On 20 Oct 2014, at 19:37, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> You can believe that God exist, just because it is an old friend
of yours.
Yes, and the reason for that is that for many the most important
thing about a belief is not its truth.
That is possible, but is another topic.
All else being equal people would prefer to be correct but all else
is seldom equal and they'd rather be certain than right; and it's
not just in religion. New Jersey is the only state in the USA that
doesn't allow self service gas pumps, whenever the issue of changing
the law comes up the state legislators bring up the same old tired
arguments about it being too dangerous (despite it causing no
problem in the other 49 states) and insist that only highly trained
gas station attendants (working for minimum wage) have the expertise
to pump gas correctly and safely. I don't believe that these
politicians are so brain damaged that at least on some level they
don't know these arguments are bogus, but they keep using them
anyway because the truth is not the most important consideration for
them and years ago they became certain it was dangerous and changing
ones mind can be painful.
> It is believing that God does not exist which is not rational.
So believing that a china teapot in orbit around the planet Uranus
does not exist is not rational.
I think you allude to the fairy tale notion of God, but I said I use
the original conception of those who invented theology, the branch of
science which by definition address and attempt to unfify all
questions (including consciousness, primitive or not matter, the
personhood or not of the origin of things, etc.).
You might define god, or the one, or the everything, by what we still
believe when we begin to lost faith in the aristotelian theology, or
when we doubt about the primitive status of matter.
Bruno
Is believing that you will not suffocate before you finish reading
this post because all the air molecules will move to the other side
of the room due to random thermal vibrations also irrational?
John K Clark
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