Item — HN Reader

Disclaimer: Believer here, so I'm not exactly your target audience with this question, but hopefully I can give a useful response.

Organized religion helps strengthen faith and create a sense of belonging, but I think faith should first stem from a personal experince. For me, the religious belief shapes my worldview and is about two things: 1. A feeling of complete reliance on God, as my creator, to help and guide me throughout life, which feels.. liberating. 2. It gives a purpose to life, so I believe in the after-life and that we were not created and do not die in vain.

I consider myself a rational person, and I do not think that faith is irrational. Besides historical and natural evidence, If you dig into the notion of rationality itself, you'll find that our actions and beliefs are based on a set of axioms/assumptions anyway, and that those assumptions themselves are not subject to rationality. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said: "At the foundation of well-founded belief lies a belief that is not founded".

Good luck on your journey!

1 comments

It is not so much as faith being irrational, I guess..but the actions of some people who subscribe to that faith that makes me want to belong to the club.

I don’t say this lightly as I realize it sounds like a very superficial excuse. But it’s not. There is a constant parallel process of mirroring when we subscribe to any group philosophy.

If faith is a powerful shaper of the spirit /personality/values, every member is a review. Almost all religions get a mean 2.5 stars out of 5.

So every time faith has to be internal and personal to be effective. If faith is internal and personal, then why do we have organized religion? Why do we talk about it? Why do we write about it and want to spread it? Why do we build monuments and churches and temples and art and wage wars? It is only those that have done all of the above that has survived over the years.

Twenty years ago, I used to go about saying that with AI, the world won’t need religion anymore. Well...now the Pope is talking about Robots and AI from the Vatican. 300 years from now, how will we reconcile an afterlife or day of judgement or karma when life extension could practically make us immortal. I suspect religious faith will still be around but in what form?