Neoplatonist mysticism ftw!!! I think all this discussion about Jesus can easily be solved if we all become enlightened and anoint each other with spikenard and start calling each other Christos. I could use a title, honestly it might help my self esteem and everyone could use some enlightenment. Seriously though I think ancient mystery traditions are the way to go. They have had scores of interesting stories and more than a few dying and resurrecting god-kings as well as some great parables about life, the universe, and everything (Join the Hitchhikers Empire!!). Or we could all be Thelemites or any of the myriad Hermetic sects, its a good mix of Judeo-Christian dogma and ancient mystery tradition scraps stolen from some of the most interesting secret societies of the western and sometimes eastern world and it happens to be a mostly private affair so we wouldn't even have to talk to each other about it. Really in the grand scheme of things who cares if its 100% accurate as long as its useful to you, right? The great quest for truth is a noble thing for sure but the quest for a meaningful life, even if that meaning is sometimes illusionary, tends to win out for me. Even science tends to lean towards useful over 100% accurate. Theories are good as long as they are useful even if they are not exactly thorough enough to be considered laws. Interestingly enough I have stumbled across a group of folks that believes they have found the messiah and hes shacked up in London chilling with the locals between trips around the world spreading peace and general groovyness and whatever else an avatar does. http://www.shareintl.org/
If anyone else stumbles across any godlike beings lemme know, I am always interested in the second coming, I see the rapture as a great way to ease population explosion and it could make for some interesting after parties.

I didn't say two wrongs make a truth. I said between two falsehoods you sometimes find a truth and I meant in spite of the wrongs not really because of them although if you hadn't noticed the wrongs you may have never sought the truth at all. The point being that looking into alternative beliefs can be valuable even if you do not adopt any of them as your own. I am also not debating the usefulness of probability I am just pointing out that no matter how much data you collect there is always the possibility that at some point the improbable thing occurs and that not only is it possible for the improbable thing to occur it often does occur at some seemingly random point. I am not discounting probability but its not the same thing as assurance of an event taking or not taking place. It is improbable that a man ever comes back to life based on the number who have not but then again it happens more and more frequently even if most of them do happen to be vegetative. You also have a weak rebuttal to the water into wine remark. You are talking about turning water AND grapes into wine or water AND orange juice concentrate into wine, I am assuming you would add yeast for fermentation acceleration and sugar for taste too. A better rebuttal would have been to say that it never happened but again you wouldn't be able to prove it to me any more than I can prove it happened without some ancient kool-aid mix. I would also argue that the two greatest motives in ORGANIZED religions as opposed to more personal belief systems would be political control of a group of people and preservation of traditions and cultural norms through religious imperatives. Fear and ignorance of science really only strike me as relevant when it comes to some actions by Christianity that I would argue really had little to do with fear and willful ignorance by leaders at the time and more to do with the two motives I proposed. True fear of science seems pretty silly to me when you consider that many ancient religions actually formed the basis of all our scientific knowledge up until a few hundred years ago. Math, geometry, logic, rhetoric, language, physics, chemistry, and many other sciences actually thrived in some of the most religious civilizations in ancient times such as the Greeks and Egyptians.

There are just too many excellent ideas here for me to reply to, without detracting from what has been said. Maybe I'm not quite as smart or as well informed as others who have contributed here, but I'm gonna print these posts out (for my personal reference only). I don't want to take a chance on losing it, as a reference, in case some god-awful thing happened to make it unavailable. I suspect I'll be re-reading, and learning from it, for some time to come.

 Thank you, all! [ snif ... just couldn't resist saying that   ]

Faith is corrosive to the human mind. If someone genuinely believes that it is right to believe things without reason or evidence then they are open to every kind of dogma, whim, coercion, or dangerous infectious idea that's around. If someone is convinced that it is acceptable to base their beliefs on what is written in an ancient book, or what some teacher tells them they must believe, then they will have no true freedom of thought; they will be trapped by their faith into inconsistency and untruths because they are unable to throw out false ideas when evidence against them comes along.



Just put more money in the collection plate please!

Not at all LightVader! I was just trying to point out that I don't think any of us are truely athiests. And in response to your remark, do you really think that out of all the billlions upon billions of other planets in the cosmos, that there is not at least one planet that has intelligent life on it. And that heaven forbid (sorry about the pun) one day our arrogance might let us belive that they could be more intelligent than us.   

