I believe that the Torah is a book by G-d about man, not a book by man about G-d. I would say that the Torah is a manual to being human written by G-d who created us. Judaism is about becoming a better person and having a closer relationship with G-d. So I wouldn’t agree that religion is man made. That’s not in line with my beliefs.
The feeling of being abandoned by G-d is a theme in Psalms. The struggle to maintain a relationship with G-d through the challenges of life. I would say that that’s a struggle any honest deep person of faith struggles with regularly.
As you can tell, we are going to have to agree to disagree about the origin of the Torah.
To me it is the story of the Jewish people, an ancient people who had no explanation for events that happened to them. It was not unusual in their world to attribute these "miraculous" events to a deity. What made the Jews different is their belief in only 1 God instead of a panoply.
It's not even that I don't believe in God. I believe that an omnipotent being created our world. There has to be an explanation for the Big Bang. The idea that there used to be nothing and then WHAM something appeared cannot be explained by science no matter how many books Steven Hawking wrote about time. I just think that God doesn't give a damn about us.
What is interesting to me about Judaism is the Talmud. The attempt by the Jewish people to expand the ideas in the Torah and work to apply them to the world around them. I think this is so indicative of a community that it tells us more about who we are as a People than even the Tanach.
Transgenderism is clearly a religion. Jesus rose from the dead. A man can become a woman. Both are examples of a kind of magical thinking protected in the US by the First Amendment as is my belief as an atheist that they are religious nonsense.
Are you sure you are not making a category mistake in both directions?
In the biblical story, miracles are ‘performed’ by God especially and only because they are naturally impossible. If anyone who witnessed a miracle habitually engaged in “magical thinking” that person would not be impressed. There is no ‘magical’ Star-wars-like force which can be utilized at a whim anywhere in the biblical narrative. Even here, The Force has been ‘scientized’ (close to “sanitized” for a reason) in later versions to make it seem less like good old pagan magic.
For the theist as well as the materialist atheist, if God does not exist, all miracle stories are false. Therefore, in attributing all miracle stories to magical thinking, the atheist is asserting nothing more profound than the fact that she is a materialist atheist, which may be personally interesting, but introduces no new information.
Regarding the other issue, many transgender advocates will staunchly insist that it is the critic who misunderstands biology. “Biological sex is not psychological gender. They are different features of the human organism. Usually the two features correspond in the same human being, sometimes they do not. When there is a mismatch, that the person wishes to correct (as much as is possible) therapeutically, that person is ‘transgender’.”
Or words to that effect. Whether or not one agrees with the premises, magical thinking does not come into it.
To avoid intellectual naïveté, and to help fulfill one’s epistemic responsibilities, one should frame one’s opponents views as strongly as possible— as if one actually believed them, and was justified in doing so. Only then is one qualified to argue their flaws. Caricaturing beliefs make one feel better, but it ends up being just whistling in the dark. Iow it’s often a doxastic defense mechanism.
Thanks for your comment. Respectful engagement is always welcome.
IMHO miracles are considered acts of God because when simple things that we know today to be part of science and how the world works occurred, ancient peoples had no way of understanding why so they were considered acts of God. Ancient people simply did not have our knowledge of physics or how the body works. They attributed any turn of an event in their favor as God's largesse. (Much in the same way that people are saying that God had a hand in Trump not being shot in the head. To me it had nothing to do with God, he was just lucky.)
Now for me as far as transgenderism. There are those who are transgender. That is a given and a reality. How much of what is happening today is the medical field run amok, and part of a social contagion are other questions entirely. But it does become a cult like following at the point of the throwing out of evolutionary biology in place of a new soft philosophy of human development.
Agreed. However, in any complex system that takes some arbitrary number of arbitrary inputs with the majority of inputs being random, it would be nearly impossible to determine which inputs were arbitrary from the random ones unless of course, some arbitrary input had significantly extraordinary results. In that case, one would be warranted in believing that an agent had chosen the inputs. And on traditional, theism and divine providence, God is meticulously involved in not only ‘ interfering with’ the natural course of events, but in also maintaining the whole show in existence at every moment in time. On that view, being mistaken about a particular deliverance or miracle is less mistaken— nearly infinitely so — than a blanket attribution of all events to chance.
Again, we are back to asserting that all non-extraordinary reports of God‘s intervention are just luck just because one is an atheist or deist, say. But if one is such a person, one has to completely discount reports of Divine intervention which are significantly enough out of the norm. And that’s fine, as long as we know why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Actually, I think at some point in human history, we will find a scientific reason for any miracle we do not understand today. Eventually everything, including divine intervention beyond the norm, will have an earthly reason.
Just to say I really like your writing!
Thank you so much 😀
I would also throw in clinical psychology and psychotherapy as having religious aspects.
