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Do you understand them as a religious/spiritual person understands them?
Which religious person? Do you have a "theist template" to whom you refer when you post threads such as this?
I only ask because it seems the religious people to whom you refer do not even understand the words themselves quite often. In fact many of them, even ones who spend a chunk of their life sitting side by side in the same church for years, appear on query to have different definitions for some of those words.
So the honest answer is "no" I do not know what "religious people" mean by those words. I know what I mean by them, and when I enter into a conversation with a religious person I endeavor to understand what THEY mean by them.
Even the word "god" alone for example will illicit a vast number of answers from people on here. Some think of it as an actual intelligent entity with a sex, morals, emotions and more. Some simply relabel things we already have words for (like love, hugs, nature, all we do not understand) as "god" and that is what "god" means to them. Still more come out with crazy things like Deepak Chopra who after a long debate with Sam Harris about "god" reveleaed he was not talking about anything metaphysical at all, but about "Generation Ordered Delivery" or some meaningless phrase like that for which "god" was the acronym.
So really I find your question a poor one because NO ONE understands what people mean by these words. You have to find out what the person you are talking to in each situation means by them because it changes from one to the next.
I am just curious to know if atheists and agnostics understand these terms:
Faith
Spirit
Religion
God
Prayer
Spirituality
Belief
Do you understand these terms as the people who are religious and spiritual? Do you know what it really means to be and feel spiritual? Do you understand why we believe in such things?
Even if you were once a member of some religion or have studied many religions...
Why is it that defense of religion always seems to come down to word games? It's almost as if they know there's no reason to believe so instead the religious retreat into "we can't possibly know for sure so I might as well believe whatever the hell I want". Weak.
To be honest we don't know. Atheists don't know, theists don't, deists, etc... nobody knows the truth. Anyone who claims to know 100% is full of it. In reality we are all agnostic at some point in our lives.
I know what I believe, I have many ideas about it. Am I 100% sold on them... no. Will they change over time... I hope so.
I am just curious to know if atheists and agnostics understand these terms:
Faith
Spirit
Religion
God
Prayer
Spirituality
Belief
Do you understand these terms as the people who are religious and spiritual?
I understand what these words mean, yes. I know their dictionary meanings and I know their colloquial meanings. I understand them conceptually.
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Do you know what it really means to be and feel spiritual?
If by "know" you mean "have experienced" (as opposed to the alternate meanings I answered in the response above), then honestly, no. I do not. No diety has ever deigned to speak to me. I have not had any personal religious experiences. It never made sense to me, even as a small child. No one could give me a satisfactory answer when I questioned them about implausiblities in the little stories they told me that did indeed sound an awful lot like fairy tales. Whenever something was particularly silly they'd trot out the "symbolic" interpretation, but other things were claimed to be literally true - and different people claimed different parts are symbolic versus literal. Some people take the entire thing symbolically and some entirely literally. The fact that there are varying translations (and more disturbingly - translations OF translations), which do not necessarily agree, is glossed over. The one that they use is of course the correct version. The fact that other people believe entirely different things about different gods with equal fervor, often also claiming to be the one true belief is shrugged off. Again, what they believe is the right belief. Of course. Unquestionably.
However, I do think I have a good idea of what it's like, to feel "moved by the spirit" if you will, from singing in choirs. If you can be one voice in the balanced multitude, loving your melody and how it intertwines with the melodies of other vocal lines, everyone singing together with good tone and diction, no show-boating, with great acoustics... it's "magical". You get goose bumps all over, and a feeling of belonging to this group as though it was itself an entity, producing this beautiful, fleeting phenomenon. Very emotionally satisfying. I have seen people apparently experience something similar in church, and when people describe the experience, it sounds like the same sort of thing to me. Some consider this feeling as evidence of the truth of their religion, but to me it is just a good feeling that you get from being part of a team (a choir, or a congregation).
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Do you understand why we believe in such things?
I am baffled. I always have been. I understand wanting to believe them, but I don't understand making the "leap of faith" required to actually do so.
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Even if you were once a member of some religion or have studied many religions...
I don't consider myself a converted atheist, but a natural one, as I have never believed - even though I was forced to attend a Christian church as a child for several years. I studied many contemporary religions in a broad, comparative way as part of my college curriculum. I've never considered myself a member of any faith. It all sounds equally improbable to me - the Greek gods, the Egyptians, the Norse. More recently, the Abrahamic "one true god", with believers of the various types actually killing each other, and anyone in the way, over which of them has really got the ear of that particular diety... it's all the same. It's mythology and cultural control sold as The Truth. I find them interesting as collections of stories which sometimes contain a grain of wisdom, but sometimes a grain of appalling savagery. I find them interesting as cultural traditions. I don't understand how people still believe in them as anything more than that.
Do you understand these terms as the people who are religious and spiritual? Do you know what it really means to be and feel spiritual? Do you understand why we believe in such things?
Even if you were once a member of some religion or have studied many religions...
Before answering, I am going to make an assumption here. I am assuming that you are refering to a shared meaning of these terms between fellow practitioners of a specific religion, or between fellow theists, or between believers in the supernatural. If you are not referring to shared meaning, then the implication is that rational discourse on ANY topic is impossible, because each person has their own definition for all the terms ( e.g. truth, faith, red, up, liberal, etc...),
If we limit this to shared meaning, then yes I do understand these terms in the same way as a theist would. In particular, the viewpoints that I understand intimately are the Southern Baptist, generic Charismatic ( specifically Assemblies of God, but others as well), and Calvinism. My understanding of other denominations and faiths is through the lenses of these shared belief sets, and is therefore incomplete and limited. My understanding of other forms of super-naturalism is likewise limited by this basic framework.
