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question re skeptics

I'm a lapsed agnostic rather than an atheist myself, so, no to the original question.

You may want to look into Martin Luther. A religious man who believed in the existence God, and the soul, and was also an iconoclastic skeptic who encouraged people to think for themselves.

Robert
 
Fnord said:
No. I am a Theist.





Yes, although some Atheists may disagree.





No, as some psychologists/psychiatrists equate the "Soul" with the "Super-Ego," while others discount Freud's theories entirely. Also, some religions deny the existance of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God while maintaining the existance of a "Soul."
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Hi Fnord, I feel really dumb admitting this, but I had to look the word theist up. What does believing in a personal god mean? Is it like everybody gets to pick what God is like for them, but he/she is really just one thing but we choose how we see him? Or is that we all have our own God (like Pizza Hut pizzas!!!) I find this concept fascinating.
 
panchov said:
So now, you don't have to answer this on a personal level, otherwise we're likely to start a year long debate..but how do skeptics believe in love since it can't be proven? Or is it common among skeptics to not believe in love?

You guys are great, I'm trying to read all the answers! Thanks so much.
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Unlike the various gods that people believe in, there is an abundance of evidence for love. Not only do we feel this emotion directly, but we see all around us behavior that can only be explained by the existence of an emotion like love. There are also measurable changes in brain chemistry when one falls in love. There is definitely some kind of identifiable phenomenon going on here, and "love" seems to be a perfectly apt label for it. No reasonable person could possibly deny the existence of love given the mountains of evidence we have for it. There is no comparable situation with gods; there is no set of phenomena that can only be explained by positing the existence of a god or gods.

Notice that all human societies have pretty much the same basic idea of what love is, but they differ on fundamental aspects on what God or the gods are like if they exist at all. People in the U.S., Egypt, India and Japan all share the same concept of love, but ask them about God and they will give you four wildly different answers.
 
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panchov said:
Hi Fnord, I feel really dumb admitting this, but I had to look the word theist up. What does believing in a personal god mean? Is it like everybody gets to pick what God is like for them, but he/she is really just one thing but we choose how we see him? Or is that we all have our own God (like Pizza Hut pizzas!!!) I find this concept fascinating.
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Never feel dumb admitting that you did not know something. To me, being religious or believing in God means many different things. According to Einstein, just pondering the starry heavens above can make one religious for that matter. Freud was a devout atheist, but his friend Rolland Romaine wrote to him and told Freud that he misinterpreted the use of religion. In essence, just feeling a "cosmic consciousness" can alone make one religious. So, perhaps everyone does get to pick what God is like for them. Maybe some people see God or religion through science, art, music, etc. To each their own!
 
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panchov said:
Hi, what's a YEC? I"m confused because from the first part of the sentence it sounds like you're talking about people who aren't up on science, don't know about evolution, then the second part sounds like they would be scientific because they are skeptical of ancient astronauts?
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Sorry for the shortcut - Young Earth Creationists - Their overarching belief is that the earth was created by God on 23 October 4004 BCE (purists who follow Ussher) or in the past 10,000 years or less (those that understand that we actually have historical records older than 6,011 years.

For some reason, I read the top part as Who are not users of LSD... Had to give it a second glance to see it correctly. (My take was funnier though.)
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You are right. It was. :):):)

Norm
 
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If you define "soul" as "the actually-existing object that experiences sensations consciously", then, yes, even athiests believe in a soul, as a poetic way to describe a conscious mind. However, I submit such a thing arises out of very real-world physics, if perhaps poorly understood at the current time.

I fully expect at some point humans will be able to assemble an artificially designed conglomeration of atoms and energies, and it will give rise to a conscious entity.
 
By the way, if "soul", however the religious want to define it, does not include my conscious mind, then why should I care what happens to it after I die? I'll never wake up to experience Heaven or Hell, so screw it.
 
Pope130 said:
You may want to look into Martin Luther. A religious man who believed in the existence God, and the soul, and was also an iconoclastic skeptic who encouraged people to think for themselves.
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Really? I know he encouraged people to read the bible for themselves but that's not quite the same as thinking...

What did he encourage people to think about?(I'm honestly just asking as I don't know much about the era.)
 
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panchov said:
Hi there, I'm wondering about skeptics in general - are you all atheists? Is it possible to be a skeptic and beleive in a soul? Do you have to beleive in God to beleive in a soul (guess that one's not really pertinent to skepticism). I understand this is not an atheist organization and I'm not trying to start a debate about whether there is a God, just if there's some for the most part standard belief pattern on the part of skeptics.
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Hmm, I am a pagan nihilist buddhist and a sceptic. On monday through wednesday I belive in the plurality of godhead, thursday through saturday I don't beleive in anything and sundays I breath a lot.
 
panchov said:
So now, you don't have to answer this on a personal level, otherwise we're likely to start a year long debate..but how do skeptics believe in love since it can't be proven? Or is it common among skeptics to not believe in love?

