Category: philosophy/religion topics
I’ve read some posts on this site in which people have said they want to read books or other material that will tell them more about their religions or cultures. People have also said on this site that they wish to learn more about their beliefs.
If you genuinely believe something, why do you need to develop your understanding of what you believe by reading literature about the religion or culture you follow? Surely if you believe something, you have concluded that it is right, so why do you need to study the religion or culture you follow?
well said. I've thought that all along...like when people jump on me for being an atheist and they can't even tell me why they believe in a god. it's nice to see others feel the same way; thanks for creating a topic about it.
some people need to because it helps them define their belief or culture as opposed to other beliefs or cultures.
Some people want to understand what makes their faith different from others. Some people want to understand all the little aspects of their culture or belief because not all of them are covered. for example, some religions are great at saying that you shouldn't do something, but not always so clear as to the why you shouldn't.
Some people genuinely don't know a lot about their culture or beliefs. sometimes it's something that their parents don't teach them. I'm part Cornish, but I know little of Cornish culture, so I research it.
Why don't people fully understand or know about the things they have faith in or believe in before choosing to follow the belief systems they choose to follow?
I know some people are brought up believing in religions, but when they're older, they can decide for themselves whether to continue to have those beliefs. If they choose to continue believing what they were brought up believing, surely they should know everything there is to know about their beliefs. How can you believe or have faith in something if you don't know about it?
How can converts change their beliefs to something they don't fully understand or know about? Why do they decide to believe in and have faith in something they haven't followed before, without knowing all there is to know about it first?
There are those who believe in their own thing, and for them, experience is all that matters. They focus only on the here and the now and what they feel to be right. But, at the other extreme, there are those who wish to know how their given religion is practiced, where, when and how it originated, and how they can get closer to their deity/s of choice. This is especially true for those, like myself, who joined their religion later in life and for those, again, like myself, who follow a nonmainstream religion in which simply asking on the street won't help. Furthermore, for those who are reconstructionists, that is, those who wish to follow their faith as closely as possible to the way in which it was followed in ancient times, study is a necessity. Yes, I love The Gods, but I'm not an ancient Greek, nor do I have all our sacred texts in my head. So I must read them and also compare translations, since several were Christianised, new discoveries were made and some are simply better than others. as has been said in the previous post, there's also a cultural element to it. I'm interested in ancient and modern Greek culture. But as for religion, it's important to understand the ancient and learn why certain beliefs existed in one area and not in another, why some city states loved war while others were more into politics etc. Then, there are people who think that they believe something but question certain aspects of their faith. For them, it's not simply about doing things a certain way, but about whether or not they should be done or whether or not it's time to change religions. Finally, it's a lot better to have knowledge about one's faith when asked than to appear foolish. Sadly, I often feel the latter, due to my lack of serious study over the last few years, and need to remedy this.
How could you decide, that the religion you chose was the right one, when you didn't know much about it? How did you reach the conclusions about the Gods you now follow without fully understanding the religion you practice?
Sometimes, a person was raised by a religious family who said "do as I say", so they just attended church and went through the motions. Perhaps then they didn't want to learn about the religion because they wanted to rebel against their parents' rules, or because they were too young to understand it themselves. They just adapted it into their lifestyles. Then, as adults, when they're away from their families, they might want to research the religion in which they were raised either to gain a better understanding of it, or to decide whether to continue to believe in it or not. They might also research different religions to see which fits them best, and if they can't ask anyone else, literature is the best way for them to obtain the information they want. There are also those who don't agree with every aspect of their religion, so they want to understand as much as they can about the things they don't agree with so that they can either accept or challenge them. Some people are just very intellectual and curious like myself. I would read about different religions just to gain knowledge and insight.
The question you asked about why people believe something they can't prove is a good one, but these are usually the people that have their heart set on their beliefs, and their faith outweighs logic. They just follow the ways of their religion and are content. I personally don't understand how someone could do this, but it's really their choice.
This is a very interesting topic.
