I'm having doubts...

[floppit]

Sifiso, if you've read many posts you'll already know I agree - I'd even go one further and maybe shock folk. For some people, those who have never had a sense of reasoning beyond their own subjective 'feelings' about topics, for some folk who have a social network at church, some standing, and a self concept built around a perceived relationship with their god, for those people it has the potential to be positive. It's one thing for them to get curious and see the gaps in where they are, it's one thing to promote the tools that lead a person there but not to seek to remove the support without any care or effort to consider the whole human being.

If a fundy starts to rant about homosexuality be sure I'll stand up and utterly disagree but I'll keep it to sexuality because there's enough reasoning to do so without me needing to derail back to the whole issue of faith. If a fundy suggests that X should be law I'll tackle it on it's own merit (or HUGE lack of it), the same if they wish to deny kids a science education. The thing is that it's them not me who would invoke their belief, it's them who'd be bringing magic to the subject not me bringing their belief in it to the table. We don't need it, we don't need that battle at all because ultimately the REAL seeds of doubt come from reasoning tools.

Where I would draw my line firmly is that I wouldn't recommend a church for it's social support no matter how much may be there or how much a person may need it (the support not the church!) because it's downside is too big to ignore.

I would agree that if someone leaves belief angry at it rather than understanding and genuinely treasuring the alternative they certainly appear to me less not more. Personally, I'd rather not have the journey than just wind up with a new bible (an avatar I saw of a glowing smile holding up an RD book comes to mind) but no ability to question, to still have criticality out of my reach.

[Chinaski]

The absence of knowledge is more desirable than the illusion of knowledge.

[Sisifo]

Sifiso, if you've read many posts you'll already know I agree - I'd even go one further and maybe shock folk. For some people, those who have never had a sense of reasoning beyond their own subjective 'feelings' about topics, for some folk who have a social network at church, some standing, and a self concept built around a perceived relationship with their god, for those people it has the potential to be positive. It's one thing for them to get curious and see the gaps in where they are, it's one thing to promote the tools that lead a person there but not to seek to remove the support without any care or effort to consider the whole human being.

If a fundy starts to rant about homosexuality be sure I'll stand up and utterly disagree but I'll keep it to sexuality because there's enough reasoning to do so without me needing to derail back to the whole issue of faith. If a fundy suggests that X should be law I'll tackle it on it's own merit (or HUGE lack of it), the same if they wish to deny kids a science education. The thing is that it's them not me who would invoke their belief, it's them who'd be bringing magic to the subject not me bringing their belief in it to the table. We don't need it, we don't need that battle at all because ultimately the REAL seeds of doubt come from reasoning tools.

Where I would draw my line firmly is that I wouldn't recommend a church for it's social support no matter how much may be there or how much a person may need it (the support not the church!) because it's downside is too big to ignore.

I would agree that if someone leaves belief angry at it rather than understanding and genuinely treasuring the alternative they certainly appear to me less not more. Personally, I'd rather not have the journey than just wind up with a new bible (an avatar I saw of a glowing smile holding up an RD book comes to mind) but no ability to question, to still have criticality out of my reach.

I think I agree on every single point you made.
I was watching now the debate "is atheism the new fundamentalism", and with the recent experience that i posted above, and related to it, I'm starting to think that we are extremists. Not fundamentalists, but extremists; maybe because our diving on atheist articles, debates on youtube, and our huge outrage at the religious fundmentalism, we (at least, I) have become a black/white, yes/no, pro/against person, in matters related to religion... There are grays in all topics, and if I can't see the gray zones in religion, I am the one who has to reboot.

There is a catholic saying I like: Hate the sin, but love the sinner. In religion I have a nasty tendency of despising the person, usually with stronger feeling than the religion in itself...
If it was any other topic, like politics, economic analysis, I would not let the substance of the difference stain my views on the other person. If I do so, if I tag a person immediatly because he or she is religious, I am having a problem... Extremism is not a mature posture towards anything.

[Sisifo]

The absence of knowledge is more desirable than the illusion of knowledge.

How can you say something like that? All our knowledge could perfectly be illusionary. The seek of knowledge is more desirable than any abscence of knowledge.
I'd respect more a person who jumps from religion to religion, or stays in one, deeply studying it and trying to make sense of it, and get answers, that the one who shrugs his shoulders, not giving a damn... I regard science and reason as the way of questioning, not the holding of answers.

[Chinaski]

The absence of knowledge is more desirable than the illusion of knowledge.

How can you say something like that? All our knowledge could perfectly be illusionary. The seek of knowledge is more desirable than any abscence of knowledge.
I'd respect more a person who jumps from religion to religion, or stays in one, deeply studying it and trying to make sense of it, and get answers, that the one who shrugs his shoulders, not giving a damn... I regard science and reason as the way of questioning, not the holding of answers.

Recognizing absence of knowledge is the first step in attempting to gain knowledge. Surety of knowledge, however, merely leads to dogmatism.

[Sisifo]

The absence of knowledge is more desirable than the illusion of knowledge.

