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
Redemption and conversion. Both play big roles in church and religion but one of the first stories comes from someone who would later become an Apostle, and the other from the least likely of places or people. But neither are people who when initial looking at their lives would we expect to be saved by God and used to spread his word to others. But God chooses the most unlikely people and in the most unlikely of places. Two stories in particular are similar and they are the stories of St. Paul formerly known as Saul and then Jules Winnfield the hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
There Are No Such Things as Miracles The subject about miracles is strongly opinionated, there are a lot of assumptions, theories and happenings that can lead a person to believing whether miracles do or don’t happen. It all relies on the person’s belief and what they follow. A miracle is usually defined by ‘unexplainable events that break the laws of nature’. There are different types of miracles that most of us have probably heard about, for example, miracles of healing, exorcism, resurrection and nature. The belief in a miracle can come from either experiencing them or religious reasons and explanations.
Just like a religious believer who states “god loves us” but can’t explain the contradiction of evil in the world, believers qualify their statements by explaining god’s love is not like humans love he calls this “death by a thousand qualifications”. Therefore religious language is meaningless. However religion has responded to the falsification principle. R.B Braithwaite argued that the falsification principle explains religious language as cognitive when it if in fact non cognitive and therefore cannot be falsified, religious language is therefore still meaningful. Hare also responds to the falsification principle, showing that religious statements are meaningful even though they cannot be falsified because they have a significant impact for the people using the statement.
The falsification principle was originally penned by Karl Popper and was later padded out by Anthony Flew. It is the idea that you cannot convert a religious beliver to not believing with empirical evidence and knowledge because they have a blik, or an unshakeable belief. A blik can occur within a person for many reasons; upbringing or a religious experience are just a couple of reasons. Where the verification principle failed, Popper and Flew stepped in to create a new challenge. Popper wrote the foundation of the principle, but flew went a bit further with it.
Page 62 of the article expresses that "most theists do not come to have faith in God as a premise for religious conviction, however come to religion as a consequence of different reasons and variables." However, he feels that to the extent confirmations serve theists, the three most usually acknowledged are the teleological, the
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.
After reading this text, I found myself wondering exactly where I go when I am dealing with an individual who does not know for sure where they stand. Although this is the basis for Entwistle explaining how to implement this integration, the lack of said knowledge would make this attempt difficult at best. There seems to be areas within these two ideologies of science and providence that are blurred. This can be seen in the five models of integration that Entwistle speaks of. 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.
For this instance, this is not the case, society must constantly correct immoral actions performed by certain individuals. These individuals originate from diverse backgrounds and religions, and where as there is no specific religion that can be solely liable. Therefore, it becomes necessary to determine how violence and religion can simultaneously exist because the nature of these two elements seems to be contradictory. To begin with, there are two particular explanations in which introduce some historical examples of religion and violence intertwining, and illustrate how those two entities (religion and violence) can coexist. One explanation states that certain individuals feel that violence is relatively harmless, and therefore feel no remorse in performing violent acts.
He spoke about faith, where faith means believing in something unproven. If a person believes in something unsubstantiated, then it is useless to say to him: "Listen, wait, well, here are the facts". This person may say "I will not even argue, it is my faith, I will not renounce it, I will not give up". That is like the terrorists think that they are sinless, that they perform the will of the Lord, according to their point of view they are do good things. According to Richard Dawkins this is the evil of religion.