Christianity and AS

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In the case of prayer or intercession, it's rather God who's the one with the power (from the believer's point of view, that is).

But anyway, I'm not sure you're right. Couldn't equal persons help each other?

I am Jewish, and am somewhat interested in the Jewish bible. However, I do not try to force my views of religion onto others, Jewish or non-Jewish. If someone is Jewish but does not believe in religion, I may not agree with them but that is their choice. The only time I take action because of someone's religion is when they commit hate because of it, as we are seeing in the Middle East. I recognize that you can't mind control people of certain religions (like Sunnis and Shiites) to like eachother, but you can get them to stop blowing eachother up.

It really doesn't matter is you're AS or NT, if you're trying to convert a non-believer, especially someone like me, it's going to go in one ear and out the other no matter what you have to say. If you come out with a remark like I'm going to burn in hell, chances are you'll end up getting a sarcastic comeback like "I CAN'T WAIT!"

That's probably why you have a hard time making friends with agnostics, they're wanting to stay that way.

They exist, yes, in your mind. You don't believe that your dreams are actual events, do you? If you do, you have a problem. And the exact same point can be made about God. He's in your mind. Yeah. That's kind of the whole thing about being imaginary. And as long as you don't try to convince other people that your dreams are true, everything's just fine.

These are emotions, your not going to see them, they're a human reaction to an event.



Dreams are in your imagination, the most you can sanely do is believe it was in your mind.


I've never said it's shamefull to believe something but I think it should be kept within your religious circles. Why waste your time trying to convert non-believers? Nobody seems too concerned with members of other religions and if you truely believe that your path is the only way to avoid damnation then surely they're in danger too?

Who said anything about converting anyone?

If this is why you all are going full force at me, then you can just trash that thought. I never try to convert anyone. Notice that I said, this is what I believe. Did I say even once that "oh and you should believe what I believe too?"

In fact, someone tried to convert me the other day . . . which I found mildly humorous, to tell the truth. I once had a friend who described herself as a Wiccan Baptist. We had good conversations as a result.

Not arguments.

Conversations.

You joined in the pro-conversion brigade. It was assumed.
Believe as you like, you have every right to think what you want!

Just for the record, and i know the thread has gone other way

Yes, you didnt say or imply that religious people are bad people. But you did imply theyre dumb people (you could have said: "Personally I dont believe in the word of god", you rather chose say: "its complete and utter nonsense"). Thats a judgement of valor, its implied there "if you believe this, then you are a fool". You can always say: "its not judgement, its an opinion and im are free to express it". But under that 'shield of opinion' you could say practically anything and say you are not judging. I can say for example: "people with aspergers are bad people, but im not judging, its an opinion".

Why would I bother pointing this out further? not for attacking or proving you wrong, but for the sake of respect. When theres no respect for other people in the room, the truth goes out the window really fast.

It seems to me that this topic has drifted way off the original question which had to do with the difficulties of being Christian and ASD. Without doing a poll, I would suspect that yes, those of us who have ASD probably have greater difficulties dealing with faith/spiritual issues than our NT counterparts. But that is just my gut feeling.

Now I am going to play a little devil's advocate here (a role I love to play!) so those of you who are not believers please bear with me. If I recall correctly, the person who first raised this issue mentioned difficulties relating to nonbelieving friends and also obsessing about religion. I'll tackle the last one first. Yes, it is possible and very, very easy to become obsessed with religion. In fact, churches positively encourage it! It's sort of being like an alcoholic in a bar, the bartender is not going to tell you to go to AA or any other self-help group. Just remember, and this has to do with the first issue, that the things that will win you praise in Sunday School are not going to win you praise out there in the workplace. Quite the contrary. Yes, the Bible says you should put the things of God before the things of man, but if you end up losing a job because you won't ease up on the witnessing, and you have financial issues as a result, you will find out real quick who your real friends are--and they might not be the ones in the pews next to you. You, and you alone, have to look out for your own best interests and weigh the consequences of acting upon whatever it is you are being taught. No one else will pick up the pieces if it all goes south. In my day I have heard a lot of irresponsible claptrap spoken from the pulpit by persons who were safely insulated from the consequences of what they were urging their flocks to do.

Ayn Rand said in The Fountainhead that the mark of a false prophet is whether he or she uses the word sacrifice. If someone is telling you to sacrifice, they are seeking to become your master and you their slave. They don't really care about you. And this leads me to the topic of witnessing. No, people don't like it and they aren't shy about saying so. Because most witnessing involves manipulation. You aren't interested in the person as a person, you are interested in a person as a goal, an object. You want something from them they aren't really interested in doing or becoming in the first place, or they'd be coming to you and asking about it. The fact they aren't says there's a problem here.

