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Dear Brian, if I may,

That is a thoughtful and analytical article. I agree with much of your vision and would like to project it a little further.

My understanding is that the protective and all powerful father or god image we have developed has served us well in our fight for survival and continues to do so, not just in times of woe and severe distress, but even in our ordinary everyday lives. Intelligence, love, empathy, altruism and self sacrifice are all faculties we share, of course, with other living species to varying degrees.

Faith, confidence, belief, or whatever you like to call it, are probably, also, I suspect, faculties which are not exclusively human. They, too, assist us and, I suggest, other living species, in facing the unknown and contribute to our well being in what might otherwise be interpreted as a hostile environment.

Religion and justice, on the other hand, appear to be more sophisticated concepts which serve to maintain peace and harmony within human societies whose members have attained a far greater degree of individual autonomy than all other species, though the behavioral patterns of servitude and self sacrifice among insect colonies such as ants, wasps, bees and termites, are, in some respects, comparable to religious practices among human societies. This raises the question as to what extent, if any, religion shares common roots with the primeval instincts of certain insect colonies.

I fully agree with you that tolerance of others is a highly desirable and realistic objective for present generations and those of the immediate future. Whereas acceptance of others remains pure utopia and, I suspect, will do so for a few more hundred million years or so. By that time, I doubt that anybody will believe in the existence of a god or gods any more, even the most remote savages still living on the planet at that time

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I find it uncomfortable to attribute human balance to 'religion'.

We all, no matter our colour, creed, religious denomination, spiritual enlightenment, biased incorrect view, truth faculty or whatever you wish to call it, fail to acknowledge that we are a finite being, like those simple animals and plants that are currently abundant, but rapidly declining on our finite planet.

Do you really care what others believe? or are you so set in 'your ways' that the bigger more important picture becomes obscured.

We all need to learn tolerance for others, their beliefs, notwithstanding the hatred that so many above put forward, despite indoctrination and family based brain-washing.

Life is a gamble, nature is a marvel and beyond simple understanding.
Science, in my view, provides many of the myriad answers that require investigation, analysis and application for the betterment of a sick species that by all comparison is becoming plague like in a petri dish of our own making.

Christian. Muslim, Buddhist, call you whatever, the real reality is we just may never know and the myopic views posted above attest to the infinite reasons why we will never really progress as a species in situ.

Pericles nailed it on the head, get with the new mantra, leave your bias at home and hopefully, sometime in the distant future we can have a species that is not ranked, scaled or truly biased to a fundamental mantra that breeds hatred, intolerance and ethnic myopia that currently is the malaise of this planet.

Where is the good old, "treat your neighbour (minus the human, biological racism, etc) that would see our collective union work toward a more progressive and harmonious future for all.

Over to you all....

Why is there even a term "atheist" ? Do we have a term for people who do not believe in astrology for example, a term for people who don't believe in the tooth fairy ?

Why are we told to prove there is no God when no proof of his existence is offered ?

I once thought the way was to be respectful of their beliefs but I now realise this was naive as they weave their evil into the community through their whacky moral codes and make no mistake, that's what makes them all intolerably evil.

The main thing that I find astounding is, if god doesn't like the way I live, let him tell me, not you.

"We certainly do not know the mechanism for human consciousness or that of other creatures. We do know it requires a physical brain."
"Do we?"
"How do we "know" that?"

Good question....sometimes reason can only take us so far.

Take Bell's Theorem for instance:

"In 1935, several years after quantum mechanics had been developed, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published a paper which showed that under certain circumstances quantum mechanics predicted a breakdown of locality. Specifically they showed that according to the theory I could put a particle in a measuring device at one location and, simply by doing that, instantly influence another particle arbitrarily far away...which Einstein later called "spooky action at a distance."

Just a little food for thought. Bell's Theorem is illogical, but it is true for quantum physics. Particles seemingly communicating "information" - at a distance, merely from the consequence of being measured.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/kenny/papers/bell.html

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Dear Brian,

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Just a brief comment on the title of your article "Reason has its place, but the human heart yearns for awe":

As you may be aware, recent research on the human heart reveals that it is not just a pump. It seems it also contains an intricate network of several types of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells similar to those found in the brain. Its elaborate circuitry apparently enables it to act independently of the cranial brain, allowing it to learn, remember, and even feel and sense.

It has been found that the heart not only has its own brain, but it also has an electromagnetic field 500 times stronger than the brain's magnetic field and, apparently, there is even evidence that brain waves and heart waves can communicate between different individuals.

As you rightly suggest, reason does, indeed, "have its place", but not just in the brain, also in the heart. That is, obviously, something Blaise Pascal could not possibly have known when he was philosophising 350 years ago, so we shall have to forgive him for that.

Perhaps, in the not too distant future, we shall find that the hearts of other living species are similar to ours in this respect and even that our liver or some of our other giblets demonstrate similar properties.

Also, what once may have been considered romantic gibberish may now prove to be scientific fact.

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The toxic nature of this debate is well illustrated by the Craibe event where he is merely restating the general Christian proposition that the wages of sin are death, but that the reward of a Christian life is eternal life. There is not the slightest suggestion that he is suggesting that gays ought to be put to death, or even suffer an earlier human death.

The death is a spiritual death.

I don't happen to agree with him, but I disagree much more strongly with those who maliciously misrepresent what he said and use it as a weapong to condemn Christianity and make out that it is violent.