Religion, Evolution, and Evil!

OK, so I began reading the chapter on Darwin and I just have one thing to say...........what? I do not understand any of this evolutionary mumbo jumbo and the parts that I do understand are just going against creationism. I have talked to many people and when we do end up talking about Christianity , someone always says there is no room for Christianity anymore because so many people aren't acknowledging God as the creator of the Universe and everything in it, but they always turn to Science. There was a movie made a few years back called "The Reaping," and in this movie there was a scientist who was once a Christian, but then rejected the faith because of a personal problem that happened to her. As a Christian friend was talking to her he told her to explain all the plagues that happened in the bible when Moses asked Pharaoh to let his people go. Within less than a minute she gave a scientific explanation for all the plagues that happened, ruling out any possible involvement that God had. I was really shocked, but back to evolution. I so not believe I cam from a monkey. OK so there have been tests and research and data that shows humans and chimpanzees have almost identical genetic structure. OK and?
I was never big on this whole big bang/ evolutionary theory and I still am not. Maybe that is why I am having such a hard time with this chapter. What really set me of is that on pg 211, it states, " whereas religious accounts of the origin of evil have less impressive credentials." How dare they!? Then Pojman go on to question God and Him not being "more efficient." I mean come on, it was said in this chapter that the evolutionary theories have little proof.
Even though science and Christianity and all of these other theories differ, I must say that I did find one interlacing fact ( yea I was surprised). The bible says, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." Jesus also says to make sure not to get caught up in the things of this world. Giving into the things of the world and bodily desires is what causes sin and greed and many of the philosophers agree with this. It is because of a persons wants and desires and their yearning to fulfill these wants and desires that there is evil. In this chapter it says, "Much, if not most, of moral or human made evil is the "unintended" result of nature's making us creatures with insatiable wants but limited resources and sympathies." I interpret this as due to the desires of man, evil (sin) is the result. That is the only underlying theme that I see between philosophy and religion.
I will try my best to finish this chapter, but like I said before it is hard to understand. I am trying my best to be patient, but it is just a fact of the matter that I don't believe in this and they are bashing religion harshly.

Real Truth.

While we were going over the existentialism chapter, my attention was directed towards page 191 on the discussion of truth. The parable of the two worshipers interested me not only on a philosophical level, but also a realistic level. The parable states that there are two worshipers one who prays to the one true God and the other who prays to an idol. The worshiper who prays to the true God and has a real conception of God prays in a false spirit. He maybe just prays because he feels like he is obligated to and has no real emotion towards God. The person who worships the idol, though the idol isn't the real thing , the worshiper prays in a real spirit. To be honest I agree with Kierkegaard when he implies the person who is preying to the idol is the one that holds the real truth. I can see this on a realistic level because when I go to church I see people jumping up and down and fainting, and sometimes I think they aren't feeling the real spirit, they aren't worshiping truthfully. I really don't know because I am not inside their head, but sometimes I feel like they jump up and down because they may feel like they are obligated to. Then I look at the person who sits there not making a sound, just sitting there quite as a mouse and I think maybe they are the one who is having the real connection with God although many think in order to worship God you must jump and dance. I didn't mean to go into something like this , but the parable just made me think about that.
There is no real definition to truth, everyone has their own truth. Kierkegaard says that "the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual." In other words, once someone is doing something whole-heartedly and full of emotion and not faking it, that is their truth. Truth requires feeling, emotional feeling that one exerts into somthing. Ithink this topic struck me also because of the example that is always used in class. Look out the window and you see the tree, how do you know the tree is really there. Unless you believe whole-heartedly that you see a tree , instead of just thinking "yea I guess thats a tree," then you have discovered your truth. It is important hold on to your truth once you have attained it. It is important that everything is done in truth and with passion. It is only through truth that we can have faith and only through faith we can have life.

Our Journey called life

Life itself is a journey. Within this big journey of life we have mini-journeys which are the roads we take in order to reach goals we set up for ourselves. There is a problem with setting goals however. People don't realize that they shouldn't only concentrate on their goal, but how they go about their goal, the road that they take to reach it. We learn from our journeys and if we do reach the end we can say that achieving our goal is our reward. Even if things don't turn out the way we want them to, going through that experience made us more knowledgeable than we were before we started.
The journey of life shouldn't be taken for granted. It should be looked at as special and even though there are rough times, we should continue on with life learning from the rough times. We should also be mindful that if we live our life well that in the end(when we die), our reward will be that in heaven (if you believe in heaven). Life is taken for granted everyday just because we find things don't go our way, which may lead us to say "I hate my life or "Life sucks." I am guilty of doing such a thing, when life gets stressful for me I say, "ugh life is so hard I just want to die." Of course I don't mean it, but I realize now that I still shouldn't say things like that. Life being "hard" or "stressful" is just a journey in which you learn to juggle more than one task and learn patience and endurance. I know one cannot be happy about life all the time, but I feel we should start analyzing why do we think we feel the way we do about life. What can we learn from each circumstance we go through? There is always something to be leaned from life, we just have to be willing to be taught.

Philosophical Sayings.

