Pericles: << You asked me a question earlier, which I answered. Your subsequent posts appear to be determined to misunderstand that answer, by introducing verbal red herrings. >>

Careful, Pericles. George gets very sensitive if you point out his sophistry.

George,

I think a lot of what you’ve responded to me with, was described very accurately by Pericles when he said: “Your subsequent posts appear to be determined to misunderstand that answer, by introducing verbal red herrings.”

You’ve always made out as though you are attempting to understand where your opponents are coming from, but I’m starting to suspect that it’s more of a case of you poking and prodding in an attempt to find a chink in your opponents armour, or confuse an issue that is really quite clear. You’re not dense...

<<I do not know what assertion you exactly have in mind, but if you mean that religious faith is incompatible with a reason-based response (to the questions of human existence?) then this is what you have already stated many times.>>

What I mean by “assertion”, is not only the claim that a god of some sort exists, but that we can actually know who that god is and/or attribute the Bible or the Koran or whatever to it.

The assertion certainly is incompatible with its reason-based response in that it is not reasonable.

<<So I should not have to restate, that there are many people - from the “little old lady in the pew” to renowned philosophers and scientists - who will disagree with you.>>

These scientists you speak of also state that they keep their work entirely separate from their religious beliefs, so I’m not sure why you would specifically mention scientists as if that meant something.

As for philosophers, well I’ve heard most, if not all of the philosophical arguments for the existence of god and they all fall flat on their faces at the premise.

Either way, I think it’s important to remember here, that it doesn’t matter who they are, or what they believe, only why they believe it - and faith is a bad reason to believe.

<<...no kind of reasoning can lead to your (or their) conversion, because faith or lack of it is a state of mind, not a conclusion you can arrive at through a purely rational process.>>

Continued...

...Continued

Faith is a state-of-mind, but it is also the conclusion as it essentially means, “belief in something for no good reason”. No amount of spin or ‘wordsmithing’ will change that.

The assertion that a god has revealed it’s self to one’s self without any evidence reliable enough to be used by others to form the same belief, is not a good reason to believe.

<<Also, please remember that I grew up in an atheist country...>>

No, you grew up in a country that had a political system that rejected religion as one part of its many tenets. There’s a big difference.

<<...so I have known most of these “reason-based responses” since my school years, and had to find answers to them for myself (and to a large extent also by myself).>>

You may have heard a lot of reason-based responses to the assertions of the religious, but what’s important to remember, is that none of the responses to those responses are reasonable or can be given without obfuscation.

Believe me, I’ve heard them all.

<<I am not forcing these answers on you, and I apologise if it appeared to you as if I were. As they say, life is more complicated than mathematics with its only right, wrong or meaningless answers.>>

Life? Yes. The question of whether or not a god exists? No, it’s very mathematical, or should I say ‘Boolean’ - the answer is a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘true’ or ‘false’.

<<I do not share the outlook of hypatia, but I can understand her when she feels “amazed and amused that we have to have this debate” again.>>

The reason we apparently have to have this debate again, is because you had made a comparison that displayed a glaring over-sight that I felt the need to point out, and will probably continue to point out in the future as I believe it’s important that it at least be on the record so as to not cause any confusion about the difference between atheism and theism.

They are not merely equally opposing views.

Sorry, George. I misread this part...

<<Another fact is that no kind of reasoning can lead to your (or their) conversion, because faith or lack of it is a state of mind, not a conclusion you can arrive at through a purely rational process.>>

I didn’t take into account the “...you can arrive at through a purely rational process” in my response.

To paraphrase, I would say that faith is a conclusion, but not a conclusion that can be arrived through a rational process at all.

Therefore, it is a conclusion that is arrived at through an irrational process.

JP, don't presume to speak on my behalf. I'm an atheist who neither knows nor cares how life originated. As far as I'm concerned, it exists, and will continue to exist whether I "believe" in it or not. When you assume that atheists are all about evidence, you are wrong. I'm all about indifference.

Trav @ "If the 20th century taught us anything about religion and it's value in society, it was that a society without religion gives us much more to be afraid of than a relatively religious one. Do the names Mao Zedong and Stalin mean anything to you, Hypatia? What about the word Communism?"

What about it? What about the names Franco? de Oliveira Salazar? Pinochet? The Greek Colonels? And so on. For every society you claim was without religion, I can suggest a number that were very religious, and very scarey.