If your intellectually cold, which will you choose to protect you? A question for believers?

Question

It is really a question about empirical data and a body of evidence. When talking science such as evolution or chemistry etc, an investigation is initiated into the question of why something is what it is or the way it is. Only empirical data is acceptable as an explanation and it must perforce be verifiable. While it is true that this approach has yet to explain everything, it does however create a growing picture of the way things really are. In the context of spirituality, there is no empirical data whatsoever. There are no facts, verifiable or otherwise that would lead one to the conclusion that a particular belief has any validity at all. All belief systems require 'Faith" for the simple reason that there is nothing to substantiate them. An easier way to view this is with a metaphor. Lets say religion and science both represent shirts. While it is true there are holes in the shirt of science, it is also true that they are being knitted shut every day with new information and technology and someday, probably soon, it will be a whole shirt. Religion, on the other hand, simply asks that you believe a shirt is there. If your intellectually cold, which will you choose to protect you?

Answer 1

You interchange the terms religion and spirituality as though they mean the same thing?

Spirituality is not confined to specific belief systems.

True spirituality can lead to connections that give something far more concrete than empirical data to the one experiencing it. Just because it is not verifiable and repeatable does not preclude its reality.

Just because a road is far less traveled, it does not mean that it does not exist.

Love and blessings Don

Answer 2

I think you are mis-representing both religion and science a little bit.

For one thing, science does not rely WHOLLY on data. That this is true is fairly easy to demonstrate: if some alien device were dropped into your living room that supplied any datum you asked for, would it mean the end of science? Far from it - it would probably give scientists a lot more to do!

Data is the very base of science, but mistaking data for the whole is like mistaking a skeleton for a living human being. Much of scientific work is in EXPLAINING data. UNDERSTANDING where it comes from and PREDICTING what it's going to be. And just as scientists have data that they sometimes cannot explain, frequently also they have explanations with no way to produce data. Any good scientist can probably name a dozen examples of each off the top of their heads.

So too it is with religion. There is a lot more data than you give credit for. There are many studies that show a positive correlation with religion and health (link 1) just to name one example. And there can be no doubt at all that many people experience SOMETHING related to religion... if such experiences are not objectively reproducible then we can only conclude that we don't understand the phenomenon, not that no phenomenon is occurring. Many people (even scientists) feel that there is more than enough data to support at least some aspects of some religions.

Given some of this religious data, it could in fact be a very reasonable (and even cold) decision to be religious for the peripheral benefits, even if there turns out to be no supernatural involvement whatsoever. After all, there are plenty of people who find that a 'religious shirt' does a very nice job indeed of keeping out the drafts that a 'scientific shirt' alone would have - and so they wear BOTH.

Answer 3

If I tell a lie, my nose gets longer, not bigger. If the shirt keeps me warm, metaphysically or empirically, what does it matter? My nose won't get longer in either case because it is what I believe it is; truth is wrapped in belief. Facts, on the other hand, are locked into the physical world of exist or imaginary.

If your belief-system has a Jewish flavor, does that make you wrong? I don't believe in Ghosts and Goblins. Does that make me wrong? We can both agree when a bus tire is flat without a danger of being heretical. You are trying to make life a class room, and the day you check out of school, you have to pass or fail with something administering a final test. I'm sorry, I don't believe I'm enrolled in your school anymore.

You are not intellectually cold or warm based on my theisical beliefs. Nor am I, based of your belief system. I don't live for your approval. I have to live within my own world, my own beliefs, my own accountability system. That is the price I must live by when I carry the "I AM, THEREFORE I EXIST." prepace to its natural conclusion. "I exist, therefore I am accountable to myself." To do less, is to try to avoid the responsibility of being an adult one day and wish the privileges the next day.