Gamerace said:
Saying you don't choose what to believe is like saying you don't choose to eat - your stomach dictates that.
Which is somewhat true, until you decide to go on a hunger strike for the greater good.
Faith is by definition believing in the unseen. You have to choose to go against your senses. Why would you do that? Because so much of what is, is beyond the veil of our limited ability to perceive and understand. If you can only believe what you can see and understand you are like an ant trying to understand New York. While that ant might concieve people are going to work like it is, not all the ants in all of history will ever concieve of all the social, political, economic realities of New York. They cannot. Nor can we as a species ever fully comprehend the entirety of what God is. We simply cannot. But we can acknowledge our own limitations, that there's more too life than what science can explain and that maybe there is some guiding hand behind it all.
As to having to believe to goto heaven, thats akin to me telling you I'm going to take you to planet Xevious which is a perfect paradise. You can say I'm nuts and choose not to believe it because you can't see it and science doesn't support it (yet) but when I stuff you in the spaceship and take you there (aka death) you are forced to either A) continue to deny (believing there's nothing out there but the vacuum of space) and exist only in the spaceship or B) acknowledge you were wrong the entire time. Assuming I want you to enjoy paradise, of course I'm going to ask you to believe, even though you can't see it.
|
Except if you go for a hunger strike you know for sure that you do it for greater good no matter the result, while ignoring your guts indicates that you are uncertain about the outcome.
If we are to ignore our senses and believe in God, that's not any different from ants drawing conclusions from what they see in New York: It is close to (if not absolutely) impossible to guess right, so why take a guess when the guess will probably end up making us drawing false conclusions? We can acknowledge our limitations (like when science says that we simply don't know how the Big Bang came to be), but taking a guess and drawing conclusions from it is a foolish move.
As for your last paragraph, I really have no idea where you are going with it. If a guy I don't know says that there is a pie located somewhere on Neptune there obviously is no reason for me to believe him. And he would be foolish to demand that I do believe him for me to be able to eat it once he takes me there and shows it to me.
