Thanks for the gratuitous insults, Craig Minns.

>>Pericles, I'm not interested in silly schoolyard games. You made a confused statement in an attempt to troll, I tried to answer in good faith, including asking you to explain so as I might understand and now you're trying to be "clever".<<

Just because you asked a silly question, doesn't give you permission to cover it up with bluster. You initially missed the point completely, and jumped into the middle of a conversation with what you firmly believed was a zinger:

>>Pericles, let's turn your question around: what is a justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century?<<

The response was straightforward:

>>...there is no justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century<<

To pretend that you didn't understand the answer you received reflects badly on your motives. It is a form of verballing, allowing yourself the opportunity to ascribe to me opinions that I do not share, and then condemn them. As you do here:

>>At the risk of offending, that's poppycock that has some rather unpleasant ethical implications.<<

I notice that you quite enjoy insulting people. If that's how you get your jollies, I feel very sad for you.

Have a great day.

Dear Constance,

I don’t feel like discussing anything with someone who starts off a post by calling me names. I also don’t consider your previous posts worth discussing.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12693 contains an article I wrote on the Communist Manifesto.

Dear George,

It is not the same problem nurses face. A nurse may not know the religious views of the patient. Missionaries who have been discussing religion with me know my views and know that I would not appreciate being told they will pray for me.

I agree that it is wrong to draw conclusions about the intelligence of a thinker from the contents of his or her views. One can depend overmuch on reason. Those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope on the grounds that reason told them he was wrong may have been more intelligent than he was.

I doubt that you were force fed Dawkins’ arguments when you went to school. You were force fed arguments against religion, but that was before Dawkins. Not all religions are the same, and not all arguments against religions are the same.

To want to know more about the world whether it is in a scientific, religious or other context is in my opinion a virtue. I would have been bothered if none of my children ever questioned what they were told. I also think doubt is a virtue, and faith is not.

Hi Craig,

Pericles' response:

>>...there is no justification for Christianity's non-existence in the 21st century<<

is simply saying that if there is no way of proving or disproving something, then we can't say that something doesn't exist. It's not saying that something does exist, merely that one can't say that something doesn't exist, so we go on believing as we like, one way or the other.

One cannot disprove a negative, after all.

Joe

Pericles, I asked you to explain your original question to George, which you claimed I misunderstood.

Apparently you can't and to be honest, I'm no longer interested.

Far from "getting my jollies" from "insulting people", I would quite like to be able to hold intelligent discussions, but unfortunately that becomes very difficult when people like yourself choose to try to deliberately derail such discussions with the sort of schoolboy sophistry you've demonstrated to date on this one.

You may be quite a clever person, but I've no way of knowing that from your contributions to this discussion.

Hi Joe,
I understand that and it seems that Pericles and I agree on that point. However, his original question was to George, asking him to "justify" Christianity's existence. As I suggested above, that may have been simply loose language, but his response since then has been a rather childish attempt to play games.

I'd suggest that "believing what we want to believe" is fair enough, but if all of us believe something, as it seems to be true that we do, then there are interesting questions that arise from the differences and commonalities across the various belief structures.

Atheism as a form of active belief, rather than a reactionary response to theism, is quite a new branch in the tree of beliefs and I think it needs time to sort itself out. Scientism is one twig on the branch and I think it's not a very strong one.

Dear david f,

I agree that the missionary should have known how you felt about these things. Unfortunately, some of them act like an importunate salesperson.

>>I doubt that you were force fed Dawkins’ arguments when you went to school. You were force fed arguments against religion, but that was before Dawkins.<<

Note that I put “most of” in brackets when referring to his arguments. Anyhow, it is people philosophically more savvy than I who say there is nothing original in Dawkins’ arguments from a philosophical (in distinction to psychological) point of view (unlike some other atheist arguments from our post-Enlightenment history, that are of value irrespective of whether or not one agrees with their initial, e.g. metaphysical, assumptions).

>>I also think doubt is a virtue, and faith is not.<<

I would put here “being certain” instead of faith, since faith in my understanding is more complicated than simply something one can doubt or be certain about. It is a state of mind, including preference for a metaphysical model of reality plus something else (depending on what religion faith refers to), but not reducible to them. I can doubt or be certain only about a statement that I fully understand, which is seldom a clear distinction where abstract concepts are involved.

Doubt in the sense of being open to other than rigid interpretations of the beliefs of one’s faith, belongs to an educated e.g. Christian’s faith, as expressed in the classical Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding”.