I misunderstood what you meant by comparing someone in the 19th century envisioning email to present day religious believers.

In my example, the 19th century dude has FAITH that email EXISTS in the 19th century. He is certain of this, despite the fact that it does not exist. I'm not talking about someone that imagines such things might be possible. I'm talking about someone with devout certainty in the existence of something for which there is no real evidence.

That is what I think is folly, not someone who imagines what might be possible, but someone who believes fervently in what is unsupported.

To take this example further, I think it's understandable that thousands of years ago, people believed in the divine and in all sorts of superstitions. They were simply making the best of the available evidence and knowledge about the world at the time. They were being, visionaries, not crackpots and I have no real beef with them. I would probably have done the same. Many creation stories are based on the idea of supreme beings, giving birth to things in the way they must have observed animals and people giving birth to living offspring.

Over the centuries, people found that lots of the old explanations weren't true. They got better at figuring out how they had been taken in by this or that. They got more careful at eliminating explanations that turned out to be bogus. They figured out that the Sun goes down at night, not becuase it's being pulled by a chariot, but because the earth is rotating. They figured out that the earth goes around the sun, and not the other way around. They figured out that people get infections from tiny bacteria entering their wounds and not from "tired blood" or weak constitutions or a witch's curse.

Some set about trying to find a general way to try to avoid being fooled by false explanations for things. By being logical about things, by bending over backwards to be scrupilously honest and diligent in their studies they made tremendous gains in what was know about the world.

But 1 area was kept officially prohibited from their scrutiny. Religion was for the most part, off limits. Occassionally they would uncover something about the world that coincedentally conflicted with the old stories; that the world is billions of years old and not just 4000 years old...the discovery of the earth's rotation around the sun was another heresy. By and large though, they avoided incurring the wrath of believers and the Church.

I suppose it's not suprising that many people still cling to the old beliefs here in the US. Really, they are no more to blame than those who lived 2000 years ago, because despite living in the one of the most prosperous, and technologically advanced nations in the history of the world, many seem largely ignorant of the sort of logical skepticism which causes faith to fall by the wayside.

Forgive me if others have already made this observation, but when I read that hatred for religion is pathological, I am reminded that organized secularism never burned anyone at the stake for a failure to be sufficiently heterodox.

For all her seemingly-thoughtful rhetoric about getting beyond ego, Ms. Armstrong is clearly taking sides, and siding with those who share her beliefs. In this sense, she is not unlike those she herself describes who have an "infantile" conception of God and put their own wishes into His mouth. How egotistical is that? She's right about one thing: religion and spirituality are hard, especially if one is to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy. I know virtually nobody who's ever gotten it right.

>burned anyone at the stake for failure to be sufficiently heterodox

OK, so it's already been said here already that Stalin and Mao's murders are the murders of atheistic regimes, but rebutted that those murders weren't murders intrinsic to atheistic beliefs. But Falun Gong? Persecution of other Chinese Christian sects because of their straying from Communist Chinese doctrine? You've not heard of this? Please. As is often said in Israel/Palestine discussions, just because the one side has its crimes, it doesn't mean the other side must be pure and virtuous.

Thanks again Ben.

By being logical about things, by bending over backwards to be scrupilously honest and diligent in their studies they made tremendous gains in what was know about the world.

But 1 area was kept officially prohibited from their scrutiny. Religion was for the most part, off limits. Occassionally they would uncover something about the world that coincedentally conflicted with the old stories; that the world is billions of years old and not just 4000 years old...the discovery of the earth's rotation around the sun was another heresy. By and large though, they avoided incurring the wrath of believers and the Church.

This seems to agree with my point that instead of shutting down scientific scrutiny of religious beliefs, the atheists can continue to make a positive contribution by scrutinizing them.

Let's say that deluxe is right: say that Ancient Greece prospered under a religious model that may have focused their creativity, but which had falsehoods as fundamental tenets, and false gods as gods. Say also that Johann Sebastian Bach, who used to write a piece of music per week for church (imagine: a piece of Johann Sebastian Bach music per week!), was using as his focus a false god, and a religion with falsehoods as fundamental tenets.

We established a few things early on, here: since the Bible offers self-contradictory instruction (viz: the conflicting views of Judas' death in the books of Acts and Matthew), it must be partly false and unreliable, or at best allegorical and figurative in places. However, since Pontius Pilate was indeed the Roman governor of Judea, the church's teachings cannot be completely false either.

Moreover, in our personal lives, we should be free to reject such dietary and other laws as no longer make sense, I think (do we really want to insist that no-one eat Easter ham, or sleep with a menstruating wife, per the Old Testament?). On the other hand, if Bach or other artists used religious structures, and even religious practices such as prayer or meditation, in advancing their art, these religious practices are surely to be emulated. The false and unnecessary are to be discarded, and the efficacious retained. Inspiration can come in many ways, sometimes through dreams, but I don't know any artist worth the name who simply barfs forth their art without undergoing some introspective moment, whether they call it "meditation," or "prayer," or just "thinking."

Scientific thought can certainly help us discover what's efficacious, what's not, and which they simply don't know about, if scientists put their minds to helping humanity. If one's atheism leads one to an Ayn Rand Deep Selfishness, or some other every-man-for-himself ethic, then that's not a priority. But I hope there are enough people of goodwill from every mindset.