The human species will be forever on an evolutionary journey -religion is just a hangover from primitive man's need to explain the inexplicable.

I get sick of having to explain why I am an atheist and hearing the tired old mantras of humility, believing in something greater than ourselves etc etc. You get the drift. You only have to look at the wonder of the earth we live on to know that we are just but one humble element in a complex and fragile ecosystem and the natural will always preside over the supernatural.

> if God can have a meaning and purpose without being created, then so can you.< said wizofaus to GP
>in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods< said the serpent to Eve (Gen 3:4)
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pelican,
> I get sick of having to explain why I am an atheist and hearing the tired old mantras... < I can sympathise with you. I too would “get sick of having to explain why I am a Christian and hearing the tired old mantras…” except I do not understand who forces you to explain against your will? I thought the purpose of participating in forums like this is to widen one’s horizon by trying to understand the other perspective, rather than being converted (or expecting others to convert to my perspective with my horizon).

Hi George
No force makes me explain against my will - just sharing a portion of my experiences, not of this forum but of real life. That might be answering the door to religious folk, chatting to friends about the meaning of life etc etc. Experience shows that arguments about religion never amount to much other than a good chat amongst friends, each usually solidfying their own beliefs and shaking their heads at the others refusal to 'see' (on both sides of the argument).

I don't judge anyone for being a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim or Pagan and hope they don't judge me not having the same faith. While I might not agree with one view or another, I certainly understand the potential attraction of religion to some people and the role that religion has played to shape our moral values through the ages. Perhaps there is an argument for religion as a necessary part of man's evolution towards a more natural altruism ie. that is the urge to behave with compassion for compassions sake itself or to do good without any other agenda.

Would this be possible without first having the 'sense' of religion - I can't answer that one. The human mind whether presented individually or as a power of the mass is a mystery.

Hi pelican,
thanks for your sincere and tolerant words. It was exactly this kind of exchange of insights that I had in mind when I spoke of widening one’s horizon without wanting to persuade, to convert.

> I certainly understand ... the role that religion has played to shape our moral values through the ages. Perhaps there is an argument for religion as a necessary part of man's evolution towards a more natural altruism<

Religion, especially Christianity, definitely played a role not only in shaping our moral values, but also our desire to understand the world we live in through scientific investigations. What is open to discussion is only the form and importance of its role (positive as well as negative) in this. My personal view, as controversial as it might seem, is, that medieval Christianity played the remarkable role of giving rise to both the thesis and antithesis that led to the synthesis called Enlightenment and modernity.

I can also understand, though not share, the view that this role should be left to history, i.e. that Christianity, after having fulfilled its role in the evolution of mankind, has become irrelevant for our contemporary understanding of Goodness and Truth.

This reminds me of the view, expressed by some people 50 years ago when computers arrived, that now mathematicians have become redundant because their work could be done by computers, although nobody denied that without mathematicians there would never be computers. Well, it is certainly true that much of what mathematicians did before, mainly things involving algorithmic processes, were now done more efficiently by computers supervised by computer scientists, not mathematicians. However, mathematical thinking is much more than performing algorithms, although some second rate mathematicians could not do anything else but that, and they, indeed, became redundant.

Perhaps in the same sense much of what belonged to the realm of religion is now better taken care of by science and secular institutions, but not everything. However, that irreducible extra, is much harder to define than that part of mathematics which cannot be left to computers capable only of following algorithms.