by gubberningbody 9 Replies latest jw friends
Can it truly be said that it's possible to understand something you can't explain?
If faith is belief in some thing or some oneother than onesself...
Then what does this say about fidelity or infidelity, faith in or apostasy from any thing or any one?
Yes, probably a flawed anologies but I'll try a few: I believe in gravity and nobody really understands it. Same with quantum mechanics. I don't understand Muslims, Democrats or hip hop and Husky fans but there seem to be plenty of them.
Absolutely!!..The WBT$ has made a Cult Religion,baised on that Premise...................OUTLAW
I think most apply the term to the apparent motion of objects which are dropped and call that "gravity". They can explain what they can see.
"Look here son, now this is "gravity"...Pick that rock up and then let it go....See?...That's what we call "gravity".
So this person "believes" and can "explain" what he sees to his son and his belief is restricted to those things. He cannot reach to "believe" what he cannot understand and explain.
It's like imagining visualizing the ability to "see" in 360 degrees. You simply cannot do it. If you cannot do (explain/understand) you cannot "believe".
I "believe" people imagine they are "believing" when they're really just playing around with verbal algebraics substituting "believe" for any number of things which they can explain and understand. It's a shell game people play with themselves.
Understand- know and comprehend the nature or meaning of; realize or grasp (something). Belief- faith or confidence; opinion; priciple accepted as true, often without proof. Faith- strong belief, esp without proof; religion; complete confidence or trust; allegiance to a person or cause. (From the 'Collins English Dictonary').
The bible god contradicts himself more times than I care to state right now, so, how do I in turn 'believe and know it to be true', even if I can not understand the 'why/how' this is so and there is no edvidence outside of the source to prove the statments it/he has made to be correct? Am I just expected to trust this source of knowledge/god/book, because it tells me too and will I we be punished if I question it?
Admitidly, I do not have all the answers, but my logic and reasoning demands that I have proof/evidence in order to first understand/know what it is that I am placing my trust/faith in.
If you are told that you must believe something or else you are going to die, it is very easy to. You don't fully understand, but you "wait on Jehovah" to sort things out. Most likely, they alter things and further confuse people rather than straightening anything out.
Credo ut intelligam?
A measure of "shell game" is probably unavoidable as the semantic ranges of "believing," "knowing," "understanding" do overlap in general usage and vary from one person, situation and context to another.
Much of our cognitive speech rests on underlying sensorial metaphors: we construe and represent "understanding," "knowing", "believing", etc., as forms of meta-perception: "seeing," "hearing," "feeling," "tasting," "smelling" in some superlative way.
From the Greek tradition metaphors of knowledge and understanding bring the sense of sight to the fore. The intelligible is construed as idea (form, image) and theoria (sight, vision, beholding, contemplation, show). Socratic dialectics leads through logical, rational discourse (logos) from the world of physical perception (belittled as mere appearance or phenomena) to knowledge as meta-vision. The Christian tradition of "faith" is not so different I guess. At first it opposes "sight" (but ultimately also as mere appearance), focuses (especially in Paul) on "hearing" and "responding" (confessing, homologeomai) to a divine rather than rational "word" but ultimately leads to knowledge as "sight" (from "mirror" to "face to face" sight, 1 Corinthians 13). The whole symbolism of revelation (unveiling, apokalupsis, or manifestation, epiphaneia) is overwhelmingly visual. Walking by faith not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7) is the way (hodos, whence method) to a goal which is still represented in terms of sight.
"Faith" or "belief," or "trust," I think, is the positive response to a call (auditive metaphor) that interrupts, suspends, breaks through, breaks open our sightlike, imaginary worldmap of representations. It is a moment of reception, an opening to the yet unknown (unperceived/unseen etc.) which is essential to the development of cognition. And it depends on literal perceptions (mostly but not exclusively hearing) and their dissonance with the "already-known".
(The miracle story in Mark 7:32ff is highly interesting from this perspective. Note how it plays on the other senses to open the impaired hearing and speaking (which is the usual channel of "faith"): "They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, "Ephphatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.")
Without a moment of "belief" nobody would have come to "know" anything.
Beat me to it Nark
I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.
Carl Jung
Jung's wording reminds me of the characteristic passive inversion of knowledge common to mysticism and psychoanalysis. Knowing is being known (cf. Psalm 139; 1 Corinthians 8:3; 13:12; Galatians 4:9).
Re: my previous post, an interesting "clash of sensorial metaphors" occurs in Mark 4:24 which I believe (!) hints at the cognitive process involved in parable teaching: what is usually translated as "pay attention to what you hear" is actually "see (look at, watch) what you hear" (blepete ti akouete). Here "attention" to the unknown (unheard) is called by sight interfering with the hearing (against the usual understanding of "faith"). But the dissonance is essential.
Drifting along: to Simone Weil, "attention" rather than "faith" in the sense of intellectual adhesion was the appropriate response to religious teaching. Her main criticism to the Catholic church (to which she was otherwise quite attracted) was precisely that dogma cannot command belief, only attention -- which may, in turn, lead to "belief/understanding" as personal "seeing" or "hearing".
Oh yes - but what is bizarre is that JWs CHANGE what they believe every time they're told to, lol.
