Mohammed

[sedonaman]

…But rather than go this route, our society has fallen in to this comfort zone where we just go “What you believe is your faith, what I believe is mine, no ones wrong, there is no logical way for you to arrive at my faith (this one sort of falls under the heresy of Modernism too I think), you just need to believe, we are all correct, lets just get along”. Then comes the loss of any faith because someone will ask the inevitable question “if we cannot know which of these religions that preach so many different things is worthy of belief, why believe in any of them”.

Sounds like relativism and polylogism.

 

[Bernadette173]

I think you are spot on about our education system.

Just to weave what you said in to this thread, I don’t think everyone needs to be a Physicist or a Theologian for an example to accept the truths in those fields or necessarily verify them. But one would need to be reasonable in choosing who to believe in a certain field of knowledge. One would also need to know which question belongs to which field.

I think today we have a failure on both of the above. Most students aren’t taught who to believe. They just look it up on the internet and believe anything and anyone as authoritative in a field. With the lack of subjects like Philosophy, most students do not even understand the limitations and scope of ones own field. This is probably why someone like Stephen Hawking would try to answer the philosophical question of ‘something from nothing’ and also be able get away with it.

The crux when it comes to religion is that Theologically important concepts are usually not verifiable (until one is dead at which point it is too late anyway). They are transcendent truths. What we do in Theology is we accept the truths by faith and then infer from it using logical and philosophical rules of inference. We cannot however verify theologically that the basic theological truths we initially accepted are true. But you would still see many who would like carry out the debate of a certain religion vs. another strictly on the theological plane. This gets nowhere because in the end, each party would simply be trying to show some inconsistency between two or more theological results of the other to prove that religion wrong. But usually there exists solutions to reconcile these seeming inconsistencies in most cases and more problematically, even if there wasn’t, it wouldn’t prove ones own religion true. Logical consistency by it-self does not imply that it mirrors the transcendent truths perfectly.

So unlike in other fields, religion is kind of unique in that it comes down to accepting an authority. We cannot become an authority in transcendent truths because we cannot study the transcendent by our-self. Therefore, we have to evaluate each person who claims to be an authority regarding the transcendent to see if he/she is worth believing. In our present world, we have Lord Buddha, Prophet M., Jesus Christ and others who claimed to be authorities regarding the transcendent. But there has to be reasons to believe any of the three have authority and just their word is not enough.

In my analysis, Jesus Christ seems to be the only authoritative figure in this case by the fact of his resurrection. The others simply lack any reason to consider them authoritative. If a person wants to rise from the dead, and be happy, it seems like the reasonable thing to do is listen to someone who has done just that. However, after realizing this point, that person has no choice but to give assent to the teachings of Christ on Faith. Some of the teachings might be verifiable through philosophical analysis (Reason) but that is just a bonus. Now since a person does not have direct access to learn from Christ himself, that person would have to turn to the Apostles. But since a person today does not have direct access to the Apostles, he/she will have to turn to the Apostolic successors instituted by them to learn the teachings of Christ. This is how one would arrive at the Catholic Church through reason and then become a Catholic by accepting the truths taught by faith (& also through reason when possible).

But rather than go this route, our society has fallen in to this comfort zone where we just go “What you believe is your faith, what I believe is mine, no ones wrong, there is no logical way for you to arrive at my faith (this one sort of falls under the heresy of Modernism too I think), you just need to believe, we are all correct, lets just get along”. Then comes the loss of any faith because someone will ask the inevitable question “if we cannot know which of these religions that preach so many different things is worthy of belief, why believe in any of them”.

From what I read the types of belief systems you speak of are Deists those who believe in right and wrong, a Supreme Being, and an afterlife gained popularity during the ‘Enlightenment’ of the 16th and 17th Century throughout Europe Once in place Deism’s concept of a remote,uninvolved God, who was unknowable, and unconcerned with human beings or their lives, it makes for a quick transition to Atheism.Once God is deemed unknowable, distant, indifferent to our complex problems and affairs, and outright incomprehensible to the human mind or soul, then pantheism, the belief in everything and anything flourishes.
The Enlightenment came about by scholars of the 17th-18th century, around the time of the creation of the Constitution of the United States of America. It was composed by Thomas Jefferson, who was a known Deist at the time.

They had a completely pagan hedonistic morality
The concept of a thoroughly secular state,They wanted to remove religion from ALL aspects of civil government The new concept of the secular state became a substitute for God And there were those who spoke of the state’s rights and the state as being divine.
Deists have absolute disregard for past history or any type of religion They have contempt for the heirarchy of the Catholic Church and Her teachings
naive beliefs that science would lead to unending human progress
They were hostile to those in authority over them
and…
They had An Unlimited view of Freedom They believed people did their best when they are free of all restraints. Also implying that the moral, legal, and religious beliefs were of no importance to the control and guidance of society as we know it today. And this is incorrect.