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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (184016)	2/29/2012 2:29:28 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541181

I did not actually talk about facts the right has correct versus facts the left has wrong- what I see is that both sides pick and choose, and both sides tend to throw out facts they are uncomfortable with. But more important than the facts, is that the two sides want really really differnt worlds. The right is much more comfortable with religious intrusion into private life, for example- as long as it's Christian intrusion. They are not so comfortable with even the idea of Muslim religious intrusion. That has nothing to do with facts, and everything to do with a lifestyle choice. You can say that this lifestyle choice is driven by myth- by adherence to the law of an invisble friend, and that's true- but it really doesn't get you anywhere to say that. It's not like logic defeats an invisble friend. And yes, college does seem to make a lot of people less religious (though sadly it did not have that effect on Santorum). But it primarily makes people less religious because it exposes them to a wide variety of religions, and many people, when they see the enormous number of ways man has responded to the unknown, by creating differing types of Gods, they begin to realize that maybe Gods are man's way of expressing something, rather than man being the expression of God. But that's not really a "factual" decision. I agree that facts enter in to it- and the more you know about comparative religions the more similar the creation myths are, and the more one can beging to realize that it all seems to be mythic, rather than a realistic tale, but the decision to believe there is no God, or the decision to suspend belief, and not waste a lot of time on the matter, is hardly what I'd call a factual decision. If you were trying to be really rational, the most logical choice is to suspend both belief and disbelief- since there is no proof of God, and no way to disprove God either - and you could bring up Pascal's wager, but that, imo, is just insulting to any deity you used it with.