[Dragaera] agnosticism (no flame) (was, long ago: (no spoilers) The 17 [Great Weapons])

[Maximilian Wilson]

On 5/22/07, Howard Brazee <howard at brazee.net> wrote:
>
> But over time, our confidence in the repeatability of science and even
> soft sciences went up, while our confidence in the testability of
> religious ideas went down.   So churches put more emphasis in faith.


[snip]

But if I go to some proselytizers from various religions and ask them
> for evidence so that I can pick the correct religion, neither they nor I
> have confidence that they can demonstrate that the other religions are
> wrong.
>

I don't think you're trying to be offensive here, but I find the notion of
relying on faith because you have no evidence to be ridiculous, and I'm
pretty sure most intelligent people would too, including members of my
church. Faith requires evidence as a *pre-requisite*, and the reason faith
is necessary is because generally we have to act before we receive enough
evidence to be dispositive. That doesn't mean you give up on the notion of
receiving evidence.

Most members of my church probably don't realize it, but we actually place a
lot of emphasis on witnesses, times and dates, written revelations, and
generally doing everything possible for mortals to do in order to make
things documentable. If you ask about a particular doctrine, "When did God
say that?" obviously nobody can give you a vision where you can watch God
conversing with a particular prophet (and also convince you you're not
hallucinating, etc.), but we can at least point to a time and date and the
words that were said so you can decide for yourself if the interpretation is
correct, and more importantly so you can decide from a primary source
whether you believe it. We're strongly encouraged[1] to ask questions, to
test faith, and otherwise learn to rely on it. Just because something is
true doesn't mean you're born never doubting it.

-Max

[1] This doesn't mean there aren't people who will tell you not to ask
questions, ask "Does that really matter to your salvation?" and otherwise
act incurious. They haven't caught the spirit of the religion yet.

-- 
Be pretty if you are, be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Everything in Windows is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
    -Clausewitz