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Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

Religion falls under Dogma (the greek word - δόγμα).

I believe in it because it is right, and it is right because I believe in it.

Religion doesn't follow logic. It follows belief.

It is like saying "the team that I support is better than the team that YOU support". Even if "my" team hasn't won anything for the last 100 years. Even if "your" team beats us 100-0 on every game. Just bad luck, the referee didn't see things clearly, the coach made a few untested last minute changes, the list is endless.

But the dogma remains. MY belief/idea is better then YOUR belief/idea, and that is that. And this is why many people (including me) are rejecting religion/"The Church". I want people to have the freedom to believe whatever they want, but I cannot get into a dialogue on religion.

I remember from the music video of Van Halen - Right Now [1]: Right Now, god is killing moms and doges because he has to (the clip displays this in all caps, I will respect everyone's eyes)

[1]: https://youtu.be/rMV-fenGP1g?t=48

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Christians have been growing as a movement nearly uninterrupted for 2 millenia. So much for the religious always losing. What I've seen consistently is the ability of the secular to debate and convert is trumped by the ability of the religious to reproduce. Church attendence is going up in many western countries driven by immigration.

Religion does follow a belief structure that differs from logic but it sure as shit is a robust and resilent belief system.

> the ability of the secular to debate and convert is trumped by the ability of the religious to reproduce.

Perhaps that’s true in a global sense, but that doesn’t mean Christianity is devoid of individuals who can clearly and logically defend their position in debate against secularists and atheists. William Lane Craig comes to mind, among several others. You might not like listening to him, but he certainly doesn’t rest his case on an assumed moral authority or any other fallacious logical grounds.

I'm not saying Christians are dumb but atheist > christian conversions aren't as common as christian > atheists. They aren't the greatest at converting people.

Atheism is merely the current world zeitgeist. In a while, maybe a century, it’ll be something else. There have always been people who were “Christians” but who eventually left. The apostle John even wrote about it happening in the 1st century —- so it’s nothing new.

What matters is whether it’s objectively true. Christians may be failing in certain ways at evangelism, but as scripture says, “The natural man does not understand the things of God, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Do you have some numbers to back this up? Everywhere in the west I look, christianity is losing grounds. People practice less, they still have the belief on the paper but don't go to church, don't pray, baptize kids only due to pressure from older generations etc.

Most I know come up with their own version of religion based on christianity - picking up what they like, ignoring rest. Which is a sane and fine solution and practically transition to agnosticism over few generations, but it sure ain't the same christianity branch they claim to adhere to.

It could be still adding numbers due to remote missionaries wiping out local religions and overall increasing numbers (I sure as hell hope not), but I can't imagine this trend in western democracies. Immigration you mention should be 0-sum game - yes more immigrants in their new home country go into church, but they left their home country.

Other religions, especially islam might be another story.

In the US, the fastest growing religion is None-of-the-above [1]. Now, that's not to say that people have given up magical thinking and have embraced reality. They still might believe false things. But at the very least, on some level they've realized that (organized) religion and its dogma is poisonous.

1) http://elm.washcoll.edu/index.php/2018/11/fastest-growing-re...

> magical thinking

Christianity’s main claims revolve around agreeing eyewitness accounts from hundreds of people, set against a backdrop of people in power who had the motivation and opportunity to disprove them if they could (but who opted to kill them instead). You may say those people were lying or call them delusional, but my choice to believe them hardly qualifies as magical thinking.

And that could easily be lobbed the other direction. To think that a universe, its physical laws, and everything in it can come from nothing might just as well be called magical thinking.

It might be more helpful to engage the worldview and its arguments than use dismissive phrases.

Talking about dismissive phrases, you mention hundreds of witnesses. Yet for a son of one and truly god, sorry God, to walk among common folks, not a single roman historian bothered to make even a fleeing mention in their records. The first one happen almost 100 years afterwards [1].

