Re: Bumper Sticker
Faith is one of those things many on the left (and no doubt, there are those on the right who also are hostile to religion) think is the realm of the uneducated religious.
That old saying about when you point one finger, three point back at you come to mind. We all take leaps of faith in our lives every day. So much around us is based on technical wizardry most of us can not even begin to understand how it all works, so we take it on faith they work. For example, I toured Fermilab when I was in college. Very awesome, a salute to man's engineering and scientific prowess.
However, one experimental area had rooms and levels of rooms dedicated to the computing power needed to collect experimental data. The thing I thought was How can they be sure they are looking at raw data instead of software and hardware bug artifacts? That is, it struck me as an act of faith to trust the data coming out of one of those experiments. This neglects a discussion of the researcher doing research at the facility who was a Catholic nun.
Religion, when you get right down to it, is faith based and therefore irrational. This is not a putdown, as rational knowledge is knowledge the human mind can come up with on its own. For those of us who are religious we have to base it on faith. There is no rational way to prove our religious beliefs to be true (or false for that matter).
Rational processes are insufficient to the job of proving or disproving religious faith. We can not use our experience to prove our religious beliefs correct or incorrect. We can not use deductive or inductive reasoning to prove our religious beliefs correct or incorrect.
So, the bumper sticker is spot on. Much of our religious beliefs do go against the rational; in effect, religion causes us to believe things that go against our rational beliefs.
So, the bumper sticker is just one more howling dog.
That old saying about when you point one finger, three point back at you come to mind. We all take leaps of faith in our lives every day. So much around us is based on technical wizardry most of us can not even begin to understand how it all works, so we take it on faith they work. For example, I toured Fermilab when I was in college. Very awesome, a salute to man's engineering and scientific prowess.
However, one experimental area had rooms and levels of rooms dedicated to the computing power needed to collect experimental data. The thing I thought was How can they be sure they are looking at raw data instead of software and hardware bug artifacts? That is, it struck me as an act of faith to trust the data coming out of one of those experiments. This neglects a discussion of the researcher doing research at the facility who was a Catholic nun.
Religion, when you get right down to it, is faith based and therefore irrational. This is not a putdown, as rational knowledge is knowledge the human mind can come up with on its own. For those of us who are religious we have to base it on faith. There is no rational way to prove our religious beliefs to be true (or false for that matter).
Rational processes are insufficient to the job of proving or disproving religious faith. We can not use our experience to prove our religious beliefs correct or incorrect. We can not use deductive or inductive reasoning to prove our religious beliefs correct or incorrect.
So, the bumper sticker is spot on. Much of our religious beliefs do go against the rational; in effect, religion causes us to believe things that go against our rational beliefs.
So, the bumper sticker is just one more howling dog.
posted by Marcus Aurelius @ 8:32 PM
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