(ctd)
I cannot elaborate further on these two distractions from the main topic of this thread. So just please note that I was simply stating my cultural/religious roots and preferences, not defending them (except for the Habermas quote).

I concede you used “gospel” as a fair term, not disparagingly. I think where we differ is that for me “certitude” is a state of mind, and so is your (self-)declared ignorance which I understand as a very legitimate position of agnosticism. I can understand this but fail to understand your need to feel “contempt“ for people who just “profess their certitude” without, as I wrote, shoving it down your throat.

“(T)hose who appropriate an inexhaustible commodity rather than develop spiritual depth within“ are not all religious people, and Christian “ascetics who despised the world“ belong to a long bygone past. Also gnosticism - if that is what you are hinting at by “demotes this world to disposable reality status“ had a love affair with Christianity many centuries ago. Nevertheless, I agree there are some Christians - but one should not generalise - whose view of the “afterlife” obscures their view of the world they actually live in. In my opinion they misunderstand what Christianity is about, but as I said, my concern here was about clarifying positions not about defending them.

You are “more interested in making the best of this world“ nevertheless participate in these OLO discussions. So you apparently see no contradiction therein, and I am gald about that, since I can learn from your scrutiny, and hopefully clarify my own world-view position also to myself.

Severin,
Thanks for your comments.

>> Apart from its obvious condescension, I would posit that “simple” people, that is people like me,<<

If I thought you were “simple“ - note the quotation marks indicating that it was not to be taken verbatim - I would not have addressed to you that post since I would not have assumed you could understand it. Besides, I used “ordinary man/woman” in very much the same sense a couple of lines above, and you did not find it condescending.

Neither did I think you were among those people, whom the statement you were “struck by” referred to, i.e. who “needed religion”. However, you must admit that many pews have people sitting in them who would not comprehend what I meant by the difference between “absolute (religious) truth“ depending on faith, “scientific truth” of some cosmological models, and truth in the naive, everyday meaning of the word, that I wrote about. I thought that was rather obvious, no condescension there.

Dear George,
You said, "I never wrote that, and you know it".

You give me undeserved credit here for distorting your meaning; how I reproduced it was in the spirit of what I thought you meant; in any event, does it not cut both ways? How is it that you interpret belligerent certitude in some, lets say atheists(?), as a front for their insecurities, yet the certitude of religious zealots, however irritating, is based in their conviction? Now I know you don't assert the latter, but since neither do I, in complementary fashion, credit religious certitude as necessarily sincere, can you see how I could take you to be confirming my own suspicions when you say, "people who try to shove down your throat their “certitude” act so because of their own insecurities", especially when you end with "Of course, I agree that there are also many “religious folk” who act thus". Though you were talking of nameless anti-religionists initially, this last sentence does seem to concede that "religious folk" might be similarly insecure. And indeed, why not! I agree with the overall premise: dogmatism of any kind is likely founded in insecurity.
But now look how many words I've wasted defending this point.
Though I have misinterpreted people once or twice on OLO (most embarrassedly over an article david f wrote, which I didn't read carefully enough and succeeded in looking very foolish indeed), I can honestly say I've never deliberately misrepresented, or put words in anybody's mouth.
But all this is relevant to other matters you raise that I'll get to as time permits.
To end here, I think you might relax your expectations a little of what language can accomplish, especially via this pithy medium. Like you I'm a lover of clear, concise prose, but yet I'm ever frustrated by the aporia that invests any such communication, even before its despatched, let alone in how it's received.
Deliberate misrepresentations are of course another matter and should be jumped on.

Dear all,

I feel we are to a large extent talking past each other. We really conceive of a different universe from each other in the mind although we physically live in the same universe. Anyway I posted an article in online opinion on secularism today and may post more.

Dear Squeers,

If I had my life to live over I would be involved with mathematics and the natural sciences rather than mathematics and the physical sciences. I am doing my best to learn about the fungi.

Hi George,

The Venn diagram (some of A is in all of B?) was an illustration to suggest the heaven-earth (god-humanity) held by many Christians, herein, God is personal and infused in nature. (Some other religions would agree: others might not). Else, we have a detached deity, an assembly worker, in a sense, who builds a car for someone else to drive.

With reconciliation, I was referring to two alternatives (of several): (a) that a God exits and that the religions are conjectures which happen to merely parallel the actual state: there is no Yahweh, Zeus or Diana, by a Creator God exists, nonetheless. Said God may approve, disapprove or be indifferent; or, (b) you have the Sagan Maxim (or Davies et al), that the universe sustains (explains) itself.

I loved the baron Münchhausen cite: It brought a smile to my face.:-) However, what if a black hole moving through space passed over the good baron’s head, we might see our “assumed” laws of physics violated. Yet, there would be a real explanation for the apparently self-levitating noble.

/Cont.

Personally, I think Occam’s razor best applies to the self-staining universe, wherein protons, are more fundamental than entire atoms and quarks are more fundamental than protons. In, referring back to the fist paragraph that the universe is an open system in commune with God, we would have a situation where a God (a complex system) precedes say positive energy and negative energy equivalence equalling zero. Here, you and I are, perhaps, like Pascal (George) and Hume (Oliver):

We might agree right down to the first equation in the universe (for what of a better posit), yet, if the evidence permits I would close the system (which will in QM and other to be discovered physicalities). Alternatively, I think you and Pascal would hire a P.I. (or Inspector Monk?)to find the power behind the thrown.

From the perspective of a sceptic, I see gods in history and an external a-historical Creating Agent as separate constructs to independent proved before drawing paths between the two, as if,we would were to model god with a structural equation say in AMOS or LISREL.

Thank you for your interesting insights and challenges.

Dear OUG,

The BB didn’t explode into a vacuum. Space-Time was created and expanded. Before (for want of a better word) the first unit of Plank-Wheeler and time/length/area are indistinct. A true vacuum might not exist in the universe, rather there are said to be QM fluctuations of existence and non-existence on the scale of the very tinny.

Hello david f.
I think we could be juggling dichotomies. Will visit your article tomorrow. Thanks.