cyber,
No, but I think it was a mistake for me to provide the example because the rationality might not be seen. I don't see a person as an object, but as a metaphysical soul confined to a body. I see Faith as a relationship between souls as well as a relationship between a soul and God.
I may have not been clear enough. You are speaking about "faith in" which always requires an object. You are the subject and that which you place faith in is the object of your faith. "Faith" on the other hand requires no object. If your belief is that a person is really a metaphysical entity, how does that make the person any less of an object?
I don't know, but he has real power and is interested in people.
How do you "know?" Is it a conclusion you've come to based on subjective experiences in your life?
. I submit that it is valid to use words to communicate because they are symbols. A word is referenced in the brain and somehow something in the brain is referenced to something that is not in this universe.
I never said it's not valid to use words, nor do I believe did the article do so. It was typed in words as well. Rather, it suggested that trying to develop a rationale for a way we feel that cannot be proven is unnecessary, and it would be more honest just to honor our feelings without trying to develop proofs to back them up. Feelings are all valid, even if they don't make complete sense, and as long as it's not harming anyone, at least imo, there's nothing wrong with embracing them.
Do I have something that manufactures ideas based on what I want to see? Yes kind of, but I do not want to imagine something that is not real...
So we're coming back the crux of the article. Your faith is really based on a wanting, a longing. The end may be different, because what you want is something you can somehow make logical sense out of, but the root of it is your wanting for that, and not the justification, which is itself the end result.
It is from a scientific model of control theory and information theory that I rationalize and understand Faith.
Is that a slight variation on the whole Unmoved Mover argument, to which one might argue, "What moved God?" or "Why can't the chain go on forever?" or "Why does the initial moving thing need to fit into your definition of God, however loose it may be?"
I think the author of that article should try explaining either why he calls himself Jewish and does not pray to God
Why don't you think the author prays to God? Perhaps better questions would be, "How does the author pray to God?" "For what reason does the author pray to God?" "What does the author believe is the purpose of prayer?" "What does the author believe happens when he prays to God?" I think you will find in the very article of mention that it speaks to prayer --emphasis mine:
"I’ll even go further than that. I'm not interested in translating the text of Hebrew prayers to make them somehow less ethnocentric, or in some way more theologically acceptable. I accept that the people who wrote those prayers were sexist, homophobic, anthropocentric -
and possessed of enormous religio-poetic sensitivity. Not to mention an inner stillness that it takes me days of silence to cultivate.
Of course, I recognize that the sexist (and otherwise problematic) language of prayer can be painful for people - and so changing the language is better for that reason. But auditing prayer to make it theologically kosher? Who the hell are we kidding? We're praying - what in God's name is philosophically defensible about that? I also understand that repeating all this dualistic language - God, please help me; I need you; I want to be close to you - is philosophically problematic, and reinforcing the wrong ideas about God... When I read the old texts, it's obvious that God is a guy, who may or may not have a body but who definitely does have personhood and separateness from us. He tells us to follow his commandments in exchange for his making the rain fall, and He tells us to follow the rules. (And when I'm honest with myself, I admit that sometimes I still believe these ideas - my mind going to things like the survival of the Jews, and the impending destruction of Western Civilization... little "proofs" that the Good Book may be right after all.) No, it does not make sense.
But would we demand that someone praying for her sick child "make sense"? And if we wouldn't, why demand it of ourselves? Auditing our religious beliefs, but not similarly restraining our impulses to love, play, laugh, and cry, is inconsistent....Conversely, is it really more honest to shoehorn those old texts into my theology, my ethics, and my understanding of how the world works? Or should I just accept that that's there world, this is mine - and we are united by love, not theory."
But if he didn't pray, why would that make him less of a Jew? If he didn't believe in God, why would that make him less of a Jew? The last I checked, you are not the decider of what is Jewish, nor is any single flavor of Judaism. In Judaism, we in fact have Jewish Humanism, a Jewish organization, as well as Reconstructionism which accepts a very naturalist, sometimes very secular, view of God. Nevermind all of the other theology that paints God in another way. Coming to new understandings of what God is to us, often in ways previous generations would not approve of, is something found often in the history of Judaism, from the mythical Abraham and Moses, to Solomon and crew, to the rabbis of the mishna, to Maimonides and his cronies, to the kabbalists, to the hasidim. Judaism is a religion that thrives on new ideas, new ways of looking at things. And even Jewish humanism does that by asking the question, "What form does Judaism take on in the absence of God?" Now of course I am not a humanist, but I don't deny the inherent Jewishness of Jewish Humanism either.
why he prays to God and doesn't think that God exists to listen.
I don't see him ever make the statement God doesn't exist either. If you go to the top of the second page of the article he goes on and on about negative theology, simply not knowing, and accepting not knowing. He never denies the existence God. He does however deny that we are ever capable of truly knowing what God is. And your second question also goes back to my question, "What is prayer?" "What is the purpose of prayer?" If it's really just a petition to a guy in the sky, I don't think I'd pray. The verb "to pray" in Hebrew on the other hand, is reflexive, and it's hardly a modern observation either.
Putting together the purpose of things, I estimate that God is much more than this Universe, which, when you study astronomy means quite a bit.
Why must there be purpose? How can you truly estimate something so ethereal as purpose? Unless you simply mean the biological and evolutionary reasons for which things exist, like my liver, or the role of plant life in maintaining the atmosphere. But is that really their purpose, or simply a role we can observe them playing in the world? Couldn't it all be chance that life came to being? I know you don't want to believe such a thing. I would not want that to be the case either. If everything we know was truly just because of a cosmic roll of the dice, then what meaning can our lives have? For me, the real meaning is that meaning we find in life, and not some universal truth that we can never objectively prove, can only justify because we badly want it to be true. But if that's the case, what's so wrong with acknowledging that we're doing it because we want it to be true? Wouldn't that mean being more honest with ourselves?
Furthermore the entire history of where every single car has ever been at every moment of its short existance, is still in this universe. That one is harder to show you, but a rationalization that also whacks out your entire belief system.
What is my belief system? And how is a rationalization, an attempt to justify, something that can whack anything? And if you admittedly cannot prove it to me, how is it anything more than a simple attempt on your part to justify your belief system that is not provable, but only requiring more justification and rationalization to back it up? This particular statement you've made seems much more like a belief than a rationalization. A rationalization would be a backing for a belief based on some form of logic (for example the "unmoved mover" example) or based on those things that in general we all agree can be observed about the universe. If I said for example, "God exists because the world is filled with strawberry preserve" that would be based on my very exclusive belief that the world is filled with strawberry preserve. If I said, "God exists because I exist," that would be a rationalization. And of course we can philosophize that and say, "But how do I know I exist at all?" However, the consensus is that I and you really do exist in some form among humanity, and for that reason, even though it is something that is still only a belief, is imo more accurately called a rationalization.
Suffice it to say, people are very special and are not the body. The body is like a part of the diary. Worth reading, but a shadow of existance.
That sounds like more theology to me. How do you know that people are special? How do you know there is a metaphysical to them? How do you know that our specialness is based outside of what we see? How do you know the body is like a diary? Whose diary is it? How do you know it is a shadow of existence? How do you know the body is worth reading? How do you know the metaphysical is more significant than the physical? I know that I for one cannot answer any of these questions objectively. If I tried, I would only be forming beliefs, which I would then either have the choice to justify to myself, to simply accept as "that which is my belief about the world," or to see as something which may or may not be true, but whose objective truth is less important for me than what it means to me.
Dauer