As we all know, many people are effin' properly weird. They make up stories, believe utter nonsense only because its convenient. But we're led to accept without any question records passed verbally for hundred(s) of years of magical supernatural acts. In fact, whole bible is full of them, somehow universe 2000-3000 years ago was much more magical place where simple laws of physics didn't work if you had the right god on your side.

Here we come full circle to the fact that most sane christians today don't have answer to this simple logical fallacy (and others). They will tell you that you can't take these things literally, just take the moral values etc. So we end up with some bastardized religion, call it a sect, which picks from Bible what they like, and conveniently ignore the rest.

With this logic we can turn to old greek/persian/hindu/pagan/etc myths which contain tons of moral lessons too. And being a good moral person doesn't need any fear-of-god pressure, most of us have this thing called moral compass. Those who don't have it can't be saved/turned good by any faith anyway.

Maybe some older folks from bible belt or some 3rd world country can be still fed this utter nonsense, but anybody with critical thinking has hard time with these topics. You can't be a good citizen and be critical to your government and overall bullshit around us, and in the same time turn this part of your personality off with faith.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

That didn't use to be the case historically, for what it's worth. The idea of religion being a matter of faith is only about 150 years old, dating to the time when naturalists put the final nail in the coffin of expectation of science validating religious beliefs.

> The idea of religion being a matter of faith is only about 150 years old

Nah.

> Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

John 20:29

> He replied, "Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."

Matthew 17:20

Christianity at least was always about (blind) faith. And I'd argue all abrahamic religions were like that. Let's not forget the start of the all these religions - Abraham blindly believing god so much that he tried to kill his son.

Or maybe try Hiob's story (I believe in English it's Job?). God killed his family to win a bet with the devil, and Job was supposed to keep his faith because he will get a new better family in the end.

Or the wife of Lot who was changed into a salt pillar because she dared to look back at the cursed city (damn LGBT, it ruined Sodom ;) ) instead of blindly believing the god and going away.

There's lots of such stories in the Bible - the message of "shut up and believe what you're told" is clear.

It's worth noting that, at least in the New Testament Greek, "faith" also translates as "trust". It is an emphasis on knowing and trusting God himself, not subscribing to a particular dogma. Jesus clearly ridiculed people who leveraged dogma for the sake of control, vanity, or out of ignorance.

In other words, Jesus blessed people who trust him though they didn't meet him. He didn't exactly expect people to say "Jesus... nice name. I think I go apologize to my wife now." The expectation was always that Christians would be a people who taught and encouraged each other to understand Jesus and trust him.

In fact "blind faith" itself is a reference to Jesus mocking folks with ignorant dogma.

Fideism has been repeatedly condemned by the Catholic church, FWIW.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06068b.htm

> A philosophical term meaning a system of philosophy or an attitude of mind, which, denying the power of unaided human reason to reach certitude, affirms that the fundamental act of human knowledge consists in an act of faith, and the supreme criterion of certitude is authority.

That's a different position than "religion is a matter of faith". IIUC it's more like "everything is a matter of faith".

And in matters concerning religion - at least the Catholic church still believes in papal infallibility.

I think you may have misread. It's clear that fideism is being discussed in the context of Christian belief in the article I linked:

>... before we believe in a proposition as revealed by God, we must first know with certitude that God exists, that He reveals such and such a proposition, and that His teaching is worthy of assent, all of which questions can and must be ultimately decided only by an act of intellectual assent based on objective evidence. Thus, fideism not only denies intellectual knowledge, but logically ruins faith itself.

See e.g. the following for further discussion.

https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/67580/what-...

From your link:

> All the truths you list above, which are beyond the capabilities of human reason alone to discover, can only be known through faith. See, for example: "Whether the trinity of the divine persons can be known by natural reason?" (Summa Theologica I q. 32 a. 1).

> Just because there are truths beyond our human natural reason, that doesn't mean faith is not an intellectual virtue grounded in reason.

This debate seems to be orthogonal to our debate. They are arguing whether faith is a feeling or a thing you can reason about. But they all agree faith is required to believe in catholic dogmas.