I believe that the Torah is a book by G-d about man, not a book by man about G-d. I would say that the Torah is a manual to being human written by G-d who created us. Judaism is about becoming a better person and having a closer relationship with G-d. So I wouldn’t agree that religion is man made. That’s not in line with my beliefs.
The feeling of being abandoned by G-d is a theme in Psalms. The struggle to maintain a relationship with G-d through the challenges of life. I would say that that’s a struggle any honest deep person of faith struggles with regularly.
Adding my two cents.
Thanks for your two cents. It is always valued.
As you can tell, we are going to have to agree to disagree about the origin of the Torah.
To me it is the story of the Jewish people, an ancient people who had no explanation for events that happened to them. It was not unusual in their world to attribute these "miraculous" events to a deity. What made the Jews different is their belief in only 1 God instead of a panoply.
It's not even that I don't believe in God. I believe that an omnipotent being created our world. There has to be an explanation for the Big Bang. The idea that there used to be nothing and then WHAM something appeared cannot be explained by science no matter how many books Steven Hawking wrote about time. I just think that God doesn't give a damn about us.
What is interesting to me about Judaism is the Talmud. The attempt by the Jewish people to expand the ideas in the Torah and work to apply them to the world around them. I think this is so indicative of a community that it tells us more about who we are as a People than even the Tanach.
Transgenderism is clearly a religion. Jesus rose from the dead. A man can become a woman. Both are examples of a kind of magical thinking protected in the US by the First Amendment as is my belief as an atheist that they are religious nonsense.
Are you sure you are not making a category mistake in both directions?
In the biblical story, miracles are ‘performed’ by God especially and only because they are naturally impossible. If anyone who witnessed a miracle habitually engaged in “magical thinking” that person would not be impressed. There is no ‘magical’ Star-wars-like force which can be utilized at a whim anywhere in the biblical narrative. Even here, The Force has been ‘scientized’ (close to “sanitized” for a reason) in later versions to make it seem less like good old pagan magic.
For the theist as well as the materialist atheist, if God does not exist, all miracle stories are false. Therefore, in attributing all miracle stories to magical thinking, the atheist is asserting nothing more profound than the fact that she is a materialist atheist, which may be personally interesting, but introduces no new information.
Regarding the other issue, many transgender advocates will staunchly insist that it is the critic who misunderstands biology. “Biological sex is not psychological gender. They are different features of the human organism. Usually the two features correspond in the same human being, sometimes they do not. When there is a mismatch, that the person wishes to correct (as much as is possible) therapeutically, that person is ‘transgender’.”
Or words to that effect. Whether or not one agrees with the premises, magical thinking does not come into it.
To avoid intellectual naïveté, and to help fulfill one’s epistemic responsibilities, one should frame one’s opponents views as strongly as possible— as if one actually believed them, and was justified in doing so. Only then is one qualified to argue their flaws. Caricaturing beliefs make one feel better, but it ends up being just whistling in the dark. Iow it’s often a doxastic defense mechanism.
fwiw, and cheers
Thanks for your comment. Respectful engagement is always welcome.
IMHO miracles are considered acts of God because when simple things that we know today to be part of science and how the world works occurred, ancient peoples had no way of understanding why so they were considered acts of God. Ancient people simply did not have our knowledge of physics or how the body works. They attributed any turn of an event in their favor as God's largesse. (Much in the same way that people are saying that God had a hand in Trump not being shot in the head. To me it had nothing to do with God, he was just lucky.)
Now for me as far as transgenderism. There are those who are transgender. That is a given and a reality. How much of what is happening today is the medical field run amok, and part of a social contagion are other questions entirely. But it does become a cult like following at the point of the throwing out of evolutionary biology in place of a new soft philosophy of human development.
Agreed. However, in any complex system that takes some arbitrary number of arbitrary inputs with the majority of inputs being random, it would be nearly impossible to determine which inputs were arbitrary from the random ones unless of course, some arbitrary input had significantly extraordinary results. In that case, one would be warranted in believing that an agent had chosen the inputs. And on traditional, theism and divine providence, God is meticulously involved in not only ‘ interfering with’ the natural course of events, but in also maintaining the whole show in existence at every moment in time. On that view, being mistaken about a particular deliverance or miracle is less mistaken— nearly infinitely so — than a blanket attribution of all events to chance.
Again, we are back to asserting that all non-extraordinary reports of God‘s intervention are just luck just because one is an atheist or deist, say. But if one is such a person, one has to completely discount reports of Divine intervention which are significantly enough out of the norm. And that’s fine, as long as we know why we’re doing what we’re doing.
thanks for the interaction!
Actually, I think at some point in human history, we will find a scientific reason for any miracle we do not understand today. Eventually everything, including divine intervention beyond the norm, will have an earthly reason.
Your argument is far too sophisticated for me. 😎
Thank God for the authors of the US Constitution, which made sure to add in the Bill of Rights which guarantees our right to believe as we please.