[MD] False Messiah

[Peter Corteen]

Hi Scott and all,

you reminded us that some religious people are trying hard to reconcile
their old religious dogmas with the findings of  science and you pointed out
that 'the official doctrine of the Catholic Church [is] that not only does
reason require faith, but also faith requires reason'. I think the catholics
are just being slippery here - they know that reason works but can't throw
away their belief and so plug the gap quickly with faith. I looked up
'faith' on wikipedia and it's use as a word  mainly has the religious
connotation and 'tends to imply a transpersonal rather than interpersonal
relationship – with God or a higher power'; I am an atheist and as I said in
another post I try to remove faith from my thinking. The closest definition
wikipedia gave that could come close to me accepting the idea of faith was
'In its proper sense faith means trusting the word of another'; better to be
good at reading body language and relying on your memory of your historical
relationship with them; use your intelligence and make your prediction then
wait for the result - don't simply have faith, that's just negligent.

Scott you also said 'all theologians, other than fundamentalists, recognize
that God-talk is necessarily metaphorical. Only fundamentalists and
anti-theists take it literally, and their problem is to privilege the
literal over the metaphorical'. OK , so they accept 'God' is not some old
man with a white beard and smock flying about in the clouds but in their
case what is 'God' necessarily a metaphor for then? They are still secretly
thinking of an omnipotent being who they want to be on the right side of;
some of them might then have a secondary background thought that
'omnipotent being' is also stretching it a bit and would say instead
something like 'the Source of all things' - but we know nothing of that -
even the postulated Big Bang may be found to be only the other side of a
Black Hole.

In your later post you clarified your position on all this with:

 'Faith is not -- or shouldn't be -- a substitute for reason. So if there
are gaps, there are gaps. It is better to leave them open as gaps than to
fill them with something unreasonable'

Hear, hear.

Peter