How much does it matter to you (if it does at all) that your religion is True?
This slid into my head as a result of re-reading through and posting again in @KarlLB's thread about the possibility of being in a wrong religion. I avoided bringing it up there, and at the risk of this having been covered at some point in the recent past, I'll bring it up here: is the Truth of your religion important to you? How much do you have invested in that aspect? Or, are you more ancient in your approach, meaning it's not so much a issue of what you believe, but more how you practice your chosen faith that matters? I'm interested to know. If the Truth of your faith is important to you, what is it, and how did it come to be True (for you)?
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I believe in Jesus Christ. It certainly matters to me that he is true, both in the sense of "real, existing" and in the sense of "tells the truth about the nature of things"--that is, is not faithless, is not a defrauder or a conniver or someone who makes shit up.
Given that understanding of truth, it doesn't make sense to me to ask when something "became true", let alone "became true for me." It's either true or it's not, and my personal opinion on the subject doesn't matter a hill of beans.
If I thought he was not true or real, I would leave.
I have always regarded the Creation story as an attempt to explain how things started. I feel that the stories from Abraham onwards probably have a grain of truth.
I regard the New Testament as fundamentally true even though it's easy to find inconsistencies. I see no point in trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
So, for instance, the Genesis creation story isn't 'literally true' on a scientific level but is true in a 'mythic' sense - using 'myth' in the C S Lewis sense of a narrative that conveys profound spiritual truths rather than being a simple 'Fairy Story' like the tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Telford can correct me if I'm wrong.
Meanwhile, I'm with @Lamb Chopped but that doesn't mean I'm an unwavering block of solid conviction and certainty. There's something about Pascale's Wager in all of this but I'm not sure relativism takes us very far.
If Christ is true then that would be case whether I believed in him or not. Otherwise it's like the thing in the marvellous 'Jason and The Argonauts' film where the gods on Mount Olympus are aware they'll fade away when people stop believing in them.
That statement is pure scientifism, belonging only to the disciples of Hitchins and his desperate flock. No debate is possible, because that is utter fundamentalism.
What's desperate or fundamentalist about it? I still have belief. That you're worth it.
I'm not an aeronautical engineer so I'm not terribly interested in how an aeroplane takes me to Frankfurt. I am interested that it actually stays in the air and that it takes me to Frankfurt not Madrid.
The only way I can make sense of a distinction between is it true and does it work is if you care about whether it gives you pleasant feelings. Does it make you feel like it worked. To that extent, much as I like pleasant feelings, I'd rather it actually worked. I may not know how the sacrament helps me love my neighbour, but I want it to help me love my neighbour regardless of how I feel rather than make me feel like I love my neighbour.
I'm not an aeronautical engineer but I am interested in philosophy, so I do want to have some idea of why Christianity is true and how it fits together.
What is truth?
My faith came about because I decided to follow Jesus (his teachings, his attitude, his ways). That decision changed my life for the better and continues to do so. I hope, if I were brought up in a different culture, that I would make a similar decision to try and follow the best of humanity through learning the truths of religion’s myths.
Am I making any sense? I don’t often when it comes to religious matters. I love my Church dearly and Sunday is by far the best day of the week for me.
That's the macro view. My personal view is that religion is a "doing" word at least as much as it is a "thinking" word. My religion works for me, and that's just fine.
Maybe.
@ThunderBunk, I think more interesting, more telling would be how you answer Martin's question, which possibly leaves a gaping wide opening for demonstration that his statement is false.
Indeed.
I think the traditional view of what happened to the original disciples and apostles is that only John, as far as we can tell, died a 'natural death' in old age.
All the others died for their faith.
Ok, so we can't 'prove' that but even if it was only 10%, 20% or 50% of them who suffered that way it's still pretty sobering. As indeed are the instances you cite today.
I didn't want to restrict the discussion too tightly at the outset, so you'll have to forgive the broadness of the inquiry. As you have, I had hoped that posters would incorporate the definitions they required as they went. If your definitions renders a question meaningless to you, I understand. I assume there are those among us who don't operate with a stark, all-or-nothing binary, particularly regarding something as speculative as a faith claim.
