"Knowing" is a concept created by man to justify a lazy mind.
In our reality, we can not KNOW anything; but we can assume certain relationships to derive useful responses.
We can not manipulate our environment directly. We must recognize and influence a confluence of relationships to get a desired result. You can not eat, start a fire, make a shelter, or anything else without knowing many complex relationships to derive an acceptable result.
Religion attempts to take a shortcut and eliminate the need to understand the observables and create those complex relationships. Faith is used as an end point to eliminate any need for effort.
Having a "limited working understanding" is a more correct statement about science, but in no way reflects religious efforts. Organized religion relies upon written works that are biased, vague, and contradictory. Practitioners will often choose to create an interpretation to fit their bias. Religion is designed to be a work of self-deception. Provide enough vague information, and you can justify any position. Create enough words that surpass the human minds' ability to correlate vague passages and you have a tool to subjegate the souls of its victims.
Yes I said soul. But where the soul is etherial and God directed for most, it is a probability for me based upon observable conditions and rational though weak relationships.
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/jamesbdunn2?p=142 But the soul and afterlife has nothing constructive to do with Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, or any other deity. The soul and our afterlife simply have the possibility of existing based upon certain observable relationships. Jesus, Mohammad, and religious leaders in general can best be described as demons in that context. Supporting the concept "Thou shalt not speak in thy name". But that's all different issues. Back to the point.
I'm curious what the Torrah, Bible, Qur'an would read like if all the vague (passages with no rational meaning except that which our imagination provides), contradictory (passages that contradict writings elsewhere), and obviously false statements (like "all the heavens and the Earth being created in six days") were removed and only the solidified works remained?
I can rationally understand "Faith" as a starting point in searching for answers. But "Faith" is not in itself an end point.
Scientists use faith all the time. They suspect a relationship exists and then they attempt to verify the correctness in their suppositions. After spending a life looking for relationships supporting their issue of faith, they recognize that they have not developed the toolset adequately needed to completely relate the issues in question. Their original premise for which they had enough faith in to devote a large portion of their life in pursuit, has changed, morphed, and potentially taken on hundreds of new aspects that were not originally perceived. Their original premise has led to much more beautiful body of information.
But in religion, faith is used as an end point. Most often faith is used as a justification, rather than potential truth.
The Torah, Bible, and Qur'an all cite the Ten Commandments as being the only words ever directly transcribed by God. Yet, in at least the Bible and Qur'an, they contradict repeatedly the Ten Commandments. I've not read any part of the Torah to find if it exists there as well.
Faith is misused by religious peoples, they use it as a justification for having a lazy mind, or they use it as a tool to assert social superiority. But in neither case is faith a valid end point in religion; and as I have sighted and proven elsewhere, absolute faith must be absolutely false.
