Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
66
Clutter is clutter. Someone has to point that out Merv. Or we just all wander aimlessly in the infinite (or is it?!) warren. My mind, my story is horribly cluttered. Why would I want to add to it? Why would I want my explanatory framework to trap me in clutter? If we follow the meanderings in clutter all we do is end up like my mother living in tracks, defiles between rat infested clutter which literally crippled and nearly killed her. It took six industrial skips to clear her modest house. Asking her what happened to her would not have helped. She presented well socially and you’d never know. She let no one in. No one.
There are people here whose thinking is that impenetrable and disorganized, i.e. ‘philosophically skeptical’. They cannot say why. They cannot explain it. That has to be clinically identified.
That’s not my fault.
It’s my inestimable, fairy Godmother privilege. God is fair.
The infinity of nature, in God or no, is perfectly rational. If rationality is just an arbitrary lens then it’s all hatstand.
Why build faith on clutter? Isn’t there a parable about that?
I hear you about the clutter - I really do. We (my family) is literally in the process of trying to declutter a bit in preparation for a hoped-for move. Even if most of the stuff around the house qualifies as clutter (in someone’s eyes) it does not follow that everything ought to get purged (though in some extreme cases, doing so might actually be an improvement - i.e. the quantity of bad stuff there is so pernicious that it is worth losing a few valuable items just to have everything gone.) But just as in your mom’s case I suspect, stuff never stays ‘gone’ - and how much more so does this apply philosophically and religiously? In fact, I think it a rather trivially obvious claim that when it comes to the human mind, there is no such thing as an empty house. If nature abhors a vacuum, philosophy simply just does not even admit of the possibility.
We do try to specialize in clutter-removal around here - especially the scientific stumbling block types of clutter. But you go much further and want to belittle things that most believers here have as critical, load-bearing structures within their mental framework.
If you find that all to be then some unbearable echo chamber of an infantile sort, then I’ve got a simple solution for you: simply find another venue closer to the ivory tower levels of cynicism you can admire. If you keep having problems here with believers being … believers - yes even with all the clutter that inevitably involves for all of us, then perhaps it’s time for you to move on.
3 Likes
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
69
What’s the point in my joining an echo chamber Merv? I have work to do here. On the premier American science and faith website. Unless that’s what it isn’t. All that’s wrong with religion is in the critical, load-bearing structures within mental frameworks. Fundamentalism, literalism goes with poverty, social injustice, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, neo-fascism, nationalism, exceptionalism. Clutter.
As in the triune God where unity and diversity are both coequally and ultimately real, we become like what we worship.
Worshipping nothing we become nothing, worshipping chaos we become chaotic, worshipping oneness we become ugly, and worshipping the creator of the universe we become beautiful.
This all is exactly what I’m talking about. People show up here, in need of some repair, some de-cluttering, some remodeling; and your one tool you have parked outside the precious house is a big demolition ball. It’s like me saying “I think you’re a swell guy, Klax - except for everything about you and everything you think. You’d be okay if it wasn’t for … you.” Not exactly constructive criticism, right?
Religion in general - including all the various forms of Christianity all has a lot of trash that needs to be taken out. I think few would disagree on that bare fact though we would disagree mightily about just which stuff it is that is unnecessary or even detrimental. But meanwhile we all will still retain some structure in which we lay our head at night.
7 Likes
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
72
Page after page after page… of the same people spouting… clutter. Not queuing up for repair, decluttering, remodelling. None of them. No, not one. Ever. Some are personable regardless. Most aren’t. I champion faith, even in my doubt. As you know. YEC, ID, the Flood, the Exodus are not the Rock on which to build faith. No one here who espouses such, who has to believe such as preconditions for believing in God in Christ, ever changes their minds, ever gets repaired, ever declutters, is ever remodelled here. Ever. Prove me wrong. With anyone. They are not touched by my wrecking ball. Any open minded, educable people here can see only from the views only I put forward that faith is valid without compromising or fallaciously minimizing science in the slightest.
I even defend YECists against accusations of lying and insanity. Every time. They are totally sincere. I am a very rare ‘success’ story of deconversion, of deconstruction from cultic literalist brainwashing. And not of, by myself. The damage to this day, in me, my life and the lives of those I love most, is appalling. And utterly deterministic.