Now here's the devil's advocate part: obviously you believe that you do have something worthwhile to offer the rest of the world. Let's say for the sake of argument that you are right, that the rest of humankind is in peril if they don't accept your message. Well, you have an uphill battle here. First of all, you cannot produce proof that this is so. That's a very big drawback, probably the biggest. So you have a marketing issue. You have to convince someone like me that this is something I should want. But maybe I don't want it, I'm happy the way I am. I don't see a need for it. Furthermore--and this is very important--you are also selling a lifestyle along with a set of beliefs; and if people don't find that lifestyle attractive, they aren't going to listen. I know I have said this before, but it has been my experience that the Christians who are the most aggressive evangelizers are the ones who really don't have much to offer except religious obsession. Does your whole life revolve around church and Bible to the exclusion of everything else? There are people who may want that. But not very many.

If I remember the Gospels correctly, Jesus didn't engage in arm-twisting to make disciples. If people wanted to walk away, he let them. But, there is something else about him that a lot of Christians forget. "This man is a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of sinners. Look at who he hangs around with, prostitutes and taxgatherers, all kinds of riffraff," scoffed the Pharisees. That tells me that Jesus didn't hang around synagogue all day reading Torah, he was out partying and enjoying life. And people flocked to him. They wanted to hear what he said. I get the impresssion people liked to be around him, even if they didn't always agree with him or understand him; there was always something new, something unexpected about him. You never knew what this Jesus dude was up to. (Myself I think he was Aspy, but that is another topic entirely.) If you are going to witness, if you are going to share your faith, then you must project that kind of enthusiasm that people will want to know what's up.

^ Woot.

Im reading The Fountainhead right now. I was just reading it before I looked at this thread. I like Sartre much more.

Well I’m of the thought that Science and religion are two sides of the same coin so to speak, The only time I’m ever judgmental is when someone else feels the need to belittle me on any points than may be connected to my religion. Otherwise I'm actually pretty subtle about it I’m in no way hiding my faith but I see it as something of a highly personal if not sacred thing for every individual of any faith in a different way per person. As a result I’m personally not a fan of certain organized religions.

Hail and Well Met, Closet Aspy!

* bows good greetings *

You remind me of two things in passing:

1) On sacrifice ... Frodo Baggins once said, “It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them." -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

2) On the personality of Jesus ... when I used to frequent the Myers-Briggs forums to discuss personality types, I heard it said that Jesus had all the strengths of every personality type ... and the weaknesses of none.

I know that feeling.... But I had fundamentalist Christian parents--brainwashing at it's finest. I don't see why some people (and yes mainly evangelical Christians) can't accept that the other person doesn't have to be wrong for them to be right, if you know what I mean. In other words: coexsist. And it is perfectly alright to choose to believe nothing--if that is possible.

Of course, it is. If all you do is allow your beliefs to inform your way of getting through life in the world, I think it's fine that you just believe as you want to. If you understand that your state of mind about the world doesn't elevate to the level of fact, it's probably not a problem for anyone. The problems seriously start when people elevate their internal states of mind about things without any affirming evidence that can be shared with others and examined into facts about the world and act as though they were absolutely true. Islamics believing in umpteem virgins at their beck and call if they blow themselves up; Christians shooting abortion doctors because they believe that that a fetus has a soul; no willingness to seriously engage in political compromise because they know that their internal beliefs trump a shared reality. That's when we all have a problem with beliefs without evidence. There is nothing to talk about, no way to negotiate peace, no evidence that can be presented that might be accepted as making a reasoned case one way or another.

We all have to live in the same universe together. We need to have something about which we can all share in terms of a common ground for discussion. And what that is, is facts and testable evidence and logic and reasoning about them. That's something we all share. We may disagree about their importance or how they should be taken on the whole. But at least we can each look at this shared reality and listen to reasoned discussions about them to see how we are swayed. With beliefs that have NO EVIDENCE of any kind at all arriving in some discussion, some political negotiation, some debate about a pending local law, etc... then the discussion is aborted, cut short, stopped in its tracks. There is nothing anyone else can say, bring forth, or try and explain that will have any material impact at all. Instead, it's "my way or the highway" from the point of view of someone elevating their internal beliefs, their internal states of mind, to the point of trumping over all evidence that might be adduced and presented and examined. The whole show is over, right then and there.

