Begin quotation:

One clear and important distinction between fantasy and religion is the knowledge of its source.  People generally attribute their personal fantasies and dreams to themselves and to events they’ve experienced.  They also know or assume that public fictions (novels, movies, cartoons, etc.) were created by specific people who had particular intentions for doing so.

A religious text is another story.  Followers believe it to be the work and word of deities themselves.  Believers assume that sacred doctrine was first heard or transcribed in some long-forgotten time by chosen prophets or sages who were faithfully repeating or imaging what the deities had directly said or shown to them.

Accepting a text on authority and faith implies that the listener or reader suspend the universal constraints on ordinary communication, that is, pragmatic considerations of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1996).  In ordinary communication, the listener or reader “automatically” attemps to fill the gap in understanding between what is merely said or written and what the communicator intends the listener or reader to think or do as a result.

In ordinary communication, there is almost always such a gap.  For example, if someone says to you “That’s just fine,” you willimmediately try to figure out what in the previous conversation or immediate environment “that” could possibly refer to, what is “fine” about it, and why it is “just” fine.  This search, in turn, takes cues from the phonetic and syntactic structure of the utterance istself (e.g., phrasing, stress, intonation), surrounding environment (the presence of a broken wine  bottle in the dining room floor), recent memory (you had just asked to taste your dinner host’s special reserve), and background knowledge (your host tends to be ironic whan angry).

Moreover, you, the hearer, automatically assume that the speaker also shares many of these same background assumptions with you and, furthermore, that the speaker made the utterance knowing that the two of you shared enough of these background assumptions for you to readily understand what the speaker intended.  Both of you also automatically assume that you, the hearer, will make the appropriate inference to the speaker’s intentions on the basis of considerations of relevance: you will attempt, with the least cognitive effort, to infer sufficient information to understand the speaker’s intentions.  You stop cognitively processing information the moment the communication makes sense. (If there were no such stopping rule, inference and interpretations would go on forever.)

Depending on the circumstances and what you know or don’t know about the speaker’s past intentions, you may suspect that the speaker is attempting to lie or deceive.  Alternatively, you may doubt that the speaker really knows what he or she is talking about, or is adequately aware of the kind or extent of knowledge that you share, or properly assesses your readiness or willingness to make the appropriate inferences.  Finally, you may have reason to interpret the speaker’s utterances figuratively, say, as a metaphor or parable, or perhaps simply as a bit of fanciful fun.

In everyday communication, humans effortlessly, but necessarily and unmistakably, make these many assumptions and inferences.  Often, they do so very many times in a single minute of ordinary coversation.  In interpreting a religious utterance or text, however, people need to do very little of the sort.  Ordinarily, believers assume that the utterances or texts connected with religious doctrines are authorless, timeless, and true. As a result, people do not apply ordinary relevance criteria to religious communications.

Because divine statements are authorless, it makes little sense to try to infer intent from their mode of presentation.   For example, the bodily gesticulations, phrasings, and intonations in the utterance of a biblical, Quranic, or Later Vedic passage cannot be God’s, Allah’s, or Vishnu’s.  They can be only the speaker’s (unless there is cause to believe that God is directly communicationg through the deity, as in a public revelation).  Interpreting what the speaker intends by uttering the passage is one thing; interpreting what the deity intends can be indefinitely many things (expressed, in part, by indefinitely many speakers and interpreters).

Timelessness implies that cues from the surrounding environment, background knowledge, and memory are all irrelevant – or equipotentially relevant, which amounts to irrelevance.  God’s message, therefore, can apply to any and all contexts and to each context in indefinitely many and different ways.  To be sure, people interpret God’s message in particular ways for specific contexts, but they have no reason to ever stop interpreting.

Finally, the fact that God’s word is accepted as true on faith – come what may – entails that it can never be false or deceptive or merely figurative.  Ordinary preoccupation with lying and false belief in communication therefore plays no role in interpretation (or at least no consistent role).  Neither can failed attempts at verification or confirmation of this or that aspect of the information represented in a religious statment, or inferred from it, undermine the audience’s belief in the statement’s truth.

