Gaudere:
Damn, you’re right. I’ll be back.
AAAAAH! NO MORE NO MORE! 
Ok, thanks for the explanation, Lib. That one did sail right over my head at first.
My memory is hinting to me that the statement in question was in a footnote or a contrary opinion. But it might be a false memory… 
Gaudere, I can’t get it to post. It must be too big. Anyway, it’s SCHOOL DISTRICT OF ABINGTON TOWNSHIP, PENNSYLVANIA V. SCHEMPP 374 U.S. 203 NO. 14, 1963. I did a search on “atheism” to be sure it was covered, and I found that one of the complainants was none other than Madalyn Murray and son.
You can read it by searching on atheism under keyword search at http://www.fedworld.gov/supcourt/fsearch.htm
Gaudere said:
Well, it would seem reasonable for that Court to expect litigants before it to “accept a belief in some sort of supremeness.” 
This leads me to the conclusion that most lawyers have a very sound religion…their prayers go to a nine-personed Supreme Entity, and are answered. (I was trying to come up with a parallel to Trinity for a nine-personed being, but the best neologism I could coin was Nonentity. :D)
At last! A question to which I can supply the definitive, objectively defined answer!
Billy Joel > Elton John.
Billy Joel < Elton John + Bernie Taupin.
Madman Across the Water flat out rocks. The Stranger and 52nd Street outperform anything Elton managed on his own.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Perfect.
I completely agree with both of you.
Uh…wait a minute! SM and Lib are in agreement? Melin and David B.? Any moment now I expect Satan to post an opinion and Jodih to back him in every particular?
Adam, Pounders, any speculations on what this might portend? Adam? Jon? Jason? Laura? Beth? Where’d you all disappear to?
Okay, we’ve let this thread meander long enough. (And it does have some interesting meanders!)
Here’s a question that does not quite hijack it, but comes close. However, I’d be very interested in the answers:
Do atheists, as a group, feel that theists should “recognize the truth and stop believing”? If so, why? (I recognize that you cannot group atheists as well as you can theists; I’m asking for individual viewpoints and opinions as to whether there is a general feeling on this among atheists of your acquaintance.)
From discussions with members of organized atheist/humanist groups, I would say that, yes, there exist groups of them who think that theists should recognize reality and stop believing in nonsense (aka “religion”). Now, this certainly does not include all atheists, since the ones who don’t really care aren’t too likely to join such groups!
Ignorance is Bliss.
Reality is Better.
I do not wish for the population at large to “see reality and give up religion”. I do wish for the population at large to recognize that their answer is not the answer for everyone and that they have no innate right to live in a community where everyone agrees with them.
That, of course, applies to athiests as well as theists.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Well said, Spiritus.
I guess technically I’m still a theist, but it doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. I am recalling and reliving now my Christian infancy, sort of born again again. I have undergone a spiritual renewal, a new epiphany, believing not just with my mind, but with my heart again. I guess what I don’t like about theism anymore, and have never liked about religion, is that it blocks out the view of God.
If you were to ask me “what do you mean by ‘your heart’,” I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I don’t know what it is. I know only that it’s where my treasure is. I don’t know anything intellectual that will define it or explain to you what it is. I just know that it’s something different than the brain, because I can’t put math to it. Even Cantor doesn’t help. Matter of fact, I probably should just stop talking about it.
Sorry. Back to the originally scheduled question from Poly.
In Buddhism, they say “If you see the Buddha coming down the road, kill him.” In other words, if your view of God has gotten that concrete, you must move beyond it. I think this may be your objection to orthodox religion; that people worship someone’s concept of God, and not God. “God and Buddhas in the orient are not final terms like Yahweh, Allah or the Trinity, in the west–but point beyond themselves to that ineffable being, consciousness, and rapture that is in all of us. And in their worship, the ultimate aim is to effect in the devotee a psychological transfiguration through a shift of his plane of vision from the passing to the enduring, through which he may come to finally realize through experience (not simply as an act of faith) that he is identical with that to which he bows.” --Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living. You might like that book, incidentally; it analyzes the Western and Eastern religious experiences, but from a spiritual perspective, not a scientific one. I like Campbell, though of course I interpret him in my own way (as would be expected).
