Originally posted by mischief
Yep. We just like debating the semantics. Christianity gets the most attention because it has the most gaps in it's story. I haven't even gotten into the whole "sons of Abraham must live as one family" rant.😉
Oh, I don't know about this. I don't think Christianity has any more holes in it than any other belief system. Perhaps we just encounter more people in the US who insist that the holes don't exist.
Personally, I was raised Christian, but always had this little secret shame because I wasn't having these mystic, life-transforming experiences, the blissful sense of communion with the almighty and so forth that everyone else swore they had on a regular basis (I had a grandmother who claimed God spoke to her,
literally). And it's not like I didn't try or lacked sincerety, but it was like when somebody says they hear a noise, and you start listening really closely, and then you think maybe you hear something, but you're not sure you're not just imagining what it would be like if you were hearing whatever it is. It took me a little longer than I would want to admit to conclude that this was probably just an "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon, and that if I was claiming to have these experiences so that people wouldn't know God had jilted me, then it's pretty likely that I'm not alone in that.
So I'm now an atheist/agnostic. I might be wrong, but you can't say I didn't give God a fair shot, and He didn't return my calls, so to speak. On a broader scale, I'm a skeptic. Skepticism gets a bad rap. Skeptics are pictured as being like the two old hecklers in the balcony on the Muppet Show. Personally, I've found that there's enough beauty and wonder in the so-called "mundane" universe that I really don't feel the need to invent things to spice it up.
Don't get me wrong. I recognize that religion can do very good things in some people's lives. I have utmost respect for the likes of Mother Theresa or Buddhist monks who seriously walk the talk. But I don't see that often. If religion leads people to be better humans than they would be without it, then yay for religion. Personally, I think I'm a better person without it. A set of arbitrary rules handed down from on high has less impact on me than a rational system of ethics based on tangible consequences and a fundamental respect and empathy for other individuals. That may not be the case for everyone.
But the one thing I really hate is to see cases where religion (or lack thereof) makes people worse off and more meanspirited than the alternative. People have this nasty instinctive drive to categorize themselves in groups and to automatically assume that being in the group makes one better than being out of the group. Instead of using our rational, thinking brains to fight this irrational tendency, we rationalize, and the result is discrimination and hate. As a matter of principle, I reject the notion that membership in a group has any effect whatsoever on the value of an individual in himself.