I think there's broad consensus among biblical scholars and historians, now, that Jesus was a real person, and that he very well may have been an itinerant, apocalyptic preacher. That's the easy part. For the harder part, maybe another way to put it is to ask what it was that allowed you to suspend your disbelief -- to rule out the impossibility of the rest of the story of Jesus. Certainly Jesus hasn't been the only eccentric to "tell the truth about the nature of things." So, why is he exceptional to you?
I heard the X-Files theme when I read your last sentence
One can say a lot of things about Christopher Hitchens, but to say he was desperate isn't one of them. Maybe it's more of an Eastern philosophy, but it has been said that "I believe something because I cannot know it." I'd never try to say what @Martin54 meant (LOL), but this believing ≠ knowing idea may be a related form.
Forgive me. I think my understanding is that it didn't mater whether or not one believed in the gods (the truth of the gods), as long as one made the appropriate tributes and followed the customary practices.
You are making sense, and I'm glad you brought up the cultural aspect of religion, which has, IMO, a lot more to do with current identity/participation than belief.
I tend to think "the traditional view" is doing a lot of heavy lifting re: martyrdom. The best arguments are for Peter and Paul, but they're still far more closely noted as legends rather than supportable history.
I've apparently hit a nerve, to judge by your "stark, all or nothing binary" slam. Sorry about that.
You ask why he is exceptional to me, and how I managed to suspend my disbelief. I'm afraid it didn't happen like that, speaking from the inside of the experience. I started by reading the Bible as you would any fairytale. Somewhere along the way, the God on the paper became the God I was interacting with, and then the God who basically saved my life.
Certainly there's an intellectual component to my faith, because I am highly suspicious by nature and upbringing (I've been lied to a LOT) and I probed Christianity in every way I could from the beginning. To give you some idea, I spent three years learning Greek and Hebrew at university because I couldn't bring myself to trust the translators--any translators!--of the English Bible, and I needed to read the text for myself (and study the textual apparatus) so I could be sure nobody was pulling the wool over my eyes.
But everywhere I probed, it came back solid.
I'm still probing, because I'm still a traumatized human being, and I figure God won't mind if I check everything six ways from Sunday. In fact, he encourages that sort of thing. So I do. And I'm coming up on fifty years of hitting something solid every time.
It seems to me that there are two aspects of trust here. There's the intellectual trust that develops after all those years of probing and finding solid ground beneath my feet. I no longer worry that the next probe is going to come back "It was all a mistake." I keep testing, but I'm not fussed anymore.
The second aspect that relates directly to "why is Jesus exceptional to you"--that's the interpersonal trust. And that goes directly to my experience of him, as a person who has never lied to me or betrayed me or done me any harm, and on the positive side has been a safe refuge for me when I do get betrayed by other human beings. I think it was Polycarp who said it best: "Eighty-six years I have served him and he has done me no wrong; how then can I now turn against my king and my savior?"
Jesus has made himself a place where I can rest; and that's worth more than gold to me.
Sorry for posting this and running - work got in the way of going further.
What mean is this. It seems to me that there is a desperate flight from epistemology, aetiology and all other questions regarding knowledge. Truth is held to exist as a purely acausal phenomenon, without origin, cause or destination.
My counterargument is that identifying the truth is a process of belief. If one believes science to be a purveyor of truth, one is joining the scientific community, the community of those who believe this to be true. This community has its rules like any others - its processes of epistemology and teleology. Experiment appears objective, but it is always to prove or refute a hypothesis. The hypothesis is formed in relation to observation and pre-existing facts, and therefore within a tradition, and a context, which is not derivable from first causes.
Propositions labelled as scientific truth may also be true, in some kind of freefloating sense, but that sense is not accessible to us. It belongs in the realm of non-conscious beings, of which we can never be part. We can only peer into it, prodding it and poking it from our position of irrefutable consciousness.
