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Thursday, April 26, 2012

In My Absence...

In my absence, I have been working on a project which is on the verge of completion.  It will be available to the public within a month or so, but I thought in the meantime, I would offer a few excerpts.  The first one will be on the subject of faith:


Faith, especially in the religious sense, is nothing more than hope or a belief in something without any facts or “knowledge” to substantiate those beliefs, or as Nietzsche posited, "Not wanting to know what is true." While wisdom is acquired through the knowledge and experience we gain in life, faith requires nothing more than the will to believe. The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard once said, "If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe,"1 which he believed was an adequate explanation for his faith. Because there is no evidence, Kierkegaard believed that faith is all that was required to be a Christian. Many Christians today however, feel otherwise, which may be due to the increased pressure from non-theists to find reasons and evidence to support religious beliefs of all types.

Faith in any case, is only good if it is faith in the right thing. One can have faith in flying pink elephants, and swear they are real through faith alone, but that won't make them real. To be real, there must also be some verifiable knowledge of flying pink elephants such as: “How big are they? Are they light pink or are they dark pink? Do they fly at night, during the day, or both? Where is the best place to see a flying pink elephant? Do you have any photos of a flying pink elephant? Has anyone else seen these pink flying elephants? And so on.

Besides religious faith, other types of faith also play apart in our lives. Women in abusive relationships for example, can have "faith" that their mates will one day stop beating them--but faith will not stop the beatings. These types of scenarios are examples of having faith in a "bad thing." It is only action that can only stop the cycles of abuse; on the part of the mate who makes a conscience decision to stop, and/or on the part of the woman who makes a conscience decision to leave. To be abused over and over again, keeping the "faith" that it will one day stop, more often than not ends in tragedy .It is having faith in a "bad thing."

Having faith and believing that god will somehow "do the right thing," such as stopping spousal abuse, or stopping the murder of the "chosen people of God" by the Nazis in WWII--has not stopped women from being killed by their partners, nor did it save 6 million Jews from being gassed to death by the Nazis.  These are just a few examples that illustrate that faith without evidence can be dangerous.  It is only action which brings about the right or the wrong thing--not faith.

This is but a short excerpt, from one section of my project. Much of this section also deals with having faith in the "right" things.  The entire project deals with the consequences of the Christian religion on society, and I will be posting more excerpts on subjects dealing with the attributes of the gods of Christianity, and the abuses-both known and unrealized--that can be attributed to this bizarre belief system.