Would you die for your non-faith?

[Atlas]

I love being a free thinking human being but right now, as I'm thinking about it for the first time - I don't think I'd lay down my life for my non-faith. When I was a fervent Christian I believed I would to save my soul. Anybody care to comment on that?

I prefer the term wisdom to cowardice. Was I so brainwashed before?

Who goes by the sig: So many cults - so few comets

I thought it was funny til this all struck me.

[BigShoeStu]

I feel people will die for something as long as they feel some good will come of it. Be it the selfish good of going to heaven (suckers) or the sacrificing good to save a life, protect the freedom of a country or whatever. What others may die for can be different from what you would willingly die for and I can respect that.

The beauty of being a Free Thinker is that YOU now have the freedom to decide what is worth dying for. What is worth dying for is no longer dictated by a set of rules written in a Book. So start thinking and make a list of what is worth dying for to you.

Personally, I am dying for a big slice of cheesecake. And as high as my cholesterol is - I really AM dying for it. Not the most honorable thing to give your life for, I know, but hey, as a Free Thinker I have that freedom to choose. You may not die for a slice, but please, respect me for what I am willing to die for - Right or wrong.

[Tony]

I wouldn't die for my non-faith. But I'd fight and kill someone who was trying to kill me for my non-faith.

[Yahweh]

I would be unwilling to die to prove a point...

[Riddick]

saying you lay down your life for your non-faith and actually doing it are definately two different things.

[Atlas]

Originally posted by Yahweh
I would be unwilling to die to prove a point...
That's probably what it comes down to. It seems a powerful example of how an eternal soul or lack of one makes a difference in my thinking. Something that I really wasn't aware of.

[Marquis de Carabas]

Would I, if stuck in a room with someone who said, "Say you believe in God, or I'll shoot you," refuse to say it. No. I like living.

I could see some situations in which I would be willing to die for "non-faith," or at least for my right not to have faith. I could see myself fighting and possibly dying in some armed conflict to prevent the rise of a true theocracy, or to affect the dissolution of same. I don't think it's likely I'll have to, but if the time comes, I'd call that a fight worth having and a death worth dying. Not to prove a point, but to provide others with the freedoms I feel they should have.

Of course, I say that now. When the revolution comes, I'll probably come up with some excuse or another. :D

[DialecticMaterialist]

I'm not sure I would die for my "non-faith".

But I may be willing to risk my life for a lot of the things I care about, like freedom of conscience, liberty, people I care for and human progress.

[El Greco]

Like Paul Eldridge said, "man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him."

[bjornart]

Would I go to certain death for any reason what so ever? No, I don't think so.
Would I do something with a large risk of death if I thought I couldn't live with myself if I didn't? Maybe.
Do I know what I would choose? No, but I can make up situations and tell you what I, at this point, would like me to choose in such a situation.

[Pahansiri]

As a Buddhist my “faith” is compassion, loving kindness and respect for all beings. Would I lay down my life for other beings, yes if it was logical and done purely for compassion.

Would I lay down my life for Buddhism, it does need my help nor ask for it as no belief should demand suffering of a follower to “prove” themselves.

Just what I believe.

On a similar topic 'To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.' [Michael Servetus]

[Wudang]

Am I wrong or is there a suggestion that there is some kind of "moral strength" to dieing for your beliefs? Well, people have died for christianity, islam, communism, nazism, manifest destiny, the glory of the fatherland, the honour of their house and so on ad nauseum. People have even died for their faith in their greatuncle Rodney who smoked 40 a day and died fit as a fiddle at 97.
Life isn't a joke - the important bit doesn't have to be the punchline.

[komencanto]

No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have much to gain from it after dying.
And besides, I might be wrong =)

[ingoa]

Dying for an idea is plain stupid.

The idea itself is manifest in your head. If you're dead, it's gone.

You killed effectively what you wanted to preserve. As long as you live you might change the world, if you're dead the world changes you. Maybe not the world but the worms. ;)

[Pahansiri]

Originally posted by ingoa
Dying for an idea is plain stupid.

The idea itself is manifest in your head. If you're dead, it's gone.

