Original thread

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,359255,359436#msg-359436

I wanted to respond to thingsithink's question.

"Do you require evidence for musical greatness as well? Or just in the arena of religion? I'm suspecting one of the "best guitar solos ever" sucked rocks. It's just a guess. :)"


One, yes I do require evidence for musical greatness. However, things like the arts all have an aesthetic preference to them. So people can be very talented, work really hard, produce something inovative and still be considered "rock sucking" by some.

For example, I really don't like the Beatles regardless of their talent and what they did to change the entire rock world.

Aesthetic preference. So if you were to claim that, "Justin Bieber is the greatest musician of all time." I would understand that your claim has some aesthetic baggage to it. But I would also require evidence to agree with your claim at least in part. It would never fully come to fruition because your undying love for Justin Bieber would never jive with my metal aesthetic preferences.

Religious claims are often not within this same realm at all. There may be claims that deal with ethics (which I would absolutely require evidence for whenever a religion says, "THIS IS THE BEST WAY TO LIVE.)

However, religious claims are often things that should require evidence, but religious people often want to weasel their way out of because they HAVE no evidence for their claims.

Like taking certain bible stories literally and claiming that Regular Jesus was resurrected and so were a bunch of other jerkbags around 33 AD.

No historical evidence. I don't have to accept that claim.

Scientific claims and theories require evidence. And the nice thing about science is that theories can be refined given new evidence. And I can change my mind about that.

And YES I absolutely would change my mind about religion given new evidence.

But religions don't believe in that. They'd rather just have faith....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/07/2011 04:57PM by Raptor Jesus.

I relate. Musical taste is not as clearly defined as religious belief. But there are similar underlying questions: why is someone attracted to a particular type of music or religion. Is someone making a rational choice relative to music or acting more similarly to one who acts on "faith." Are the attractions to a certain music for some people just as silly (unfounded on truth) as some people's religious beliefs? And can't those attractions cause problems in a person's life - be destructive - like religion?

If so, is it enough to simply say religion is silly? Isn't there a much deeper inquiry into our ideas and beliefs that can take place? Religion just being one small step into the process.

Are we really "attracted" to religion? There aren't too many people raised as athiests who develop religious attraction in adulthood. Every religious person I know was indoctrinated in their brand of of it by their "loving" parents.

good point.

Just like I think that teen bop music is silly.

And there are lots of things that I like and do that are also silly.

While I say that my worldview deals pretty much with evidence, that isn't everything about my worldview.

A big part of it is the personal philosophy that we all need to not take ourselves or anything TOO seriously.

At most times we could all lighten up.

Things become dangerous when they are taken too seriously. And of course there is a balance to that. Some things are very serious.

But not eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a dead guy in order to gain entrance to a place where everything is on a fluffy cloud and we all sing sychophantic songs forever.

That's silly.

So, avoid the deadly silly stuff and enjoy the innocuous silly stuff?

I appreciate you taking the time to comment on my original question because it was serious (but silly). Trying to organize things in my own head.

Why was the original thread closed?

I see religion in much the same way that I see the arts (music, art, drama, etc.) It's another, expressive way to talk about the human experience -- about our hopes, our aspirations, our fears, our weaknesses.

In that regard, sometimes I think that the arts can talk about deeper human truths very well indeed, even though they are, in many or most respects (surprise!) fiction.

I had an art professor once who was talking about a picture that a child had drawn of a baseball pitcher. In this drawing, the pitcher had thrown the ball so hard that his arm literally came off and was traveling with the ball. Literal truth? Of course not. Did it beautifully convey the force of a baseball throw? Yes.

I think that's what bothers me when religion is compared to science. To my way of thinking, it's not the right comparison. I think that a more apt comparison is, how does a religion stand up as story? As literature? As art? As drama?

Religions do need some grounding in reality. Perhaps, like myths, they are the bridge between reality and the arts.

Perhaps the question to ask is, does a religion speak to deeper human truths? Does it add to, enhance, and magnify our human experience?

I really like that perspective. I haven't heard that angle here. Thanks for sharing that. I'm going to think about that some. :)

When taken mythically or viewed as literature, yes - their scriptures are much more in the realm of art.

But religion deals with much more than that. And that's where I have a problem.

Becauase the belief statments are CLAIMS. The structures, rituals, and guilt mechanisms used for control are also something else entirely.