Today in class I heard a quote that stuck to me, "No man is an island." I agree with this to the fullest. I am the type of person who wants to be independent and loves doing everything myself but, even though I may not want to, there are times where I just have to bite the bullet and ask for help. We live in an interdependent world, as I did state in an earlier blog. If we were to go to the woods and try to live alone without anyone, which I believe Thoreau tried to do, we wouldn't survive. Humans are social animals, relying on others to reproduce, talk to, help, and just be around. Though it is hard for me to be around people due to my introverted personality I know I have to be.
Another thing that I have been thinking about for quite awhile is, since we, as humans, are suppose to define themselves and our life, why is it said that life is pointless and absurd. Doesn't that mean we are making it pointless, since we have the power to do what we want. I , at many times, had said "I'm bored", and I am sure you have to, but aren't we just making ourselves bored? Don't we have the power to make our lives exciting? On this topic I want to talk about Nietzsche. He describes the "routine" life of someone who wakes up, goes to work, comes home, showers, watch TV, go to bed (just to do the same thing the next day) as wasting life. How is that wasting life? People have to make a living don't they? Also, I am almost positive that the same thing doesn't happen in the same order everyday. This is why I do not like his theories and many other theories of philosophers. They love to generalize and try to make it seem like every one is the same Everyone is evil, everyone is naturally good, everyone has lives that are absurd! I just don't understand , and I don't think I ever will.

Suffering and Nietzsche

OK, so listening to the side of the tape about Nietzsche was a bit interesting and confusing at the same time. He likes pain? Maybe because of the sheltered life he lived, he grew up to despise and rebel against it. He is one of those philosophers brought up in a good Go atmosphere , just to turn into a atheist who talks about pain. On the tape it was explained that suffering is good. And that the healthy persons life is full of suffering. Is this true? I mean I know to go through many trials and tribulations is to be made stronger, but it can be detrimental to a person to have a life of suffering. Not everyone can bounce back after going through such pain.
I do not agree when it was said that , "Suffering just happens" and that it was "Bound to happen." No, suffering doesn't just happen, it happens because people take certain paths in their lives that causes them and others to suffer whether it be intentionally or accidentally. I do believe there are circumstances that blaming oneself is appropriate , but Nietzsche asks , "Why blame yourself for something?" You blame yourself maybe because you see that there was something you could have done, but didn't or you see that there was something you shouldn't have done but did. This philosopher really had some ideas that were out there, and needed to stay out there. I didn't like his points at all, at least the way they were portrayed on the tape.

Faith vs Proof: A response to "The Leap of Faith."

Faith is the belief in something/ someone without it being physically present. People, however, cannot believe without having faith. How can you seriously know that 2+2=4? Because your teacher taught it to you? Wouldn't you have to have faith that your teacher actually knows what they are talking about to believe them? Yea, you can do the math for yourself with objects or even your fingers, but who is to say that addition isn't really subtraction and what we were taught is subtraction is really division? We had faith in those who taught us math to believe what they say and take it for the truth. People have faith in people,(trust) to teach them what is what sometimes without physical truth. Believing teachers and parents is the "Leap of Faith" that we take and then establish truth. Another example is religion. It has a lot to do with faith because one cannot see God, but those that are devout to Him knows that He is there. People who believe in religion believe that God is present in the atmosphere around us and do not need a physical being to know that He is there. The recording was talking about the difference about faith and proof. Well it seems that proof feeds into faith for some, if not many.
Another thing from yesterdays class that got me thinking was when the speaker was talking about people imagine they believe in religion and then you have those who truly do believe in religion. Religion,like i said in a previous post, isn't a physical thing; it is a spiritual and emotional thing. Those who supposedly "imagine the believe in God" may not have that connection with Him and don't acknowledge Him unless they need something. Also these people listen to sermons, but are absent minded while the sermons are going on and do not digest the word. They hear the pastor taking , but they don't understand or practice the Word of God. Those who truly believe try their best to please Jesus and listen whole-heartedly to the sermon digesting it and practicing it. Faith is a hard thing to have because we are spoiled to always have physical objects to cast our senses on. To get over not having faith, we must get over fully relying on our senses.

Freedom of Life?

What is freedom? Why do we have freedom? Are we truly free? Personally, I believe freedom is the ability to choose a direction or path we want to take. Humans do have freedom but as oxymoronic as it sounds, we have a restricted freedom. We have laws to guide us (even though we choose whether or not we follow the rules) and we have social moral codes that we follow (if we don't we can be exiled or looked at as an outcast.) I do believe that God has a purpose for all of us, but he gives us the freedom to choose whether or not we want to live out the life he has for us. We have the freedom to do good/ we have the freedom to do wrong. In existentialism, it is said that we make our morals and define ourselves by what we do; I agree. If we do just things we can be defined as just, if we do things that are wrong then we can be looked at as unjust; though this is true, each individual has their own definition of moral and immoral things.
The topic of freedom is a complex one. Everyone has their own concept of freedom. People feel free because they have religion, others don't feel free because of religion. People only feel freedom if they are harming someone and others feel truly free if they are helping. "We are free to create our own essence...We are totally responsible for our actions, for what we become." Though our parents raise us to hold certain values,when we are older we have the freedom to choose whether or not we keep those values. As long as we make sure we take responsibility as to how we use our freedom, I think no one can really say what is moral or not.