Honest question. It seems to bother some of you that people have faith why?
Does it bother you that the 9/11 Hijackers murdered over 3,000 Americans and plunged us into a 20 year long war?
Yes…
Actions are manifest from beliefs. So actions based on accurate beliefs congruent with the objective reality yield better outcomes. As beliefs deviate from objective reality, so do the quality of the actions based upon those bad believes and the worse the outcomes.
Unfortunately the bad impacts of those bad actions are not always limited to those holding the objectively wrong beliefs. Combine bad fanaticism with objectively bad believes and you get very bad outcomes, like 9/11, half million "witches" burned at the stake, modern science deniers who attempt to substitute religions classes for science class, trillion is economic damage fighting the evils of modern progress, and 100 million dead under Mao.
Different beliefs have lead to every war in the history of man. I’m not here to argue how someone believes. I’m just trying to understand why some have an issue in how I believe. I have no issue with people who don’t share my beliefs because that is their choice. I have made mine and you have made yours and I respect that.
My friend and hunting partner of more than 30 years is agnostic/atheist I’m actually not sure. I just know he doesn’t share my beliefs but it hasn’t affected are friendship because of it.
People like the OP do a disservice to a lot of Christians and that is unfortunate.
SC, Not all religions/belief systems are created equal, nor are all Christianities.
A good majority of Christians in America today are what I call functional Atheist. They claim to believe, don't really know what's in their bible, go to Chruch for weddings and funerals and focus on solving this world problems in this world, and don't unquestionably based their actions on dubiously sourced ancient parchments, and attempt to force other to conform to the same belief their at the point of a gun by trying to pass laws based on their old book. When debating, these are not the Christians I'm looking for, and I suspect you fall squarely in this camp. Dont' get me wrong, I'll still debate you for fun, to see if you have new or cleaver apologetics I've never head and to hone my skills, but you are not the droid I'm looking for.
When we study the impacts of religion against measures of well being, the evidence is crystal clear. The more fundamentalist the beliefs the worst the outcomes. It really doesn't matter what you measure, income per capita, teen pregnancy rates, rates of imprisonment, life expectancy, educational attainment, across the board, greater levels of fundamentalism lead to worse outcomes.
These are the believer's I'm looking for. Those who's beliefs are so wrong they impact the greater world in a negative way. I don't limit myself to Christians Fundamentalist's. I'm also opposed to Marxist, Muslim, Global Warming Alarmist, Hindu, Shinto, and Jainist Fundamentalist, we just don't have may of those of The Fire, so our religious debates typically revolve around Christianity.
Additionally, fundamentalist creates a viscous cycle. When fundamentalist fail they attribute their failure to an insufficient level of fundamentalism. Put another way, fundamentalism leads to bad outs, bad out comes for fundamentalist leads to greater levels of fundamentalism, which lead to worse outcomes, and more fundamentalism etc. To better understand this in action, I suggest you read Lawrence Wrights "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11".
You didn't use logic or reason to get into this opinion, I cannot use logic or reason to get you out of it.
You cannot over estimate the unimportance of nearly everything. John Maxwell
