Faith and Doubt events - Part II

How was my first trip to the event about faith and doubt?
I was caught by surprise from the start. In my experiences with religious people and the fiery debates that come from the usual conflict between religion and atheism, I am used to resistance, and in some unfortunate cases, disrespect and aggressive stances towards atheists.
This time it was going to be different. It started with a quote from the Bible:

"…Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts,
always be prepared to give an answer
to everyone who asks you to give the reason
for the hope that you have.
But do this with gentleness and respect."
1 Peter 3:15

Be gentle and respectful when anyone questions your faith. Seriously? I was impressed. I immediately got those images in my head of the most extreme of Christians. Those who preach by yelling, those who preach with a closed fist and loud voices, and would call me Satan, or devil, just by asking the wrong question. This didn't happen here. But it was right after listening to Peter's quote that I glanced at the concentrated look of my friends and decided: "I am going to see this through".

Faith and Doubt events - Part I

A couple of weeks ago, religious friends of mine asked me to go to some event that their church organized.
The reason for the invitation is pretty obvious:
I am an Atheist, and the event was about faith and doubt.

We went, we listened, and we came home to talk about it.
Unfortunately, Atheists were not very well portrayed, and I left under the impression that every religious person in that room now likes atheists a bit less after having heard what we did.

Let us just say that the explanations about what we represent were accurate, the quotes of popular atheists were too, but the conclusions were pretty offset by the emotions of faith.

As such, and after stating my opinions to my friends, I was invited back due to the event being a 4 week presentation on Faith and Doubt, to see it all through, and now the presenter knows they had and will have an Atheist in their midst. I told him on their website.

More details soon, here, on the Religious Faith Challenger.

Tolerance

Most people like the idea of tolerance.
The truth is that they only accept it in a very generic way.
To be tolerant, is to accept change, and to accept difference whenever it is upon us or just around us. Embracing change becomes a requirement for tolerance.

World peace is all about tolerance. It is about accepting different people, with different ways and different values to be themselves even when right in front of you.

Religion is about absolute certainty. Is about repeating the same words over and over, in a church or holding a rosary, forever and ever, until the end of time, even if that means defying logic or letting go of common sense. When it is all about faith, thinking about it does not matter:

Amnesty International has condemned the stoning of a 13-year-old girl in southern Somalia. The human rights organization claims the teenager was stoned to death after her father informed the authorities that she had been gang-raped. She was reportedly accused of adultery and the stoning, in front of a crowd of around 1,000, was her punishment. Reporter Jon Manel and Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International, discuss the influence of militant Islamist group Al Shabab, which has control of some areas in Somalia.

From this article.

Well... Gay marriage, abortion, public displays of affection, and an endless list of behaviors that people have, will obviously clash at some point with some religion's law that clearly states that no one can have such behavior. No one can be different. No one can be outside what such religion claims.

You can surely see where this is going as far as tolerance goes. World peace, for one, will have to wait a long time... If you don't believe me, ask the 13 year old girl mentioned above.

Tolerance and Muslim Faith

One day, someone in Denmark made some drawings of prophet Muhammed, of Islam. It was a cartoon about the muslim god. However, the reacting muslims looked more like this:

Muslims at the Danish Embassy in Britain,
preaching their views on tolerance,
according to their religion.

For these religious people in the picture above, it is ok to trust the invisible god they have never seen, and trust that his teachings are just fine: if anyone makes a drawing of my invisible god, or if they say something I believe to be an insult to him, I should slay them, butcher them, and make all Europe pay because demolition is on its way.

Religious faiths are not all the same. But when us as a society grant people the right to trust whatever thing they want (faith), even when no reason or facts are behind those beliefs, it is obvious that if enough time passes, beliefs like the ones on the pictures will eventually be part of our world, and forever passed from generation to generation...

If you think world peace is on its way, religion will make sure that day will never come. At least for as long as we allow people to draw cartoons about whatever they want, that is...

Faith

Faith: confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.

Faith is also a personal choice. The concept alone has little to do with reality, proof or fact. It can, but it does not have to. It is a trust based system, not necessarily a fact based or reason based one. You can trust a person, idea or thing, for any reason (or absence thereof) or fact whatsoever.
Some people wrongly believe that faith is a concept of religious origin alone.

Faith can be the choice we make when facts are not available:
Like when we are about to decide between A and B and we believe both choices are good in their own way, but we are unable to choose both. In such cases, faith comes in. We decide to trust one choice to be the better one over the other or others, and we go for it.

I have faith when I play the lotto. I know the odds are against me. I know the odds of it being a waste of money are huge. But I play. Even though I rationalize the act of buying a ticket as the price for the excitement before losing, faith in winning is a big part of it all as well.

Religious faith is no different. It just means that the same faith is put into what some religion / belief is claiming to be true with a lot of trust and confidence, wherever those claims may be coming from.

Free Will

If I give you the remote to a TV with 99 channels but that only picks up the reception of 1, and then tell you have the free will to choose any channel, even though the 99 options are real, I do know what you will choose just because I know there is only 1 viewable channel on such TV.
As long as I know what your choice will be, you have to real choice. You will choose exactly what I know you will.

I always felt religion was throwing sand in my eyes when the subject of free will came about to shield gods from guilt and responsibility.

Every time we ask why do gods allow for evil, a weird answer is always given. In those answers, there is always a relative or a too general term to describe the whole deal.
My favorite one, is God giving humans free will.

Let's grasp this concept.
Let us consider God in that moment before creating man.
Then, let us consider mankind as we know it today.

Before Man was created, God knew everything, as He always does.
What this means, is that all future things He was about to create were known to Him.
What it also means, is that the knowledge of all people's actions was also known.
And what it also means, is that he knows exactly what all humans that will ever exist will do every time, in all the moments and choices of their lives.

If He knows all my decisions, then I am only making the decisions He knows I will make. Not the other decisions also presented to me.
If I am living exactly the life God knows I will be living, then I am only choosing to live the life God knows I will live. I will happen exactly the way God wanted and knew all along.

Where do I do whatever I want? So much for free will...
There is no free will if someone else with 100% certainty (such as all knowing gods) can know what my choice will be before I even make it.

Divine sloppyness.

A god is, according to many, the all powerful, all knowing creator of everything.
When he was about to create Man, he knew how we would turn out to be, and made us the way we are anyway.

Man is by far, the most cruel of all species. We are the only ones capable of torturing, killing for sport, genocides, mass pollution, the atom bomb, to name a few...

When I was a roman catholic, I was once told that God had made us in His own image. Now that I see that a being that can do everything (including having created a perfectly happy humanity) was able to be so sloppy in creating Man, I wonder:

Since God is also responsible for the creation of evil to begin with, and responsible for creating beings that become evil, is God really that human?