And I fail to imagine how you could think otherwise, religions make lots of assumptions about god, and the proofs of existence of god I've seen were all flawed, and even if they weren't - they would only prove the existence of something, not the existence of a personal god with any particular properties.

I especially liked the proof that went: "all things are perfect to some degree, therefore there must be a thing that is the most perfect, and that's by definition god" :)

I was a devout catholic when I heard it the first time, and still it seemed so fishy to me :)

It's not in any way an orthogonal debate. The Catholic Church clearly condemns blind faith in the main tenets of Christianity. That is, it condemns the idea that one should believe unreasonable doctrines through faith alone.

>Human reason is able to prove with certitude the existence of God; faith, a heavenly gift, is posterior to revelation, and therefore cannot be properly used against the atheist to prove the existence of God.

>...

>Revelation, indeed, is the supreme motive of faith in supernatural truths, yet, the existence of this motive and its validity has to be established by reason.

Whether or not certain arguments for God are valid or not is beside the point. The point is that rational grounds for believing in God's existence are regarded as a necessary foundation for faith.

Catholicism also condemns Rationalism, so faith is considered essential too, but it's not the blind faith you were referring to in your earlier post. You believe in the trinity through faith but your faith is grounded in a knowledge of the reliability of the relevant revalation(s).

You are stretching the words to mean what they doesn't mean.

> it condemns the idea that one should believe unreasonable doctrines through faith alone.

And who decides what is unreasonable :)?

Because as a catholic you are required to believe in lots of self-contradictory statements with no proof. Stuff like holy trinity, virginal birth; omnipotence of god; humanity and divinity of messiah; omnipotent, omniscient and loving god creating an universe with evil in it; free will, salvation by good acts, and god's omniscience; impossibility of salvation without sacrifice of Jesus; bread that is a human body as well (in essence not in substance, but the idea of essenece itself is unreasonable and has no basis in reality).

All of that with no proof other than scripture and tradition.

I was a catholic for 22 years. I was taught by parents, and in school by priests. I took it seriously and fought with these statements for several years before abandoning them altogether.

Catholics are required to believe in whatever the pope says is true in the matters of religion. You have to believe Mary was a virgin her whole life and never died, but went straight to heaven. You can have doubts, but the correct reaction is to ignore the doubts and pry for god to give you faith.

And it haven't changed in last 150 years - some dogmas were added, but the idea that you have to believe in these things is at least 1600 years old, and probably older.

You're getting side-tracked on the issue of whether or not there are good arguments for the existence of God and other key components of Christian belief.

The Catholic position isn't that you should believe every part of Christianity on the basis of blind faith. That's clear from the sources that I linked to.

You might think that the arguments are bad. However, believing something on the basis of a bad argument isn't the same thing as believing it on the basis of blind faith.

Take the infallibility of the Pope's ex cathedra pronouncements as an example. Yes, you are supposed to believe these as a Catholic. But the doctrine of infallibility rests on reasoned (though not necessarily sound) arguments. Catholics don't say "believe whatever the pope says because blind faith". They say: here is why we believe the Pope's ex cathedra pronouncements are infallible and hence to be assented to.

AFAICT this has descended into semantics at this point.

The difference between "blind faith" and what the Catholic church would call "reasoned faith" doesn't seem at all relevant if one doesn't accept (logically sound) arguments where there is no demonstrable reason to accept the premises of said argument... is it?

Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?

EDIT: To me it's a bit like arguing from a premise of "the Bible is 100% true and infallible". Well that can't be a valid premise because there are contradictory passages... and, anyway, it wasn't written directly by God, so there is already at least 1 layer of interpretation going on. I mean, I can accept that if you believe the premise then you wouldn't want to wear clothes made of mixed fibers, but that's neither here nor there. Likewise, you could argue as long as you like about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, but I don't accept the premise that angels (as described in the bible) exist, so...

