Unbelieving
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Unbelieving is a word showing to keep off from belief. It has besides two main meaning:
a) - holding that only material phenomena can be known and knowledge of spiritual matters or ultimate causes is impossible
b) - denying or questioning the tenets of especially a religion; "a skeptical approach to the nature of miracles"
Mainly the unbeliever kept that all the prophets assertions about God was false or issues of dreams. They show that what God was thought speaking through them is actually an amount of stories or myths. That a revelation was announced long ago makes it difficult to examine, but does not otherwise attest its soundness. That some revealed doctrine has lasted for ages and has met the needs of many generations proves that it is the kind of doctrine which endures and satisfies, but not that it is divine. Secular doctrines which turned out to be perfectly false have also endured and satisfied. If belief in a God has to proceed from the assumption that he exists, belief in revelation has first to proceed from the assumption that a god exists and then to go further to the assumption that he communicates his will to certain men. But both are mere assumptions. Neither is, in the present state of knowledge, at all capable of proof. If we suppose a God did exist, and suppose he did communicate his will to any of his creatures, we make only a dictation, for overwhelmingly persuaded persons, which have already faith, believing in the revealed books. So they will by its correspondence to their imaginations and wishes, but not with any proof of historical evidence. The unbelievers think that nothing is proved by this general response except that men are everywhere very much alike. They have the same members, the same organs, the same glands, in varying degrees of activity. Being so much alike, they tend to agree upon a few primary desires. Physical and social conditions brings about a general similarity in prophecies. They think besides that the human mind is often teased is the desire to live after death, and believers seeing themselves cut off before their will to live is exhausted and that the religions which provide these successful schemes credit with keener insight into human wishes than other religions have had, but nothing credit them with greater authority as regards the truth. They would be for unbelievers all guesswork at all.
See also
- Irreligion
- Laicism
- Relativism
- Religion
- Religiosity
- Religious skepticism
- Secularism
- Skepticism
- Atheism
