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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (17508)	6/29/2001 8:06:37 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

You have dismissed people who believe in God as mindless. Given the centuries of evidence and the billions of people who disagree with you, I'd say your characterization is, at the very least, exaggerated and intolerant. Centuries of evidence? What evidence? If billions of people told you that the sky was green, would that make it green? If you decided that they must be right and your eyes must be wrong, what would that make you? I deduce two things from the centuries of evidence: many humans want to believe that the phenomena that surround them are caused by the conscious will of an all-powerful being (it is a comnforting explanation for that which is not understood), and that the more we learn about the mechanisms which actually do govern our environment, the less compelling this desire becomes. Besides, I didn't refer to people who believe in God. The existence or non-existence of God is pretty difficult to prove either way; it's pretty much a question of what you choose to believe. Believing that God is intimately concerned with our lives, intervenes on behalf of those who abase themselves in the recommended fashion, follows our every thought, punishes the bad and rewards the good, regularly adjusts the course of events, and demands that we grovel on a regular basis is another story altogether. This is something that I see no credible reason to believe. Believing that some individual human or group of humans, now or anywhere in history, was in contact with God, and believing that God wants us to do as those humans or their books tell us to do, is, IMO, totally off the wall, and amounts to surrendering our rational capacities to another human being. This, in my mind, is simply inexcusable. Faith in God is, to me, simply a mild curiosity. Faith in religion - and I don't see that religion has anything more to do with God than any other human hierarchy - seems quite dangerous, and thoroughly inexplicable. You didn't answer my question: if the voluntary surrender of our questioning faculties is not mindlessness, what is it?