Is there a bridge? - Beliefnet Forums: "I was born and bred atheist. I had many friends who were religious and had no problems talking to them about their religion and what they were getting from it. It never occurred to me that they were wrong in their beliefs, but none of them came close to working for me. I never cared about the existence of God. If God worked for a friend of mine, no problem, God bless herm. Even fundamentalist Christians. If they tried to convert me, I simply said I was not ready yet and asked what their faith did for them. They put my name on the next convert board in their mind which was no skin off my nose, and happily told me all the wonderful things about their faith. I had to suppress my gag reflex occasionally as impolite, but I am used to that.
I have learned much about living from my conversations with theists, and my study of the Mass in order to sing it properly, but the God belief never made any sense to me. God just is irrelevant to my life.
There seem to be good reasons for the fact that God is useful to a large segment of the US population. Whether these reasons will be sufficient in a society where information is a free good is an open question, and I suspect not. However, religions will become irrelevant due to their own inadequacies, not because of anything I or the atheist ranters can say about them. To quote Ian Flemming "Live and Let Die."
I have better things to do than to help them die. "
Getting Iraq right
23 hours ago
2 comments:
Everytime an alternative to a God belief is presented and accepted, the original God belief must be modified to accept and adopt the alternative or the God belief must be rejected if no accommodation to the alternative is found. Either way, it is a win-win for the forces of human good.
The original God belief needs to be modified only if the original God insists on exclusivity. True, this is a significant proportion of the Western Gods all of which are derived from the Abrahamic God of the Torah, but even though exclusivity is a major tenet it is the only one that needs modification to open the door to a whole new world of knowledge.
Please note that many atheists suffer from this same exclusivity tenet. That is that no Gods is the only answer. I think many atheists deprived themselves of much valuable information about living and dying by rejecting all Gods and the associated religious beliefs associated with them.
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