It has been interesting reading all of the letters since my post. People have some good, valid points.

I guess what really makes me nuts is the fact that religious stuff is in the public forum. I don't care if people want to go completely crazy and worship paperclips, etc., but for the love of dog STOP talking about it! Yes yes I understand we have freedom of speech, but whywhywhywhywhy can't religious people just practice their religions inside their places of worship and leave it there? This is a secular society, not a theocracy. Our laws aren't based in religion.

Anybody care to comment on this?

Why do people of "faith" find it so hard to keep it to themselves? Like I wrote earlier, if your religion forbids you to do something, then by all means don't do it! But leave other people alone!

(I'm not sure where I first heard/read this, but I have a friend who says it from time to time and it always makes me laugh: "God *was* my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.")

I hope you get starred for that one. What you wrote in that one post makes more sense than all the religions of the world throughout the ages put together. Too bad more people don't see it that way. I do think the world would be a better place without religion. As I wrote in my first post, I sincerely believe the net result of the existence of religion has been negative.

So let's do away with the dogma and start fixing earth!

(By the way, does anyone know why the hell Mozilla Firefox doesnt allow me to use apostrophes sometimes? It just gets it into its head sometimes, and instead of putting in an apostrophe, it brings up a search box when I type one. Drives me crazy. It also disallows my cursor arrows, though it allows other punctuation marks and functions. I would hit "slash offtopic," but it disallows slashes too)

Anyway: Again, let me say that I believe in intuition, in God, and in the efficacy of prayer, but I have absolutely no desire to believe for one second in anything false. I do believe that prayer, Marys annunciation, Mohammeds "channeling," and Moses" burning bush depend upon communication effected without the five senses. I also believe, however, that if we cant measure such communication now, theres no reason to assume that we wont be able to within the near future, within our lifetimes perhaps.

christian, I find the Amazing Randi much less credible than Richard Dawkins. Be that as it may, though, wasnt there a study done recently that showed that prayer had positive, curative effects? Admittedly, prayer is explicitly religious, and this is different from conducting a study strictly on non-religious telepathy. But essentially, is it not telepathy, i.e., communication with something external to you, using thought instead of the five senses? Are you aware of the studies I refer to?

To jg, and others who have been annoyed that Salon would run an article about religion, I would remind you that they ran the article about Richard Dawkins and his attempts to debunk religion long before they ran this article.

The reason we talk about religion is that many billions of people on the earth subscribe to one religion or the other. Of _course_ we talk about it! Even if religion fell away as a practice no longer needed (and I am completely open to deluxe"s conclusion that if a society like Greece"s, or a Bach, succeeds, it is not because of divine inspiration, but simply the inspiration within themselves, just given channel by their religious frameworks), it would still fascinate me, as a student of history, as it would many others.

And, okay, someone may argue that Moses, Mary and Mohammed were actually hearing the voices, and that it was not outside the five senses. Prayer, however, is not necessarily spoken.

"That's the difference between rational belief and religion The willingness to adapt to new information, and the slavish devotion to what is known, rather than what is sacred."

-- Ben

But what about those who HAVE known the sacred? I have experienced religious nirvana only a few times in my life, but it felt just as REAL as anything else I've expereinced. So isn't it therefor rationale to be devoted to the sacred. It was mysterious, but still quite real.

LRS

(I don't want to be accused of ignoring the "google is your friend" rule when mentioning the prayer studies to christianjb--I am aware of google, but I hesitate to provide links, as links friendly to the possibility of prayer tend to be from Church Lady. Awaiting response from christian to see what he thinks.)

Arty is right about the impossibility of proving definitively there is no God, but I think he's missing the point of the numerology example. The point is there are lots of ideas which cannot be definitely disproven in an airtight, mathematical sense. One can posit the existence of all sorts of things. Perhaps there exists a divine and omnipotent creator...perhaps the old "none of this is real, you're just a brain in a jar" college freshman idea is correct...perhaps the number 3 is somehow linked to the divine, or maybe 7 is, or 11...Maybe I am your God and you ought to send me your money lest your incur my wrath. When confronted with the possible existence of some construct that is imbued with suposedly supernatural aspects, there is no way to disprove its existence. The best, it seems, one can do in evaluating an idea's worth is to examine all of the evidence in support of, or against said idea.

Those of us who view religious claims under this lense, see atheism as a narrow part of the same impulse that keeps us from believing in all sorts of unsupported claims. It's not a seperate belief system for us so much as it is a very specific example of what's widely called "common sense", or even "sanity".

I'm an atheist for the exact same reason I don't believe in ghosts, or that the world will end tomorrow, or that it'd be a really good idea to send spammers my credit card number.

At one point Arty seems to conflate Atheist's attempts at "proving" there is no deity with proving there is no meaning in anyone's life. I don't know if this is his view, but many religious people seem to believe that without God, life has no meaning. This, to my sort of brand of Atheist, makes as little sense as saying that rejecting the divinity of the number 11 is tantamount to saying life is meaningless. Again, atheism for me, is not a moral code, or a daily ritual. It has little to do with why I get out of bed in the morning, or how I treat other people. It's the rejection of what seems to be untrue. Meaning, for my own life, comes from other sources.