DOPE-HARDCORE-0 Posted:

Shii, your godlove is much appreciated and all but a bit of a derail.

The god or not issue has been debated in other threads. Plenty of scientists like to use god as the black box until they get finer tools, and then put god as the new black box at the new edge of measurability.

Again, the heart of this discussion is organized religion in general. Their methods of operation, depending on the particular church, range from simple high pressure coersion to flat out terrorism (both foreign and domestic). Hell, Rajneespuram managed to convince PhDs and other intellectuals to become gun-toting martyrdom-ready guardsmen as Rajneesh reaped in millions through donations and hostile takeover of the local town.

Smaller cults, the kinds that make the news, get mocked because they tend to be small and fleeting. However, I’d posit that a hundred Jonestowns would be FAR better for society than the tiniest fragment of catholicism, simply because of the volumes of falsified histories and ancestral ties people have to the church, because it’s just one more reason for idiots to turn off their brains and blindly follow the whims of the reigning regressive guy in the funny hat.

I thought the point of this thread was debating why a rational person can believe in God, which, in fact, you stated in the first post.

What I want to understand is how a fundamentally rational human being can ever continue to be part of a religion.

That was in your very first paragraph. Don’t get on my case because you decided to switch topics.

Forgive me for giving you the exact reasons why someone would and evidence to support said beliefs.

As far as organized religion goes, throughout history we’ve seen that power corrupts. The church would be a lot better off if the members just read the Scriptures, with proper hermeneutics and exegesis, and took away what really mattered from them, rather than sitting and obeying the commands of the higher-ups.

As far as the “terrorism” thing goes, extremists exist in every religion. They’re by no means indicative of the whole. The teachings of these religions generally contradict the extremist sects’ practices anyway.

I think you’re making some pretty enormous generalizations, here.