And for that you have my sincere thanks.
You criticize my writing style while demonstrating an incredible, nigh unbelievable, lack of reading comprehension skills. Given the credentials you have touted I suspect your actions here {the train wreck mentioned in a previous post} are purposeful. If that’s is the case this is the wrong forum for me to express what I really think.
It’s really to late for you to bow out gracefully, but just bowing out will be sufficient.
Thanks.
I love this post , thanks
What great timing for those other threads to be going on now. Thanks for spelling it out so clearly.
That would be most welcome. Thanks for being a class act.
IMHO that’s why it’s not productive to have a discussion of religious and/or spiritual beliefs based just on the objective, unless that is made clear and the discussion is very specific, such as the hard evidence about the history of the bible and the undeniable hard evidence about it’s many changes. A belief which has hard evidence available to support of falsify it can be discussed in objective terms. A few of the atheists on this board seem to want to force the discussion into one only about objective evidence, and dismiss the subjective as if it doesn’t matter. Since the subjective experience and emotions are so tied to our faith it obviously does matter. That is, if our goal is to advance understanding and left the dialogue up, rather than make it combative.
That’s why you’ve seen me make comparisons between religious faith, and the kind of everyday faith everyone exhibits. I think that human experience and emotional connection is basically the same.
Over time I have been able to shed many of the “traditional” beliefs. It’s been interesting to observe the process of letting go of them and rewarding enough for me to want to keep going. I’m interested in the largely emotional reason why people who claim to value truth seem so unwilling to really look at it. I’m sure some atheists feel that way about me. 
Many people can’t seem to tell the difference between the great mysterium tremendom they have named God, and the traditional doctrine of there particular church. They treat it as if questioning the tradition, as the bible directs them to, is in someway questioning God. It’s like finding out something horrible about your parents. Your mind and heart just don’t want to consider it.
jsgoddess has said she’ll start another thread about this later in the week. If not, then I will. I’d like to discuss the subjective spiritual experience, belief, and it’s emotional connection.
I can believe that. I totally support Sam Harris in his removal of the untouchable sacred barrier around religious belief. If people are going to campaign hard to force their interpretation of a 2000 year old book into law then we should be raising our own voices.
I’m not sure I follow you here. This is some sort of opposite example isn’t it? 
It seems to me that the problems lies in the distinction between “religions” that make objective claims and ones that do not. To a certain extent some atheists assume anyone claiming to be religious also believes in the objective reality of God and the events of the Bible and Jesus. Some theists muddle the distinction between their subjective experiences and the reality of Jesus. I think it must be hard for someone brought up in a traditional religious environment to go with the truth of their feelings and be willing to abandon the “truth” of the Bible and an objective god.
That was a garbled sentence, wasn’t it? :smack: I meant that creationists aren’t interested in teaching creationism because it is all that important, but as a reaction to the teaching of evolution which they see as undermining the role of God, which they do see as important.
I think we have seen illustrated for us the fact the other folks may perceive or interpret things differently.
For example, PRR mentions as an example the Ten Commandment “Thou shalt take no other God” as arrogance and disrespectful towards other faiths, while I think that it is not. (That one commandment is demanding exclusive attendance/observance, nothing else.)
When an atheist calls religion “supersitious clap-trap”, or “those who still worship despite the evidence to the contrary are nutjobs”, he/she sees it as a mere statement of fact and/or opinion, while I think it has some disrespectful and/or arrogant overtones.
It’s not that the atheist who disagrees about the evidence presented by the faithful as being sufficient is considered arrogant for disagreeing, it’s that the adjectives that get thrown in with the rebuttal(s) that defines a participant (either atheist or theist) in the discussion as either arrogant/disrespectful or not.
I think that’s part of the confusion alright. I had what I’d call a spiritual experience , totally subjective, and I interpreted it within the influence of the people around me, and my own emotional desires and needs. Pretty normal and human, but it clouds the vision and I accepted things I probably wouldn’t have because of the influence of others. Not always a bad influence. It is hard for folks to separate the emotion , from the spiritual high, from the objective parts of their beliefs.
The thread seems to have faded but I wanted to address point two one more time.
I was surprised when reading comments on the two articles I linked to in the OP , how much anger and disdain was expressed. Lots of people venting. I don’t see much progress being made with combative insulting dialogue.
It seems to me that we need dialogue about beliefs, especially those areas where beliefs are having an affect on the laws that govern us. It occurs to me that our own guidelines here in GD might be applicable to such discussions outside the boards as well.
First and foremost, don’t be a jerk.
Listen to your opponents, try to understand, and formulate a response that they will understand. Discursiveness doesn’t move the discussion forward.
Keep it about the subject and and promoting mutual understanding. Don’t make it a personal attack.
In debates the goal may be for one side or the other to be declared the winner , the larger goal is to fight ignorance and promote understanding.
While I do actively believe that the God of Abraham and Issac does not exist and that the Bible, Torah and Koran are collections of mythologies, I do not support the anti-religion stance at all. Religion, like guns, doesn’t kill people; people kill people, and it doesn’t matter whether they use distorted doctrine or false territorial claims to justify the killing. Religion, in and of itself, is inert; it appears harmful and deadly only when evil people cloak themselves with it as false justification. The Christian fundie who rails against stem cell research and the Islamic terrorist who kills innocents in his rage both find it convenient to use their religion to justify an otherwise indefensible emotional position. They would rail and kill regardless of their beliefs. Some of the worst despots in history were utterly without religious conviction; they used fear, ignorance and tribal loyalties to justify their genocides.
On the other hand, of course, I don’t think religion is the reason good people are good. One of my favorite people is a local Baptist pastor with whom I verbally joust on occasion. I believe he’s a Christian because he’s a good man; he argues that he’s a good man because he’s a Christian. For all the harm that’s been done in the name of religion, many times more good has been done in the name of that same religion. And believers across this nation and around the world are overwhelmingly more like my friend the pastor than they are like Pat Robertson.
So if there is such a thing as fundamentalist atheism, I want no part of it. In my experience, fundamentalism of any kind has been the first sign of a closed mind.
Good observation. I agree. People choose what they value and there are various paths. People who value honesty, compassion, justice, honor, may find it in their application of science, and philosophy, or their application of a particular religion.
People who seek power, control, and material gain can use those same venues.
I think when people use thier religion as a justification to impose their ideals on others then we do need to challenge that. The question is how do we go about it in the most effective way.