The real questions they dont want you to ask (quote, faith, beliefs)

[granpa]

The question isn't "what should you believe."
The real question is "what do you know beyond a reasonable doubt" and "how do you know it".

True faith is having enough confidence in your beliefs that you are not afraid to analyze them objectively.

The question isn't how to be moral.
The real question is how to be civilized.

The question isn't what to do with sinners.
The real question is what to do with criminals and lunatics.

One person considers eating meat to be bad and another person considers it to be okay. What then do we say? Is eating meat good or bad?
Do we say that it is right for one person and wrong for the other? Clearly not! That would be moral relativism.

When one person eats meat it sets off alarms in their head. But when another person eats meat it does not set off alarms. One has to draw a distinction between the act of eating and the alarms going off.
We can say therefore that eating meat is not bad (for anyone) but setting off these alarms is bad (for everyone) and therefore anything which has the effect of setting off these alarms is something that should be avoided. 

It isnt the alarms that make everything wrong. The alarms are just one thing that happens to be wrong. Actions like murder and theft are wrong regardless of whether any alarms are set off. What makes something wrong? Ultimately, exactly the same thing that makes 2 + 2 = 5 wrong. Reason and logic. If we want to live and prosper we must have civilization. If we want civilization then we can't have murder and theft. But some people can't accept that the world doesn't revolve around them and never quite fit into civilized society.

[Freak80]

7 out of 10...

[Tired of the Nonsense]

Originally Posted by granpa

The question isn't "what should you believe."
The real question is "what do you know beyond a reasonable doubt" and "how do you know it".


If the question was, "What do we (humans) know to be true beyond all possibility of error, and how do we know it," I would be forced to acknowledge that the answer is NOTHING. Fallible humans are always subject to being wrong. That does not establish that we ARE always wrong however.

But the question you posed is, "what do you know beyond a reasonable doubt" and "how do you know it". And that is a very different kettle of fish. For example, we humans know "beyond a reasonable doubt" that a corpse, once fully and truly dead, will not come back to life again. We know this from thousands of years of experience with dead corpses. We also know that a corpse will not come back to life and then fly away "beyond a reasonable doubt." What we do know perfectly well however, is that humans can imagine that such things are true, and then convince themselves that things which contradict all reason and experience sometimes occur. Because people often prefer fanciful beliefs over reality.