Ps. And if they do decide to meet us, hopefully we won't shoot them as we seam to do in every science fiction film made. I'm not one of those "people", but I try to be a realist.

you're absolutely wrong. 'faith' is a necessary aspect of a healthy mind. faith and trust are essentially the same thing on a psychological level. perhaps to you, there's a difference between founded and unfounded trust, but to have 'faith' (trust) in a religions belief because everyone else around you does is still a foundation. accusing people of being irrational and superstitious is unproductive.

faith/trust is a necessary part of a healthy mind. if you didn't trust that gravity would work the same from moment to moment, you might end up too paralyzed with fear to take another step walking. sure, perhaps gravity has worked the way you think it works during every step you've ever taken in your life, but there's still a psychological "leap of faith" to go from 'every step taken so far' to 'every step i might ever take.' ref. R. D. Laing or Anthony Giddens for more on ontological security.

IIRC, Laing developed the concept of ontological insecurity in the 60s while working with people with schizophrenea. he found that schizophrenea, on a social-cognitive level, effectively represented occurances when people no longer felt "in" the world. such persons felt as if they were real, and the world is real, but the two realities operate on totally different levels. Giddens takes the concept farther by examining the ways in which everyone unintentionally builds a sense of ontological security into their identities. this isn't a feeling you can easily identify by thinking about it, so much as an emotional operating assumption. you must assume you are rea, that the actions you make in reality will have real effects, and that there is a connection between the actions you take and the effects they produce.

of course, belief in a god isn't necessary for belief in your own existence, but i hope you can see the relationship. a creator-god is an easy way to explain and cement your existence in the world, and one that can't easily be questioned except by indirect means.

so faith to the human mind is the opposite of corrosive; it's constituent. faith in god is another issue. if there absolutely is no god, then faith in a god is certainly corrosive to intellectual integrity. however, any absolute belief in the unknowable is corrosive of such integrity, so belief in no-god is just as bad for you.

personally, i take a medical approach. i don't care the specifics of what you believe in. i care about what your beliefs lead you to do. if you believe in god and that leads your to harbor hate for any of your fellow human beings, then you've got something wrong. same's true of an atheist, and conversely it doesn't matter what you believe if you love your fellow people. i think all our concern about each other's beliefs boils down to that: we worry, "if he doesn't believe in X, what's going to lead him to the same values as i? how can i trust such a person?" we've seen posts of people saying things like this.

if you question how a person can live and be happy just for being slightly different than you, i say you need more faith. faith in human beings, that is. you should see that people are capable of being Good despite any common beliefs or cultural norms.

We all believe in things without reason, whether it's winning the lottery or that your team will win the championship. Religion just takes it a step further than most. The problem is that approaching from the opposite side is just as ridiculous. Pick a country you've never visited that you believe exists and then provide evidence or reason for this belief which doesn't rely on further leaps of faith (i.e. "It's on the map" requires we believe the map maker was telling the truth, which we have no reason to presuppose).

That's more a problem with the person rather than belief itself though. If you believe something because you've been told to, then naturally you'll be forced into an inconsistency whenever you encounter a question or situation the teacher didn't expect. If your belief on the other hand is a conclusion based on your own interpretation, reasoning and assessment then such a situation merely requires a re-assessment of the belief.
You seem to be making the mistake many non-believers (and for that matter many believers themselves) make in assuming that what is written in a holy text is intended to be inviolate, literal law. In most religions this is simply not the case (certainly in the major religions), the idea is that the texts provide insight on the nature and desires of the 'God' which are to be constantly interpreted as new information or situations are encountered. This is the main function of the priesthood of the faith, to interpret the divine revelations of the texts as they apply to a given situation or piece of information. One of the main reasons for the existence of the main religions today is because the principles and knowledge contained in their books is capable of being interpreted in such a way (or at least the priests were clever enough to interpret it in such a way) that it has never been rendered invalid by the growth of our knowledge about the universe.

Now you sound like a preacher. Just repeating what your religion has implanted in your mind. I and many others have a very healthy mind, but faith played no part in it. Gravity can be proven to exist, we experience it in every step. It was discovered by an apple, and Mr Newton, it requires no trust. Gravity exists because the earth rotates on its axis. Religion on the other hand, has no such foundation or proof.

People are good by nature. Faith in people has nothing to do with my faith in religion.

Comedic Interlude -
Stage Scene: "Gollum" [Lord of The Rings] and "Dale" [Chip&Dale Cartoon] are having a discussion about Religion. Fade in, as Gollum asks a question ...