It is enough, so long as you understand the limitations of internal states of mind lacking evidence in our shared reality. If you don't understand those limitations, we all may have a problem. But I think it is fine to allow your beliefs to motivate and inspire yourself in life and to find some way through it. No problem there, so far as I can see.


But that doesn't make your case. Don't you see why? I could quote you there, word for word, while trying to say that's why I believe in the great purple poka-dotted planet eater as the creator of the universe. One simply has nothing whatever to do with the other.

More than that, the ideas of hope and joy and love are ALSO internal states of mind. We communicate with each other and give words to these ideas, but honestly we have no way of actually comparing my feeling of love of my daughter, for example, with someone else's. In fact, they are likely somewhat different. We look, sometimes, at the actions that are motivated by what people claim to be their internal emotions of this kind and can, to a degree, indirectly interpret (induce) some kind of idea about whether or not we agree that their actions are consistent with what we believe those claimed emotions mean for others we've heard about and observed.

But in any case, if your claim is that others do have internal states of mind called "hope," "joy," and "love," and that you have an internal state of mind that is "belief in god," also, then I will grant you that much. If you instead want to suggest that since we all have internal states of mind about the world, that this allows us to also presume they are also as much about reality around us as the law of gravity is, for example, then you have gone way too far.

Your internal state of mind is one thing. Reality is quite another. Do not conflate one with the other. Beliefs assumed true ABOUT reality without evidence IN reality shouldn't be taken as more than (or even similar to) comprehensive and studied conclusions about reality on the basis of the weight of affirming and disconfirming evidence about them. They are quite different things.


Well, I think this is good to hear. So long as you recognize that we all need to get along and that the only thing we can fully share amongst each other is a reality that can be tested and weighed, and you are willing to not let beliefs you have about the world which have no shared reality to them trump well-evidenced fact and prevent you from being able to weigh reality well, then the rest of us can probably rest easier about it.

The fact that people dream has been studied and the evidence of this can be shared amongst us. But if you start imagining that your dreams trump reality, you can rest assured that you are in a world of hurt and need some serious help.

The fact of dreaming does not make the dreams fact.

There is no shame in believing things. But here again your very writing this way uncovers your conflation of ideas. The word "believe" is used in so many ways in our communication amongst each other. But you need to separate in your mind the differences between different uses of the word. Your thinking will be far too mushy to be useful, if you cannot isolate semantics from syntax.

I might "believe" in the law of gravity. But in this case, I mean to say that I have studied the shared concept, tested the ideas for myself here and there, made measurements and tested them against good theory on the subject, examined the evidence of others, done as comprehensive of a job as time and interests have allowed me, and come to a conclusion about the matter on the overwhelming weights and found that the laws are well supported. I say "believe" because that is quicker to say and saves a lot of time. But I mean the above (and much more.)

On the other hand, I might say I "believe" in the Easter Bunny. But in this case, not because there is shared reality about the subject, with good theory as well as experimental evidence, and so on. But instead simply because I choose to believe without evidence, at all.

The two uses of "believe" are nothing alike, at all. Keep them separated.

We all need to share this world together and if you and too many other "believers" cannot separate reality from beliefs without fact IN reality, things are just not going to improve and will probably get much worse.

Jon

Belief versus reality . . .

If I understand the New Testament correctly, whether or not you believe influences the outcome of events, i.e., if you have faith the grain of a mustard seed you can say to this mountain, be lifted up and moved. But only if you have no doubts. The teeniest, tiniest doubt is enough to invalidate the desired result. That is the world of religion. That is also the world of Harry Potter and may explain the hostility certain Christian groups express towards the Harry Potter books and movies, because it competes with their worldview.

However, a different set of rules applies when you are talking about reality. For example, if I am seated in a plane, it does not matter one bit whether I believe it can fly or not (although obviously if I really really doubted that I wouldn't be sitting there!). Once it is moving at a certain speed the laws of physics takes over and it is going to get off the ground no matter how many doubts I have. In fact, at that point, it HAS to get off the ground, it has no "choice" in the matter. (I have a friend who let me experience what it is like to be at the controls of a plane at takeoff and believe me it is absolutely incredible to feel the irresistable skyward pull that happens at that magic moment--and it is magic, no question about it.)

Now, which has more power . . . thinking that can be invalidated by doubt? Or thinking based on a knowledge of the natural laws around us?

Not much of a question. Asking whether superstitious fantasy has more power than reality isn't meaningful, so far as I can tell.

Jon