most people think taht they are are in conflict because they erroneously think that if you have reason then you don't need faith and if you go by faith , then you cannot go by reasoning ..this is a paradox that has caused the biggest problems in all spirituality and religion..

but the truth is faith and reason are actually one and the same thing.. in order to have faith about something you need to know it as true. you cannot know something as ture unless you have a reason for it to be so... faith is reason and reason is faith

greatgenius: most people think taht they are are in conflict because they erroneously think that if you have reason then you don't need faith and if you go by faith , then you cannot go by reasoning ..this is a paradox that has caused the biggest problems in all spirituality and religion..

but the truth is faith and reason are actually one and the same thing.. in order to have faith about something you need to know it as true. you cannot know something as ture unless you have a reason for it to be so... faith is reason and reason is faith

Guy, you are not a genius with that foolish comment.


Faith is very diffferent and sometimes opposite to reason.


Faith flies you into buildings reason helps you make buildings

plaetton:

Have you ever once considered that what happened to Paul on his way to damascus could have been a sudden onset of some kind of benign mental illness?b

What if, some time from now the 'talking donkey' ish becomes explanable via our frail human intelligence?

outc@st:


What if, some time from now the 'talking donkey' ish becomes explanable via our frail human intelligence?

What if some time from now "God" becomes diagnosed as a mental delusion?

Guy, let us focus on what we know. Donkeys can not talk. Faith is not reasonable

Logicboy03:


What if some time from now "God" becomes diagnosed as a mental delusion?

Guy, let us focus on what we know. Donkeys can not talk. Faith is not reasonable

At least with this I can't justify calling you Olodo...so I will shelve it for a more appropriate time .

Seriously now, what really is 'reason'? If I can provide justification or explanations for the things I believe in then what I do is in line with reason.

As I mentioned before a number of things that we believe as Christians are completely reasonable. To say that some other things Christians believe in are against reason would be very inappropriate.

If we say something is against reason, we are really saying that what is believed cannot both now and in the future be explained or justified...this is not true and we need not go back too far in history to prove it.

The best we can say is that there are some things believed by Christians (I can only speak for my faith) which are beyond the scope of reason...what is beyond the scope of reason need not be unreasonable for all time as you guys suggest.

loswhite: ur foolishness knows no bound since u cannot read and understand a simple post. How many of those experiment have u carried out on your own? Imagine a drug 4 instance that was accepted because it was proven and accepted but after ten years a knew knowledge came out and dat drug was found to have serious negative impact on humans and as a result it was bound. The people that have been using the drug 4 d last 10 years put their faith in dat drug because the experiment was carried and vetted by due process by scientific community and they believe that community because they are good @ what they do. ppl always put their faith in sumtin

Nobody will tell you that a drug is absolute, scientists will only tell you the probability of success n also tell u d side effects if known. But scientists will tell u that friction opposes motion n its a fact. They' ll also tell u that action n reaction are equal n opposite n its a fact....how about d earth revolves round d sun, its a fact.....

@Loswhite....use d right comparison n avoid baseless arguments

loswhite: ur foolishness knows no bound since u cannot read and understand a simple post. How many of those experiment have u carried out on your own? Imagine a drug 4 instance that was accepted because it was proven and accepted but after ten years a knew knowledge came out and dat drug was found to have serious negative impact on humans and as a result it was bound. The people that have been using the drug 4 d last 10 years put their faith in dat drug because the experiment was carried and vetted by due process by scientific community and they believe that community because they are good @ what they do. ppl always put their faith in sumtin

Nobody will tell you that a drug is absolute, scientists will only tell you the probability of success n also tell u d side effects if known. But scientists will tell u that friction opposes motion n its a fact. They' ll also tell u the action n reaction are equal n opposite n its a fact....how about d earth revolve round d sun, its a fact.....

@Loswhite....use d right comparison n avoid baseless arguments

outc@st:


At least with this I can't justify calling you Olodo...so I will shelve it for a more appropriate time .