Well, if you don't believe in the Catholic religion it would be hard to argue that one should assent to its teachings. But Catholics really do believe that their beliefs should be subject to reason. They wouldn't necessarily agree with reasons why their beliefs are wrong, but they would believe that faith must be in accordance with reason.

As to why the specific teachings of the Catholic church? It literally comes down to "God said so and God wouldn't lie."

"We may point out in this connexion the falsity of the prevalent notion that faith is blind. "We believe", says the Vatican Council (III, iii), "that revelation is true, not indeed because the intrinsic truth of the mysteries is clearly seen by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Who reveals them, for He can neither deceive nor be deceived." Thus, to return to the act of faith which we make in the Holy Trinity, we may formulate it in syllogistic fashion thus: Whatever God reveals is true but God has revealed the mystery of the Holy Trinity therefore this mystery is true." [1]

As to the reasons why Catholics believe that one should place one's trust in God, these have to do with a variety of purely rational, if not always convincing arguments. Catholics believe that the existence of God can be proved with reason.

"'that God, the first cause (principium) and last end of all things, can, from created things, be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason' (Denz., 1785-old no. 1634)

and in the corresponding canon (can. i, De revelat.) it anathematizes anyone who would say

'that the one true God our Creator and Lord, cannot, through the things that are made, be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason (Denz., 1806-old no. 1653)." [2]

Catholics would not argue that you can logically deduce every tenant of their faith through reason alone, but they do believe that through reason, one can deduce enough to decide to place faith in truth of the religion and then chose to follow the rest of the beliefs.

1. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05752c.htm 2. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06608b.htm

> As to why the specific teachings of the Catholic church? It literally comes down to "God said so and God wouldn't lie."

How do you know god said so? How do you know there even is a god? How do you know god wouldn't lie?

You assumed it (in one way or another). Blind faith.

BTW, regarding the whole "god doesn't lie" thing:

> O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me.

Jeremiah 20:7

> And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the LORD have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.

Ezekiel 14:9

> And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:

2 Thessalonians 2:11

But Bible is full of contradictions, it's not like anybody can be persuaded by pointing them out. Faith doesn't care about contradictions :)

> these have to do with a variety of purely rational, if not always convincing arguments.

Arguments using circular reasoning are indeed not very convincing :)

> that God, the first cause (principium) and last end of all things, can, from created things, be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason

There's no way to deduce anything about the first cause. Not the fact that it would also necessarily be the end of all things. Not that it was something conscious with a free will. Much less again that it was a personal god. Much less still that it was the God as Catholics define him.

And it's perfectly possible that there was no first cause at all (the chain of causes could be infinite for all we know).

> Catholics believe that the existence of God can be proved with reason.

And that's blind faith, because they can't actually prove it, they just declare it's possible. You're arguing my point for me here ;)

"How do you know god said so? How do you know there even is a god? How do you know god wouldn't lie?"

I don't know any of these things. I don't believe in a God. But you're missing the whole point which is that just because you disagree with the reasoning and beliefs of Catholics doesn't mean that you can impose a doctrine upon them which they do not believe.

"And that's blind faith, because they can't actually prove it, they just declare it's possible."

They believe that they can prove it, and I've met many who will attempt to a do so at the drop of a hat. If you'd read the link I provided you'd actually see some of those attempts. Whether they actually can prove it is beside the issue, however. What matters is whether they believe that their proofs are valid.

Again, you're confusing blind faith with belief on the basis of an argument that you think is bad. We know that you are not convinced by any arguments for the existence of God. But believing that God exists on the basis of a rational argument isn't blind faith.

You cannot turn irrational belief into rational one just by making a flawed argument about it.

Belief: "Earth is flat"

Argument: "If earth was flat it would look flat. Earth looks flat therefore it must be flat."

It's no longer faith, it's reason now. Doesn't matter that you ignore all the counterarguments.

Believing that the Earth is flat on the basis of that argument certainly isn't belief on the basis of faith.