How can you say something like that? All our knowledge could perfectly be illusionary. The seek of knowledge is more desirable than any abscence of knowledge.
I'd respect more a person who jumps from religion to religion, or stays in one, deeply studying it and trying to make sense of it, and get answers, that the one who shrugs his shoulders, not giving a damn... I regard science and reason as the way of questioning, not the holding of answers.

Recognizing absence of knowledge is the first step in attempting to gain knowledge. Surety of knowledge, however, merely leads to dogmatism.

That's a quite dogmatic statement.

[floppit]

Recognizing absence of knowledge is the first step in attempting to gain knowledge. Surety of knowledge, however, merely leads to dogmatism.

I'd agree with this up to a point - the point being that if the perceived lack of knowledge is only followed by faith in a person who's seen as having it then there's no drive to gain reasoning and only an alternative dogmatism.

Logic, reasoning, criticality is bloody hard work, more than a lifetime's work, perhaps never fully achieved even by the greatest minds - it isn't reading a new book or following a new leader.

Two people in honest, rational debate, two thinkers will deliver blows to each other's assumptions, while emotions like hatred and devotion are tangled into it's my experience that the emotive will forgo reason to protect emotion - no matter which side of the fence they were sat on.

Atheism is just an absence, it requires no reason and proves no reasoning. Personally, atheist only describes that I do not believe in god, it in no way describes 'me' as a whole, for that I have to work.

[charlou]

Recognizing absence of knowledge is the first step in attempting to gain knowledge. Surety of knowledge, however, merely leads to dogmatism.

I'd agree with this up to a point - the point being that if the perceived lack of knowledge is only followed by faith in a person who's seen as having it then there's no drive to gain reasoning and only an alternative dogmatism.

That's the point I understood FS to be making (if a little clumsily worded) when he said:

The absence of knowledge is more desirable than the illusion of knowledge.

[floppit]

FS will need to clear that up - I took it as the step from religion into a void, a starting place, largely due to the context.

[Sisifo]

Atheism is just an absence, it requires no reason and proves no reasoning. Personally, atheist only describes that I do not believe in god, it in no way describes 'me' as a whole, for that I have to work.

I agree. Atheism is just a status or opinion about the idea of God.
But religion comprehend more than the idea of God; it interlinks and interpretates under its prisma the relationship of the individual with other humans and with the world in many, if not all, topics. And equally important, it tries to guide on its own rules, the process of self-awareness.

Although the brain-space "God", can be kept void without need of reasoning or refilling, the rest of the structure Individual-World-Self either is rebuilt by a process of reasoning, or it seems to me that it would just create an oddity.

[floppit]

Another way of putting it is the atheism describes a destination, an end point and reasoning describes the journey or process.

Reasoning the attribute of the process, opinion of the product of the process. It is perfectly possible to be wrong with good reasoning and right with appalling reasoning. Medicine has some wonderful examples!

The notion that atheism equals sound reasoning is to confuse the means of travel with the city arrived at.

[Sisifo]

Another way of putting it is the atheism describes a destination, an end point and reasoning describes the journey or process.

Reasoning the attribute of the process, opinion of the product of the process. It is perfectly possible to be wrong with good reasoning and right with appalling reasoning. Medicine has some wonderful examples!

The notion that atheism equals sound reasoning is to confuse the means of travel with the city arrived at.

Yes. You put it much better than I could.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

A few things puzzled me about your OP, Sisifo. You finished by saying that you told her you were pulling her leg and took her to a church.

Firstly, why deny that you meant what you said? It is one thing to tread carefully around someone's religious sensibilities and quite another to pay tacit lip-service to them. By all means brush it off by saying that you are not trying to preach atheism and each to their own. But to claim that you were joking is going a little further IMO.

Secondly, did you just drop her at the church? Or did you attend the service with her?

[Sisifo]

A few things puzzled me about your OP, Sisifo. You finished by saying that you told her you were pulling her leg and took her to a church.

Firstly, why deny that you meant what you said? It is one thing to tread carefully around someone's religious sensibilities and quite another to pay tacit lip-service to them. By all means brush it off by saying that you are not trying to preach atheism and each to their own. But to claim that you were joking is going a little further IMO.

Secondly, did you just drop her at the church? Or did you attend the service with her?

I said I was pulling her leg, because my arguments had hurt. I had attacked like if she had been a fundamentalist, and I tried to rectify some of it; especially the anti-catholic ones. That is mainly the point. I was not advocating reason; I was attacking religion which was unfair to a person who took religion internally and silently.

I didn't attend the mass. It was clear after all, and I told her so, that I considered the religious belief an absurdity. That statement didn't bother her at all. That day I saw that I was less flexible to human diversity than I thought. As I put later, that I was/am an extremist, and I would like to fix that.

[FBM]

I don't see any chance of every human being agreeing totally on every issue. Even us atheists/skeptics/rationalists have heated disagreements and schisms. More important than ideological homogeneity is peaceful co-existence. As long as the person who disagrees with you isn't agressive, take the opportunity to practice compassion and learn humility and forebearance by simply agreeing to disagree in an amiable manner. This case seems like a perfect example of that and I think Sisifo did exactly the right thing.