Friday, June 10, 2005

Fear of Disbelief

"If it is a risky thing to reserve any belief in a god until we have reasonable evidence for it, it is either unfair to our generation (which has far more knowledge of science than ever before) or the Torah's theme is simply something that never happened. A god that is described as removing the "existence" question would only be just to give us that same assurance in every generation. If I am a good person, and I simply don't cognitively accept any belief without evidence, and god never gives me the benefit of that evidence that he allegedly gave to people from 4 millennia ago, what do I have to fear for simply reserving any idea of faith?"

You should have nothing to fear in reserving faith. (Hey, I do it too so it must be alright ;-) )

But seriously, like Galileo, I think that if God exists and has personal care in each one of us, I don't think He would give us the power of the mind but without the intention to have us use it. In fact, I also believe that it is the skeptics who look for rational grounds to believe in things and sweat to form wise views who would be most valued by God.

But then again, that is likely just my own projected bias.

Anyway, my point from before has little to do with what God will do to those who fail to believe, but what kind of life you will live based on what you believe. The strict skeptic can really not believe in anything at all, but what kind of life is that? And at the other extreme the gullible cult member will have no life either.

I think the strict atheistic view is small and closes the mind to a world much greater and exotic than what we're familiar with. Even the agnostic who refuses to believe things because there is no evidence loses out on conceptual speculation of such possibilities. The typical agnostic feels comfortable in their worldview as they straddle the fence, but straddling the fence does limit things one would take into consideration because one becomes loyal to one's agnosticism.

Refusing to take a side is a side in itself.

I'm not arguing for faith here, but an open-mindedness and a non-loyalty to any one view. When some evidence comes your way, don't just stay agnostic because it's "safe" and don't automatically argue on your "traditional" side.

If there's nothing to fear from sometimes being a strong atheist then it should be immeasurably more true in that there should be nothing to fear from being a semi-credible believer sometimes too.

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