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This is why I describe my religion as being Pastafarianism.

If you are going to ignore nature, why ignore it for something less awesome?

It's brainwashing, I largely ignore it.

Lovely straw man, EC.

All very badly distorted.


Religion and science are separate fields. You may as well claim that chemistry is incompatible with economics.


Nowhere in the Bible does it command us to take a literal interpretation. In fact, I can point to the NT to find indications that we should not interpret the Bible literally. This doesn't mean you pick and choose what to believe and what not to believe, it means you actually have to exert some effort to understand what the meaning of a passage is rather than applying the reading comprehension of a small child.


It is a false dichotomy (or actually trichotomy in this case). Religion and science do not serve the same purpose or answer the same questions, so they really can't conflict.

EDIT: Wait a minute, did you tell me I'm going to burn in hell? Damn, fundies think I'm going to hell, and so do the atheists. I guess you and they are just two sides of the same coin. You both think in rigid, simplistic absolutes and completely fail to comprehend the idea that someone else has beliefs different from your own.

Either that, or you are going to burn in hell.

I don't fully blame the atheists for taking their approach. After all, Orwell, most atheists will interpret religion as historically making claims about the past workings of reality and perhaps even the current workings of reality, ones that can be questioned, doubted, and attacked. And this causes issue because to if the historical claims that a religion makes are false, on what grounds can the religion be accepted as meaningfully true/correct in representing reality? I mean, under an atheistic scheme, religion does not have its own jurisdiction, it only overlaps other fields, so obviously religion can be attacked in all of these overlapping fields from their perspective.

The problem is that they consistently attack straw men, only a very small subset of Christians actually hold the beliefs that atheists attribute to all of Christianity.


Then the atheistic perspective is wrong.

They consider that small subset to be the essence of the religion.


How is it wrong? Under an atheistic perspective, theology is the same as a study of imaginary fabrics. So to them, the real issues would be metaphysics, and history, and perhaps psychology or sociology. If the metaphysics of religion are wrong(with let's say the problem of evil being a valid argument) and the historical foundations lacking for religion(with various historical happenings contradicting the historical beliefs of the religion), and if religious belief and experience correspond to cultural background more so than any truth-bearing variable then on what grounds could a person rationally think that a particular religion is true? If a religion lacks rational grounds, then how could it be irrational or wrong to disrespect religion?

I think I brought this one out mostly on a) saying that while I liked what Pat had to say on almost all grounds I also didn't trust the theism-must-end brand of atheism b). endorsed the middle ground, and c). from there I got what I haven't heard spelled out by atheists but has been inferred for a really long time - that no legitimate middle exists. That's also saying that theism as a form of philosophy doesn't exist, the possibility that every bit of knowledge out there has its clues doesn't exist, the assumption is that any form of philosophy is a failed and ultimately inferior pre-science supplanted by science. People can believe that if they really want to, just that they still have to remember what they'd tell us by the same token; reality doesn't care what we think of it nor does it remake itself to fit our current set of beliefs or knowledge. My own assemblage though: whether we look at a single universe, multiverse, regardless of how many 'gaps' aren't really gaps, the universe, the scientific laws of it, quantum physics at the deeper layer of it all, all of these things are somewhat fantastic when you think about it - we get a bit numbed and/or functionally fixed by our own angle of views and short lives though.

What I think does get annoying is that many theists here can understand where atheists are coming from, many strong-atheists purely take that as 'Of course, its because I'm right, your wrong, you know that I'm right and your wrong, and you just aren't a strong enough person to put down the blanket and teddy bear'. Agreed that there are many atheists here who are not like that and don't chop at it from that angle, I enjoy that the forum lack of right-wing religious fanatics telling us in all seriousness that we're all going to hell, people who need to be bull-headed though just need to be reminded that they're stance is an extrema. Some people can get their ego off on and truly believe that they're in the minority because they're superior, most people when they start having those thoughts it sends up red flags that something's really incomplete in their thought processes.

Meh, whatever, I wasn't even paying attention. I just like bothering Orwell. However, it is true that there really isn't a middle ground, and it is also true that the big issue is the incommensurable nature of these beliefs. I mean, atheism and theism often are part of a bigger worldview, so the issue isn't just "does the problem of evil work", but rather do all of these thousands of other things work right. That's why one can take any issue and make it an argument for/against God as this is not just a matter of a few arguments, but rather "which worldview matches reality better".


I think it is hard to fully have in one's mind an entire worldview. That's going to be a major issue. I really think that strong believers in either worldview are going to have the issue worse than anyone else. So, yeah, that will make an already difficult conversation even harder.