You guys are great, I'm trying to read all the answers! Thanks so much.
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I've heard that argument repeated quite a bit, and it has never once made the least bit of sense. Of course love is provable (insomuch as anything is provable). People in love behave differently than those who aren't in ways that are incredibly predictable. Existing does not require that something be a physical object.
 
Do I think it's possible to be skeptical AND believe in a higher power? Heck, I'll go one step further and say that it's possible to be a member of a Particular Religious Tradition AND be a skeptic. After all, wasn't Doubting Thomas like, the ultimate skeptic? I think spirituality is a very personal thing, and everyone's got to decide for themselves.

However, I'm not letting Religions off the hook: when they try to do stupid crap like insinuate that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory, or that homosexuality is wrong because some shepherds decided so hundreds of years ago, then skeptics should rightfully call them on it, even religious skeptics.
 
Jeff Corey said:
Over 50 years old. Things have changed a lot since then.
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Sorry, and with no offense: your question was which psych.s had, with no time limit included (and only two necessary for an example).

I am, by the by, extremely literal when researching questions. I assume that the question as asked is complete.
 
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Jekyll said:
Really? I know he encouraged people to read the bible for themselves but that's not quite the same as thinking...

What did he encourage people to think about?(I'm honestly just asking as I don't know much about the era.)
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Mostly he encouraged people to think about religion. Not, perhaps, what we would consider a modern skeptic, but by the standards of the time he was quite the revolutionary. The revolutionary aspect I see is his translating the Bible into German, and encouraging people to read it for themselves. At that time most Christians had not read the Bible, they depended entirely on the priesthood. (Actually, I'm not sure how many Christians have read it today, but at least they have the opportunity.)

As I understand it he wanted people to study, discuss and make up their own minds, rather than believe what they were told.

This was a direct challenge to the power of the Catholic Church.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on him.

Robert Klaus
 
For me skepticism is about exploring all the evidence and requiring claims of truth to include all evidence, not just convenient evidence. There are lots of things I would love to be true. I even spent much of my youth searching for evidence to support my preferences. Even then I was impatient with people that believed my preferences were true because they wouldn't even look at all the evidence. This is why skeptics see believers as closed minded. Yet believers think the same about skeptics because we are impatient with belief in spite of all their cherry picked evidence. As a skeptic you can explore and/or entertain beliefs about anything you want. You can't run to the world and/or a message board and claim you found truth without real evidence that doesn't even attempt to answer contrary evidence. You can't call this search a science either as that presumes that what you are searching for really exist before you found any real evidence. The use of science to search for what probably does not exist does not make it a science until the existence has been established.

panchov said:
So now, you don't have to answer this on a personal level, otherwise we're likely to start a year long debate..but how do skeptics believe in love since it can't be proven? Or is it common among skeptics to not believe in love?

You guys are great, I'm trying to read all the answers! Thanks so much.
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The problem in talking about believing in love for me is like saying I don't believe in water. You hold up a glass of water and ask, "What is this?" I respond, "Hydrogen Dioxide." (which is true). Love is a definition, not a thing. No belief applies in any general sense. It falls under what sociologist call "The Definition of the Situation", however fun that definition may be.
 
fromdownunder said:
Everybody is sceptical about something:

I suspect pretty well every Christian is sceptical about Muhammed's writings on Allah. Everybody who is not a member of the LDS would probably be sceptical about Joseph Smith receiving gold tablets from Moroni, and the accounts in the Book of Mormon.

YECs, are sceptical (or should that be ignorant?) about evolution, and certainly have to, by definition, be sceptical of Von Daniken's claims of "ancient astronauts".

Most non Roman Catholics are sceptical of the idea of the Virgin Mary popping up in Grottos, statues, trees, clouds......

I suppose this list could go on forever, since, there must be around 6 billion people who are sceptical of something.

Norm
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I think this is a very important point. Some people who believe in weird things don't like the idea of skepticism when it comes to having their cherished held beliefs questioned. But that's something worth pointing out--why be skeptical about stuff that you already don't like, but drop critical thinking when it comes to something you want to believe in? Why be skeptical of pharmaceutical companies, but not of homeopathic remedy companies? Why be skeptical about some religions, but not your religion? Why be skeptical about the other political party, but not your own?

Being skeptical to me means applying critical thinking across the board.
 
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