Seriously now, what really is 'reason'? If I can provide justification or explanations for the things I believe in then what I do is in line with reason.

As I mentioned before a number of things that we believe as Christians are completely reasonable. To say that some other things Christians believe in are against reason would be very inappropriate.

If we say something is against reason, we are really saying that what is believed cannot both now and in the future be explained or justified...this is not true and we need not go back too far in history to prove it.

The best we can say is that there are some things believed by Christians (I can only speak for my faith) which are beyond the scope of reason...what is beyond the scope of reason need not be unreasonable for all time as you guys suggest.

Beyond the scope of reasoning? Your christian beliefs are below the concept of reasoning. They are foolishness upon silliness.

A donkey can not talk. It can not talk. Even if it could, why would it speak a Jewish language?
A dead man who has been bled to death can not come back to life in 3 days.


Your beliefs are insane. Faith is the only thing that can make a man carry a bomb to blow up people and than cries the next day that he didnt reach paradise because his bomb didnt detonate and he was caught.

Reason can never justify such psychopatic terrorism

Logicboy03:


Beyond the scope of reasoning? Your christian beliefs are below the concept of reasoning. They are foolishness upon silliness.

A donkey can not talk. It can not talk. Even if it could, why would it speak a Jewish language?
A dead man who has been bled to death can not come back to life in 3 days.


Your beliefs are insane. Faith is the only thing that can make a man carry a bomb to blow up people and than cries the next day that he didnt reach paradise because his bown didnt detonate and he was caught.

Reason can never justify such psychopatic terrorism

So as an atheist,you have absolutely no faith in anything or anyone?

chukkynwob:

So as an atheist,you have absolutely no faith in anything or anyone?

We are talking about religous faith.

And yes I have faith in the fact that my football team, Arsenal, will win the league at every season. And I agree that such faith is silly.


I have faith in my close family members that they would be loyal to me- however, this is not faith in the religious sense because I reasoned with the current evidence that they have always been loyal beofre and they have two good reasons to be loyal; blood and my return of that loyalty back to then

Wow! I really wasn't expecting this thread to hit the frontpage. Too many comments to go through. Lemme take my time {might not be able to reply anyone though}

Krucifax: Buddhism was founded in 520BC long before Christianity in India
Christianity was founded in 30AD in Israel
Confucianism was founded in 471BC in China
Islam was founded in 622AD in Saudi Arabia
Jainism was founded in 550BC in Eastern India
Judaism was founded in 1300BC long long before Christianity
Sikhism was founded in 1500AD
Taoism was founded in 550BC

hmm i find this interesting, using CHRISTIANITY as benchmark to judge periods of other religion.

greatgenius: most people think taht they are are in conflict because they erroneously think that if you have reason then you don't need faith and if you go by faith , then you cannot go by reasoning ..this is a paradox that has caused the biggest problems in all spirituality and religion..

but the truth is faith and reason are actually one and the same thing.. in order to have faith about something you need to know it as true. you cannot know something as ture unless you have a reason for it to be so... faith is reason and reason is faith

U are confusing having reasons for your faith, and "Reason". Ofcourse all religions all over the world, even the oldest like hinduism have better reasons than christianity.
The question is based on faith and reason, u lack the right understanding of the question, but I don't blame u.
Another point of correction, you don't know your faith to be true, you can only believe it is! Reason seeks to know.
Where faith arose was where knowledge ended, then it seemed reasonable to believe in "something" - something you can't prove. But in the end, if you had knowledge you would not need to have faith. If you really are dependent on reason which naturally seeks certainty, there will be no room for faith.
The fear of the unknown brings about the necessity of faith. Fear!

hisblud: hmm i find this interesting, using CHRISTIANITY as benchmark to judge periods of other religion.

