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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: Rick Julian who wrote (24889)9/13/1998 3:02:00 PM
From: E  Read Replies (1) of 108807
 
I want to try to differentiate between the negative statements you have offered about marriage and those Christine has offered about religion.

Christine quotes a number of philosophers who assert that religion is nonsense. If this atheist position is understood to mean, "doesn't make anybody happy," of course the position is silly. But rationalist atheists don't assert that. They assert that statements along the lines of "there is a God," bear the same relation to the truth as statements along the lines of "there are teeny folks living in my clenched fist."

Your negative quotations about marriage illustrate the figure of speech called "synecdoche," in which a part is used to represent a whole. Bad marriages are used to characterize "marriage."

Christine's negative quotations about religion do a different thing, so the two are not good parallels. She is not characterizing all religions by citing a group of them. I would say her quotes are a way of making the argument that all religions, without exception, partake of certain defining (silly and, even when weighed against their anodyne side effects, ugly) characteristics.

I hope I haven't taken too great a liberty in offering my explication of Christine's post.

I am going to reply to your post beginning "What we live is our imagination" later, Rick.

P.S. Nice to meet you!
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