If certain religious beliefs or non-religious beliefs suit a particular person and helps them maybe to live a happy and fulfilled life, why does it matter whether or not those beliefs can be proved as truth? If they are beneficial to a particular person, surely that is the most important thing?

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I can see for myself that the sun is sinking
how I wish you were here to see
tell me now, I am wrong in thinking
that you have forgotten me?

I believe there is ultimate truth. If 100 billion people believe something that is not true, it's still untrue, no matter how much they want it to be true.


The Universe was created by the "Big Bang" or it wasn't. But it came into existance some way. There is a way and a means that it truely happened.

There is a God, or there isn't. There is a "true religion" or there isn't.

I can't see how it could be any other way.

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Carter. Available in original vanilla and now, chocolate swirl!

Let me see if I got this right. The government is now going to spend billions of dollars we don't have to force car companies to make cars they don't want to make to sell to people who don't want to buy them so that we can combat man-made global warming that is neither man made nor warming.

Fascism & Communism don't begin with piles of corpses, they begin with hope and change.

Everything around me tells me that there is an end.

When I drop a pencil, it always reaches the ground, sooner or later EVERYTHING ends.

The universe tells me this, and so I believe that we will one day find that there is in fact an end to the universe...what is after that? I don't know. But I am convinced that there is an end to the universe and that there must be something beyond it.

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No wire hangers everrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr


This is what I'm listening to right now!

I hate to do this, but I think you are wrong there. NOW, I can't clarrify without this going relegious, so I'll just point out that I disagree with that part and let it be (unless this is moved to the appropriate forum ofcourse!)

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Things I've learned from working in the ER: Leave circumcision to the professionals

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Wow, sounds like someone has been reading terry pratchett books!
I do think that if you believein something with faith then it must be true and by believeing in iut you give it for substance. Like, if the christians quit believeing in Satam he'd dissappear.

I'm also very Taoist, if you read my Taoism quote is the quotes section, the one POD bashed
Anyhow, withpout Evil, there would be no good because with evil, how would we know what good is? AND THE same with good, there would be no evil
As I have said before, the earth is nothing but God's raging bile duct but every just runs in cycles. And no matter how bad stuff gets, it always comes out right in the end...
so why worry about who's right? we all go back home in the end....
man I love these icons....

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"Luke, estoy tu pap'a!"
"No! NOOO! Es no verdad!!!!"

I didn't mean that each teaches explicitly that everything else is wrong-- I just meant that the majority of religions are mutually exclusive. If, for example, the Christians are right, then Judaism is wrong, Islam is wrong, etc. If atheists are right, then Christianity is wrong, Judaism is wrong, Islam is wrong, etc. I realize that Buddhism and some eastern religions may be more permissive in this regard, but I don't know all that much about them.

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is snuggly

Well for example, if someone is living a happy and fulfilled life as a Christian, when really Christianity is wrong and Judaism is right, then they've managed to live happily for 80 years and then doomed themselves to a most unpleasant eternity. So I suppose it depends on what you mean by beneficial.

My main point is that I don't believe that Truth is relative. Like stratman said, either there is a God, or there isn't. In the same way, either Christianity (for example) is right, or it isn't.

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is snuggly

This is of course assuming that there is an after life at all, though it has been a predominant factor in many religions. Truth be told, no one's ever died and lived to tell about it. At least not in recent history, and certainly not with any sort of documented evidence, if such a thing can be proven.

This may not be the place for it, but it sort of is relevant if I express my current personal opinion. Now, this is not meant to denounce ANYTHING, these are completely internal contemplations of self. I think at the moment, being raised Catholic, that I only hold onto to a faith in monotheism and a higher power because if I didn't, I would feel terribly insignificant, like my life was a fluke and everything around me was just some fragile mistake that just so happend to come into existence. My faith has been reduced to believing that, at some point, a force, god or no, sparked the beginning of existence itself and set this cold, sterile turn of events known as evolution into motion. Where this force is, and if it awaits me after I die in some other state, I have no clue. Once, if ever, I am prepared to accept the terrible feeling of being so small in a vast universe, then I'll give up my 'faith'. To some extent, I feel maybe this is where our religions first came from. Mythology, making stories up to explain things we don't understand. As advanced as we are, we really haven't come any closer to understanding anything more about the questions that plagued us from the very start. Who are we, where did we come from, why are we here? We're no more advanced than the Greeks, and at most, we are nothing more than super-chimpanzees. We're constantly adding zeros to our universal equation of understanding and theory. I can't base my faith on a gut instinct or feeling, because I could feel that about anything. When I'm alone, I can feel like someone else is there that I can't see, regardless if there really is or not. I think we have instincts, but I don't think we have them to any sort of paranormal or supernatural extent.

That sounds like some sort of Pascal's wager on God (but he didn't think about different religions actually...), choose your own belief and hope it's the right one.

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If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

That's the same for me, I'm resigned to my ignorance and I can't accept "faith" as an answer, but sometimes I envy those who have lots of certainties: God, afterlife, Truth etc... they live much better I guess

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If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

Sometimes they do live much better, but sometimes they don't, and they spend all their time trying to make sure everyone else is just as miserable as they are...

And I know this from experience, sad to say...

All the talk here of Truth brought to mind my all time favorite cartoon strip, by Wiley: Obviousman (who is dedicated to pointing out the obvious buffoonery of the world about him) sees a street preacher strolling about with his placard which reads "There are no absolutes in Life". Obviousman takes it upon himself to explain to the street preacher that the statment is, in fact, an absolute statement, thus contradicting itself.

Street Preacher tries to reason and rationalize it out, and then... His head explodes.

Love it, love it!!!

Cheers!

GeeDub#1
<...who just wants a big ol' cosmic hug, really...>

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"Roger lost his father in the war, I lost mine in Greenwich Village..." David Gilmour
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It's easy when you stop pretending that you just got lost on the way
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When did you first realize/It's time you took an older lover, baby?

Perhaps the truth does depend upon the observer. Imagine that you are facing a house, and the orientation is such that you can only see the side that is facing you and no other side of the house. You can observe from this stance that the house is painted white, therefore you believe that this house is white. But what if the rest of the house is painted green? So a belief that the house is white is not an actual fallacy, but not the truth either. We base our beliefs on our limited perception of our world, and I imagine we are much like the Flatlanders, unable to conceive of more dimensions than those of our world.

Am I babbling yet?

The truth in your example would not be that the house is painted white, nor that the house is painted green. Both beliefs would be incorrect. The truth would be that the house is painted both green and white. That is not tangent upon any observation.

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is snuggly

Exactly. Well explained.

__________________
Carter. Available in original vanilla and now, chocolate swirl!

Let me see if I got this right. The government is now going to spend billions of dollars we don't have to force car companies to make cars they don't want to make to sell to people who don't want to buy them so that we can combat man-made global warming that is neither man made nor warming.

Fascism & Communism don't begin with piles of corpses, they begin with hope and change.