The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #107461   Message #2235172
Posted By: GUEST,Steve Baughman
12-Jan-08 - 11:55 PM
Thread Name: Folklore: Amazing Grace. Should We Be Singing it??
Subject: RE: Folklore: Amazing Grace. Should We Be Singing it??
"God is Love." Sorry, Kat, I just don't know what that means, and I suspect it means nothing. It just conveys a feeling, like mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm......... or wow! or harumph! I do not believe that such a statement says anything about God, only about the mood of the person making the statement.

"Zen comes readily to mind and many other spiritual disciplines can attest to the ineffability of the spiritual moment." Slag, great points, thanks for being a deep thinker here, (I mean that seriously.) But I think there's a diff bet the faith of Xtnty and the "faith" you see in Zen. The latter does not make propositional claims of the sort that Xtnty does. There are no "wrong" facts in Zen, (s'far as I know, though I'm weak on Zen).

Christianity, by contrast, at least the evangelical and Catholic kind, makes plenty of factual claims, Jesus rose bodily, he was part One of Three, God exists and has XYZ qualities, God gets pissed if thou dost x or y or z, etc. These are FACTUAL claims, they are either true or not. I see no room for "faith" in deciding such matters, any more than I see a place for faith in believing the earth is a certain age, string theory is true, quarks exist, Alexander had a horse named Bucephulus, etc etc.   

Imagine someone saying "I have faith that Oswald killed Kennedy." How would that sit?

I say abolish faith. Believe what the evidence supports, and where the evidence stops, take a position of epistemic humility, accept that you don't know and don't use "faith" to justify the beliefs your heart desires.