Bill Maher is a smart individual but an agnostic can only promote what they know which means not very much when it comes to religion. Bill Maher said “Rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price.” To me having a meaning and a reason to
However, in the New Testament God heals and individual who is blind and lets others die. A strength of Maurice Wiles argument is that it appeals to educated believers of God and scientific laws. This I because Wiles says that the concept of miracles can exist as it is "logically impossible" to prove miracle wrong scientifically. By saying this, Wiles is allowing religious people to also uphold their beliefs in scientific laws. A second strength of Maurice Wile's argument against miracles is that it allows a re-interpretation of miracle.
Swinburne would argue that St. Theresa’s character would not lie about a supposed religious experience due to her deep faith in God and morals suggesting that her visions must have been from an external agent. On the other hand, it could be heavily argued that scientific advances could prove otherwise and expose the visions of Christ as an act of the mind ‘playing tricks’. Science has shown that the temporal lobe when stimulated through seizures can produce an altered perception such as religious experiences of this variety. St. Theresa had these visions in the 1500’s when science was in its earliest stages and religion was an answer for everything; these factors appear to support Richard Swinburne’s defence of certain types of characters not lying in support of
For example, on Damascus Road, Saint Paul’s religious experience transformed his moral outlook. It would appear that all religious experiences demonstrate a revelation of truth, but one could argue that this does not indicate they are true. As Freud would argue that religious experiences are a way of externalising deep, repressed personal truths. In such a view, religious experiences are unverifiable and cannot be thought to prove the existence of God, as they are merely manifestations of the human subconsciousness. A transient experience short, and cannot be sustained for a long duration of time.
The belief in a miracle can come from either experiencing them or religious reasons and explanations. People that believe in miracles usually believe in the religious evidence that we are provided with. Christians and Catholics will believe that miracles can happen because there are a lot of stories in the bible that seem to break the laws of nature and almost seem impossible to believe in, for example Jesus healed poorly people and he rose from the dead. In our society people believe that rising from the dead is humanly impossible and then jump into assumptions that this event must of had some sort of supernatural explanation; others will not believe it at all. Catholic people think that if you believe in God miracles seem more obvious to you and if you deny and test the existence of God then it will be harder to see the miracles happen.
In this essay I will consider Richard Katz book Boiling Energy: Community Healing among the Kalahari Kung, in particular the chapters "Kung Hunter Gatherers" and "The Kung Approach to Healing". I will examine Katz proposal that the Kung’s healing dance does more than just ‘cure' in the generic sense. I find his argument compelling. I argue that his conception of the Kung healing dance allows us to draw parallels with religious practices in our own society, and therefore infer ideas about the nature of religion itself. I note one weakness of his argument in regard to his observation if the inseparability of the Kung’s everyday life and their religion, compared to western societies.
In particular, when speaking of Spies, the lines are not as clear as they do not accept the tenets of Christianity but see activities such as prayer or forgiveness as useful to the secular world. Because of this area of debate, the idea of absolutes is not possible. Without absolutes, how can we actually give someone guidance on how and where to go in their lives? Without a spiritual path that is laid out and definite, where does someone with a troubled soul go? I am grateful for the door that the book opens by illustrating how the two worlds of psychology and Christianity can be married yet as in any marriage, there is always areas that are not
Popper wrote the foundation of the principle, but flew went a bit further with it. He was influenced by Popper but Flew applied the falsification principle to religious language and derived the conclusion that religious statements are no more than words with little to no significance. He then goes on to modify John Wisdom's analogy of the intangiable gardener to illustrate his point that religious believers cannot be convinced against God and their belief in him. Flew says that a religious believer is forced to say that “God's love is incomprehensible” when they are faced with the argument that God allows the death of a child due to an inoperable illness. He also goes further to say that “religious believers are allowing their definition of God to 'die a death of a thousand qualifications'” which would suggest that Flew believes that religious believers will use any 'qualification of God' to explain certain happenings in the world.
Religion at one time was very touchy subject in many cultures around the globe, as the world progressed more people became open to religion. Theses effects have lead to a society overflowing with religious moderates. Religious moderates are people who aren't fundamentalists and don't interpret their religious scripture in a literal context. They have tolerance for other religions and beliefs and believe that no faith should be forced upon you. Sam Harris discusses religious moderates and their dogmatic views in his article “The First Ten Pages.” Harris argues that they are the “instability” in our society because moderates believe in something without having factual evidence to prove it.
The Moral Implication in the Charity Culture Nowadays, the charity culture is both strange and familiar to the public, for it is not reported so much on the media in one hand, and in the other hand, the moral implication in the charity culture is just like the blood in human bodies. In the western countries, the origin of charity culture is from the religion. The theory of “Original Sin” in Christianity makes people believe that everyone is born guilty, who must atone for his philanthropy by working hard for the entire lifetime in order to get peace and go to the Heaven after death. In the western Christian culture, charity is regarded as a discipline, which has an external force; while it is an effective way as well shuttling between the wealth and the spirit beyond the free materialism. As a result, charity in the western world is not just a moral stuff, but more like a religion one.