You killed effectively what you wanted to preserve. As long as you live you might change the world, if you're dead the world changes you. Maybe not the world but the worms. ;)

Not fully true, if you give up your life through selfless compassion to save others you have planted a seed that will grow, flower and spread.

[Crossbow]

It is all too easy to make grand claims about how one will die for this, or kill for that from the safety of a PC terminal. However, I doubt that very few of those who make such claims would actually follow through with them if the situation really presented itself.

As for me, I really do not know if I would be willing to die for my non-beliefs; I tend to get plenty scared when I face death.

[ingoa]

Originally posted by Pahansiri


Not fully true, if you give up your life through selfless compassion to save others you have planted a seed that will grow, flower and spread.

Well in this case you're dying for other people and not for the idea. I've been in the military, but martyrdom just to provide a punchline is not my cup of tea.

[Pahansiri]

Originally posted by ingoa


Well in this case you're dying for other people and not for the idea. I've been in the military, but martyrdom just to provide a punchline is not my cup of tea.

Many times if not most, wars are not to die for others who need help it is to die for the powerful, for greed and desires to control.

[Hexxenhammer]

Originally posted by Marquis de Carabas
Of course, I say that now. When the revolution comes, I'll probably come up with some excuse or another. :D When the revolution comes, you'll be one of the first against the wall...

[Marquis de Carabas]

Originally posted by Hexxenhammer
When the revolution comes, you'll be one of the first against the wall...
I was thinking just that when I typed my original post...funny that.

[max]

yea I agree with the Marquis, I would go to war and die for it but not in any other circumstance....I don't think

[Pahansiri]

Originally posted by max
yea I agree with the Marquis, I would go to war and die for it but not in any other circumstance....I don't think

Why? would you die for oil or the power of a leader but not to save a being suffering? Or your cgild, family?

[c4ts]

Ummm... no. That would be pretty stupid of me.

[max]

pahansiri
No I wouldn't die for oil/power or for any lying, towrag politician.
but if my country was to become a religious one whereby I would have to wear robes and pray a thousand times a day and be forced to wear stupid head gear. Adhere to a religious, lying, towrag leader, then I'd go to war for my right not to believe in a god and be prepared to die in the process

[Pahansiri]

Originally posted by max
pahansiri
No I wouldn't die for oil/power or for any lying, towrag politician.
but if my country was to become a religious one whereby I would have to wear robes and pray a thousand times a day and be forced to wear stupid head gear. Adhere to a religious, lying, towrag leader, then I'd go to war for my right not to believe in a god and be prepared to die in the process

Ok, I respect that.

[Nyarlathotep]

Like most questions, the answer to this one is "It depends". In this case it would depend on what I hope to accomplish. If dying for my no faith meant being uselessly "martyred" (i.e someone is trying to convert me to their religion at gunpoint) I wouldn't. I'd claim to have seen the light and whatever else I had to do to survive.

However, I would like to think that I would fight against a system that was systematically killing "unbelievers" and I might die in such a cause, because such a system is inherently unjust and thus worth fighting against and such a fight always entails the risk of dying. Though to paraphrase Gen. George Patton I would also say that the point isn't to die for one's cause it's to make the other guy die for his.

[Atlas]

Hey guys, I'm really enjoying reading your posts. I wasn't sure when I started it what to expect. So far it's been great. Now I need you to put on your therapist hats and listen to me rant a moment. Then maybe tell me what drug regimen I should be on.

When I first broke free of the need to grant the dogmatics authority over my eternal soul I was left with a dilemma. The God I knew was imaginary but the felt experiences of closeness, oneness, joy and light were all very real.

To me, this was the bond that is shared by religionists the world around - apart from the fears of mortality that might bring us to God - what held us there was the body of felt experiences euphemistically referred to as God's Love.

I wondered about those feelings and whether they would vanish like dreams upon awakening or whether there was a way to live inside the dream still. Now the euphemism might be - Sleeping with the bunnies. Could I train myself to generate or find those feelings outside of churches and holy writ where I had found them before.

I needed a mechanism. Realizing that God is conceptual in me, whether God exists outside me or not, seemed to be a clue. Was there a master concept even higher than God? The great thing about having a human imagination is that the answer can be YES!

