Dear Banjo,

I don't see faith as opposed to bigotry. I see bigotry as a kind of faith. I think it is a false dichotomy.

I think the yin-yang is a good way of looking at things. It applies in painting also. If we paint a white house by the sea we put some blue on the house to reflect the sea and some white in the sea to reflect the house.

I'm just a babe in your bathwater, but the water is getting muddier. Banjo, what day is mudder's day?

You wrote: "Faith is a virtue which creates a favourable environment for fruitful human relations. Lack of faith, mistrust, is a vice which renders fruitful human relations impossible."

I disagree. To deal with other human beings realistically we must mix faith and mistrust. I regard a person who has faith in either Abbott or Rudd as a fool. Complete faith is gullibility. Complete mistrust is negativity. We must employ them in the proper proportions. That would be a reasonable application of the yin-yang.

You wrote: "As demonstrated by the periodic table, the number of natural elements is limited. The number of thought patterns and sentiments are too. Future research on artificial intelligence will probably codify this as well, one day."

Here you played fast and loose with an analogy. The periodic table does not demonstrate the number of natural elements is limited at all. It merely gives an order to the elements we know of. New elements have been created since the periodic table was first developed. For all we know the number of new elements that can be created is infinite. Of course natural has more than one meaning. It can mean what is found in nature or it can mean that which is not supernatural. I was using the latter meaning.

Whatever the periodic table demonstrates there is no reason you have given to show that an analogy between the number of elements and the number of thought patterns is in any way a valid analogy. Your usual rigour is absent.

Dear david f,

>>One can also say belief is accepting that for which there is no evidence. <<

As I said, I agree in principle but would like to distinguish between those beliefs that are, and those that are not, about “provable” statements (i.e. for which an evidence can be imagined), as I tried to argue in my previous post.

You are right that those of a religious kind - e.g. belief in the existence of God - are (mostly) non-provable, whereas e.g. belief in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life is of the provable kind, i.e. one can somehow imagine what would constitute an evidence although we do not have one. On the other hand, I cannot even imagine an evidence for the existence of God acceptable to everybody, although some atheists ask theists to come up with it without being able to say what would actually constitute such an evidence convincing to all (or most) atheists.

>>We cannot know what Abraham expected, but the story implies that he was willing to carry out what he thought was the wishes of the Lord.<<

Another, just randomly chosen, interpretation: “God had earlier promised Abraham that he would make a great nation of him through Isaac, which forced Abraham to either trust God with what mattered most to him or to distrust God.” (http://christianity.about.com/od/Old-Testament/a/JZ-Sacrifice-Of-Isaac.htm).

As said, I am no biblical scholar to adjudicate between different interpretations of the story, especially whether it is about absolute obedience or absolute trust. I only know that for me one interpretation is more meaningful than another. You and OUG apparently prefer a different one.

>>We cannot reasonably say that the story has a point other than the point its readers give to it.<<

Exactly. And different readers (private or “institutional”) give different points to it. (ctd)

(ctd)
>>There is some evidence that the virgin birth … narrative has been conflated with the narratives of the pagan religions extant at the time of the invention of Christianity <<

This might be one aspect of the mystery. As far as I know, at those times the woman (its womb) was seen as just the passive vessel into which the man implanted his seed. Hence the human mother (rather than father) to represent the passive contribution to the Incarnation. (Of course, another, rather obvious reason is that a person's mother is more "visible" than the father.)

Well, here we are in a for me even more unthreaded (exegetic) territory. Namely, how to properly (whatever that means) interpret the fact that the New Testament, and consequently the Church, ignores the question of Jesus’ biological father and, if you insist, claims he did not have one.

The fact, that these things Christianity shares with more "primitive" religions worries me about as much as the fact that I share 95% of my DNA with a chimpanzee. Evolution, darwinian, cosmic and in general, offers a new perspective of looking at many things.

Dear Banjo,

>>“just as light produces shadow, the god concept inevitably comes with its corollary as two sides of the same coin. Impossible to have one without the other.”<<

Sorry I somehow overlooked this. What is the “corollary of the god concept”?

>> I saw faith from the same perspective. The yang is pure faith. The yin is pure bigotry. Same coin. Two sides.<<

The “Two sides of a coin” metaphor implies that the two are interchangeable, which is not what one has in mind if one refers to the Yin-Yang principle. Yin in Chinese philosophy is often referred to as the opposite of Yang, and vice-versa.

This could be misleading, since in our (English) use, “opposite” can have two different meaning:

1. having a position on the other or further side of something
2. diametrically different, of a contrary kind.

For instance, the female complements the male whereas absence of something is “diametrically different from the presence of that thing. The traditional chinese thinking, as far as I can follow it, did not have this distinction, hence the mixture of kinds of pairs that also you list.

For us, I think, a better understanding of the Yin-Yang relation is to see it as COMPLEMENTING, rather than opposing, each other. Well, in that case, I certainly do not see (religious) faith as complementing bigotry

>>In a similar vein … faith is like sand in an oyster: a little produces a pearl, too much kills the animal.<<

I think this is much better, bigotry as being an exaggeration of faith, although I would prefer “degeneration” (on the psychological level ).

A general remark: If one makes statements about, say, “space” one must make it clear whether one speaks of the abstract concept dealt with in physics, the even more abstract concept used in mathematics (like Hilbert spaces) or that what you are looking for if you want to park your car in a car park. Otherwise all sorts of confusion can arise.

I think something similar applies to a careless use of abstract terms like faith, belief, proof, evidence etc.

Dear George,

The virgin birth does not seem a mystery to me. It is legend based on a lack of knowledge of biological processes at the time the legend arose. Religion incorporated the legend and preserved it.

One can find security and community in the bosom of any religious group. To find security and community one must sometimes assent to dogma that you may know is nonsense or may bring yourself to accept.

However, to me it is no more reasonable than the Japanese account of the birth of the sun goddess.

Pages 21 to 33 of "Sources of Japanese Tradition" give an account of some of those legends.

A History of Embryology by Joseph Needham gives an account of various beliefs that people have had regarding reproduction in the past.

Dear david f,

>>The virgin birth does not seem a mystery to me. It is legend based on a lack of knowledge of biological processes at the time the legend arose. Religion incorporated the legend and preserved it.<<

As I said, this is not my cup of cake. I called it a mystery, or enigma if you like, for those who have to believe it in this or that form as a basic tenet of their Christian faith. As you know there are enigmas also in Quantum physics that those who understand physics have to live with. Maybe the will be satisfactorily resoloved, maybe not,

Technically, we are not far from doing all sorts of things unheard of a couple of decades ago (human cloning, human-animal chimeras) so perhaps one could think of providing a male DNA to Mary’s ovum in a way that we and our ancestors can understand only as “supernatural” intervention. Of course, this is all pure speculation.

When contemplating these things I am always reminded of Frank Little, the former Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne (1925-2008) who, when asked a difficult questions to which he could not give a straight answer, used to say? “If you cannot accept (or understand, I don’t remember) any other answer only yes or no, then the answer must be YES”. This is what i would have to offer as my answer to the question whether Mary was a Virgin.

>>However, to me it is no more reasonable than the Japanese account of the birth of the sun goddess.<<

And to me an Arabic text is no more comprehensible than a Chinese. An Arab would not say that. It is possible that the one text is very deep, the other just silly but I would not know except if somebody translated them to me, somebody I can trust will be as faithful to the original text as possible. Even so, this is not 100% possible so I own e.g. three English and one German translations of Tao Te Ching.