Curhurock-opboink

This starts with just bhxob and forniss, doing counterpoint and point respectively.  Anyone of you can join in, and are encouraged to.  No one is right,  no one is wrong.

Point:

After nearly 52 years of wandering through tons of literature and miles upon miles of life, I have come to a solemn conclusion. The most important question in my life has changed. It was “Is god real?” (I will use the word god as both singular and plural to satisfy all of your concepts!) Now the question has evolved. “Does it matter, do I even care about the belief in god, real or not?”

I do in an oblique way believe in supreme evil as well, i see it in the hearts of men and women all around me, in fact, its the ONLY place I see evil, nature is not evil, only the heart of mankind

Counterpoint:

I should start his off by saying that I am agnostic. I believe that I don’t honestly know.

Atheism is a belief, of a specific non-belief.

Point:

Stepping back, I have to look outward and think of this in a “We” formation for a bit. Looking out at the 6 billion or so folk who trod this worn out planet, arou

All major nd 97.3% of those folk believe in some form of deity. The other 2.7% believe in atheism, which some classify as a religion with man as god. Either way you count it, most folks believe in something supernatural, that forgoes any rational explanation. So, whether it matters to me or not, it does matter to nearly everyone else. It matters to humanity that there is deity.

Counterpoint:

All religions are just sets of beliefs, each acting as a model or guide to some aspect of the universe the user is expected to intersect with. If it is not a model, or functional in some way, it is just exposition. Fiction, in this way, also has it’s place in many religious beliefs.

Models, religious or not, can be useful tools in our individual journeys through the ridiculously small bit of the universe that we interact with. Weather models, for instance, are functional guides for predicting inclement weather and hazards. They can also be wrong, but they act as a general guide to a system which is much to complicated to be reduced into a more empirical system, at the current time. This is an example of a scientific model, however. One which was developed through research and study over long periods of time. It produces useful information, regarding happenings in the weather on this planet.

Point:

The profitable reality of belief and religion reaches back to the first shaman who accepted a hindquarter of deer for a spiritual service rendered, or curse cast. The processing and manipulating of the need to believe is singularly the most profitable enterprise mankind has ever invented. Does the hypocrisy of organized religions/beliefs have a tinker’s damn of a relationship to whether god exists?

Counterpoint:

We have many other models that determine our human action. Destructive and inane are the realms of most of them. Either useless, for providing real information to the user, or completely ineffective. The situation that most humans are living in right now, for instance. We have societies of people who have no rational explanation for its belief in a god which does not present itself in measurable ways, yet they are willing to warrant their own exceptional behaviors in that god’s name.

March 17th, 2008 by forniss | Anthropology, Capitalism, Politics, Religion, Spiritualism | 2 comments