is it so important for a Christian to believe in the Virgin Birth that not do believe it disqualifies one as a Christian? Is String Theory a core theory in science or a sham?

Historically, the claims of science are outstanding in our times, not least because since Thomas Aquinas was charged with refuting science in favour of the word of God, science has proven to have practical solutions to practical problems that in the same period religion has failed to deal with in the same way. Thus more people put their faith in science, or should the word faith be banned as being inapplicable? It is perhaps not the core beliefs that interest, but the modalities of thought and feeling that mark the transfer of allegiance from a supernatural condition to one more humble and, dare one say it, temporary. None of which proves or disproves the existence of God, but may retire the fear.

[Stavros]

I am of course glad that Jews don't stone people to death and that not many Muslims support the practice. Any exception to a rule that imposes a cruel result should be considered a net positive. However, I have not heard the explanation by Jews or Muslims as to why they should not follow a practice that is commanded by their religious doctrine and presumably endorsed by the deity whom they worship.

I cannot understand how someone can practice a religion with a fully formed doctrine, complete with history and direct interactions between ancient figures and their deity and believe only some of the claims are true.

When a law is passed by a legislative body and legislators are asked what they meant, you have the difficulty of divining the opinions of dozens of legislators.They each might have had a different subjective understanding of what they passed. With scripture you have the opinion of one entity that matters but he does not exist and has not made a single appearance to arbitrate.

But often it's not even a matter of the text being unclear; people simply don't want to follow provisions that have aged badly. And there is the cognitive dissonance. They must hold beliefs that contradict each other. What they follow is the word of God, God is omniscient, and he also commands things that are unwise. And if they choose not to believe their doctrine embodies the word of God, then what is superior about this bill of goods as a moral philosophy given all the baggage it comes with?

As for science, I love to read about it, but I have very little formal study of the subject. But I feel that what makes something a science is that it is testable, and a lot of the reasoning is inductive or based on observation. A theory may be developed based upon what is observed, but if there are phenomena that challenge the theory it may then be considered a useful but incomplete description of nature. It must be refined until it describes every anomaly, or scrapped if the data supporting it were misinterpreted or some other theory better explains them. At no point in the process should someone close their eyes to contradiction or allow their beliefs to be unchanged by something that challenges their original theory.

I think what we are dealing with here is the subtle differences between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The central tenets of a faith may not change -indeed, may not be allowed to change- yet the contemporary application of what sacred texts say is clearly not applied always and everywhere in the same way. Two outstanding issues can be found with Jews and Muslims in Christian Britain, where the rights of women to be treated equally before the law are concerned. In both cases where divorce is the issue, a legal divorce conferred by a court of law, may be challenged by the Beth Din, in the case of Jews, and by the opinion of an Imam in the case of Muslims. In many cases women argue that the Beth Din fails to recognise the law of England as the primary judgement, and that husbands, perhaps for vindictive reasons, refuse to divorce their wives 'religiously'. For observant Jewish women, obtaining a judgement from the Beth Din is crucial if they want to marry again, so that this obstacle is seen as hurtful, even if it appears to conform to Jewish law. In the case of Muslim women, the issue of who becomes the legal guardian of the children becomes an issue if an Imam awards them -as most often they do- to the father than the mother. Neither of these processes has any legal clout, but because of the behavioural nexus of Jews and Muslims 'united in their faith', it would be difficult for them to ignore the judgements or cause them genuine distress to do so.

On this basis one has to recognise that it is important for many to be part of a community of believers, but that in doing so they become part of a social group where their individuality is challenged, or enhanced as the case may be, and that I think is where the fractures appear, because how that community interprets the sacred texts -or not- can determine behaviour which may be benign in some cases -not excommunicating someone from the community for adultery- or extremely violent -excommunication or even murder as a consequence.

Mob mentality is clearly a distressing example of how badly things can go with so called 'religious faith' as the shocking case of Farkhunda in Afghanistan shows. Her personal complaint was that a man was selling spells, which is clearly not Islamic, but which also seems to be common amongst Muslims in Afghanistan much as people around the world of all faiths believe in prayer, magic, superstition, the intercession of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, and so on- but when she challenged the man, he accused her of burning a Quran whereupon a mob descended on her, beat her to death and tried to burn her body, most of this being caught on video. I don't know if any of this has links to religion or theology, but it does illustrate how collective reactions to perceived injustices can flare up. The assumption that a course of action must be taken if someone 'insults the prophet' or the Quran is just that because there is no blasphemy in Islam and most of these violent reactions are cultural rather than theological. There is a link to Farkhunda's case here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Farkhunda

A stark cleavage between religion and science can be seen with disease, where science has been able to isolate the causes of disease and find treatment and a cure, while religion explains disease as 'the wrath of God' or divine punishment for collective sins. This can have devastating consequences, notably for outsiders in a community. The historian Frank Snowden writing on Cholera noted how in southern Italy in the early 20th century the local name for it was 'lo zingaro' ('the gypsy') with all the connotations that has. The emerging fascist movement in the UK, the British Brothers insisted Jews brought diseases with them from Russia, just as in today's Telegraph people writing comment on an article on immigration insist Syrian refugees arriving (or in their parlance, 'invading') in Europe are bringing with them Jihad and disease, in this case with no God at the back urging them to think of it as punishment for sins committed.

I doubt most people read the Bible for what it means, but suspect they skim it for what it says, and are only satisfied when they find something they want to read just as Muslim radical read the Quran to find a justification to kill someone regardless of the actual meaning or context in which that sura was delivered. The social relations in which these religious texts are read thus shapes the way they are understood, and it may have no relation at all to the meaning that was intended but is validated by that social context, not least if there is a project to complete, be it conversion, missionary work, an assassination, or a bombing. The fact that one can probably justify anything with reference to the Bible or the Quran does not in fact justify it, and that it seems to me is where the chasm opens up between theology and politics and most of what we have these days, is politics, and bad politics at that.