Catholics as a group don't "ignore all the counterarguments". So for example, Ed Feser recently published a book presenting five arguments for the existence of God (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/...). The book responds to the various counterarguments that atheists and agnostics usually make to these arguments. You might not be convinced by the responses, but the counterarguments are not ignored.

Again, I am not trying to argue here that Catholicism can ultimately be rationally justified. I'm not a Catholic, and it's not particularly important to me whether it can or can't be. But it's unfair to caricature Catholics as a group as irrational faith heads (though no doubt some individuals may meet this description).

"Argument: "If earth was flat it would look flat. Earth looks flat therefore it must be flat."

It's no longer faith, it's reason now. Doesn't matter that you ignore all the counterarguments."

Exactly! Otherwise literally everyone on earth could be said to be acting on 'blind faith' because nearly everyone holds at least one or two mistaken beliefs out of some prejudice or unwillingness to examine the counterarguments.

> Catholics are required to believe in whatever the pope says is true in the matters of religion.

This is fairly explicitly not true. Most papal statements even on subject matter that could in principal be subject to infallible declaration are not made ex cathedra. There very few even arguably ex cathedra pronouncements (leaving aside the disputed status of canonizations), even though Popes say and write a lot about religion.

If the validity of any religion were testable, it's arguable that we'd all know by now which one it was. But I'm not aware of any such experimental data. So it's all just speculation.

I don't see how that's relevant to this thread.

It seems relevant to the faith vs rationality discussion. For me, rationality strongly implies testability. Unless we're talking about mathematics, and not physical reality.

First of all, if there's a special get out clause for mathematics, why shouldn't there be a special get out clause for God? God isn't part of physical reality either.

But anyway, the question was whether religious belief was necessarily based on "blind faith", not whether it meets some kind of positivist criterion of ideal rationality. People who believe in God wholly or partly on the basis of arguments aren't believing on the basis of blind faith. You might think the arguments are bad, but you could have a rational discussion with them about that.

> And in matters concerning religion - at least the Catholic church still believes in papal infallibility

Papal infallibility is actually a rather new dogma (and, on the age scale of the Catholic Church, even somewhat new as a general belief), and it means a lot less than a lot of people (especially outside the Church) think it means, because it applies only on special circumstances and only on specific subject matter; there's a very small number of pronouncements to which it is generally held to apply (and I believe only two that are absolutely unquestioned), and several more to which it has been argued to apply (as well as one very frequent act to which it has been argued, but is not generally accepted, to apply: canonization of saints.)

"There's lots of such stories in the Bible - the message of "shut up and believe what you're told" is clear. "

You've picked some of the best stories that illustrate if god existed, he'd be a moral thug and sociopath...

The entire Gospel is centered around salvation by faith in Christ, which of course is much older than 150 years.

No it isn't; while the years is more like 500, it is nonetheless a recent innovations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fide

>The idea of religion being a matter of faith is only about 150 years old

I think I know what you're driving at but what you literally said is wrong. I've read many Christians from over 150 years ago jawing on anout faith.

Yeah I should have said "solely a matter of faith."

Many early scientists and alchemists were driven by a desire to discover through theory and experiment the mind of god. Archeology as a field was largely formalized by members of christian societies hoping to find the historical sites of miraculous events, to bolster their faith. Even as these searches strike out in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, religion still clung to the near universal belief in material of life being different from inanimate matter. The proof in the existence of god was as simple as looking in a mirror--you were made in his image, and so obviously different from the mechanical substances that made up the rest of the world.

The discovery of evolution as a mechanism for the explanation of life, and the later elaboration of life's mechanical nature really closed off the final possibility of there being everyday real-world proof for the existence of god. It was then that the philosophy was adopted that ALL of religion was a matter of faith alone, untestable by science.

Faith does seem to be a Judeo-Christian-Moslem thing though, rather than something inherent in religion. As far as I can tell, the Indo-European pagan religions were more about practicing the correct rituals, rather than believing the correct things.

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