Imagine No Religion — Page 7

The thing is, many people have claimed to see ghosts just as many people haven't. They've gone through the pains of collecting and analyzing data. A lot have had repeated experiences, and after five times of seeing the same thing someone isn't going to write it off as being tricked.

Afterlife itself isn't something that is just used in terms of ghosts. I was just using that to show one way in which afterlife can be argued for.

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That reminds me of something I remember reading about called Pascal's Wager. A person can bet on four possibilities:
We don't believe in God and he doesn't exist.
We believe in God and he doesn't exist.
We don't believe in God and he exists.
We believe in God and he exists.

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"No, that's just the first point. The second point is to control your behavior and other people with undeliverable promises of something you'll never collect on (ie, hitting the jackpot in the great casino in the sky)."

Do you know that we'll never collect on it? In the end, they don't force us to believe (especially today); it comes down to personal decision. If someone truly believes, it is because they wanted to, not because the Church made them.

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"people who are atheist are because they believe there is no god and they believe that they are right"

Noooooooooo. You're applying the religion template to people who have no need to believe in magic, which like ghosts, doesn't exist either. It's a common pitfall, most frequently voiced as "Atheism is a belief and practically a religion itself!" Nice soundbyte, but unsound reasoning.

"Personally, without religion in my life, I would feel a bit misguided."

That's a shame. But you probably would have turned out all right anyway. I have faith in you.

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I don't share your point of view, but I completely understand it. I think atheism is a belief, but I could be wrong.

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Which is why it is not a religion. It's belief.

On an ironic note The New York Times had an advertisement for "The Atheist Bible" as a wonderful holiday gift.

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Maybe it's a sort of faith. If I have faith or belief in something such as what you mentioned, someone can have equal faith and belief that that something doesn't exist.

The difference between belief and fact are two different things, though. We can believe that God does or does not exist, but no one knows for sure. Which is where faith comes into play...

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Because, every single day scientists get closer to unlocking the "mysteries" that we would "never" be able to understand because we lowly humans have "have limited understanding of our own world" and only The Creator (who is all-knowing, and all-seeing and somehow simultaneously simpler [God is LOVE] and more complex [God would have to be even more complicated than the most complicated systems that have evolved over millennia in order to CREATE them all in the first place] depending on what position you're arguing.

Scientist are probably a decade away from creating life in a test tube. CREATING LIFE. It's no wonder fundamentalists denounce, belittle and in some cultures outright ban science.

"Technically, Atheism is just as much belief as Christianity is," GuitarGirl, when I make a point about something being a soundbyte but unsound reasoning and I explain why, please don't rephrase and repeat it.

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Jesus was a Jew and therefore pointy.

Building your life and "beliefs" on something that can not be proven to even exist is irrational. Being a rationalist doesn't put one in the position of "having to disprove" that the thing irrational people have faith in DOESN'T exist. That's their problem.

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"Those who are religious are just as rational as those who aren't."

Hmmmm - it seems to me that 'those who are religious' are basing a life around some kind of construct. My contention is that no one knows enough to make ANY kind of construct.

The only thing that makes sense to me at this point is saying, "Who knows?"

I think that it's irrational of you to call people who believe in God, or are religious, irrational. If you make it your life's goal to prove that they are irrational for having faith, perhaps you are a bit irrational yourself, devoting so much time to condescending a group of people who, for the most part, are likely to be very rational people if you took the time to at least consider their point of view. Not to believe, but to hear them out at not condemn them immediately to being crazy or "irrational", which is an insult.

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