I haven't questioned why people believe things they can't prove, rather, why people believe things in religions they don't fully understand.
I can see why people would want to learn more about a religion they were raised to believe in as a child. In the situation you described, the people haven't reached any conclusions, but they hope to reach conclusions using the knowledge they gain. What I am trying to understand, is why people reach the conclusions first, then look into the religions they have chosen to follow. I think this happens more with converts.
Hmmm, I'm not sure I have an answer for that. I guess, like I said, for some people faith conquers reason, and they just don't want to understand things because they're happy with their beliefs.
I had always been interested in The Gods, ever since I was a child and heard the stories of Arachne (Roman not Greek) and of Persephone and the seasons. I guess they stayed with me. I had no true religion prior to becoming a Hellenic Polytheist, except a belief in some kind of higher power and the paranormal. But I couldn't name it. Then, while looking up something Greek, in December of 2002, I discovered that there were still people who worshipped the Greek Gods and Goddesses. I researched, and the more I learned, the more I liked it. But I wasn't seeking a religion. Still, by February of 2003, I'd decided that this was the religion for me. Something about it felt right and I knew that I should follow it. I was also welcomed with open arms by the religious community. All that said, this doesn't mean that I don't question or want to learn more about it. To this day, there are many things I don't know, and I'll always be finding out new things about my pchosen ath.
You pose an interesting question, but another way to look at it would be to ask why someone would need to take an English or Composition class while attending college. I mean if one has been speaking and writing English for the past eighteen years of their life, then why the need to continue learning it while in college? In both cases, I believe that both language and religion contain various complexities that are worth further investigation. Even though everyone learns how to write while attending high school, there is more that can be learned beyond this level. I think the same principle holds true with religion. Even though someone may have a basic understanding of their religion, they may wish to learn more about it.
Additionally, I think some people sign on to a religion without really understanding it in the first place, and want to learn more about it so they can figure out what the heck they signed up for when converting to a particular religion. Some people simply convert to a religion because of some feeling in their bones while others are looking for a way to ease the pain of a hardship in their lives. There are many people who sign up for something thinking that it sounds better than their current condition. In which case someone might not necessarily know much about a religion except for the fact that it could possibly provide a better future for them.
I think people have hit it on the head here.
religion is sometimes something people rush into, and often they are guided into it, and it's not something they find out for themselves.
I was guided into the church of laterday saints when 12 years old, but after my own research later, decided that I didn't agree with it....
Senior,
I will attempt to address your question as I converted to Christianity.
Basically, you ask, why would one not know everything about a particular religion or faith to convert? It's like many things: you know enough to be *reasonably* convinced. Of course the threshold of reasonable is different for different people, and even on different topics.
Rather than "learning about what we believe" - kind of a popularized term I guess - I rather look at it as settling the issue, whatever issue that happens to be.
By way of example, a few years after my conversion, a woman who was an acquaintance of ours invited me to go to a "creationist" seminar. At first it was pitched to me as, like you said, "learn about what we believe." Well I drilled down a bit and ultimately it was pitched to me as a scientific inquiry.
Well, I went, and in short, I was thoroughly unconvinced. A session beginning with singing, followed by some amateur geology and then some debate-style tactics, followed by a discussion on values by a prosecutor hardly adds up to a scientific inquiry. Their science was no more science than is astrology, whose charts don't even acknowledge Pluto amongst other things. It only *sounds like* science, in a rather diminutive fashion.
So why would I have wasted an afternoon, and several subsequent hours on my own time on the net, looking at what they produce? I didn't need to change my understanding of evolutionary theory, that being a scientific principle and not something one "believes in". But there are those that propose you can't be a Christian without first subscribing to a particular (and in many ways perhaps particularly tenuous) cosmo-construction model.
So I had to settle the issue of this incongruity. Is faith totally incompatible with sound science?
