College students are an interesting demographic. On the one hand, OMG they’re so young, barely out of the nest. They have had very little time to think much about what they believe, so you get a lot of students who are still cruising on received knowledge for significant parts of their personal views. On the other hand, they are in an environment that is designed to teach them to think, to reason, and to question received wisdom, to come up with their own beliefs and their own justifications for those beliefs. Sometimes the educating process works and you get a transformation sometime during their college careers from accepting authority to questioning authority, accompanied by a serious transformation of political, social, cultural, and religious views. Other times the process never quite takes and you get college graduates that are just as wedded to received wisdom as they were when they were in grade school. Or it only works halfway and you get people who manage to learn to be very analytical in some narrow areas of knowledge, but who continue to cling to received wisdom for everything else in their lives.
I really want to know what results you would get if you administered this test to, say, divinity students. Or to know how people who have assembled their own personal flavour of spirtuality would compare to people who belong to a long-established sect. Those results would probably look a lot different.
So are you the reason I have to pay $80/mo to see a pain doc and get 30 days worth of Tramadol, pay out of pocket to take a piss test several times a year, have to wait a week to pick my meds, and can’t just order 3mo worth at a time online anymore?
Being religious but not believing in the supernatural is like believing in bread but not carbs. One constitutes the other.
Oh. I guess there is a god.
This was kind of my point. I’m not religious. I hate math. So yes when it comes to a math problem I look for the simplest answer or say fuck it I don’t know because. I HATE MATH.
Give me a riddle or logic puzzle hell I love sodoku. Just don’t put anything that even smells like a calculation in front of me because my “zero fucks given” feelings kick in hard.
the one that makes your dick hard since that is all people care about.
Some religions include a belief in the so-called supernatural, others don’t.
Some (like for example Unitarian Universalism) allow practicioners their own opinions rather than prescribing enforceable dogma.
Which is one reason people like me are welcome in UU circles. As a pantheist and monist, the concept of the “supernatural” makes sense to me only as a category of fiction. Nature is regardless of what you think it should be; if something is real, it can’t be supernatural.
What if you don’t know if you believe in God or not?
What is it about these three questions that supposedly indicate a person’s faith? They seem like standard math problems to me.
There’s nothing intrinsic about the questions. But they do require a bit of thought, and questioning of your own assumptions - it’s easy to answer all three quickly … and wrongly.
I expect that the indication of faith is in a person’s confident reliance on quick, easy, and wrong solutions, rather than taking the time to check and properly solve each.
I also suspect that the BB post is a little overstated. The three questions don’t predict, with 100% reliability, whether you believe. But rather the more questions you answer correctly, the less likely it is you believe in God, god, or teapots.
Then you are self-agnostic.
Agnostic dyslexic insomniacs lie awake all night wondering if there really is a dog.
All of them.
Surely that means I’m not sure I exist.
I got one wrong, so I must be agnostic.
Sounds to me a bit like you’re overcomplicating basic observation with burdens of divinity.
Well, the rest of us aren’t sure if you exist, so … ?
Fair enough. Other explanation is that I’m god.
Yep, you can make a pretty damn solid case that ‘supernatural’ is an oxymoron.
