How do philosophers define "religion"? Nietzsche said "God is dead" and Feuerbach said "My only wish is…to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own procession and admission, are "half animal, half angel" into persons, into whole persons". How right do you think these statements are? Does God exist? Do you believe in God?
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Philosophically25% Voted for by IvoryRose, Kaori, cante jondo.
Philosophically there are proofs for the existance of god. These proofs show the necessary existance of a verb god. A god that is synonymous with Being, not a being, but being or existance as a whole. This to philosophers is the only necessary god. Philosphically it is also widely accepted that all gods that exit in the mind of man exist. The question is do they exist in the collective concious or just the concious of a group. However it is important to remember that the where of existance does not determine existance. It exists if it exists anywhere even within the mind. The dragon I imagine exists. It may not have a place in the realm we call 'reality' (topic for another day) but it most definately exists. Therefore all noun gods also exist, just not necessarily, just like you or I are not necessary. In fact nothing except existance is truly necessary. i could get into the proofs but that would take too long. You can read up on it or take a class. Overall though All noun gods and the one verb god exist. Only the verb god is necessary. THe noun gods (as well as people or things) could dissappear today and the world would still continue. However the verb god cannot dissappear if being did then nothing (sheer nothing) would be, and that cannot logically happen. So therefore God does exist, in fact all of them do, now it's up to you to decide where and how.
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"Thank God I'm an atheist!" -Luis Bunuel16% Voted for by UpsideDownFrown, Stella Cadente.
Feuerbach was reacting to the conditions of his time, wherein the Church was a dogmatic institution of hatred, violently opposed to medical and scientific progress.
Kind of like when Pastor Fred Phelps funds abortion bombings. Or like the violent protests outside of stem cell laboratories.
He is also responding to the immense amount of time and resources churches wastes... imagine all the time you spend talking to a big invisible man in the sky after paying your church to move a molesting priest somewhere safer that could be spent actually helping people around the world. The organization that gives the most global aid today is the secular United Nations; no church even comes close.
Just because your Bible tells you to do these things doesn't make it right. Your Bible also tells you to throw stones at disobedient children, murder homosexuals and wiccans, and, oh yeah, surrender your individuality and personal freedom to the concept of a hypocritical, self-contradictory judge in the clouds - at least, the popular version of him as dictated by your local minister.
I am an atheist. This is quite a claim, and the one form of belief that almost no one is willing to stand up for. No politician today will ever publicly express skepticism because he is held hostage to popular religious beliefs. Thankfully, I'm not yet a politician.
According to my personal beliefs, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and all the other theologies out there are completely wrong. The Eastern philosophies like Buddhism have to get sort of a free pass because they don't have a central deity in the Western sense, but I am morally opposed to Buddhism for a host of other reasons.
But make no mistake: I am not an atheist just because modern Christianity is full of loonies. Islam is much, much worse, no matter what some pinheaded PC freak tells you. Christianity would be just as violent, if it weren't based in Europe and America, where democracy has forced it to lose some of its bite. Make no mistake: if they could get away with regaining control of the world, they would. It is only by feigning "moderation" that they survive; read your Bible yourself. It is not a nice faith.
There, there's your answer: God does not exist. Faith is a measurable activity in the brain; spiritual experiences do not require religion to happen. They are chemical. Meditating, as the Easterners do, creates a much stronger reaction than praying and chanting. Intuitive ethics and reason, those are the things humanity must live by.
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Nietzsche16% Voted for by Luciferschild, ButerfliSpirit.
Alot of people argue what Nietzsche meant by god is dead, But one of his major points in philosophy was that everything is a lie. Two kinds of lies, Noble and then Evil. He put all that affirms life into the noble category and all that denies it into the evil one in which christianity is based. Christianity denies life in many ways. Probobly the most obvious is the way it glorifies the weak over the strong. It discourages true knowledge and encourages living a weak, meaningless life. The christian god is sadistic at best and the whole concept of jesus is flawed in almost every way. I can go on indefinitely but i have to go.
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atheism reexaminedVoted for by Auxiliar.
Although it is a bit unfair that the Judaeo-Christian God is established so that it is impossible to prove or disprove him, it still creates a problem for the claims of atheism. The way that the Soviets created an almost ancient Slavonic Icon, a Byzantine representation of Marx and their founding fathers was a religion in all but name, but that doesn't mean there is no hope for the Marxists and Revisionists to go forward in thought. Atheism, when played by the rules of monotheism, is a faith. It is a faith due to its very incompletion.
My favorite atheist is the Marquis de Sade, if for nothing else, then for his style, energy, and imagination. In "The Dialogue Between a Priest and a Moribund," presents a Priest speaking of the infinitudes of God, and a dying man. At the beginning, the dying man asks for penance, but later asks for what penance truly meant to God. He then amends himself by clarifying that he never meant to repent to a Christian God, but rather to the Omnipotent Mother Nature, a combination procuress, queen, godess, and patron of the sciences. Now comes the incommensurable: by the meter of the workings of the Judaeo-Christian mind as a collective unconscious, it is questionable whether this is simply a new God or a supplantation. The only true difference is that the Godess of the Marquis is accessible simply through a logic that weds cynicism. As a being that lends license to certain actions, and whose powers are exclusively alotted to the credent, the difference is negligible, if not in theory then in practice. Of course, the Marquis does not speak for all atheists, but he seems to reflect the extremist end of a world that isn't ruled by a consciousness but by probability. He is the horizon when it meets the railroad. At any rate, this is the closest to a valid atheist spirit that doesn't reject metaphysic that I can find without Heidegger, or an ens realissimum or a primum motum or a demiourgos or any other Thomist truism.
