I keep saying good things in obscure places...

To rectify this injustice, I shall, like a mouse bringing you a half dead lizard that you neither want nor asked for, repost my brilliance here to be evaluated and praised (or perhaps validly critiqued allowing for personal growth).


SomeGuyOnMyspace

you blame the idea of religion instead of human being nature of exsistance lol fun stuff. the idea of religion is to bring a group of people with common interest together, and have them follow a higher power its human being who use the idea of religion as a weapon just like a gun/sword/rock/words whatever you can use to convince the other person into believing your right...

Me:

I don't blame human nature for anything. By and large, human nature is a positive force for good. Humans, when they aren't feeling threatened, are some of the most lovely and interesting animals in all of nature. My point is that religion isn't suppose to bring together a group of people with common interests. That is the domain of knitting circles and book clubs. Religions are beliefs in things unseen, without evidence, on the word of people you don't know for reasons you cannot fathom.

Religion seems to be largely a product of the human proclivity towards confabulation with regard to agency. Humans will make things up and believe them with the slightest impulse to do so. If we see something in reality that we do not understand, we make up stories. Whether it's Apollo riding across the sky on his fiery chariot, God punishing snakes by taking away their legs, or Odin making man out of driftwood. Humans are remarkable story tellers. The problems arise when these stories are enforced by inquisition, defended by crusade, and protected by rejecting basic science.

Saying that it's humans faults for defending their false myths and lies too vigorously is simply wrong. The fault lies in epistemology. How do we know what we know? Is that a good reason to accept that belief? Could you be wrong about that? -- The only valid epistemology we've ever encountered is that of science. Rather than depending on what we think might be the case or what we are told, we test our ideas against reality, we test our hypothesis against the actual world, we check our theories about the universe within the universe.

There in is the problem of God. There's no good reason to accept it. If we were to accept God on such reasons we should equally accept werewolves and vampires. So long as the evidence of goblins, fairies, and werewolves is on par with the evidence of gods E.G. none... we should be atheists. If religion were just a hobby and the only problems were believing those lies and defending them with violence, then your comments would be apt. However, the better way of knowing and the way we should be if we want to believe the most true things and the fewest false things is to accept those things that we have reasons to accept. To remain open to evidence and argument and allow for a real battle of ideas... in this arena religions tend to lose. Perhaps they are just very unlucky, but more aptly they are just untrue.