Squeers
I don't know Yuyutsu. He/she may not assume to 'know' otherwise it would not be faith based belief. Faith assumes an absence of knowing.

Maybe religious faith is right for him/her. While there are many who sit in that pool of 'knowing' beyond all doubt I don't wish to dwell there nor live in judgement of those who do. As long as it is each to his own and there is little interference in how people live their personal lives.

It is sad that Yuyutsu can only find meaning or purpose with a belief in the supernatural, but that is his/her right and there is not much anyone can do about it, we each make choices on how we live our lives.

Many believers seem to think they would sin and lose all morality without a belief in God. Much rather we are all protected from that eventuality by those people sticking with their chosen faith.

Hey Pelican/Squeers/Joe, is it just me, or is Runner starting to seem downright reasonable and rational to you too?

Not yet, but he's coming close :)

Pelican,
I don't know yuyutsu either but I have debated him at length on this topic and am satisfied again here that he does claim to "know"--he can disabuse me of this notion if he likes.
I don't know that it's true either, "that faith assumes an absence of knowing". It logically and in all modesty should, of course, yet religious adherents who claim to "know" are the commonality are they not? A timorous "faith" seems to be an unsatisfying draught, and so is fortified with considerable conviction---even whole spurious ontologies like intelligent design. It's a small step from this "knowledge" or absolute conviction--which amount to the same thing in practice--to the kind of judgemental attitude I allude to above, or to violent intolerance, fire and brimstone and militant millenarianism.
I'd be just as scathing of atheists if they claimed to "know" that God doesn't exist, or held their negation with absolute conviction. But all the atheists I know are reasonable creatures who only want for evidence and are brave enough to accept their insignificance in the scheme of things in its absence and in preference to pulling the wool over their own eyes. In preference what's more to condescending, at best, and sitting in censorial judgement (by proxy) at worst. Indeed, it's rich indeed that the same zealots who demonise gays and murder abortionists (again by proxy) call atheists "militant"!
Blessed are the meek---and hopefully the ignorant.

And to tie into the thread; I'm all for mother earth so long as we temper our conviction with a recognition of the absurd---thinking Camus, but especially Becket, who was modest and resigned in his millenarianism.

The United Nations are not blind to the facts of religion.

Ok! You all want religion in your life's knowing, fine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaOVPaYf780&feature=related

After this.......I shall speak of it No more.

You all deserve each other, you really do:)

I shall love the earth and you lot can do what-ever floats your boat.

I guess non religious people never had a look in, Oh well.....like everything else that gets taken off us, why not it all as usual.

LEA

Well, Squeers, all of the Books have, after all, been written by humans, and presumably priests or people who otherwise had a vested interest in systematising the myths and descriptions of social relations that were current when they pulled it all together. The task of embroidering, modifying, interpreting, mediating and inventing new up-to-date verions of what some guys wrote one or two or three thousand years ago was worked on by the monks and priests of the Middle Ages and by the various rabbis and mullahs over the past millenia.

So their books are bodies of guff that anybody can feel free to dip into and construct whatever fantasy world they like, they don't have to subject it to any sort of rigorous, scientific analysis at all.

Meanwhile, in the real world of oppression and injustice and pain and deprivation, real people are suffering. Yuyutsu can see in every one of those people some reflection of god if she likes, but that doesn't ease their misery - which, of course, he can justify as some sort of test of faith in some god or other.

It's a tragedy that intelligent people, as I'm sure Yuyutsu is, have diverted their energies to, in effect, reinforcing that misery, and thereby rendering themselves at best irrelevant to the relief of that misery, and to the tasks of enabling people to envision their potential, as they have every right to do.

Joe