1. The Case for Teaching The Bible

Comment #27766 by sbhatti on March 26, 2007 at 3:34 pm

As long as the kid is not pressured to feel one way or another I think this is great!

If people actually read the bible, especially in the context of their other classes such as computers, physics and history -- I think we'd have far fewer theists.

2. The questions science cannot answer

Comment #21569 by sbhatti on February 10, 2007 at 12:33 am

Absurd! If reason is not valuable then why does this writer so poorly try and argue reasonably? If this argument was correct, there would be no reason I shouldn't believe in Santa Claus (I can't prove he does not exist).

To think that metaphysics cannot be explored with reason is to reject thousands of years of philosophy. The majority of benefits that have led to these false believers deluding themselves into thinking they believe, and promoting these absurdities can be greater accomplished by reason.

These people aren't true believers because if someone truly believed in God and Jesus, and Allah they would never fear death as the majority of supposedly religious people do. If these believers truly believed there would be no higher priority than to break down and analyze every portion of these 'sacred' texts. True believers join and act like members of God Hates Fags or the Taliban. They would stone and kill to this day, and if they find those appalling; well it is because they don't truly believe but the self hypnosis of thinking they believe gives them comfort.

As an example of something religion solves for many people that can be addressed by reason: why I don't fear death. I don't fear death because I'm convinced time is an illusion, and only space-time exists because I have presented plenty of evidence and contemplated it's consequences of what it means about my reality. Death is, just as birth, an endpoint of a cognitive existence intricately an element of a larger whole, the world that composed my life, that I live in, and that will take the energy from my body when I die. Being that we can't reasonably see human life as autonomous, but it is within this environment, I am a part of the Universe that has become so wonderfully complex it rises like a wave out of an ocean and is able to be aware of it's (the Universe's) own existence and elegance. A myriad of space-time where the now is a transition of what was to what will be without instantiation (in the greek sense of 'atom', a discrete moment), that this illusion appears like a leaf on a tree that is humanity. Like a leaf it begins and ends somewhere, but on this mural of space-time it is there eternally in that space-time be the Universe forever in flux to us as observers.

I've come to this through reason, reading and a constructive approach with all evidence I encounter. I am willing to reject any part of it on new evidence but that I am even here is pretty rockin, when you sit down and think about exactly how amazingly complex the Universe is - and when one contemplates on that the mundane becomes appealingly miraculous.

Anyone who takes the time to just understand what we can know, what we can determine reasonably (even if we assumed all that evidence from Physics and the sciences was somehow incorrect), would fill one with such awe that an idea like an omnipotent God watching over us seems far too simple and quite boring.

People like this writer, just observe the mundane and go 'how did it get here' oh I wish there was some magestical answer, letting me know everything will be fine and my egotastical self-centered wishes about how everything should be will be fulfilled. If they didn't delude themselves, and really wanted to know: they'd get a whole lot more fulfillment than God.