"What's 'Spike-Nerd', Precious?"

"'Spik-en-ard!?' Even you couldn't say no to that."

"Oh yess we could! Give it to us wwwraaawh, and wwwwwriggling! ... Keep nasty Chips!"

actually if you'd been paying attention, you might have caught the fact that i'm pretty muich an atheist as well. my claim that faith is a necessary part of a healthy mind is one based on secular psychological theory and research. you're caught up on the religious meaning of faith, but there are non-religious valences of the word as well. basic trust, which isn't different than "faith" on an emotional/psychological level (that is, what it does to you), is what is essential to a healthy mind, and i think i made that clear in my previous post. did you even read more than the first two sentences?

is this supposed to promote religion? for some reason, saying "everyone believes when they face violent obliteration" sounds just a little oppresive to me (sort of like Winston's re-education at the end of 1984).

I didn't want to take the time to read through 4 pages of text to see if this idea was mentioned at all, so if my idea was mentioned earlier, then I apologize.

I will use a relatively simple and logical argument against aeithesim (I don't even know how to spell it!), and in the belief of some higher power (God?). We all somehow were thrust into our lives. For some darn reason, I am Stanley Aaron Tarrant born on January 10, 1981 on an air force base in Turkey. Aeithesists answer this question: why exactly am I Stan Tarrant? Why am I a now 26 year old white male living in the USA? Why wasn't I a Turkish woman born 103 years ago? Why wasn't I a Chinese male born 43 years from now (assumming we are still around)???? Why is it that when the molecules in the form of proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, DNA, etc. came to form my body as it has formed countless billions of times with other humans, that my "consciousness" is in this now 26 year old white male body???? Why???? Do some key molecules have a "Stanley Tarrant" radioactive tag on them and when these molecules form into a white male body born on Jan 10, 1981 that is what my consciousness became?? Then when I die, and my body decomposes and the molecules with the "Stanley Tarrant radioactive tag become ingested by maggots in my grave, am I now a maggot??? Then when a bird eats these key molecules with the "Stanley Tarrant" radioactive tag or whatever, do I then become a young bird???? This explanation seems just as plausible as any else. I mean how can you not believe in a "soul" or some higher power when you stew on everything I wrote??? Science in this universe can't possibly explain the undeniable FACT that for some bloddy reason, I am a 26 year old white male human, and not a bird, another human, or a maggot.

Another argument for everyone to stew on - aetheists believe this life is all there is and when you die, thats it - game over. So, where the hell did I come from??? Lets just assume that I was conceived during sex between my parents on April 10, 1980, precisely 9 months before I was born. Well where was "Stanley Tarrant" on April 4th, 1979???? January 24, 1234???? Did I not exist at all??? Was I nothing before I was born / conceived??? The FACT is, before I was born "I" "came from" either SOMETHING or NOTHING. Well, according to aethesists I obviously came from nothing, because certainly I didn't exist before 1980 right?? Well the UNDENIABLE FACT THAT I AM ALIVE AND COMMUNICATING TO YOU NOW means that somehow I came into this world into this body for some reason. If it is true that I in fact, came from absoulte nothingness and total oblivion, then why would I think death is the end???? If death puts me into a state of "nothingness" where I don't exist, then why wouldn't it be possible to come from "nothingness" into a new life???? I guess put simply, somehow I got into this now 26 year old white male body. Why wouldn't "I" somehow pop into another body??

Stew on this everyone. I don't see how it is possible to be aetheist using pure logic. I can easily see being agnostic but aetheist????

And no, I didn't smoke any pot before putting this post together.

whether or not you like the explanation, science has done so - explained why you are who you are, that is. these aren't scientists studying molecules in a lab enviornment; these are anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists studying human beings in their real, lived environments (though psychologists also and increasingly rely on lab studies, they also increasingly resemble neurologists in their methods and assumptions).

particularly, i've found the ideas of G.H. Mead (Mind, Self and Society), Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life), R.D. Laing (The Politics of the Family), and Anthony Giddens (Modernity & Self-Identity) to have argued salient explanations of identity formation.

modern social science aren't the only schools of thought to eschew the idea of a soul. the Buddhist doctrine of shunyata ("emptiness") states that the notion of a permanent, transient self (essence, soul or atman) is an illusion caused by attachment.

so there are plenty of people who've explained, to their own satisfaction, human idiosyncracy and individual identity without needing the idea of a soul. of course, your mileage may vary.