Guy, that was a silly retort

i think we are missing a point here...Lets take a look on faith from the word of God which says that faith is the response of human spirit to the word of God...while reason is man's response to the way he has being doing things...Now how sure is man's way in doing things depends on how long by experience that method has worked for him or her.....so when dealing with God,reason flies to the the wind....so reason and faith doesnot apply

traeces: reason deals with rational thinking, logical soundness, sensory perception and is altogether physical.
Faith on the other hand is spiritual. It is what connects the physical to the spiritual. It is not a function of any physical sensory perception. It is actually the evidence of what physical sense cognition could not percieve.
To that extent, faith and reason are incompatible.

Thank you!
If we really decide to be rational in some things then we won't have faith. Faith to me is a belief in the supernatural. Something that ordinarily would not happen but we have faith that it would happen because there is an omnipotent God who has everything under control and we believe nothing is impossible for Him.

For example, a woman without a womb cannot conceive. That is logical and rational. But a Christian woman decides to leave logic and reason but instead looks up to God with faith that irrespective of what the Doctor has said, she would still conceive. You cannot apply reason and faith or else you would start to have doubts. The Bible itself doesn't support doubts. If you have doubts then it means you don't have faith.

Faith is incompatible with reason. A look at the book of Hebrews would convince us further If Noah had reasoned He won't have built that Ark. If Abraham had reasoned He won't have left his house to a land he had never seen. Sarah applied logic that is why when she was told she was going to conceive she did not believe. Why? Because she looked at the fact that she was past child bearing age.

Faith requires that you look away from all logic and reason and to just believe that with God all things are possible.

To be candid. If I decided to apply reason when reading the Bible, I won't be a Christian today. Atheist have applied reason that is why they don't believe in God. Science also applies reason.

The word miracle itself would tell use that faith and reason are incompatible. It is a miracle because It defies all logic and reason.

Reading the scripture widens one intelligent and gives internal peace.So, being able to reason start from understanding the verbal structure of the Author/creator who create senses.Believing in God is the beginning of wisdom.Even in science world, those who care to put the scripture to test, found out amazing things and were convince enough that there must be a supernatural being somewhere who had the knowledge of everything on earth before the bath of science ideology.A researcher, call keith moore said and I quote

"As a scientist, I can only deal
with things which I can
specifically see. I can
understand embryology and
developmental biology. I can
understand the words that are
translated to me from the
Qur'an. As I gave the example
before, if I were to transpose
myself into that era, knowing
what I do today and describing
things, I could not describe the
things that were described...
I see no evidence to refute the
concept that this individ
Muh ammad had to be
developing this information
from some place... so I see
nothing here in conflict with
the concept that divine
intervention was involved in
what he was able to
write...
I believe and I found joy in it

Logicboy03:
Beyond the scope of reasoning? Your christian beliefs are below the concept of reasoning. They are foolishness upon silliness.

A donkey can not talk. It can not talk. Even if it could, why would it speak a Jewish language?
A dead man who has been bled to death can not come back to life in 3 days.


Your beliefs are insane. Faith is the only thing that can make a man carry a bomb to blow up people and than cries the next day that he didnt reach paradise because his bomb didnt detonate and he was caught.

Reason can never justify such psychopatic terrorism

It's either you do not know what reason is or you are mistaking it for something else. Or better still maybe you choose a definition that suits your purpose.

Anyways, like I mentioned in my OP, reason is largely a subjective term and what might be reasonable for one might be very unreasonable for another.

The bottom line however is that my faith as a Christian in a lot of instances can be defended using reason and I maintain that faith and reason work together instead of against each other.

Krucifax: The problem with Faith is that it's very foundation are a paradox! And every faith by that notion is actually unreasonable!
Think about it for a moment.

Questions:

1. What is your faith?(i.e religion)
2. Does your faith not teach you that salvation(paradise,heaven,etc)is only via it's adherence?
3. How did you come to believe in your faith? (i.e religion)
4. How can you prove that your faith is the only way to salvation?

