I have this feeling...

[adderslj]

...that I should start using this again, rather than just using it as a cross-post dump from Vox.

Where has this come from? Well, largely from researching this post. I realised that I sort of missed Livejournal. Vox, my new bloggy girlfriend, has turned my eye with all her fasy, ajax-y Web 2.0 goodness, and the fact that many people I know in the flesh are on it now. But LJ allowed a different kind of conversation, one that I do miss.

What else has been keeping me away? Well, things like this, this and this tend to bother me (I'm sorry Matt, but if you genuinely believe that, you're showing the same ignorance and prejudice that you often accuse religious folk of showing).  I don't have time or enough available attention in my life to deal with pointless drama or wilful ignorance.

On the other hand, there are lots of people on here whom I genuinely care about, and with whom I can have interesting debates about different subjects that are genuinely thought-provoking.

Perhaps I need to do some friend page weeding to put me at a point where LJ is an attractive place to me again.

Not really sure where I'm going with this, just musing aloud...

Comments

[adders.livejournal.com]

Y'see, I think that's fair.

Yes, religion is inherently divisive. But then, so is politics. And so is supporting a sports team. Being divisive is not, in of itself, bad. It's being divisive in a way which prevents communication which is bad.

[innocent-man.livejournal.com]

Sure, a little divisiveness is good.

See, but here's the thing. If we want to argue about a sports team, we can point to the stats of the players. If we want to argue about politics, we can point to the actions and statements of the party members. In either case, opinion and belief plays a large role, but there's still data.

Not so religion. I should say, we can argue about what given church members have or have not done, good or bad, but the question is always there - Did a supernatural being have anything to do with it? There's no data saying that this being even exists.

I'll agree with you on this, though: A lot of folks take any degree of divisiveness and turn it into an insurmountable argument. You should see the looks my friend gets when she wears her Pittsburgh Steelers jacket in Cleveland.

[adders.livejournal.com]

No, because it always comes down to the same fundemental decision point: did the universe just happen, or was there an intelligent force behind its creation?

And fundementally, by the nature of the idea of faith, there is no proof one way or another of the existence of this intelligence. If there was data as to the existence of God, there would be no faith. You'd just have stupid people (ignoring the evidence) and clever people (responding to the data).

However, there is planty of data available as to the teachings of each faith, and that can lead to dicsussions of all sorts of things. So, fundementally, I don't agree with you. There's only one thing that there is no data to support - the existence or not of god. Beyond that, there's an almost infinte amount of things to talk about.

Also, when does a lack of data prevent conversation? Humanity has a fantastic reasoning ability, that can work from unprovable principles.

To be honest, I find the "there's no evidence of God, so it's pointless talking about it" athiests as depressing and narrow-minded as the "I'm going to ignore Darwin, na-nah-nah can't hear you" creationists. They're both fundementally dogmatic in their approach to debate. And dogma tends to be the enemy of debate.

[innocent-man.livejournal.com]

I wish it were pointless talking about God, but since religious faith is a driving force behind so many of the actions folks take, it ain't. Discussions on the existence or non-existence of god, though, boil down to "I believe it" or "I don't". You believe it. I don't.

Now, within that, there are other facets to the discussion, of course, one of it which is the disconnect between the literalism of the fundamentalist Christians, which is kinda sickening, and the broader faith that a lot of folks have. Like you say, there's discussion there.

[adders.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it's right to say that I believe in God. I'd say that I have faith in the existence of God, but like most people with faith, I have days when I believe completely and days when I'm very unsure indeed. Such is the nature of faith.

And I completely disagree that God wouldn't be worth discussing even if it could be conclusively proved there was no such thing. In that context, God is actually one of the most powerful ideas conceived of by the human mind, an idea which has had the power to remould whole civilizations and untold lives.

I can't see any viewpoint where that idea isn't worth discussing, if only for the insight it gives us into humanity.

[magentamom.livejournal.com]

One of the more common arguments I have with atheists comes from their belief that "Oh, if not for belief in a god or gods, we'd all be better off."

It seems to me that something of the sort is hard-wired in the brain. It's there with socialization and language and art. The concepts all seem to have emerged at the same time. A god or gods is universal to human culture. There isn't one that has sprung up without.

So, whether humanity senses "God" because He exists or because there is some part of our psyche that develops the concept at a certain stage, the idea seems inherent to human development. To imagine a humanity that developed without that sort of belief seems to me to imagine something that is apart from humanity. We might grow beyond the need to believe, but as individuals, as cultures and as humanity, we've all gone through those stages.

I dated an atheist for a time, and we had the argument often. I explained that for me there were two interpretations of the culturally universal concept of god or gods. One was that there was definitely something that we all sense. The other was that we made it all up. Given that we can hardly get people to agree on proven and nearly indisputable principles, well, I know where I come down.

[magentamom.livejournal.com]

This is a good point. When you get down the the bare bones, math is based on a set of assumptions every bit as faith-based as religion. They seem to work, though. Then again, in the end "it works" is probably a big factor in why those of us who have faith have it, I suppose.