Actually … this would be interesting to know more about. And I’m not convinced you’re right about this. More than once on this forum, I’ve read the more recent offering from some particular contributor, and my memory does a bit of a double-take: “wait a minute! wasn’t this the same user who I thought I remembered as having been dogmatically spouting the most stubborn nonsense just a few ___ ago?” It could be my memory playing tricks on me - likely even - my memory being what it is. And I’m never so interested as to go back and try to research it - how much of a jerk would I have to be, to want to catch somebody in the act of having changed their mind? “Aha! I see that you used to think xyz, but now you really flipflopped on that, didn’t you! Gotcha!” No No. It would be almost unheard of for someone who’s recently “come around” on something to come forward and publicly admit “I was wrong about this - thank you all for correcting me!” That doesn’t usually happen until some time has passed and the pain of embarrassment has receded so that we can laugh at ourselves and allow ourselves to be used as object lessons (and plenty of people have done that around here too, that are very public about our embarrassing past - yourself included.)
So while I can’t spout evidentiary statistics to you, I nonetheless don’t buy for a moment your conviction that nothing ever changes here. Just because somebody doesn’t repentantly kneel at your altar the very moment you’ve declared to them how stupid their beliefs are doesn’t mean that person is impervious to any change. Especially when the exhortation happens in the context of something like a trusting relationship. But even short of that - even the mockery of the outsider that is typically so easily dismissed because it is so over-the-top with its insensitivity, even that will take a psychological toll on a person - and probably not in the direction the mocker is hoping for. It’s something we all need to think long and hard about here.
And regarding changes of mind … dare I use the example of evolutionary change? Which is probably the way it happens most of the time anyway.
For most of us, we probably make changes in small increments so that it doesn’t really feel like much of a change at all. And our egos like it that way. Because then, after years worth of accumulations of that - even when we may feel radically different about something than we did ten or twenty years ago; we nonetheless have this vaguely pleasing feeling that … “no - I’ve always thought this way” and we congratulate ourselves on our long and steady run of being so smart. Very few people undergo the sudden “saltational” changes of leaping from one perch to an entirely different one. Even the YECs who make sudden huge leaps to become atheists usually fail to lose their fundamentalism in the process (and in fact still cling to that as the one and only set of spectacles through which they will see the world and all religion.) So even the apparently “big and dramatic” reversals are probably not nearly so big and dramatic as one might be tempted to believe.
Like stirring the waters, the tide changes, or as Michael Heiser so well described from Jonah, there is a tempest not on the water, but in it.
Something odd happened when I thought I could know God through a philosophical argument, after being convinced that Jesus is a myth.
I don’t believe that about Jesus now, but still see how easily those arguments disprove atheism.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
76
You’re a good man Mervin. A good shepherd. If you can think of a single person at risk from my insensitive mockery, please p.m. me. Compared with those at risk from biblicism.
PS, in fact call me out in public if I’ve shaken any little one’s faith here. As long as they don’t have faith in social injustice, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, neo-fascism, nationalism, exceptionalism of course, in which case they wouldn’t be little ones.
PPS I’m sure there are biblicists who are nonetheless incarnational. I swim with many.
Do you remember when you said, “And as we progress to eternity, like everyone else from eternity… including God, we’ll never get there. What a perfect paradox!”
I can’t help but wonder if it’s the fear of what will happen when atheism is known to be so easily wrong that keeps you from knowing that married bachelors will never exist.
keeps me from knowing what?! When have I ever expressed any opinion about this? And no - square circles, married bachelors, etc don’t exist. But that has no relevance or connection (in my mind) with there being an infinity (or not) of something.
Infinite is (by definition) not finite or definite. And infinities do exist as you yourself have already pointed out - like the number of real numbers between zero and one. So, simply trying to redefine it as a contradiction so that you can say it doesn’t exist - that doesn’t work. And lest you reply that these numbers are only abstract and that there is no infinity of actual physical things, I find it totally comprehensible that there would be an infinite number of points in space/time. The fact that I find it incomprehensible to think otherwise isn’t proof that I’m correct in thinking so (physicists have proposed things like Planck units that I have failed to wrap my mind around), but even so I’m reasonably certain that possibilities of infinities are not so easily dismissed by fiat of re-definition as you seem to be attempting.
I hadn’t thought about it … sounds like a reasonable proposition. Which, if true, would mean that it always had to exist, and never come into being. I’m not a philosophy major, and so probably easily argued in or out of such things, but it sounds like a reasonable beginning of an argument that an infinity of things could not exist if the entire universe (not multiverse) had a beginning - which I tend to think it did.
An interesting historical point: LeMaitre (the monk who theorized what we now call the ‘big bang’) very deliberately did not see his theory as any sort of apologetic for Genesis. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, he was quite philosophically and religiously fine with the eternal steady-state universe that was widely presumed by scientific thinkers of the time. But he was just following the evidence where it appeared to lead.