Answers:

1. Your faith is irrelevant all peoples of belief have different concepts of it,so how is one better than the other? Is it by who came first? Is it by their doctrines? They all teach goodness and moral principles and life after death!
So which is better,or truer or the correct one? If none of them is,does that not mean that none of them really matters?

Buddhism was founded in 520BC long before Christianity in India
Christianity was founded in 30AD in Israel
Confucianism was founded in 471BC in China
Islam was founded in 622AD in Saudi Arabia
Jainism was founded in 550BC in Eastern India
Judaism was founded in 1300BC long long before Christianity
Sikhism was founded in 1500AD
Taoism was founded in 550BC

2. If you are reading this,there is a 99% chance that if you believe in a faith system it is simply because you where born into a family,community or society that practices the faith of your belief! If your where born somewhere else in under different circumstances and faith, chances are you would be a believer of a different faith. Fact!

In summary Faith is good for society as a whole,it gives people things to strive towards and helps keep human behaviour in check and under control to a great degree. If we did not have faith systems the world would be a wild and dangerous place as people would have no fear of karma and repercussions. But ultimately faith is a construct of the human mind by men with greater intellect than their peers. It was reason not faith that brought us advances in medicine,science,technology and generally every field of human endeavour.

In the end reason and not faith is the ultimate arbiter of truth! But faith is good to have around as we were not all born equal!

I like your comment on this issue, however, one thing should be made clear here, and that is there are two main kinds of faith, one id physical and the other is abstract, the faith that is physical is the one kind that attached to things that you know about already, for instance, you know that there is a chair in a particular place, you need not to verify if the chair is there or not, because you aware of it already, that is different from the faith that you know there is no chair and yet by a convincing force within you, you decided to go ahead to sit down.This kind of faith has nothing to do with reason, in fact reasoning here will nullify the effect of the faith in ones life.So reasoning and the physical faith works hand in hand but the abstract faith is a paradox to reasoning.

Krucifax: The problem with Faith is that it's very foundation are a paradox! And every faith by that notion is actually unreasonable!
Think about it for a moment.

Questions:

1. What is your faith?(i.e religion)
2. Does your faith not teach you that salvation(paradise,heaven,etc)is only via it's adherence?
3. How did you come to believe in your faith? (i.e religion)
4. How can you prove that your faith is the only way to salvation?

Answers:

1. Your faith is irrelevant all peoples of belief have different concepts of it,so how is one better than the other? Is it by who came first? Is it by their doctrines? They all teach goodness and moral principles and life after death!
So which is better,or truer or the correct one? If none of them is,does that not mean that none of them really matters?

Buddhism was founded in 520BC long before Christianity in India
Christianity was founded in 30AD in Israel
Confucianism was founded in 471BC in China
Islam was founded in 622AD in Saudi Arabia
Jainism was founded in 550BC in Eastern India
Judaism was founded in 1300BC long long before Christianity
Sikhism was founded in 1500AD
Taoism was founded in 550BC

2. If you are reading this,there is a 99% chance that if you believe in a faith system it is simply because you where born into a family,community or society that practices the faith of your belief! If your where born somewhere else in under different circumstances and faith, chances are you would be a believer of a different faith. Fact!

In summary Faith is good for society as a whole,it gives people things to strive towards and helps keep human behaviour in check and under control to a great degree. If we did not have faith systems the world would be a wild and dangerous place as people would have no fear of karma and repercussions. But ultimately faith is a construct of the human mind by men with greater intellect than their peers. It was reason not faith that brought us advances in medicine,science,technology and generally every field of human endeavour.

In the end reason and not faith is the ultimate arbiter of truth! But faith is good to have around as we were not all born equal!

Nailed it!!!

Logicboy03:


What if some time from now "God" becomes diagnosed as a mental delusion?

Guy, let us focus on what we know. Donkeys can not talk. Faith is not reasonable

For 4 good pages, this was a serious discussion devoid of insults until you came in. Shame.