While I can view certain doctrines mythically; the religion itself DOES NOT view their doctrines as such. They view them as metaphysical - and sometimes purely physical claims.

And here I was, all ready to buy a Kindle just to download and read your book.

Now, I'll hafta' think on that.

HERETIC!

[this a response to Steve Bensons Bursting the Santa-Style [Delusion Bubble: Using Mormonism, Christianity and Islam as [Investigatory Guides, Religion Is . . . (sound of angel [trumpet, please) . . . Delusional--

[Who cares what you think about religion? Seriously, get a life.
[Posted by: Quoth the Raven Nevermo (

I love it when the uneducated/uninvolved respond to intellectual threads with eloquently rehearsed responses that add so much to the discourse

I once was taking two physics classes by different professors. One was educated in Beijing and the other in Moscow during the USSR days. I pointed this out to my Beijing professor and jokingly said, "so I'm being taught communist physics?"

He laughed and said, "there is no communist physics."

Physics is about as objective as you can get. Physicists from India, China, USA, Europe, South America get together at conferences and agree on a huge fundamental body of material. There are areas of research where results are far from conclusive that there will be disagreements over the validity or significance of results [I predict that the recent CERN result with neutrinos traveling faster than light will not overthrow Einstein's Special Relativity theory--but that's just me] but a PhD from Beijing and from Moscow can easily get jobs at the University of Utah.

However I could not imagine a BYU religion professor being hired to teach theology at Notre Dame. I can't imagine an Islamic cleric teaching Book of Mormon classes at BYU. In the religious world there is total disagreement from the beginning. There are no universally recognized religious authorities. There are only "authorities" in specific religions.

Belief, in such a situation, comes down to a matter of faith, or to use another word, a matter of taste.

What if we were to consider the question of which flavor of ice cream tastes best, What evidence would be needed to prove that Rocky Road tastes better than French Vanilla? We could actually sit down and taste it and I would say "French Vanilla is best" and you would say, "no, Rocky Road tastes best."

Or we could conduct statistical studies to see what the majority of people prefer. Using that example Justin Bieber is a greater musician than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.

As my grandmother used to say, "de gustibus non disputandum est," which, if I knew Latin, I'd know what it meant. But you can't argue about taste. It is an individual thing which is about the person more than about the ice cream. If I say "I prefer French Vanilla to Rocky Road" nobody questions my statement. It's clearly a statement about my tastes of which I am the authority.

Similarly if someone says, "I find solace in following the tenets of religion XYZ" who is to say they don't? But the problem is that it is usually phrased as "Religion XYZ is true and those who don't agree with this are wrong." From there it's a short step to flying airplanes into tall buildings like the Al Qaeda people did, or publishing books saying that God has cursed Blacks to be an "inferior race" as Joseph Fielding Smith did.

The next time some Mormon bears their testimony about how they KNOW that the Church is true, tell them, "That's not a statement about the Church, that's a statement about you."

You can't deny a persons statement that they like Justin Beiber more than Bach or Jimi Hendrix (you can't deny their preference), but you can discuss the reasons they have the preference and that can take you to some pretty interesting places.

The last straw for me, when I decided that I was free from believing in Mormonism, was watching "Spirited Away" you may think that Japanese animation is just sillyness trying to be profound, but when I watched that scene were the girl is riding away from the bathouse on the train it transported me. It was spiritual. More than the beautiful feelings I had reading scripture. I knew that the spirit was just a feeling of being connected to other people. Art does it better than religion.

Religion is just art married to political power. There is beautiful stuff all through the bible. But it's mixed in with political power, war and mass-murder. Then those feelings are taken away from us an given to another world where they exist in a more pure and wonderful form (a form that apparently justifies mass-murder) But those feelings belong here with us. They are our, they belong here with us in this life. We own them.

One thing I wanted to add is that religion takes ownership of not just art, but our friendships, and our family relationships. By political I don't just mean government, but any organization that tries to own your spirituality. It is true that religions like mormonism that take ownership to a larger degree are more harmful, and those that take ownership to a lesser degree are less harmful. But that is just because they are less religious and more like art. At some point you have to wonder why pretend to be a religion at all. Why not just admit we are here together to enjoy each other, to connect, and figure out how to make our life here the best it can possibly be?

I've always felt more connected to spiritual matters when I'm at the top of a mountain, or at the ocean, or otherwise connected to the natural world.

I also love Taoist art. Seeing a tiny speck of a man against a massive mountain puts things in perspective for me.