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• Monday, June 30, 2008 10:39 AM

  @Taliesan

  >>To you Jesus is the son of God. To me, and a lot of the people of his time, he is a guy who went out into the desert without adequate provisions, claimed to have heard the voice of the devil tell him to eat rocks, and came back claiming to be the son of God.

  No, I am not a Christian. However, as you, yourself, can see it's easy to explain things away which you neither understand nor witnessed. While I don't believe I certainly don't fault those who do. I'm not two-faced in that regard.

  >>Go back a bit and everyone was listening to a guy who listened to a burning bush of indeterminate species, possibly the original wacky weed. Real reliable.

  Possibly. Possibly it was a man and God talking, too. I wasn't there and I can only base an opinion on what different people say "possibly" happened.

  >>Now, we don't accept the existance of things based on that sort of testimony. Particularly when that something wants money. And particularly when that something's best argument is that you can't disprove its existance - a shitty argument at the best of times seen as one could just as easily worship the flying spagetti monster.

  This paragraph made me do some thinking. We accept the existence of many things on this sort of testimony. Why? It's human nature. Take global warming, for example. Those of us who have been on the Earth for a half-century or so don't notice anything different in the climate from when we were younger. If any change is there it's too small to see with our own eyes. So, we have people telling us that global warming is affecting the environment this very day only it's affecting it somewhere other than where I, or really anyone else, lives. In the Arctic, the Antarctic, The Amazon rain forest the media is telling us global warming is endangering things now. Meanwhile, here where I live, we've seen a cooler than normal spring and early summer. I don't doubt that where you live doesn't seem any different, either. Floods, heat waves, storms... These things aren't new. Why do the effects of "global" warming only seem to be showing up where no one lives? I can't answer that question. It's strange. It's almost like someone wants us to believe in some tremendous thing that no one can see but that "might" affect our lives in some seemingly humongous way sometime down the road. No, not when we die but when our grandchildren die. I guess we're just supposed to "have faith" that this is true?

  Now we have people wanting money for something we don't, and can't, see simply because they tell us it is there and we need money to take care of it. See the correlation to religion? It's all based on what we believe or choose not to believe. I see people talking about "catastrophic" global warming and I've been looking outside for fifty years and I don't see any difference. Do you? Does anyone? Did we really not have heat waves and floods a thousand years ago?

  I'm sorry but I just don't have that much faith in it.

  Speaking as a paleogeologist I threw something out in an earlier post in this thread that is both true and should turn some of the science we know on its head and yet it doesn't. Why doesn't it? Well, it's because it flies in the face of a lot of things we believe now. Things that are scientifically accepted as fact even though, well, it's made up. We don't like to change our beliefs but some of us will gladly jump on a bandwagon that comes along when we're not happy with things as they are.

  Let's talk about polar bears for a moment. Here we have a population of a species that has at least quadrupled in the last forty years that has been added to the Endangered Species List because of things that MIGHT happen. People, if that's not a "leap of faith" I don't know what is. These bears aren't endangered now. I don't understand. Perhaps I have no faith. Perhaps what I see isn't what is really happening.

  I have many people telling me things are happening that I cannot see. I have people telling me Jesus was the Son of God and I have people telling me we evolved from apes and I have people telling me that the Earth is going to suffer a catastrophic meltdown sometime in the future. No one can quite put a finger on these things and show us, "Aha! See? Here is absolutely irrefutable proof that it's true!" So, we have faith that it is.

  Those of us who have faith in evolution point at those who believe in God and shake our heads in wonder. Those of us who believe in God look at those who believe evolution is fact and shake our heads in wonder. Neither group can imagine the other has taken that same sort of leap of faith.

  The common ground through it all, as you unknowingly pointed out, is money. They all want you to give them money. Both religion and global warming run on money.

  Call me a hopeless skeptic. If you can't show me WHY something is and WHERE it is and WHAT it does and WHERE it's going and it happens to be something I CAN'T SEE and understand myself then I believe there's always alternative ideas and those ideas should be exhausted before we jump on any bandwagons that exclude the very idea of simply looking for another explanation. That isn't science. That is the very definition of "religion."

  —traumatic Read traumatic's other letters
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