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Cruddy
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I guess faith is an illogical argument. Accepting something without proof (not evidence - not the same) is illogical.
It's not impossible though, and we have to take a lot of everyday things on faith (for instance, the existence of other countries and the events of the past).
As for the religion angle - if a religion has any worth, it's giving people a set of guidelines to live by. I guess we all know truly religious, evangelical people. Showing scepicism to them isn't the same as showing scorn.
It's horrible living without a set of at least some basic guidelines. I know, I've been there... and I don't want to go back.
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Lincoln
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It is interesting how much af mans logic has been proved wrong over the years. One who relies on logic alone rests on shifting sand.
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St Leo
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Member of the Apolyton Social Democratic Party
Jul 2005
time: 00:28
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"As a teenager I was a committed Christian. It was in my background. I used to work for the school chapel, in fact. Then one day when I was about eighteen I was walking down the street when I heard a street evangelist and, dutifully, stopped to listen. As I listened it began to be borne in on me that he was talking complete nonsense, and that I had better have a bit of a think about it.
[...] In the years I'd spent learning history, physics, Latin, math, I'd learnt (the hard way) something about standards of argument, standards of proof, standards of logic, etc. In fact we had just been learning how to spot the different types of logical fallacy, and it suddenly became apparent to me that these standards simply didn't seem to apply in religious matters. In religious education we were asked to listen respectfully to arguments that, if they had been put forward in support of a view of, say, why the Corn Laws came to be abolished when they were, would have been laughed at as silly and childish and – in terms of logic and proof – just plain wrong."
- Douglas Adams, interview
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Cruddy
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That's how theologians earn their bread - by actually giving arguments for reliogious beliefs.
Evangelists earn their bread by taking it from the guillable.
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St Leo
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Member of the Apolyton Social Democratic Party
Jul 2005
time: 00:28
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" What astonished me [...] was the realization that the arguments in favor of religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the robust arguments of something as interpretive and opinionated as history. In fact they were embarrassingly childish. They were never subject to the kind of outright challenge which was the normal stock in trade of any other area of intellectual endeavor whatsoever. Why not? Because they wouldn't stand up to it. So I became an Agnostic. And I thought and thought and thought. But I just did not have enough to go on, so I didn't really come to any resolution. I was extremely doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn't know enough about anything to have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the universe, and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I kept reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins's books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
- Douglas Adams, interview
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Amen to that...
The Blind Watchmaker is a great Book
Douglas Adams will be remembered 
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22-05-2003 04:14
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