On Religion

[lilolme4 (imported)]

The only defensible religion is agnosticism?

I'm not sure I agree. If you accept Jesus as a hitorical figure and you're willing to concede that there are forces that operate outside laws of nature as we know them, then Christianity is a defensible religion.

Consider, that you've got a person that was widely seen, who apparently performed public miracles and attracted a lare body of followers and claimed to be sent from God.

It seems to me that until someone can replicate those miracles who isn't from God, it can be valid to take him at his word.

[calmeilles (imported)]

The way religion is being sold these days is more like 17th Century Venice in the days of the Doge. Fire and brimstone, damnation. Fear and threats. Believe what I believe or you will go to hell.!

What are you referring to here?

Now C16 Florence I'd have understood. But Venice was so secular and mercantile that the cathedral was kept out at the far edge of the city until the beginning of the C19.

[A-1 (imported)]

The way religion is being sold these days is more like 17th Century Venice in the days of the Doge. Fire and brimstone, damnation. Fear and threats. Believe what I believe or you will go to hell.!

...sure beats the hell out of the INQUISITION... except for one thing...

...can't legally tie up the wench of your choice on the RACK in the DUNGEON...

[Kortpeel (imported)]

The thread was started by a self-described agnostic (a word invented in the 19th century). That seems, to me anyway, both a popular and cowardly way out. Its the "I don't know and neither do you" argument.

Popular? Maybe. I don't know. Cowardly? What's cowardly about it? I see it as being honest to oneself. Take a different example: Do I believe in advanced, extraterrestrial life forms? No but I admit the possibility of them.

With religion why build your life around a proposition that may not and probably does not exist?

In reality agnostics are atheists, they don't believe in God.

This is untrue and you have missed the point. Atheists assert that God does not exist. Their position is as much an act of faith as believing in God is. And it is just as unprovable.

Agnostics may claim that atheists don't know for certain if there is a God either. That one must look throughout the entire universe to be certain. (Perhaps God is in a galaxy far far away.) Again, that is a cowardly way out.

Again 'cowardly.' Why is it cowardly? Come to that what do you mean by cowardly? Ducking the issue? Fence sitting? What?

Search the entire universe and you won't find God. True.The universe is physical and there is very good reason to believe that every part of it is subject to the same physical laws and consists of the same elements that we have on earth. God we are told is a spiritual being and exists on a different plane from the material universe.

On the other hand I rather like the concept of the old man with a beard sitting in some grand cosmological control centre in a far distant galaxy monitoring all the events in the universe. Do you think he really cares whether Joe the plumber uses a condom or not? It would be the kind of set up that Homeland Security could only dream of. How many cctv screens would it take?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke. So there would be magic in that control centre. It would just possibly be conceivable if the technology were unconstrained by the arrow of time. If events were so fast in that control room that it could scan the rest of the universe frequently enough to take into accounts the events in it.

Perhaps it would be easier to believe in God! Again, we don't know.

Kortpeel