Religion is another way of knowing, or at least of exploring our ignorance - one in which we are closer to being part of the community of non-conscious being than that of conscious beings. We formulate hypotheses, and call them religious texts, doctrines, even religions. But they are all peering at the same mystery, within and beyond us, and I see no way out of either bind. We want to know, to be sure, of what we can only glimpse, only sense.
I'm not saying that it's not true, or that people who say that it's true are mistaken, but that the effect on individuals and society is derived from people believing that it's true (and/or professing a belief that it's true). In contrast to engineering.
That rather assumes that the effect on individuals and society in this world is what matters to us.
If Christ's return, survival of or resurrection from death, becoming one with God or experiencing eternal life also matters to us, then whether it's actually true is of fundamental importance.
As a blogger I've pointed to on ancient religion before says, it's generally the case that people in earlier times believed their own religion.
As far as I can tell the assumption that people in the ancient world didn't believe largely stems from Enlightenment intellectuals who didn't want to think that the Roman and Greek statesmen that they admired believed things that they didn't.
Truth is a rather nebulous concept. What is true for one person, may not be true for another. Even in science, there is no such thing as "true." It is more like a tested theorem works until it doesn't, When it becomes unworkable or until some other simpler explanation works better, it will be followed.
Someone once told me, truth is like moonlight shining across a lake. One person on the other side, will think the light is shining directly at him, but someone else standing a little ways away will think the light is shining directly to her.
Christianity works for me mainly because I was raised in it. Now if I were Buddhist, it probably would work for me because of the same reason.
I’ve had recent discussions with people calling themselves Christians while asserting that they are not religious.
What does it mean then that the Christian religion is True? For me, it means that Jesus lived as a human, was killed and resurrected, and lives in another form to continue to guide us, to show us the way to God and help us to serve and worship God, for the good of all. It is important to me that this is True, it’s the foundation of my faith. I have become convinced of its truth and remain so.
Again, that assumes that the only thing I'm interested in is how it affects my life now. It isn't.
Saved your life from what? Original sin? Eternal damnation? A life devoid of meaning? A lack of purpose? Loneliness? All of the above?
Wait -- no Aramaic?!
Do you mean free from errors or discrepancies in the translations, or in the validating power of what you infer as the message(s) of Jesus? Or both?
Well, that's fascinating.
Probably not.
This is an aspect of what I was driving at in the OP when I asked, "If the Truth of your faith is important to you, what is it, and how did it come to be True (for you)?"
Did your convincing take any particular forms?
Well, I once heard someone compare truth (aka binary thinking, I guess) to the skeleton in a body. You need the firmness of bone so the muscles have something to react against; without it, you won't go anywhere. See if that analogy explains where I'm coming from better.
That's easy enough to answer. Suicide.
Yes, I did Aramaic, but I spent so little time on it (a month?) that it doesn't seem right to claim it as something I know at all. I'd have to pull out the textbooks and dictionaries to do anything with it nowadays.
As for the other issues you mention, I've studied that stuff too, all my life--but it's probably a leap too far for this thread. Seriously, you thought I stopped worrying about truth when I confirmed that the translators got it right?
I want to know what is. I don't want to mistake it for what is not, or vice versa.
I mean that I test everything. I don't care if it's a historical issue, or a psychological statement (like the one where Jesus puts obedience and "knowing the truth" in a semi-causal relationship), or "Do this and you shall live"--I pick at stuff (in the Bible, and elsewhere) to figure out what it means, and what it meant to the first hearers, and what I ought to do about it--and whether it holds water. I'm not really sure how to explain it more clearly than that.
I think you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick when you talk about "the validating power of what you infer as the messages of Jesus". I'm not looking for something that is "true for me," anymore than KarlLB is. I want something that is true across the board, something that remains true even if I reject it, even if everyone rejects it. I want to know the truth about the universe and who made it, and those who live in it, and so on and so forth. If the truth turns out to be something that makes me unhappy, I'm still better off than if I lived in error or ignorance.
Lewis once called himself a dinosaur for believing what he did in a culture that didn't. You could call me that--or childish, for holding to Jesus as the center of my universe. I'm not really fussed about it. Feel free to ask me what you like, I'm here for it.
I know the feeling.
By whom? One can go no further until they are identified.
