You misread my intent Ian. I can't really see how any claim that science and religion can be 'intelectualy' equal at all, well not all the time we have no objective evidance for the concept of a creative God.
What we can say, and what I shall carry on saying is that all of us use both pure faith(religious or not) and intelect(logic, deductive reasoning etc..) in our everyday lives. Simply it gals me when I read twaddle put about 'the religious' such as we are unthinking, or it's such a waste of a mind. I view it as no differant from any other type of speach which seeks to breed contempt or even hatred based on differance. If I see such an untruth spouted as 'All black men are muggers' I'll speak out about that kind of rubbish also. To my mind saying 'To be religious is such a waste of a good mind', is exactly the same type of comment. It stems from hatred and bigotry, and I'll not just sit here and take it, would you? To reiterate. Religous faith and science simply cannot be compared on equal intelectual footings, but so what. We are not all critical thinking machines all of the time, all of us have irrational basis for some of our thoughts of some kind or other, a fave muscial genre, a fave footie team, our poltics, our views on the death penalty or gun ownership, or abortion. Chris, who I regard as having a sound intelect and an outlook on life that I think is fine, still insists that a rapist of a child somehow becomes non-human, and so should not be treated as such. Not rational nor logical at all, yet he sure does belive it. He is not alone, dispite the very logical maxim 'Two wrongs don't make a right' emotion wins over intelect with many regarding the dealth penalty. Logicaly speaking for mankind to surive it is best that we try to work as one body, yet over here we have Euro scpetics aplenty, we have some very strange Liberterians over in the States, we all know the validity of that other maxim 'Divide and conker' yet the vast majority want us to remain divided. We engage in the dangerous persuit of patritotism, when our very history is full of war. Waring families, waring tribes, waring counties, waring nations, shit we are still waring, it's been going on since the very beginging. Logic says look at our history and see what causes war, and then simply stoping doing it. *sigh* Nope I'm afraid that humanity is not very 'reasonable ' at all. Almost finished, honest. Finaly, I get things, this is a nice thing for me. I find it easy to see postion A and position B, even if they are both opposed to each other. So of course I can understand some peoples dislike or hatred for religion. I mean it has fucked things up for thousands of years, yet I can also see that hatred in and of itself is a deadend, and any action take or words spoken out of it, well they fail to fix anything so what's the point? The point is there is no point. There is no point in denigrating 'The religious' it serves no logical porpouse nor fixes any of the problems people have with religion as a whole. So it is irrational, and emotional. Hah I also get it that this is the way we work, so choose for yourself what you place some faith in, that is fine, choose also your prefered methoeds of reasoning, that too is fine, but don't pretend that you have no faith(religious or otherwise), and don't denigrate those who admit to having faith, as you only denigrate yourselves. On 29 Jan, 14:11, Ian Pollard <[email protected]> wrote: > Let's be clear, an empirical position -- say on the Earth orbiting the sun > -- does not require "faith" in the religious sense of the word. Or not any > longer. There's a reasonable amount of "faith" required for anything, but > this operates in degrees and a few people in this thread are trying pull it > into the realm of the absurd. > > I can see why people like Pat and Lee are hoping that a position of > "everything requires faith" is accepted; such proposition would seem to put > God and science on similarly valid intellectual footings. In other words, by > weakening science, theism is strengthened. Such a position won't be accepted > though, since it demands that we also accept that the level of faith > required for the two is in anyway comparable. It isn't. > > Ian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/minds-eye?hl=en.