On the contrary, apparently disconfirming evidence only seems to make believers try harder to understand the deeper truth and to strangthen religious beliefs.  For example, after reading a bogus article on a new finding from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seemed to contradict Christian doctrine, religious believers who also believed the story reported their religious beliefs reinforced (Batson 1975).  For believers, then, confidence in religious doctrine and belief can increase through both confirmation and disconfirmation of any factual assumptions that may accompany interpretation of those beliefs.

Faith in religious belief is not simply another manifestation of a general psychological propensity to reduce “cognitive dissonance” by ignoring or reappraising information that is contrary to one’s views (cf. Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956).  It is the direct cognitive result of suspending the relevance criteria that universally apply to ordinary communication.  If faith is, in part, willingness to suspend ordinary pragmatic constraints of relevance, then beliefs held in faith become not only immune to falsification and contradiction but become even more strongly held in the face of apparent falsification or contradiction. Apparently disconfirmed religious beliefs show only the superficialty of one’s current interpretation and point to an even deeper but more mysterious truth.

End quotation.  pp.91-93

BV: What is it?  What’s happening?  Something’s happening.

(silence, non-amorous pressing)

BV:  Are you smelling me?  Are you being a zombie?  What are you doing?

Husband: I am the felt presence of God!

Ho ho ho!  Endlessly delightful, that Husband.

This blew my mind.  I haven’t heard this before but Husband tells me it was quite common in his community of Christians back in the day.  To be honest it’s just never a thought that has ever crossed my mind.  For one thing it implies an ongoing belief of God (behaving as a good Christian curbs my good time, so I’m going to reject the restrictions); when I say I don’t believe in God, I really, truly do not – and if there is no belief, it is meaningless to say there is rebellion against the figurehead.

But I certainly don’t just do anything I like, and I never considered atheism as a state which permits that when other states do not.  So I really am not sure what to say to her about this.  To my mind it’s just self evident that you don’t need Christianity to be a moral person – the mere existence of someone like me proves it, but so do the cultures world wide which have not been Christian yet embrace the usual moral precepts.

Which begs the question, what is morality?

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

-Jonathan Haidt, psychologist, morality researcher

The specifics vary with culture and time, but there are five general categories (“virtues”) of moral emotion/thought that all humans are heir to, according to Haidt:

1. Fairness/reciprocity.  Anyone who studied first year psychology learned about this when they studied Kohlberg, who thought all morality came from these principles.  And they are ubiquitious – but they aren’t the whole story.

2. Harm/care.  Carol Gilligan famously challenged Kohlberg with these additional moral principles.  Her error was attributing them to women, saying this is the basis of a distinctly women’s morality.  Actually they are an intrinsic element of all people’s moral sense.  Even men.

3. Authory/respect.

4. Ingroup/loyalty.

5. Purity/sanctity.  Disgust regularly trumps other feelings on tests of moral reasoning.  We see this element in restrictions on hand washing, eating, sex (and menstruation), and so on.  When someone says, “Sacrilege!” this is the moral sense which has been offended.

Haidt explains:

Virtues are socially constructed and socially learned, but these processes are highly prepared and constrained by the evolved mind. We call these three additional foundations [3, 4 & 5] the binding foundations, because the virtues, practices, and institutions they generate function to bind people together into hierarchically organized interdependent social groups that try to regulate the daily lives and personal habits of their members. We contrast these to the two individualizing foundations (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), which generate virtues and practices that protect individuals from each other and allow them to live in harmony as autonomous agents who can focus on their own goals.

People who self identify as liberals endorse the first two virtues, whereas people who self identify as conservative (which has huge overlap with religiousity) endorse all five.  Conservatism, in this light, hits more of our moral senses.

In my experience many atheists fall into the “liberal” camp insofar as they consider justice and harm primary considerations for moral thought and behaviour.  Yet what the conservatives, and religious, have on their side is a conception of morality that is broader than mere “right and wrong,” extending also into “community maintenance and building.”

