WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...

[Strangelet]

Originally Posted by Deckard

You said you would feel uncomfortable with a president who "unquestioningly accepts the truth of the bible". But what is, for example, 'believing' in a virgin birth if not unquestionably accepting the truth of the bible? An awful lot of vagueness and embarrassingly undeserved respect is hidden behind that word 'belief' (even moreso 'faith'). And understandably so. We all have friends and loved ones who do subscribe to such beliefs, and most of the time we don't want to make them feel awkward unless they've shown their willingness to get into a debate about it. And besides, subscribing to an organized religion has pay-offs beyond the simple matter of truth, and so we typically don't press home the distinctions of having faith and knowing. It seems untoward. And around this vacuum has grown an (IMO) unwarranted reverence for the concept of religious faith.

hmmm. really good question. to be honest I don't have an answer for you. The relationship between faith and knowledge is easily the corner stone of all religious mischief, so its important by those who want to use religion to manipulate to keep the faith/knowledge relationship as complicated and ambiguous as possible, so that you don't know where one ends and the other begins. This is how a person who embarks on an honest spiritual quest with an open mind are so succeptible to be selling magazines on a street corner with a shaved head two weeks later.

Anyway, in terms of faith versus knowledge, my own take is that there is no such thing as knowledge outside of the analytic and the a priori, in other words we can know things in definitions and mathematics, but that's about it. so that our relationship to, for example, the bohr model of the atom is one of faith. i know. its insane, but i'm a little unhinged.

Its interesting, your Unamano quote. the american pragmatists william james took him literally and basically argued that we can "will" into reality truths in which we instill faith. Which is totally awesome and practically useless, but then in the context of modern philisophy its a drop in the bucket of all th attempts to square what we want to know, what we think we know, and what we actually can and do know.

Originally Posted by Deckard

But discussing it here in reference to a leader, I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel more comfortable with someone who didn't have faith in superstition and myth (if you'll excuse the triple negative).

And I agree!! But I think this is because we're all exhausted from all the recent dickheads whose belief in myths were the smoke that indicated the fires of authority, heirarchy, and unquestioning demands beneath.

Originally Posted by Deckard

Sure. The fundamental opposition being between dogma and the scientific outlook. In that sense, Christianity and Communism are on the same side, they are two of the great dogmatic systems, despite being rivals at one time or another. On the other side, the scientific outlook/humanism.

Yes exactly and that's really the point I was trying to make. I was not attempting to disagree with you or sean, but to expand on it. If we're going to get rid of god fearing politicians, lets get rid of the real problem, not the symptom of the problem. The belief in God is a symptom of the religious but its isn't the only symptom. And its possible to believe in God, like spinoza and the other deists of the enlightenment, without being religious and its possible to be religious without believing in God. My interest is cutting out the totality of the cancer from humanity, not born again christians. But I'd be happy if they fucked off first