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Wes_W comments on Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points - Less Wrong
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Can anyone point out the weakest points in christianity? You need to know enough about it and you need to give it considerable thought.
(I am christian. As long as I can remember I have adopted a mindset of skeptical thinking and self doubt, but since I in real life don´t know many people who are smarter than me and knows enough to say anything about christianity, I ask you. My mom is agnostic and pretty clever, but she can come up with better arguments for a God than I can. A fair warning, I doubt that many here knows enough about christianity to actually come up with something, but I would be positively surprised if someone did. I have some weak points of my own, but it would be very useful to see if I have missed something instead of just sticking with that.)
I don't know if this will feel relevant to you, but a big one for me in retrospect is that the concept of "faith" is really suspicious. When someone says "no, trust me unconditionally on this, I know you have doubts but just ignore them even though I will never address them in any concrete way," that person is lying to you.
I always thought of God as truth-loving. If faith is a virtue, then God's own commands undermine and obscure the truth, while making all sorts of lies equally defensible. The whole structure of the need for faith is just really weird if Christianity is true - but perfectly logical if Christianity is false.
A good point. I considered this when I was younger and still hadn´t fully turned my head towards christianity. (I still have a long way to go but I now consider myself christian.)
As I see it, we all have our basic premises. Just how much we depend on them differs. We all make fundamental choices. (In case you have read hpmor; Like Harry did when the sorting hat warned him about how unlogic it was for him to hope and risk that he would not turn into a dark wizard if he was sorted to any house but hufflepuff. He knew he was going to choose rawenclaw, but he couldn´t put words on WHY, and yes, that may be seen as suspicious.)
I think it is all about WHAT you put your faith in. Yes, you are allowed to doubt anything. And you should not blindly believe in something until you are ready to actually put your faith in it. It is a risk you take. Willingly. Kierkegaard once said something along the lines: "To have faith is to throw yourself out over a seventy thousand fathoms deep and hope that someone catches you." I don´t respect stupidity, as in suiciding by jumping off a cliff. But I do respect Kierkegaard. When you have found something you are willing to put your faith in, you need that bravery.
The need of faith (in christianity) may seem weird, if you do not know what you are supposed to have faith in. It is an important part of christianity to realize this. Many fail to draw any useful conslusion from the fact that Jesus says that we will be saved if we believe. And I do consider the conclusion that there is no god to be a useful conclusion if that is the best answer that mind can produce. Everyones way is their own making and should be respected. Those who "believe" in something just for the sake of it are not doing it right as far as I can see.