I took some convincing, I began in middle age as I realised that I had been avoiding the issues of life and death and all that and it was about time I started to think it all through for myself.
Over four years I came to be convinced that Jesus really was guiding me to God. Twenty years later I not only remain convinced, but have an ever deeper commitment to the relationship.
I believe that truth exists, that there are real things that can be known, and that all truth is on some level a reflection of God, who is Truth. I also believe that human beings can delude themselves and reject what is true and good. And if you begin to lie to yourself, even with the best of intentions, it's really easy to get lost in your own web and never find the way out again.
If you give me the choice between a pleasant lie and an unpleasant truth, I'd rather take the second. And that goes for pretty much everything--a medical diagnosis? a statement about God or about human nature? the question of whether someone I care for is true or false to me?
I would rather know the truth. And it doesn't matter to me how many other people choose a different road. I don't believe that usefulness is better than truth, I don't believe that happiness is better than truth. I want something firm I can stand on.
And that's what I've found in Jesus Christ.
Yeah, but that's not the focus of what matters to me. That focus is whether it really will be demonstrated to be true or not.
Why are you so determined to tell me I'm wrong about what matters to me? Isn't that by definition utterly subjective?
One can I'm sure, but I feel sad, bereft, alone, gutted, disappointed. For Your answer confirms, like @ThunderBunk's and the other closed ones, what I have now long known. I, like you, have nothing to be superior about, And by the way, your other last three posts alone are a beautiful testimony to the power of mere belief, untouchable belief. How I envy, covet that. As I do in all other decent Christians. I'm sad for two reasons, three. One, I've lost belief. Two, as with ones parents and all Christians I know in person bar one remote, one cannot have the conversation. Three, I'm sad.
You have nothing to be insecure or defensive about. You know I admire you, although you won't have it.
I look forward to parenting myself with you in the new forum.
It is very difficult to name such processes, I think it is a version of what the younger generation term gaslighting.
There are other things I know to be true - that eating more veg and less biscuits would be good for me, that exercising more would be good for me etc etc. And yet, despite knowing these things to be true, I still eat biscuits and don't exercise enough. My belief that exercise would benefit me doesn't motivate me to go to the gym. But my belief in Jesus does motivate me to go to church.
There's truth I know in my head (exercise is beneficial) and truth I know in my heart, soul and every fibre of my being.
Which is what I meant when I started that thread - how does Christianity work for people whose minds so don't work that way that we're struggling to grasp what it even means. For those of us for whom there are things which are so well evidenced they're effectively proven (the earth is a sphere, we orbit the sun, anhydrous copper sulphate reacts exothermically with water, aerobic respiration involves oxidative phosphorylation), things that may or may not be true (most religious claims, ghosts, string theory, endothermic metabolism in sauropods) and things that are effectively disproven (the earth is flat, burning releases phlogiston), strength of belief in a proposition is proportional to strength of the evidence. I cannot imagine my mind working any other way.
Consider it a mental disability if you like; a thing my inadequate mind cannot do. The question still remains how Christianity is meant to work for people with this mental disability.
These are not the same thing. In the RC Mass the priest prays that we live in "joyful hope." Not that we live in certain knowledge.
That is kind of my watchword.
Isn't there an H G Wells short story about a sighted man who discovers the lost valley of the blind? (Yes there is). He falls in requited love but the price is that he blind himself. So he leaves. Alone. Sighted.
Nearly 60 years since I read that.
My aim was express something that makes sense to me, in the context of my experience of religious faith and my understanding of religious belief and truth, which includes a significant amount of what the bible (especially the New Testament) says about those things.
Considering the statement I made from the perspective that these things are actually true, I would still say that the fundamental basis of Christianity is that it is *belief* in Jesus that saves us and that leads to the things you mention above. And that's the case because Jesus is the truth, but I don't think Christianity suggests there's any way of "knowing the truth" except through "knowing Jesus". And given what you've previously said about the concept of "knowing God", I would guess the concept of "knowing Jesus" doesn't work for you either. I think both these things only make sense in the context of religious belief.
Jesus saves us.