To answer your question, yes, I understand these terms at least as well as your average Evangelical Christian. I probably have a wider interpretation of them than most, simply because I am able to look at the subject without those internal blinder, now that I don't believe.
Before the conversation goes there, let me say that this smacks of a lead in to the classic Christian "No true Scotsman" fallacy, the argument being, "If you DID understand, you could never have become an atheist, therefore your experience as a believer is invalid, because you obviously never were a REAL believer." I find this to be not only infuriating, but hypocritcal in the extreme. I am being asked to believe something based not on rational repeatable proof, but on personal experience. Not just religious belief, but any supernatural or mystical claim, from the existance of got to the efficacy of echinacea or homeopathy. Then when I do not believe, I am told that that very same experience is not reliable, and I must have been doing it wrong.
Invalidating objective measurements, or a logical premise in a rational discourse is one thing, but maintaining the validity of your subjective experience demands that my subjective experience be granted the same validity.
This is arrogance talking. You know your experience and your definition of these terms. You have no idea what others might define as faith or spirit. This is the biggest problem I have with some atheists. they feel that just because they felt a certain way about something, that everyone should.
You should not take it so personally, you are basically just judging them which is a rookie mistake and a big one.
To be honest we don't know. Atheists don't know, theists don't, deists, etc... nobody knows the truth. Anyone who claims to know 100% is full of it. In reality we are all agnostic at some point in our lives.
Thanks for proving my point. You're attempting to confuse a lack of 100% absolute certainty with the idea that we can't ever know anything. There's a huge gap between these two extremes - but keep playing word games to try and convince us otherwise.
What was the import of your original post? For what purpose did you canvas the non-believers on their knowledge of certain words, particularly since you claim there is no objective meaning of those words?
What was the import of your original post? For what purpose did you canvas the non-believers on their knowledge of certain words, particularly since you claim there is no objective meaning of those words?
What was this all supposed to prove?
My point was that thought these words have a standard definition, they have multiple meanings to different people. What some might call illusion, fairy tale, delusion, or meaningless, is hope, joy, happiness, and full of meaning.
Just because you do not share the same meaning of these words does not make the person wrong.
It really isn't important if Gods exist, or if faith, prayer or spirituality really work. What matters is the meaning they have for the people. Praying to some God to you and I might not seem like the thing to do, maybe even silly. But, to the dying, the hopeless, the unwanted, it has more meaning than anything you can imagine.
My question is this: How is believing in things religious/spiritual bad if it gives a person hope?
It isn't. If a child's parent is sick do you tell them that there is little hope and break their heart or do you tell them that they might be okay? Most sane people would tell them they might be okay. Giving someone hope is a good thing.
I know, I know... what about the people that use it for bad and evil things. Guess what? Those people would do bad and evil things with or without religion. When you attack religion and spirituality in its entirety you not attack the bad, but the good as well. How is this fair? If you want to focus your attention on the bad, then do just that and leave the rest alone. Stop claiming it is illusion and stupid overall. Focus your attention on only those that use it for their own gain and for bad things and leave the rest to have their hope.
My point was that thought these words have a standard definition, they have multiple meanings to different people. What some might call illusion, fairy tale, delusion, or meaningless, is hope, joy, happiness, and full of meaning.
Just because you do not share the same meaning of these words does not make the person wrong.
It really isn't important if Gods exist, or if faith, prayer or spirituality really work. What matters is the meaning they have for the people. Praying to some God to you and I might not seem like the thing to do, maybe even silly. But, to the dying, the hopeless, the unwanted, it has more meaning than anything you can imagine.
My question is this: How is believing in things religious/spiritual bad if it gives a person hope?
It isn't. If a child's parent is sick do you tell them that there is little hope and break their heart or do you tell them that they might be okay? Most sane people would tell them they might be okay. Giving someone hope is a good thing.
I know, I know... what about the people that use it for bad and evil things. Guess what? Those people would do bad and evil things with or without religion. When you attack religion and spirituality in its entirety you not attack the bad, but the good as well. How is this fair? If you want to focus your attention on the bad, then do just that and leave the rest alone. Stop claiming it is illusion and stupid overall. Focus your attention on only those that use it for their own gain and for bad things and leave the rest to have their hope.
In that case, let us get on to the meaning of your original post.
Whether or not god is real could have a big meaning. Afterall, if he is real, particularly some versions of him, I might be in huge trouble!
But I take your point - that spirituality or faith my be beneficial to some people. Maybe many people. It may have a theraputic effect, it may relieve stress of the everyday world by "turning over your troubles to the lord." It may make the concept of death easier to manage. For some people the idea has value independent of the ideas truth.
On the other hand, as you pointed out, it often has some pretty well documented downsides. And one may wonder if we should encourage people to believe untrue things when they are good, simply because it also conditions them to believe untrue things when they are bad.
The central premise is that the truth matters. If we start encouraging people that the truth does not matter, we may have some unintended consequences, which you are well aware of.
So my position is that it is understandable why some people will get comfort from false beliefs, but notwithstanding that fact, we should still encourage people to only believe those things which are true.
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Yes, I do understand...
