I do. Even if I try I can never settle with the "we simply don't know" answer, I need something to believe in, be that easter bunny, Jesus or the flying spaghetti monster. I'm not a religious type of person, but I still prefer living a "lie" than to live in doubt about everything.
I think that's more a pretty sad indictment on the state of peoples lives than a real argument for religion.
Curiosity about the unknown is one of things that brought us down out of the trees, and could be argued is a defining part of what makes us human. To suppress that instinct with fairytales seems backward.
Save those who come up with the religions in the first place.
Well it could equally be said that they're the ones for whom the crutch fits the best...and equally will suffer the worst when it's taken from them since their need is greatest.
I agree that I was told what to believe in (by my grandfather), but I've recently realized that our common religion was what kept my family together. For us it was all about heritage and traditions, God and Jesus came second. So I honestly wouldn't call religion a crutch.
Well there you have it. It's the social aspect and tradition, which could equally be supplanted by any other regular family bonding. Shared meal times, supporting the local sports team....these are equally cohesive. And the list goes on.
Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal.
Yeah, those are sooo last season
But these morals tend to be universal, whereas the specific moralities found in various different holy books tend to emphasise concepts which are centuries or millenia out of date.
Kosher (or Halal) diets, for instance, have been argued to have originated from the difficulties of keeping unspoiled foods in a hot climate without the benefit of modern refrigeration techniques.
Keeping meat and dairy produce apart would make a lot of sense to prevent cross contamination, but is now essentially obsolete. But because it is a religious commandment, sales of refrigerators are double in Israel.
We've been over this before. Not believing something doesn't exist isn't equivalent to believing it does exist. 'Not disbelieve' is not synonymous with 'believe'. With the Zeus example I was indicating that pure rationality would have us neither affirm nor deny his existence due to a lack of any convincing evidence either way.
This is right.
Pure atheism is as much an issue of faith as any religion.
I admit that in the strictest sense I'm an agnostic. It's just that my agnosticism is so strongly in favour of atheism that for all intents and purposes I am an atheist.
You seem to be mistaking my stance for 'we can't prove they don't exist, therefore they do'. That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying 'we can't prove they don't exist, and we can't prove that they do exist, therefore we cannot claim either that they do or don't exist'. From a standpoint of scientific reason, of course.
Except that the field is gradational.
You would have believe that there can be only atheism - agnosticism - theism, with the total lack of evidence pointing firmly to the middle ground for anyone without some kind of faith (either positive or negative).
I'd argue that there certainly is evidence for some sort of atheistic slant. Historical proof of the incomplete and highly edited nature of most major holy texts.
Scientific proof of the inaccuracies and impossibilites in most major holy texts.
And moralistic arguments that render most major religions either obsolete or even amoral by the standards of our time.
These things weigh heavily in favour of atheism (for me), though I agree that it is scientifically impossible to cross the final line.
Dizzy