The following is a passage from the masterful work "Also Sprach Zarathustra;" ostensibly it's about science, but I take it a bit further because it is worth to note that the sorcerer is one of Zarathustra's most formidable opponents. I still prefer Z-, but you can see where the sorcerer is coming from. "And alas, when such as you chatter and make ado about _Truth_! Woe to all free spirits who are not on their guard against _such_ sorcerers! Their freedom is done with: you teach and lure back into your prisons, you old melancholy devil..." (Nietzsche 311). This almost presents us with an impasse, and if it were an impasse Nietzsche would still have put it at the end of the book as he did, because the sorcerer's Kritik is that Z- leads his adherents astray into a forest of pathlessness, and turns on them due to his love of his enemies. All quite true. But I still prefer the pathlessness of Agnosticism to the path of Atheism.
It seems to me that if we were to read the bible as though James Joyce wrote it, we'd get much more out of the thing. Voltaire, using much more questionable language as his appraisal of the bible tended to be just a critique of Jesuits and Catholics at large, said that the Patriarchs stole the myths of the region, co-opted their cultures for lack of their own. I wonder to think what he'd have said of Joyce. The book doesn't function on a plane of reason whereby God is good because he does this or that. It was intended to teach people who had taken God to mean infinite wisdom and wavering morality. Like with "Finnegan's Wake" it shouldn't be taken to make perfect sense, except of course that it's taken far more seriously by people who are far too serious.
Believe, not in atheists or extremist monotheists. If you've to believe in anything, and don't get me started on belief, believe in Literature at large. _Hier_ stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders. Dieu, si vous existez, sauvez mon ame, si j'en ai un.
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Belief in GodVoted for by frndofyaweh.
As the name says "Friend of YWH" and brother to all men and women. As much as I would sacrifice for my Father, so also will I sacrifice for brothers and sisters.
God is the Father and we are the children.
----- After 30 some years and several denominations; have never heard a Christian say, they believed they were, half angel and half animal. What Feuerbach wishes for believers, is exactly what My Bible teaches us to already be. Feuerbach seems ill-informed above.
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As for Nietzsche; Is that all Nietzsche says? "God is dead?" On what does he base this claim? Did he research his Bible first and attempt to find God first, before he made such a careless claim?
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god is deadVoted for by Neros Decay.
in my opinion philosophy is used in two ways. people will use it to prove that god exsists and create some sort of support for their beliefs. on the other side people will use it to dissprove the exsistence of god. people give god way too much credit for the things man has done clearly on his own through evolution of the species and technology. i completely agree and interpret those statements as correct. people waste too much time backing faith in something they themselves created while further advances can be made. religion, god, the churches... none of these things help people how they once might have helped people. people are now helping other people more rather than seeking guidance through praying to an entity. we're in a time where everything needs to be questioned and reexamined. alot of faith is crumbling because people are seeing it for what it is. ie: molestation by preists, the placement of doubt into people's minds by books, circulation of new ideas, technology, a loss of old morals, ect. honestly, this is the age of man. even those that are still religious know it. that's why there's such a hype about the world coming to and end relatively soon because people as a majority are cutting religion out.
personally: i dont believe in god. i dont follow religion at all. i have nothing against people who do either but i have no reason to see why i should restrict my life in anyway because a book a mortal man wrote says i should live this way or that way. religion isnt even holy if you think about it. its a man-made thing. like ive stated repeatedly on this site, religion is a security blanket for man to provide answers to the unknown questions of exsistence. anything that tells me i should devalue myself because everything i do is from god is not worth believing in for me. there's far too many contradictions when it comes to god - or religions in general.
as more answers are uncovered and mysteries are solved through practical methods of science, i see no reason for god. and since that form of thinking has always been around i think thats a loose meaning of "god is dead.", that over time people have seen they are their own "god".
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Friend or foe? (god and religion)Voted for by Cal5.
I believe that religion and God is not to be taken lightly! For example, I believe that religion is the start of wars, look at the war in Iraq, based upon the religion of terrorists! The wars and conflicts in Ireland based on the beliefs of Protestants and Roman Catholics. Also the world wars were based around religion and their beliefs. Most religions are set on saying that they want peace on earth but by having a faith you are destroying the world and creating conflict. So why believe in something that is destroying the world?
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Title "Philosophy vs Religion"?Voted for by asgrey.
To me philosophy and religion go hand in hand - and no true theology can exist without philosophy. Surely you must examine faith philosophically in order to reach conclusions about your own faith?
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September 25, 2007
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