Do religious people constantly mix up "believe" and "know"?

Knowing the difference between fact and fiction isn't their strong point.

Probably because you are on conservative Yahoo. Sometimes you get better answers at ask.com or wikianswers.com

I hate to tell you this because the truth hurts, but, although you're all too often right, actually your definition of belief is faulty. I know, because every word has unfathomable depth and an average of maybe six or seven definitions. You learn to believe in science as you find it reliable. Same with religion. Science tends to take things apart, but it takes "whole brain thinking" to put it all back together and get the big picture. So often a piece of a map is hard to match with the territory, if not almost impossible. An approach that considers all categories of knowledge is more helpful than omitting any of the ten categories in the library. There's a lot of study that has been put into psychology and even more into spirituality for thousands of years. Spirituality is just seeing what picture you get when you put it all together. Considering that whole brain thinking can map out an answer that it takes linear logic over three days to do and that the whole mind has a million times the capacity, the answers from intuition and inspiration is actually more reliable and can be tested with linear logic. As a matter of fact the brain does that automatically. It still is wise to check it, but the pieces all fit into a whole, and are sometimes meaningless out of context. Everything can be related to everything else to see if they fit. Some say that's what thinking is all about, relationships, one idea supporting another. You can put the pieces together any way you want, I'm just saying, in the biggest picture the vision logic of the whole mind can produce, your picture just doesn't fit very well. That's a bad sign. lol A poorly constructed building won't last and life is so about change, and the building won't last long anyway. Ideas are the same way. Only maps and not the territory. We will never know all of reality, only some comfortable assumptions that need constant updating, by the microsecond in some cases. Old people tend to be more spiritual because the pieces start all falling together for want of space. Enough facts and intuition can put together a pretty good map. All greats say intuition was their guide. You might enjoy listening to your intuition because it connects the whole brain and connects to your love, compassion, genius, confidence and creativity, to name a few.

We have to understand emotions to keep them from coloring our judgment. You can fix that in the breakthroughs in Emotional Intelligence, an excellent start for developing intuition and get more data for the information hungry higher consciousness. We are so slow and we don't want to bore our minds.

Most people don't know the difference between knowing science facts and knowing science fiction. What really is a quark? knowledge? fact? theory? or belief? maybe believable scientific method fiction?

Fact and Fiction really don't work as opposites, in my opinion.

Santa is an example of fictional fact (smile).

As many times as they realign dino bones, is that fact or fiction.

Knowledge and Belief hit me as tricky.

[1] With some things, you don't have to know, to believe.

[2] With some things, you don't have to believe, to know.

Which one of these is religion?

Which one is science?

Good Luck.

That became into between the final pleas i've got examine in a protracted time and that i sympathise with the way you experience, whether i'm no longer gay. besides the fact that i think of it quite is a mistake to straight away affiliate hate with being positioned to dying. could you no longer positioned down your previous crippled canines and nevertheless love him? Even the ArchDevil, Hitler, had them positioned to dying. i would not recommend that and don't trust the bible's statements on the undertaking. What i in my opinion dislike is that, for the reason that there are properly over 2 billion human beings on the planet that are non secular and not in favour of 'gays', why you insist in affronting them with what they view as sin, and are continuously pressing for greater tolerance, to the quantity of having marriages and so on. So it quite is not any suprise to you that they react against it, even strongly. wisdom could say stay interior the closet and save to yourselves. whilst issues get tough, as they are going to over right here couple of years and previous, it quite is properly wide-spread that populations turn on minorities they dislike to offer vent to their concern and anger. As Christ reported, enable he who's without sin throw the 1st stone. i do no longer throw stones, yet others will. don't be a aim seems common-sense or maybe maybe smart.

Yeah, I dunno...

But I do know that they also mix up 'revealed truth' (ie, something that they believed god told them, and so they believe) with 'observed fact' (ie, something that science has recorded, measured and reliably duplicated).

Odd, isn't it!?

EDIT - @Bam

You make a good point. Yes, it's true that what science believed yesterday they overturn tomorrow (well, broadly speaking anyway: the timescale is usually longer than a few days!)

But, what I said was 'observation' - that is, what we see and record. Those observations are the raw material for science, and other than having decreasing error bars associated with them (as the observations are repeated more accurately) those observations are fixed.

What changes are our explanations for those observations - usually from particularly complex explanations to increasingly simpler explanations. For example, it used to be believed that observed phenomenon involving magnets and those involving electricity were entirely separate - and so we had two distinct explanations for them. Then, it was appreciated that they are in fact the same thing, and the two explanations could be combined into a single explanation. But, the observations themselves regarding electricity and magnetism did not change.

Does that make sense?

No more than you mix up "believe" and "trust."

Francisco J. Ayala, “Science and religion are dealing with different dimensions of reality, different levels of experience. Anybody who thinks that everything in the world can be explained in a reductionistic, materialistic way is just naive."

Edit: Sorry, I forgot that most atheists may have a lot of head knowledge about science, but the majority of them on R&S are semi-iliterate, so I'll explain. When a Christian says they "believe" in God, it doesn't mean they believe He exists, because they know He exists. The definition (obvious by the context) is trust, as in "believing" (trusting) that someone can accomplish a certain task.

@raith: so then you're an idiot for not knowing the difference between "knowing" and "trusting?"

@prof: yesterday's science is today's myth, a little research into what science believed in the past but now disutes might do some good, since what they believe today will be disputed tomorrow, and since you like facts, that's historical FACT.

They know the difference. I don't think you can really understand faith unless you have it. I don't have it, but did at one point. I don't "believe" science, even science is fallible, and what you think you "know" may not be reality. Lets not be so quick to attack the religious, they just wanna believe. If it makes them feel better, why should we care?

knowlege provided by science facts

like life just happened

its not proven its a theory

like the jonas bro.

i know that i dont believe in the bible. it was written by man, most of the religious men i know today are untrustworthy. what are the chances of the ones that wrote the bible beig any different. i say little, man has always been greedy

Only idiot religious people don't know the difference between "knowing" and "believing".