I called it the Ideal. I imagined it more in my understanding of Objectivism than in classic Platonism. That being, the Ideal is a vessel for all of the High Sound concepts... God, country, family, self, America, liberty, and of course, etcetera.

I had heard of researchers recently discovering an area of the brain they called the God center or something like that. As if to say human beings do have some kind of hard wired response part of our brain that is susceptible to, I don't know, a type of stimulation. A part of us that is trained from childhood to respond positively and with warm feelings to our obeisance to authority perhaps. Again, I don't know. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? From a societal survival standpoint I could see it's evolutionary value.

I linked these ideas - that part of my brain was the Ideal Center and realized I could be tweaked by authority figures appealing to the mix of concepts I stored there.

This brings me back to the thread topic and some of you have touched on it. We might choose to die to save the life of our child, who is real but is composed in our brain not as an instantaneous concept of the true child but as a manifestation of the ideal from the moment we held the tiny person in our arms, past the child's current age and into the realm of hopes and dreams. This is what we might choose to die for. It's an idea although one that has a tangible reality.

Same thing for 'America'. And also for 'God' though less tangibly so. I thought my confusion stemmed from the addition or subtraction of the eternal soul.

Now I think differently. I think that my eternal soul was a concept that I held dear in my Ideal Center. Today I don't anymore, but the Ideal Center/Concept still holds plenty both to live for and die for.

If faith is nothing to me, non-faith is less than nothing. No wonder I was having problems picturing myself dying for it. The man of faith may go into the arena to face the lions but only because his Ideal center has been stoked overriding his need for self preservation. Again from a societal survival standpoint I could see it's evolutionary value. Likewise how vulnerable we might be when authority figures make appeals to it.

You're probably anxious right now saying - Atlas, tell us more about the bunnies! For me, it works. The bunnies are real. I call them and they come. It feels good.

Now that you know, can I still hang around you guys? Or am I already off the cliff?

[epepke]

Originally posted by Atlas
Hey guys, I'm really enjoying reading your posts. I wasn't sure when I started it what to expect. So far it's been great. Now I need you to put on your therapist hats and listen to me rant a moment. Then maybe tell me what drug regimen I should be on.

I think I answered this in another thread, but I didn't get a response.

This is a normal reaction, and you will get over it. It's like a heroin addict without the heroin. Just let yourself dry out for a while. Eventually, you'll come to realize that the heroin itself was the reason you thought you needed the heroin. Going off and sucking down methodone or Religion Lite™ is just going to prolong the unpleasantness.

When you're dry, you can do all the re-evaluation you want.

[Atlas]

Originally posted by epepke


I think I answered this in another thread, but I didn't get a response.

This is a normal reaction, and you will get over it. It's like a heroin addict without the heroin. Just let yourself dry out for a while. Eventually, you'll come to realize that the heroin itself was the reason you thought you needed the heroin. Going off and sucking down methodone or Religion Lite™ is just going to prolong the unpleasantness.

When you're dry, you can do all the re-evaluation you want.


epepke,

Your post took me by surprise. I wasn't sure if your were trying to be helpful or condescending.

Anyway in formulating my response I thought I was falling off the thread and created a new one.

God: Real or Imagined - A Titan says NO (http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?threadid=35088)

I do agree with what you say, by the way, and hope to convince you I'm not slurping Religion Lite™.

[evildave]

I'd be willing to live for not being religious.

Dying's easy. Everybody eventually does it.

Why not survive to carry on the message, rather than play the 'martyr' game that religions are so good at?

[!Xx+-Rational-+xX!]

We're going to war with the believers! So it may happen to some critical thinkers!!!!!!!!!!!! At least we will better humanity with our rational thinking!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ingoa]

epeke
I like the addiction angle.
Karl Marx was almost always wrong, but that he got right. Religion IS opium for the masses. It prodives a weird view of reality that is much easier to handle than doing the thinking by yourself.

But gettig to a decision by yourself whithout the guideline of a two thousand year old recipe is much more satisfying. At least you know whom to blame if things go wrong. ;)