A couple years ago, I read Francis Collins' book "A Case for Belief" - not the typical lawyerly apologetic rhetoric, but written by an actual scientist, Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome project. He, too, did not follow the party line, but his own journey of faith was well expressed, I thought.
Ironically, this same person who took me to the meeting was quite adamant in her dislike for the Human Genome project. After a few genetics questions, I realized she had learned talking points, and been convinced, emotionally perhaps, that this project (at that time still underway) was not to be trusted. I still do not know what their reasonings for mistrusting such a project were, as by then I had lost patience and was exercising all due restraint to simply not go off.
So, for me, I was able to settle the issue. To her the original meeting may have been "Learning about what we believe," while to me it was more "Show me what you got and I'll think about it."
I gave perhaps an extreme example being they were quite dogmatic, but Ihave been to other meetings - usually study groups of one kind or another - where I was convinced, after an explanation was given. But there are things that remain confusing, or for me at least, puzzles yet to be solved.
One such puzzle, and I can hardly believe I'm writing this, came up when my wife started (quite a few years ago now) doing ministry. Now me being a man raised in the eighties and college educated in the early nineties would never have considered the prospect of denying someone a position based on gender, but that can exist within Christendom.
I soon learned this wasn't a case of immature loser boys using gender as an excuse since they couldn't really compete: some of the ones who had a problem with women in position were ... women themselves. Sounds incredibly unbelievable, at least it did to me. After all, if you assent there's a God, that this God has created all people in his own image, and this God might even be responsible for the concept of logic, or at the least utilized it in abundance, then how can one account for first the creation of some very qualified women, and second, a ruling that dispenses with that resource by denying them access to positions that exploit their qualifications.
Something in the equation must be terribly wrong.
I realized I would probably do well to settle the issue for myself from a faith-based perspective. She apparently had. so how to settle the issue? Basically I used the Internet, and found web sites that pretty much outlined the arguments for and against, and to my thinking anyway, the threads of logic for denying a qualified woman a leadership position were quite tenuous, and driven by sentence fragments extracted from innumerable places. The arguments in favor of women's access to leadership basically set down a cultural context of the same texts and provided explanations for apparent incongruities. Also, and this is especially true of GodsWordToWomen.org, they had done a lot of studies in the ancient original languages. Much of this was beyond my abilities as my areas of study have not really been religion and philosophy, but there was overwhelming evidence, at least to the mind of an amateur in this area.
In the end, I did change my position somewhat: I no longer simply held that a qualified woman had a right, in the modern sense, to position, but that quite possibly had a responsibility that exceeded anything I could conceive of. My wife who was involved in this, had tried to explain this very thing to me, but thus far it had totally skimmed past me.
This wasn't a career aspiration like innovating something cool in software, it is, at least for some, a lifestyle. So in settling the issue, I found out it was more than a cultural war - between good ol' boys and the ever onward march of time. I went from simply thinking of it as a sexist versus rational argument, to gaining a profound respect and some understanding for women - including my wife - who are doing it.
In short I settled the issue for myself.
There are lots of things outside of faith even, where you can assent to the principle in question, but still wonder about some of the details.
My understanding of Einstein's Theory of Relativity has increased over the years. Yet how many of us really get the whole thing? How about Steven Hawking's rather avant guard theories regarding parallel universes, vorteces and the like? Well I am not a physicist and my understanding is amateur. That doesn't mean I think Hawking is a crock.
I think people continue to attempt to expand their understanding of a given area, and faith is particularly challenging because it's not concrete. Add to this the whole area of perceptions one gains about a particular group. Nobody has a perception on gravity, set theory, or whether matter has three states, because those are concepts you can prove in a laboratory. However, invariably one has to sort out with faith what are actual tenets, what is cultural, and often shed some misperceptions (such as: all Christians hate queers, all Christians are corporate-owned republican folks that "go dancing on the backs of the bruised"). Those all factor in, and if one is pursuing a deeper understanding, may have to be factored out.
