JesusPets / Faith as a Moral Failing
Francois Tremblay Permalink
12 comments
JesusPets, because who's gonna take care of your pets when you rocket your way to Heaven ?
If you have a non-Christian family member, they might take care of your pet, but if not, have you made any plans? Imagine being taken to streets of gold while your dog starves to death walking around in his own feces trapped in your small house or apartment, subject to fire and earthquakes or even being eaten by heathens searching for any remaining morsel of food. Do you want that to happen?
(...)
That’s what JesusPets is for. We are assembling a community of heathen pet-lovers to care for pets that are “left-behind.” We are coordinating with feed mills and kennels in preparation for your post-apocalyptic pet care needs.
On the one hand, extra jobs for atheists, but on the other hand, this might just be the final spike in abandoned pet population that forces mankind to get on the dog-'n-cats diet.
George M Felis wants to be brutally honest about faith. I think he's doing a pretty good job :
Faith is not a mere failure of reason: Faith is the willful abdication of reason. Faith isn't a mistake along the same lines as a logical error such as affirming the consequent. It is not simply an oversight of evidence that ought to be under consideration. Faith is the declaration that reason may be all well and good in other areas, but reason ends here where the believer says it does! No argument can conceivably be given for not adhering to the standards of reason on any given subject, because argument itself must adhere to rational standards. Otherwise, it isn't argument - it's shouting, empty noise, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
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12 Comments:
You people ought to be ashamed, making jokes about pets being "left behind."
If you alleged intellectuals knew anything, you'd know that dogs will go to Heaven long before most people.
Granted, cats might not.
But dogs certainly.
I guess the philosophy department at the University of Georgia never covered "begging the question". George has based his entire article on experiential faith.
He is right that anyone who basis some belief on what they "feel" can believe anything without justification. In his assertion that faith is the abdication of reason he has created a false dilemma, because he has assumed that all faith is based on feelings (while this may be true for some Christians) it is not universally true.
edit *basis should have been *bases
Then what is an example of a 'faith' that is NOT based on emotion?
Vic-
First, are you using "faith" in the same sense as "belief" or "faith" in the sense of some set of beliefs. e.g. the Christian faith.
If you are using it in the former then I would say 1)memory beliefs and 2)rational intuition (which include axiomatic truths such as the laws of logic).
streetapologist,
How do you define "faith"? Secondly, how does the Bible define "faith"?
First, are you using "faith" in the same sense as "belief" or "faith" in the sense of some set of beliefs. e.g. the Christian faith.
Why are you asking me? YOU are the one who insisted that there are types of faith that didn't depend on emotion. Ask yourself - what did YOU mean by 'faith' in that post?
Or do you not have the first clue...?
Streetapologist,
You said:
If you are using it in the former then I would say 1)memory beliefs and 2)rational intuition (which include axiomatic truths such as the laws of logic).
I contend that the definition of "faith" (the former usage you referenced) is: "belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence."
So your claim that faith can rest on axioms like the laws of logic, is incorrect.
Faith is a cop out. As Dan Barker said (to paraphrase): If the only way you can accept something is through faith, then you are conceding that it cant be taken on its own merits.
A butterfly farts in India and a little boy in England dies when his sister catches him spying on her through the keyhole. Or something like that. I think the whole religion thing ultimately comes down to people who can't correctly associate cause and effect, and people who make a comfortable living shoveling conceptual horseshit all over the same subject. As for the butterfly thing, your abandoned pets theory opened the door. Who's sorry now? :-)
Faith is not based entirely on the irrational. As I stated before, faith and intellectual assent to some fact x can be based on empirically observable facts in the noumena of experience. Otherwise there would be no conceptual possibility of the contrary. For example the resurrection of Jesus Christ is an empirical event in history, otherwise it would be completely outside of the realm of reason. Coherence and cogency of evidence can reasonably lead to faith in x proposition. Of course we begin with a presuppositon (I begin with the presuppostion that God exists)and therefore my faith in him is rational where faith is defined as "belief and trust in God". Because your presupposition is indeed antithetical to my mine your faith in God would be irrational. Without acknowledging your presuppositions the above statement would rightly be nonsense. However if you acknowledge the role of presuppositions in the original post then certainly faith cannot be irrational if based on one's presupposition.
Proof, for God empirically could never lead to saving faith however one can observe God through natural revelation. The argument that this phd in Philosophy offers badly begs the question and his conclusion does not follow from his premiss.
Vic- The english language can be very ambigious, this question was not meant to be offensive rather it was an attempt to clear up any ambigiuty before moving on to the real issue. As I stated in the above negating faith by claiming that all faith is based on emotion doesn't address where I demonstrated the basis of "beliefs".
Then what you've basically said is that, if faith is not based on emotion, it's based on some other figment of the imagination. I get it now.
Vic-
I am saying that the "article" in question, begs the question. The article says that all faith is based on emotion, .: no faith is rational. He goes on to say that "it is not an oversight of the evidence that ought to be under consideration"... but 1)to what evidence is he referring? 2)he asserts that it is the abdication of reason. When he goes further and says that it is just "empty noise", he has made an assertion without demonstrating how faith is the total "Casting off" of reason. This means that in this one area the believer is utterly irrational. Is this proposition true? Can a person completely supsend reason in only aspect, especially one as foundational as a first principle?
It has not been demonstrated IMO that a person can be rational in all other regards and yet irrational in some other. Irrational states exist to be sure but not isolated to one particular area i.e. mental illness effects all areas of one's mentation not just one.
Again this article begs the question, critically examine the premiss (of the article) and you decide.
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