And hypocrites like you would be whining about intolerance next.

davidylan:

For 4 good pages, this was a serious discussion devoid of insults until you came in. Shame.

And hypocrites like you would be whining about intolerance next.

you have no sense! he was 1 of the first posters to come in on this thread.

so if this thread has been mislead, its because of the likes of you.

PAGAN 9JA:



you have no sense! he was 1 of the first posters to come in on this thread.

so if this thread has been mislead, its because of the likes of you.

It appears you are still smarting from the total beat down you got on the animal rights thread. Quite petty of you... grow up, this is a separate discussion.

davidylan:

It appears you are still smarting from the total beat down you got on the animal rights thread. Quite petty of you... grow up, this is a separate discussion.

Chai....Davidylan is an artful dodger
-When caught in a lie, shift to an irrelevant attack

davidylan:

For 4 good pages, this was a serious discussion devoid of insults until you came in. Shame.

And hypocrites like you would be whining about intolerance next.

Ignorant liar,

I was the one of the first posters on this thread(with the most likes, i might add)

davidylan:

For 4 good pages, this was a serious discussion devoid of insults until you came in. Shame.

And hypocrites like you would be whining about intolerance next.

slowpoke

davidylan:

It appears you are still smarting from the total beat down you got on the animal rights thread. Quite petty of you... grow up, this is a separate discussion.

what animal rights thread? wtf are you talking about

outc@st:

The bottom line however is that my faith as a Christian in a lot of instances can be defended using reason and I maintain that faith and reason work together instead of against each other.

yea right, same way al qaeda can defend crashing planes into a building to go meet up with allah's 71 virgins in paradise using reason...

From the 2 contradictory creation account timelines of genesis in which yahweh makes a sky-dome, fixes all the lights like the sun, moon and stars into it, and then creates a magic garden with a talking snake...

...to the ridiculous little tower of babel story about some ancient people who try to build a tower to reach the sky so they can be with yahweh who gets scared and curses them with many languages (and this, not the evolution of human speech in different cultures isolated from each other, is why we have many languages)...

...to the sheer absurdity of the story of noah's ark and the global flood of how the human race as well as the animals survived on a large wooden boat that included an insufficient genetic diversity and a perfect god who twice repents...

...to the story of exodus in which the great egyptian empire gets zapped by yahweh with 10 curses yet strangely there's not a shred of evidence in actual historical accounts; and moses then leads his people through the desert for 40 years, sustained by magic food from heaven and water from a stone...

...to the passion and resurrection of jesus in which yahweh expresses his unconditional love for you by sending himself down to earth to sacrifice himself to himself because bleeding on a cross was the only way he could convince himself to forgive you for the fact that one of your ancestors made from a rib ate a magic fruit after speaking with a talking snake. the holy zombie then flew up into the sky after being dead for 3 days.

abi na the fact that john was exiled in an island known for its mushrooms when he wrote his awesome stories of 10 headed dragons and giant locust with human faces spewing fire...

or is it the book of job were your god decides to screw around with a mortal on a bet with satan

what about when king david organised a census that enraged your god so much that he wipes out some 70,000 israelites with a plague but spares the main culprit - David himself....

you know, maintaining that "(religious)faith and reason work together instead of against each other" is actually a mental condition; it's called "Delusion"

Faith is stepping out into the SUPPOSED UNKNOWN knowing God will somehow come to your aid. So faith is not compatible with reason, Because with man there are impossibilities but with God nothing is impossible. Faith is not just sitting at a spot believing. Its acting upon your faith

I see someone hasn't lost his old touch. Make we cross path first.

God thought and way is far higher than ours, dats why 90% or more of the time, faith will always negate reason

A man bound to drown, will drown in his sweat. You cannot understand because you are reasoning. Wait till you have a life threatening situation, your grammar and logic will disappear.