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And that's perfectly fine. I just never understood why you (Edit: I'm not saying you specifically, but atheists in general) need to insult the faiths of people who believe in God. Is your faith in yourself further strengthened when you discuss the faiths of others, be it if they have faith in God or Gods or Gaia or whatever else?

   

How do you figure I'm insulting your faith?
I'm not,I could care less who you put your faith into,whatever helps you to get through another day is fine with me.

I wonder why peeps like you(edit: I'm not saying you specifically,but religious types in general)feel the need to think anyone who doesnt agree with your religion is somehow against it.

   

Religion,huh.

If you have been to a Catholic wedding you know they kinda have a good way of showing you what the rest of your married life will be like....not enough crackers or wine.

Now my wedding had a minister from the united church and I swear they used to take all the guys they saved out of the dumpsters and sent them here for their trial as a rev after they dried out.

It's tradition in a small Alberta town for the rev to hang around for the wedding reception for some free eats and with any luck,he may get laid.
My Rev....I came back from the photographs to find him in my mobile pounding back tequila shooters and smoking a big spliff in my place with some gals from the wedding party.
We had to pack him off the dance floor at about 8 that night and lay him out in the back of the dj's van.

Now,Im making fun of religion,at least my guy didnt take it too serious.

   

Nonsense

We rely on our ability to solve issue with reason and trial. One can spin philospohy as to question what's 'real' all day. The facts that are at hand tell us that religion, in all it's forms was created by people, not a super-natural being that we can neither see, touch, measure or hear.

The assumptions that you may believe that you ground your worldview on are simply 'givens' that you accept because human history and progression has allowed you to witness and everyday experience without having to prove them yourself, because science has got ther long before you ever thought even thought about it.

Religion is irrational becuse as a precept it deamnds 'faith', where those faiths differ from religion to religion and by those differnces the assumptions that you make cannot stand scrutiny. Try having an Israeli tell a Palestinian that the land Israel sits on today was given to them by 'god', the Palestinian will tell him the very same thing. How do you determine with a rational appraoach whose religion is right and wrong?

   

I'm perfectly fine if people want to have thier religion. It's when relgious people start judging people on thier 'beliefs' that I cross swords with them. If your a christian and you don't believe in gay-marriage, spiffy, if your a guy don't marry another dude. But if you start making claims that a higher power has told you that gays are 'sinners' because they are gay thats when i pull out the guns.

Or if you think 'intelligent design' should be taught as a 'theory' in schools is when i start looking for the Fred Phelps behind the statements

   

   

   

Except assumptions and beliefs are not synonymous with religious faith whatsoever.

I have the belief that if I look out the window, I'll see my patio and some potted plants and not an African savanna. I hold that belief solely from my direct experiences in the past, but I'm not going to insist that I still see the deck if I'm faced with giraffes and tigers at some point. I don't have any "faith" in my patio and potted plants, because I believe in its existence only because of my direct experiences in the past, and because I've never experienced any evidence that refutes that belief.

On the other hand, if I held the belief that some day in the future I will definitely see that savanna, that would be a baseless, irrational belief. Even though it can't be proven that I'm wrong, I've got no solid evidence that this should be so, and I've got plenty of solid evidence that it will still just be a patio and potted plants.

Faith in something without basis or evidence is not rational belief, and it's not similar to rational belief. Holding rational beliefs means minimizing the number of baseless assumptions that need to be made, and adapting the beliefs when new evidence arises.

   

The essential epistemological questions cannot be answered via observation of the world around you. The answers must be reached via abstract reasoning, which requires that one construct a worldview, analyze it for coherency, and then reject/revise it if it fails to account for everything. That is the only way to reasonably form a life philosophy. Attempting to build out from oneself without any worldview to account for the existence of reality is truly irrational.

I would argue your point that all religion was created by people, but that diverts us away from the current point.

I am speaking of fundamental philosophical assumptions, not of scientific assumptions, which have no meaning in and of themselves.

"Religious" assumptions can be scrutinized. The inability to do so requires surpassing mental torpitude. I can understand one not having the time to analyze religion, but complaining that you cannot by its very nature is a decidely anti-intellectual stance. Likewise, I would criticize the religious man who refuses to defend his beliefs.

I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED. Use the same manner you would use to critique any philosophy or worldview -> Analyze it for contradictions within itself and how it accounts for the world around it. If Christianity states that we have a good, loving, perfect, and all-powerful God, then it must be prepared to deal with all the implications of such.

   

Don't y'all have a vote?

I do understand the frustration when Christian groups act to silence others to "protect" their worldview. The struggle against the anti-intellectualism forced upon us by modern philosophy is very difficult. The Christian should be intelligent and able to defend and evangelize without resorting to such tactics.

   

That's a nice lie you have right there though. I particularly like how the scales aren't defined properly, there is no justification for the formation of the line, and the actual reality of the past is unaccounted for.

And the Common Era thing is a nice touch.

   

So how are you distinguishing religious faith from rational assumptions and beliefs? Are you contending that I have no rational reason to believe in God? Because I would love to hash that out.

But here again, we are getting a bit far from my basic point, which was that you cannot know that reality is actually reality without first creating a worldview that accounts for such. At that point you may then analyze the worldview itself for its validity, but so often people move purely into the materialistic world without bothering to fight out what actually needs to be addressed first.

   

I wouldn't; if it were a rational belief, it wouldn't be called faith, and you could objectively demonstrate the reality of your belief.
A worldview that only the natural world exists is certainly more valid than a worldview that a supernatural world necessarily exists because we have evidence of a natural world and none of a supernatural world. Just because you can come up with multiple hypotheses doesn't make them equally likely.

   

I question your dichotomy between faith and reason. What should I call my belief in an actual God that exists and has affected this world in several recorded events in actual space-time? I justify my belief rationally, thus it is not faith? We need a functional definition we can work with. Should I just call it faith-plus?

A worldview without a supernatural component cannot account for the existence of the natural world nor for the purpose on mankind in such a world. In order to have evidence, we must first assume that it is actually evidence and provide justification for such.

Multiple hypotheses are of course, not equally likely, because only one can be correct. I am arguing that these hypotheses CAN be subjected to reason and SHOULD be.

   

I don't trust that you have evidence of supernatural meddling with the natural world, because every instance (medicine, weather, etc) believed to be evidence of the supernatural influence is later revealed to be quite contained in the natural world. It's much, much more likely that you misinterpreted natural events, and personal anecdotes are therefore useless in such a discussion.

Not a valid argument - who says the universe can't exist without a creator? How can you propose that the supernatural exists without a super-supernatural world, through which its existence came to be?

You're baselessly assuming that the universe must be a certain way, but making exceptions to that assumption in order to allow your God to exist.

Argumentum ad Consequentiam - other than your discomfort with the notion that "mankind" has no purpose beyond its role in the natural world, this argument does nothing to support belief in the supernatural. Really, you don't have any proof that "mankind" has any supernatural purpose, only a desire for that to be true.

   

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