Posted by Jim (206.79.177.145) on March 05, 2002 at 11:39:08:
In Reply to: Re: Question of the Week posted by m1s1n on March 05, 2002 at 01:26:52:
I've been trying to assert that it's not so simple as city vs. no city, God vs. no God. The problem is that you guys have been sucked into a narrow, Judeo-Christian perception of God; a God that is seperate from the universe and made his presence known in the past by blowing things up, but now, inexplicably, relies on pure faith. Though this God, the mountain God invisible bastard, is easily and quite reasonably disbelieved, the quintessential, essence of the earth and universe God is not so easily dispelled. Essentially, I'm saying that you guys have spent too much time looking at the Sistine Chapel and not enough time looking around you. Quite frankly, any western religion's God (and a hell of a lot of eastern ones, too) are wet paper bags when it comes to logic. Time to move up to the big leagues.
M1s1n, your philospohy professor was bringing a zealot's argument (in a way, kind of book-or-the-sword esque) to the question of religion, which pretty much negates a lot of his credibility. I'm wagering that he's an energetic existentialist type, with some degree of unhealthy desperation seeping through every now and then. Maybe not the desperation part. In any case, I'll debunk him right here: I have no idea whether there is a God or not, and you'll have to take my word for that.
I think you'd have to be a complete asshole to assume that you have such a deep understanding as to the true nature of the universe and our existance to say, with certainty, whether there is a God or not. Either that, or you'd have to be enlightened, crazy, or fundamentally dishonest with yourself.
Thor, the fact that you equate atheism with empiricism is a clue to your own zealotry. To really mix metaphors, I'm going to claim that your evidence, or lack thereof, and its natural conclusion is essentially a witch trial taking place in your own mind; one where you have fabricated your own set of causes and consequences that inevitably point toward a desired conclusion. See Sistine Chapel reference.
I believe that we're like prehistorical doctors trying to pin down the source of illness-- taking shots in the dark because nobody knows what is going on. We simply do not have the ability to fully comprehend what God means, whether God exists, and to what extent, as we stand. There were those of us who followed our village superstitions (got a fever, huh? Time for some goat urine and the naked dance...) and there were those of us that rejected these superstitions, chalking the entire situation as unknowable or irrelevant, going about their daily lives. But I'm sure there were also those who knew that there might be an answer; one that hadn't been discovered yet. I'm sure they were seen as chumps by both sides, then, too.