Fresh Outbreak of Religion-Bashing Threads

[DavidRoss]

That's not what you said earlier. You said clearly that "millions of people actually know something that you don't want to be true". You still oscillate between "knowing" and "believing".

There's no oscillation in what I've said.  Millions of people know that God exists.  Not believe, but know.  Millions of others believe without knowing.

You are not clear about that yourself. It is however clear that it is emotionally extremely important for you that it must somehow be true, even though you really have no clue, not anymore than I do or anyone else on the planet.

No, I'm quite clear.  I know God exists.  I'm hardly unique.  Millions of people have a functional relationship with God, whether you believe it or not.  You're welcome to believe whatever you wish, true or not.

You saying "believe whatever you find comforting" is very telling. It is not about whatever "greater truth" there may be for you, it is simply for your own soul's comfort that you cling to those beliefs. Which is OK if it works for you. The only problem with "religious" people like you is that their comfort construct depends on it somehow being absolutely "true" and there it clashes with people who are actually much more open-minded and who do not want their minds screwed with by primitive idol worshipping cults and their close-minded followers.

Again, you are welcome to cling to whatever beliefs you find comforting.  Some of us prefer to seek truth, despite its inconvenience and discomfort at first.  I prefer to know what's real and to live accordingly...and I don't really care whether it is fashionable among the set of arrogant youth I left behind many years ago.  Also, I am not at all religious, as you would know if you had been paying attention; however, I've learned to have high regard for folks who are, as in my experience most of them are at least trying to lead worthwhile lives.  You don't have to look very hard to see that most of them have a much better batting average at leading decent lives than the rest of us.  I might not believe as they do, but I'm not such a boor as to refuse credit where credit is due.  For you to paint all religious folks as if they were wacko extremist cultists makes you as egregiously bigoted as the morons who paint all Germans as Nazis.

I have absolutely nothing against religious or mystical feelings and experiences. What gives you that idea? Because I don't think your little primitive cult has all the answers? Only because you and your fellow cult members declare themselves possessors of the ultimate truth? How dare you? Therein lies the greatest bigotry and arrogance one can display. There is nothing more arrogant, aggressive, and ultimately inhuman than that. See how it screws with your brain and sows hatred for other people in you?

This sounds as if you're starting to foam at the mouth, Michael.  Aren't you even a bit concerned that your irrational anti-religious fervor is pathological?  Please note that (a) I'm not a member of any religion and (b) I don't claim possession of ultimate truth (I don't even have any idea as to what that might be--nor do I care).

Merton may be a hero of the faith for you. For me, he is just another guy, an irrelevant writer of religious blabla who just got zapped off the planet like a rat while he probably thought he was some very special and saintly person, better than other people, that he was somehow in the position to lecture other people about "God". I find that brutally funny and ironic. Like I said, maybe that tells us that there is some kind of "God" after all and he punished that guy for his arrogance.

You've already demonstrated your ignorance of Merton and your prejudice toward him.  Odd that you feel compelled to repeat the performance.

Since nothing of that subject has anything to do with "intellectual integrity" - from an intellectual point of view, the whole subject is completely ridiculous and very obviously just a phenomenon of cultural history - but it all comes down to a matter of "faith", and the fact that you claim you have that and that makes you better than other people - that weak attempt at an only slightly veiled personal attack of yours is pretty pitiful and makes you the complete loser of the argument here. If you have to sink as low as attacking people for lacking "intellectual integrity" about a subject which you yourself said time and time again is not a matter of intellectual analysis, but of "faith" - that means you are totally out of arguments.

You're going off the deep end again, dude.  Your repeated mischaracterization of religious folks and chronic habit of setting up strawmen to vanquish is what falls short of intellectual integrity.  Your off-base statements about Merton come up short, too, as do your off-base characterizations of me and my statements.  I've made no claims about being better than others--that's obviously another artifact of your bigotry regarding matters of faith.  You might take care of that ridgepole lodged in your own eye before worrying about the speck of sawdust in mine.

God bless you, M--at least you're passionate about such issues, which shows that they matter to you--and that's half the battle. 

[karlhenning]

We don't even know ourselves.

There is wisdom in that.

To know God is a completely ridiculous claim.

That is a faith-based assertion 

[karlhenning]

To assert that it is "a completely ridiculous claim," is ironically a claim to know what God is, sufficiently to assert that to know him is ridiculous.  OTOH, with a bent that is not at all the irreverence which appears the sub-text to M's remark, many religious sages learn that knowing God is an incomplete matter, a work-in-progress . . . so there can also be wisdom in reflecting on what may, indeed, be ridiculous in one's claiming to know God.

And another question is, yer grandfather's epistemology conundrum: what is it, to know?

[M forever]

And why is the "creator God" a "commonsense" notion? We don't understand all this, we can't explain it, so it must have been some kind of being like us, only infinitely more powerfully, and yes, he/she/it created this universe just for us to play in! And yes, that being or power was accurately described already thousands of years ago by people who knew less about the world we live in than *a moderately intelligent 9-year old today*, but they had it all *completely figured out*!!! Reminds me once again of Einstein's characterization of religion as "childish" and reconfirms once again my impression which gets stronger and stronger all the time that this "religiousness" is really an early, very necessary but at some point to-be-grown-out-off, intermediate step in our mental and cultural evolution, just like there are many such steps in our personal evolution from infant to (more or less) adult.