In summation, I don't think it's a matter of going into a place with beak open like a baby bird being hand-fed, but more having something presented to you for your consideration. There are still many things that Christians take for granted, but for me the jury is still out. I think it would be rash and rather disingenuous of me to simply swallow something without making a concerted effort to sort out incongruities. Some things take a long time to work out, if for no other reason than there are a lot of barriers erected by culture, dogma and a lack of evidence.
Well, as a possible convert to a different denomination, I can totally understand why someone would want to know about their faith. I was raised Lutheran, and am interested in Catholicism. Not only did I learn more about my Lutheran faith by researching the Catholic church, but also about Catholicism. I have the mindset, that I don't want to just say I believe in something cause the Pope or church catechism says I should. I wanted to know what Catholicism teaches, and also why. I also know a lot about other religions. Even though I don't practice them, it is good to find similarities between my faith and other religions.
the beauty of life is that we don't know everything. Discovering and expanding our minds and souls are what make us human.
It is said that the last person who knew everything about everything was thomas bacon and he lived at the time of shakespeare. Even that is an erroneous assumption because he knew all there was to ken in the western world. What the arabs and people in india and chinese knew went far beyond his limited sphere of understanding.
The process of exploring and adapting beliefs to our own circumstances and questioning is what is important. No one, and that means not any human, one of the few times I use no and every, should blindly accept and never question what they are told in any situation and that includes church, temple, or mosque.
Although I was raised a christian, I was a member of a family who practiced the christian lifestyle as opposed to the belief in jesus christ. In other words, I was told you do this because it is tradition or whatever.
As a teen, like many of us, I questioned everything and went away from organized anything. at one time I flirted with marxism and believed that religion was the opiate of the people bla bla bla.
At the age of 35, I began studying pondering praying and arguing. It became apparent to me that there was a God, and. In order to believe in him, he had to become part of my life. I couldn't do it on my own. I could say a lot more but this isn't necessarily the place.
I certainly don't pretend to know everything about God and Jesus. I wouldn't want to. Once we put them in a box, they lose air and die.
Robo, as for the evolution argument, who cares? In stead of arguing about how we got here, we should be worrying about what we are doing on the trip through life. In my opinion, evolution and creation are very simple. In creation God is in control. If you look at the bible and leave out the days it follows roughly darwin. If you look at darwin, he takes god out of the equasion. Really what difference does it make? Does this make sense?
As for women being in leadership positions. It all goes in to that box thing. If a woman strongly feels that God wants her to preach, who am I to argue? If she's trying to prove a point, then I have a problem.
I have to agree here. I'm totally against anyone denying women their rightful places. If they feel that they're called by their deity/s of choice, why shouldn't they be able to serve Him/Her/Them? Then again, I come from a religion with priests and priestesses so that could taint my view a bit. *smile*
Well Turricane that is good assessment, and nice to hear from someone else who has worked through some stuff.
As to BLW1978 I totally understand; it seems disingenuous just to take what is told without question. I wish you the best on your travels. We are in with the foursquare people now but I don't think I have a particular denominational leaning, as it were. My daughter has a youth group she likes which has pretty normal stuff, like even rock concerts and stuff, but still deep at least what she comes back with, plus my wife works with them, and they have no issues regarding women doing ministry at all, there seems to be a whole ton of them in there and the founder herself was one. Plus, they really don't get themselves all worked up, like where we used to be you would see. Naturally some get quite dogmatic, but provided they're not uncivil about it, I consider that their affair.
Why do we stick a spoon in our mouth if we know the soup is hot?
Because we're idiots.
That is why learning things, like how to wait for soup to cool down, is important. It helps you survive and it helps you look like significantly less of a dumbass.
Knowledge is power, boys and girls. If you believe something and least have the decency to figure out why you do.
miss m, i am really not sure of your point, but it was amusing.
one of the few things bob dylan said that I liked was "the minute you stop growing you start dying." If we don't learn something new every day we are just marking time and taking up space. So we must get out there and expand our minds and/or souls, which is healthier than growing our waistlines.