Lordy, I must not use my brain at all; I almost never use math to figure anything out! I can do it well enough (I even took the more advanced math courses in HS) but math and logic seem to create their own little world that may or may not relate to the “real world”, so I view them only as possibly useful tools.
It is truly disconcerting to find that Reality is far greater than one’s initial conception of it…that the Great Insight into How Things Really Are is actually a “D” grade in Reality 101. But what did you expect from Infinity, anyway? To be comprehensible? 
An anecdote that seems to me to fit here: some years ago, my friend Chris and I were sitting at his table after dinner, discussing with great depth and candor some tough choices he was facing about his future. He was in the process of trying to get his daughter Amanda, then three years old, to finish eating her dinner, while carrying on this coversation with me. At a point in the conversation where it fit absolutely perfectly, Amanda piped up and said, “Daddy, you know sometimes the right path is not always the straightest one.” This turned out to be a quote or paraphrase from Disney’s Pocahontas, as we discovered after scraping our jaws off the floor. But it’s always been a lesson to me that insight comes from where it comes from, not from where you expect it.
As a group, I would say no, for exactly that reason.
Well, since you asked for personal opinion…
Personally, I think that many theists would be far better off without their theism because they then would have to find and use the power of self. However, you can’t take the wheelchair away from a man who can’t use his legs, and ask him to walk again (btw, LOVED that commerical with Christopher Reeves). The same could be said for theists who use theism as a crutch. If you take it away, or they lose it, then they would become lost and unable to function. Of course, the theist would reply that this is proof of the power of God, once you got Him you cannot simply let Him go and function in life without Him. So, strictly speaking would they be better off … no, but if they could lose their theism and find their own personal inner fire, yes.
Then we have theists who use theism as a club or judging tool. Clearly, we and they would be much better off if they were to lose their theism.
I am left; however, with the problem of theists who clearly have inner spirit and are theists. This almost seems like a contradiction to me (maybe I need to start “The Theist Religion” ;)). Am I misunderstanding the people who seem to use it as a crutch? Perhaps so. It warrants further thought.
Nominee for 2nd Annual SDMB Awards:
- Most rational in the face of a heated argument
- BBQ Pit’s Rookie of the Year
Glitch, I do not understand why, if the spirit of God and the inner spirit are one and the same, as I believe they are, there need be any contradiction. Can you explain?
I respect your beliefs; however, in this case I do not agree with them.
There are two prime problems with my understanding of “God’s spirit = inner spirit”.
First, lack of consistency amongst Christians. There must be a certain spark of difference at the spiritual level, otherwise, with all Christians filled with the Holy Spirit of God I would expect to see much more unity.
Second, free will violation. Your own personal spirit much be autonomous (sp) from God, otherwise it begs the question, how could you break free from God is you wanted to? Or equally is troublesome, if you broke away from God is it your spirit breaking away of God’s?
I can accept the possiblity of some kind of merging of spirits, even to the degree of becoming one (with the possibility of divorce); however, I don’t think equality is true.
Perhaps, by “one in the same” you mean something different. If so, I would love to hear about it.
“Glitch … download” - Glitch’s final action. sniff
What is a Christian? Is it anybody who adopts the label, or is it, as Jesus said, someone who loves others? And among those who love their neighbors as themselves, is there not a consistency?
Not as I see it. It is something like a marriage, I guess. But two things are required: (1) that God has your permission (that’s your part) and (2) that your spirit is made utterly pure (that’s His part). I guess it is kind of hard to imagine unless you make an effort not to think of the spirit like some sort of mist with molecules.
This may seem very MPSIMSish but has a certain amount of irony to it, in view of Lib’s last point. On leaving this thread after reading that, I went back to the GD master thread list, where I was confronted by the following juxtaposition of titles:
“What’s wrong with atheism?”
“Masturbation is not the same as real sex.”
Now, there is a bad case of (a) great minds thinking alike, (b) the Spirit at work, © synchronicity, or (d) none of the above! :rolleyes:
'Pends on how you look at it, Poly; either “atheism is to theism as masturbation is to ‘real sex’” or…“atheism is to theism as masturbation is to masturbation with an extraordinarily convincing fantasy life.”