Hey, I finally get better than a C from a philosophy prof and he gives it to someone else -

Actually I like Tillich a lot and that is probably where I stole that idea.

If there is no hell at all, then of course the religious exclusivists are wrong. So I don't need that as an assumption.

I have written and deleted five or six versions of a reply to this thread. I have parsed K3nt's last post line by line, agreed, disagreed, and countered. Then deleted. I think that I can say what I want to say in a much more simple way.

Love is a wonderful emotion. However, it is tied to other emotions, some of them down right ugly. Jealousy. Hate. Vengance. Avarice. Those emotions come from some mistaken belief that love must be fed, must be appeased. For those that see love as an emotion that consumes, I feel tremendous sorrow.

Prayer is a wonderful tool, tied to a love of God and an desire to know God and grow stronger in faith.

Faith is an emotion, not unlike love. When love is presented with competition, it can experience the negative emotions - jealousy, hate, vengance. The same holds true with faith. Religious Exclusivism is an abberation, a negative outgrowth of jealousy and hate.

Prayer is not study. Faith is not a science. Prayer is a tool used to channel the love of God. People use prayer to commune with the Divine. Epistomology has its place in the world as the study of the nature, origin, and scope of knowedge, a study that can properly include the study of faith as an origin of beliefs and knowedge, although all too frequently in history corrupt people in positions of power in organized theocracies have hindered the pursuit of knowledge.

Studying emotions and looking for evidence of something that can be quantified is an exercise in futility (take love, how do you quantify love? What is the unit of measure?). Academic types frequently go wrong here by attempting to do just that when it comes to faith in God, and many so-called "free thinkers" use it to justify being atheist. Faith is part of the human condition. Being an atheist is not the absence of faith, rather it is faith in the sciences of man, to the complete exclusion of the divine or supernatural. That is fine, but it is still faith.

You cannot quantify the value of prayer, because it is tied inextricably with the emotion of faith, an is different for different people. There certainly are people that have faith that prayer is epistemically productive. Some of them are the very people that you are attempting to convince that their jealous hating ways are wrong. Others argue that prayer is not epistemically productive. Does prayer lead to knowledge? Yes, it leads to answers sought regarding a person's faith, a very personal thing. Prayer is not going to tell you how much additional flour you need to add to your cake mix if you are baking in Denver.

My point in the prior posts in this thread is simply that if part of your proof that Religious Exclusivists are wrong assumes that prayer is not epistemicaly productive, then you do not have a universally accepted assumption.

My response that the way to know whether the exclusive religion that the exclusivist picked is the correct one is for that exclusivist to pray was actually flip. I do think, however, that as person that has strong faith, a religious exclusivist has the ability to see the errors of their exclusivist beliefs and that realization, which I can compare to new found wisdom (knowledge?), if it comes at all will most likely come through prayer.

TUP IS BACK

TUP = The unknown player = my hero.

emmasdad, search for all posts by tup....hes been gone for a while but they are worth reading.

But, where is his "unknown" pic/icon?

T-Rod reminded me that I had written this thing. And then today a blogger I read a lot linked to this youtube.

No surprise: South Park manages to say in 60 very funny seconds what my rather boring essay took forever to say:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur_xV9ztFvg