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When there is proof of something, there is no need to rely on faith. Unless I'm mistaken, it has been proven conclusively that the Earth is not flat.
Yes, but when the facts are inconclusive, where do reason and logic lead you?
Should lead us to further consideration and evaluation of what requires further consideration and evaluation. Pretty much as I explain in truths six and seven. Not sure there is any good reason to choose faith when facts are inconclusive in any case. We humans have "been there done that" too many times to count and proven ourselves badly misguided by doing so.
Thanks, but if you are going to be a part of my congregation, you must accept all my truths entirely, without questioning and pass them along to others, in both printed and hand written form!
And I'm sure you'll be requiring tithing. Goodbye.
Well, for starters, either the human spirit continues to live on after the body dies or whether it also ceases to exist. When science can prove that there is no such thing as what which we religious people refer to as our "spirit," then I will use reason and logic to conclude that death is final. Until then, I won't.
If we were to include all human speculations into this category of what cannot be proven, then we would need to convince ourselves to have faith in far more than you or I would be inclined to take on. You jump to faith when something can't be proven. I simply can't do that. I don't assume or believe anything is true unless facts, reason and logic support such a belief. Can't even begin to speculate what happens to the human spirit when we haven't even proven such a thing exists.
How do we reconcile the difference in our way(s) of thinking here? Not really sure, but say we're both asked to have faith Mohammad was a prophet sent by God to preach Islamic teachings.
What would you have us do or conclude? Put our faith in such a thing because we can't prove it not to be true? Do you see the problem with your line of reasoning here?
That's right. You certainly don't, and neither do I. But that does leave us with unanswered questions, and I'm inclined to believe certain things that can't be proven to be "true." Those things are my own truths, but I would never suggest that I couldn't possibly be wrong.
I consider myself "lucky" that I don't have that problem of believing in things that can't be proven true. I simply believe there are unanswered questions as we all wait for more questions to be answered in the most sensible -- believable -- ways.
It's as if we're both in an advanced math class and the professor puts up a very complicated algebra problem on the board and asks us to derive the answer. He further explains you get an A if you can prove the answer, a C if you admit you can't and an F if you give the wrong answer.
You seem willing to risk an F with an answer you can't prove but have faith to be correct. I would always choose the first two options instead. The difference between our line of reason goes something like that I think...
See now, I'm feeling a tad insulted. Do you honestly think this question has not occurred to me at least a thousand times in my life and that I haven't come to exactly the same conclusion you have? Of course, if I were born in Thailand, the odds of my now being LDS would be extremely small. On the other hand, they were extremely small for the 22,000 Mormons in Thailand today. That's a small number, relative to the Thai population, of course, but those people had to make a choice and something about LDS teachings obviously made sense to them.
Truly don't mean to be insulting, but of course anything I suggest thinking about is because it seems (to me) worth thinking about in light of the comment. I can't possibly know what you or others have thought about at all or thousands of times, but maybe it's how we process the meaning of these sorts of demographics differently that deserves the further attention. I say this because here again you don't seem to be recognizing the influence and impact of religious inculcation that the statistics well demonstrate. Instead your focus is on the exceptions, but they don't make the rule!
Why is the rule what it is? The answer to that question is the understanding that is most important here in my opinion. So important.
We all know there are exceptions to just about any rule, but how we understand the rule as well as the exceptions is how we gain the better understanding ALL CONSIDERED.
People don't necessarily get injured in a car wreck if they don't wear a seat belt, but what are we to conclude overall and why?
Need to conclude the end for me in this forum today which is a pity, because I am surely getting the feeling just one or two more comments in this thread, and our universal truth -- for all of us -- will finally be revealed. Maybe tomorrow then! Until then, cheers.
LearnMe, the concept of universal truths is central to your Ten Truths, and yet you don't seem to have a clear idea of what universal truths are, as illustrated by your appeal to how "widely accepted" they are.
Universal truths are not determined by how "widely accepted to be true" (popular) they are.
In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition must be true because many or most people believe it, often concisely encapsulated as: "If many believe so, it is so". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
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If Truth means a statement the content of which corresponds to reality...
and if Universal means always and everywhere...
then a Universal Truth is a statement which corresponds to reality regardless of time and space.
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LearnMe, the concept of universal truths is central to your Ten Truths, and yet you don't seem to have a clear idea of what universal truths are, as illustrated by your appeal to how "widely accepted" they are.
Universal truths are not determined by how "widely accepted to be true" (popular) they are.
In argumentation theory, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for "appeal to the people") is a fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition must be true because many or most people believe it, often concisely encapsulated as: "If many believe so, it is so". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
-----
If Truth means a statement the content of which corresponds to reality...
and if Universal means always and everywhere...
then a Universal Truth is a statement which corresponds to reality regardless of time and space.
-----
I don't mind the additional participation. Encouraged in fact, but please do try to follow along, because I addressed this already. Comment #298. Many times before that comment as well. Don't really want to repeat myself or go in those circles Katzpur also wants to avoid. All I ask. Please have mercy...
I consider myself "lucky" that I don't have that problem of believing in things that can't be proven true. I simply believe there are unanswered questions as we all wait for more questions to be answered in the most sensible -- believable -- ways.
---[snip]---
Yes, you have Faith that every unanswered question will eventually have a non-theistic, "natural" explanation. That's not fact, it's simply what you prefer to believe.
It's not true, for example, to say "when the Earth was believed to be flat, and widely agreed upon, it was a fact." We both know that wasn't a fact then and isn't a fact now...
You said truth is based on widely believed facts, and that is what was the widely believed fact until it was proved not-fact. Are you walking back your central thesis about truth now? We learn from mistakes, good thing.
What you are proving by your statement is that facts change. Truth does not change, truth is always the same. It cannot be based on something that changes, if it does then it was never a truth.
Perhaps it would have been a good idea for me to point out that today's manner in which to distinguish what is fact vs what is not is quite different from back when we didn't know as much about the importance of the scientific method like we do today. This is a common source of confusion as well, as if to suggest that today science can't get something wrong or can't correct itself as we learn more.
You can change it any way you want, and make it all lok like some kind of science, but your argument is still invalid.
The most significant difference I am pointing at in this respect is that between the scientific method vs religion, theism.
Science is a methodology to arrive at knowledge of this world, and spiritual inquiry is a methodology to arrive at truth about the self. They are mutually exclusive only to those who have limited understanding, which is ok.
Truth is not a concept! You simply want to define truth in such a way as to leave space to debate what we really need not debate. A way to validate what can't be established as truth. Not sure why, but I have a theory or two about that as well.
You have not given one single example of the widely believed facts based truth yet.
Last edited by mensaguy; 04-17-2020 at 04:16 PM..
Reason: fixed quote
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