Letters to the Editor
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Going beyond God
If propaganda tries to relentlessly shove something down your throught but your own personal experience tells you otherwise, believe your own personal experience. I've always detested organized religion. Growing up in a fundamentalist family, I was amazed at the insistence religion put on female inferiority. I was made to go to church as a young girl where I was given the unmistakable message every female in organized religion is given; that I was inferior, second class goods. I would go to school the next day and get the highest grades in every class I took and every exam, quiz etc. If I was such an inferior being, put on Earth to play a submissive role to a male, why the academic giftedness? Why would God/ess go to the bother if giving me more brains than the boys in the class if I was to be their slave? It dawned on me, though quite young, that the male half of the population invented and interpreted all of organized religion solely to benefit themselves at the female half of the populations expense.
I have a sister, now in her 40's, who fervently believes in Catholicism and female submission. She won't go to the bathroom and take a shit unless her husband gives her permission. She loves it that way. She is also very timid. She is hiding behind religion to stay timid. I think dumb, timid women love organized religion because it gives them a place to hide. The thing is, they oppress their daughters.
All you women out their who support organized religon, grow a spine. You're all cowards. That's like a black person supporting the KKK or a Jew supporting the Nazi's. You're afraid to go against the status quo.
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Superstition can go...
I disagree, my friend. impatient also alluded to the persistence of superstition against scientific findings. Well they treat evolution that way, and they treated Galileo and Copernicus that way. Unfortunately, delusional needs for belonging are a fact of life and religion.
However, I can't think that the answer is simply to avoid undertaking research that would make superstitious religious people mad. The answer is to undertake it, and follow it wherever it leads, whether it pisses you off, or me, or Dawkins, or Armstrong, or impatient, or Ben, or all of us at once.
And I do think that the task is simply defined: can consciousness survive the human body? Can thought be transmitted (though, of course, still by physical and natural, but as yet unmeasured means)? If not, then Mohammed's thoughts must have come only from his own mind, and not from any angel. Seems like research that could be done. If I were a scientist whose funding was being interfered with, I'd be hopping to solve the riddle.
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Circularity
I can't believe people are actually arguing here about whether or not "there is a God." It's a little like arguing whether there's any such thing as an astrological sign. Or a soul. None of the above can be scientifically proven to exist or not exist because they are not things, they are concepts -- concepts that exist solely for the benefit of those who feel a need for them.
Look, it's real simple. If you don't believe in God, you're right -- for you, there is no God.
If you do believe in one or more deities, then you are right also -- for you they are "real," as you choose to understand them.
Religion and spirituality are only problems when they become instruments of social repression and conformity. But atheism can be an instrument of social repression and conformity also, as it has been in communist societies. If we have to get "everyone" to agree on a single set of spiritual beliefs or non-beliefs, we're in big trouble. It will never happen.
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Telepathy vs. email...
Anon2: If someone 200 years ago believed in email...they were wrong to do so. It doesn't matter that email exists now; at the time of their beliefs, it did not and they had no reason to believe it did. We now "believe" in email because it exists. One's belief in natural phenomena must be based on measurable evidence, otherwise you may end up believing in things that aren't real. 200 years ago, email was one of those things.
Since there is no measurable evidence of the divine, there is no reason to believe it exists. The same goes for telepathy. Until there is some measurable evidence of telepathy, there's no reason to believe in it. Furthermore, of the many people around the world who claim to have experienced telepathy and other "para-normal" phenomena, none have ever come forward with any evidence, and many have been debunked by testing.
I understand the allure of these mysterious ideas and your reluctance to give them up. You should take solice in the existence of email;in many ways WAY cooler than telepathy. This happens often enough. The actual possibilities of the universe tend to be WAY more beautiful, weird, and wonderous than the stale and dubious miracles of scripture.
Looking for wonder? Study science.
As for the Santa analogy, you can't be sure of debunking Santa because he reputedly has magical powers and may use them to hide his existence.
You see how any omnipotent creature capable of hiding it's own existence is impossible to "disprove" using science? The best we can say is, there's no measurable evidence to cause us to postulate Santa's existence, or God's. They have no measurable interaction with the known world, all signs point towards the idea that they're man made myths, and belief in them just doesn't make rational sense.
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I don't hate Christianity, I just hate the Christians
Anyone who can read the sacred texts of the major religions and say (as Armstrong does) with a straight face that they all boil down to some mushy, vacuous New Age stuff about expressing the ineffable and the golden rule, is just a fraud plain and simple. That stuff's in there (buried here and there), but it's a tremendous stretch to say it forms some common denominator. Anyway I can arrive at these really rather simple attitudes through philosophy, science, art, or really just plain common sense.
What's specific to religion is the whole set of absurd dogmas, the belief in absolute (revealed) truth, the superstitions, the pointless rituals, the ecclesiastical apparatus, the demand for obedience and belief, the formation of a religious community (ususally hostile to non-believers), and, basically, the whole authoritarian attitude according to which all the answers have been given and they're contained in such and such a book, or in the words of its interpreters.
Saying, "hey, that's just you're narrow Western interpretation of religion" is ridiculous. Ultimately even a Buddhist or Confucian is not going to entertain the possibility that the Buddha or Confucius was flat wrong about something. That's the essence of religion: blind slavishness.