Haidt levels the following criticism of the new atheists, whom he says mount straw man attacks against religion:

a) The new atheists treat religions as sets of beliefs about the world, many of which are demonstrably false. Yet anthropologists and sociologists who study religion stress the role of ritual and community much more than of factual beliefs about the creation of the world or life after death.

b) The new atheists assume that believers, particularly fundamentalists, take their sacred texts literally. Yet ethnographies of fundamentalist communities (such as James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh) show that even when people claim to be biblical literalists, they are in fact quite flexible, drawing on the bible selectively—or ignoring it—to justify humane and often quite modern responses to complex social situations.

This is something I have written about here before.  The arguments against religion are not irrelevant, but they’re only a part of the story.  Husband’s friend who feels in her gut that my atheism is little more than a bid to sidestep responsibility to moral behaviour is expressing something that we can predict from this model of morality.  It’s why the contradictory, nonsensical and unbelievable content of the Bible is really not very important to Christians.  There is something bigger going on, and it is hitting all the moral receptors, and that makes it tremendously urgent and tremendously powerful.  We’re talking about the underpinning of what makes society possible for humans – moral behaviour as so much more than just what is fair and what avoids suffering.  The Bible, in this sense, is carrying a lot more baggage than at first glance it seems to.

I find this interesting because it gives a window into why religion is so important to people.  I don’t believe religion is necessary for the stable functioning of good societies, but the fact that stable, good societies are necessary goes some way to explaining the importance of religion, which satisfies all those related moral senses.

Read Haidt’s article in full.

What kind of person thinks it worthwhile to literally spend years wondering, Do I not believe in God? OR Am I a non believer in God? I’ve GOT to figure this out.

Deep stuff. Priceless.

What’s the protocol?  So far I have been very lucky in that all my commenters have been sincere, thoughtful, and even though it seems most of you don’t agree with me, we’ve been able to hold discussions on our points of difference, trying to communicate and get closer to the truth and deeper understanding.  So I really don’t know what one is supposed to do with a comment like this.

I mean other than laugh about it.

I never quite know whether I should say “Agnostic” or whether I should say “Atheist.”  It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled about it.  As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is no God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job.  You could not get such proof.

Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophic audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic.  But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists.  In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.

Russell, B. (1949). Am I an atheist or an agnostic? A plea for tolerance in the face of new dogmas. In A. Sekel (Ed.), Bertrand Russell on God and religion (pp. 83-86). New York: Prometheus Books.

I am appending the main content of Puck’s content, which is important and useful information related to these terms:

He’s right, especially when you look at what the words actually mean. The “a” prefix means “without”, so an atheism is “without belief in a god”. Someone who is “not sure” doesn’t have “belief” and is therefore an atheist.

There’s really no middle ground — you either believe or you don’t. “Not sure” simply means you don’t believe but you could more easily convinced.

Agnostic uses the same prefix in the same way. It was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley to describe his rejection of “gnosis” or “enlightenment”. To him, “agnostic” meant “I haven’t figured out the secret of life”.

It’s only been recently that the terms have been used as “absolutely there is no God” and “not sure”, both of which are incorrect, and pigeonholing much more descriptive and useful definitions.

Religion is a conversation stopper.  As a culture we have agreed that people’s religious beliefs are so precious, and people’s reactions to challenge so powerful, that we cannot openly speak against them.  This is a form of conversational censorship that does not deserve respect.  I’m voicing my opinion in a public forum where everyone, even the faithful, is invited to respond in print.  That’s called free speech and it’s part of democracy.

People identify strongly with their religions.  This means that is is very difficult to discuss religion as an idea without people feeling personally attacked.  But that is for the faithful to manage.  Because in fact you are not your religion.  You are not your Bible.  You are just you!  It is not correct to assume that because I challenge your religion I am therefore attacking or mocking you.  Christians even have a phrase for this: Love the sinner, hate the sin.

When I discuss the Bible and its contents, I am actually using the Bible as my reference.  If the conclusions I reach are upsetting, consider that the problem may lie in the source material.

