Korean Job Discussion Forums

[tomato]

[joyfulgirl]

[Satori]

[itaewonguy]

bump! why not re read through this from 2 years ago also..

[Privateer]

Atheist because it's too much trouble to be agnostic on *every* religious belief or supernatural entity that mankind has believed in over the centuries and I want to be consistent. Either sit on the fence for all of them or disbelieve in all of them, that's what I say.

[tfunk]

A belief is a conclusion that can logically result from an empirically measured set of conditions.

'I will be alive tomorrow' is a belief.

It is a fact of life that everything cannot be known in advance. A person has to make assumptions about the future in order to function coherently. I think there is a difference in the degree of beliefs and that is important. While the religious person might argue that leaving an umbrella at home is based on the belief that it won't rain, it is a belief based on a subset of empirically observed, and in this instance limited, possibilities.

How can you know that there isn't a dinosaur on your roof? Isn't that a belief? Yes, I believe that there aren't any dinosaurs on my roof because I have observed roofs before, I have never seen a dinosaur before but it is within the realm of possibility (my teachers could have been lying about the existence of dinosaurs).

A lot of people feel personally motivated to believe in something concerning death etc..the religious package. These beliefs are often emotionally orientated by fear, want, greed and desire about existence, the unknown, their ego etc. One of the reasons I feel uneasy discussing issues with Christians is because at the root of any discussion they accept axioms that I do not accept. Christians take as their axioms experiences that are emotionally based and universal and then make the leap to apply them to specific instances (which is essentially what all the other religions do too). So, they go from the belief that 'there must be a God' to the belief 'God wrote the Bible' and once they are on that bandwagon they can jump freely from belief to belief according to the fashion of their church/personality.

Personally, I am skeptical of beliefs that aren't technical in nature. I believe(!) that language and thought are useful tools for creating abstract structures, but they need to constantly be calibrated against reality. Dogmatic belief in political, religious, ideological thought structures have increased the suffering of millions of individuals.

[tfunk]

'The Tao that can be Tao'd is not the Tao'. Does that make me agnostic?