aren't we all atheists?

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do you believe in the gods or goddesses of any pantheon that came before christ (if you're among one of the christian denominations)?

Everyone is born atheist.

a circumcised penis does not a Jew make.

I will agree to the extent that both nationality and race are constructs based on human and essentially arbitrary definitions.

So is being human - or a mammal.

But - given that those definitions exist in the scientific community and in the laws of various lands, you can be born a mammal and a primate and a human and a Caucasian and British and a royal personage.

I've often wondered what makes a person look Semitic. I've never though of "Jewish" a s a race before but to see some Jews, most have distinguishing features. And no, it's not racist to think that. It's an actual thing. Racist would be saying all black people look alike when clearly they don't. I'm saying some Jews have distinctive features in common. I'm wondering where that comes from.

You're all atheists towards all gods accept for your own.
If you're religious that is.

I can see 2 reasons why a lot of people might be inclined to believe in some type of "creative" force (or God or whatever):

1. To try to explain why reality exists. It seems unintuitive to be unanswerable or meaningless: that reality "just exists" requiring no further explanation.

2. Even with the most comprehensive cosmological theories there seems something that is missing. For example take Tegmark's attempt at a TOE (Theory of Everything). It still leaves unanswered a number of deep philosophical questions. First, what good does it do to "anthropically" explain this universe in terms of an metauniverse unless one can explain where the metauniverse came from? "

Of course if there was an "external" creator responsible for reality, doesn't the "existence" of a creator itself cause similar problems and leads to even more incomprehensibility.

The only thing that makes sense to me is the concept of cognitive closure:

Consider an ape, which is arguably over 95% genetically similar to us. Consider what their understanding of the universe is compared to ours. They could never understand what we are capable of: science, biology, physics, abstract algebra, etc. We are qualitatively different, so we think. Assume that even our cognitive abilities are only slightly more advanced than an ape's. Of course, from our perspective it doesn't appear that way. Assume reality is extremely complex. The ape's mind might be able to understand/pick up .001% of it. The human mind may have access to about .01% of it. Big improvement but still a miniscule part of all of reality/totality of "true" theories. Personally, I like C. McGinn's concept of cognitive closure. We assume it in all other organisms/animals. It would be surprising if we were any different:

Cognitive closure refers to the possibility that certain problems cannot be explained by the human mind. In philosophy of science some have adopted the position that some problems are forever outstanding, and not because their solutions do not exist, but rather because the solutions cannot be properly conceived. This philosophical position is also sometimes called transcendental naturalism, anti-constructive naturalism, or New Mysterianism. It proposes that the human mind is unavoidably biased, or "closed" in some areas of thinking, and so these areas then are forever mysteries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_ ... philosophy)
http://art-mind.org/review/IMG/pdf/McGi ... blem_M.pdf

MasterJedi:

please to distinguish:

pagan

infidel

heretic

schismatic

atheist