We (Husband and I) think Christians are good people.  We do not advocate infanticide.  We’re also not picking on Christians, nor are we mocking them.  In fact we think Christians are, overwhelmingly, much better than their theology.

The previous posts have simply been efforts at offering formal arguments, using widely held Christian doctrines, to demonstrate inconsistencies in the structure of Christian theology.  Either these inconsistencies are real, or we have misunderstood.  Unfortunately, none of the replies so far really gets to the core problem, as we see it.

The doctrine of Natural Grace just does mean that dead innocents go to Heaven.  The manner of their death is not relevant and so could very well include murder.  A total nutjob who killed babies in the name of God would be sending them to Heaven.

The only way to defeat the argument is to defeat Natural Grace.

However, if you defeat Natural Grace, then God damns babies to eternal torment.  That’s not a very attractive alternative.

Let’s build a new argument, starting from Incognito’s

1) Killing a newly baptized 8 day old baby guarantees the child salvation.
2) To guarantee the salvation, we must murder the child.
3) Murder is against God’s laws.
4) Something against God’s laws cannot be morally praiseworthy.
5) Not all actions that guarantee salvation are morally praiseworthy.
6) God wishes that none should perish but have everlasting life. (2Pet.3:9)
7) From 5, thus, some actions which fulfill God’s wishes are immoral.
8 ) God, being omniscient, knew this prior to creating the world.
9) God, being omnipotent, could have created the world in such a way that immorality was not required in fulfilling his wishes.
10) God, being good, would have refrained from creating such a world.
11) Thus, either omniscience fails, omnipotence fails, or benevolence fails, or some conjunction of them fails.
12) Thus, Christianity has mischaracterized the true nature of God.
13) Thus, Christianity is false.

QED

1)  The soul is everlasting and indestructible.

2)  The soul will spend eternity either in the presence of God or the Lake of Fire.

3) Abortion terminates earthly life, not the soul.

4) The soul of the preborn infant is in a state of natural grace.

5)  An innocent abortus immediately enters the presence of God.

6)  Thus, abortion, unlike earthly life, guarantees salvation.

7)  Therefore, abortion – guaranteeing salvation – is morally praiseworthy.

8)  Any morally praiseworthy act is consistent with Christianity.

9)  Abortion is consistent with Christianity.

QED

JESUSA: My faith, my loyalty.

That… kind of freaks me out.  I didn’t notice where the plates were from but wouldn’t it be weird if they were Canadian?

And two, I have consulted with my family doctor and I think I am going to get an IUD.  There’s a variant with progesterone which – I shit you not! – is more effective than a tubal ligation.  Srsly!  I am blown away.  But apparently this is because in addition to preventing implantation is actually prevents ovulation in the first place, so you are super secure from a babies perspective, yet it is totally reversible,  AND!  This is the best part: for most women, after three to six months, you stop menstruating all together.  (Should that be “altogether”?)

I have had this experience before.  Many years ago I was on an injectible birth control called depo-provera which was handy because you get the shot once every three months, but not handy in that I ballooned in weight and lost my interest in sex and would cry at the drop of a hat.  For example, the Royale toilet paper commercials?  With the fluffy white kittens?  Serious waterworks.  And long distance phone plan commercials… oh man.  I cried like a baby.  But no period.  Which was soooo awesome.  Turns out it wasn’t worth it.

Aside: at the time I had a number of women tell me they wouldn’t want to forgo their periods because it was an intrinsic part of being a woman, something distinctly female and a part of the woman-experience.  I… do not get this.  I can’t speak for anyone else but I really dislike the experience.  It’s uncomfortable ranging to painful, it’s gross, it requires expensive outlay for, um, management products… why on earth would I want to keep it?  Or, why would I be sad that a side effect of a treatment I want is cessation?  Frankly it’s the sort of thing you should throw a party over, not be sad about.  IMO.

So I have a referral to a gynecologist.  I am worried it will be painful to place.  Does anyone have experience with this?