A Civil discussion about Religion
First of all, I want to make sure that everyone has read that second word in the title. Please go back and read it again to be sure. This is not here to give anyone with a particular religious belief a soapbox to shout from. That does not interest me. If this thread turns in to a mess of name calling or simple religious bigotry I will ask for it to be locked and will never attempt a thread of a serious nature again.
That said, I ask the mods to give this thread a chance before closing it. A number of forums I've been on would likely lock a thread of this nature straight after the OP, but I'm hoping this community is mature enough (in terms of the relationships between its members) to respect everyone's views, providing they are put forward with a sufficient level of eloquence, and without the self righteous fervour often associated with such a topic.
Now, providing the tenuous assertions made in the above paragraphs prove to be true, I would like to begin this thread in earnest.
I am a fairly staunch atheist, and have been for a number of years. Religion was pretty much left up to me to decide from a young age, though like most children I was informed of the existence of a god, along with everything that goes along with it. Even from a very young age I became aware of the duality of existence; the world I saw around me (which is much like the world I see now, only bigger), and the world I was being told the world was (this involved Santa, god, fairies, angels, ghosts, and monsters). This duality confused me for a while, partly because I was being told the world was like this from the ultimate authority (parents), and partly because I genuinely wanted the world to be like that.
When I hit primary school I started to apply more thinking to the world around me and hit upon a fairly simple hypothesis; if I ignored what people had told me, and went off only what I could see and examine myself, would I ever come to the same conclusion regarding a god that other people were telling me was true? The answer I came to was no. I distinctly remember a vague sensation of trepidation when I let go of those ideas, neatly filling them under the "probably not true" section in my mind.
An interesting thought experiment is to imagine what would happen if a man turned up today, purporting to be the son of some god or another. I would like to believe that he wouldn't end up with a religion by the end of the century, although history clearly shows that to not be true.
My experiences thus far have left me with this view of religion: in all of its iterations, it exists as something that people want to believe. That fervent want seems to have become synonymous with the dubiously labelled "virtue" of faith. People have faith that the universe is how they want it to be because they simply cannot face the idea that it isn't.
I am not setting out to offend anybody, although I would ask that, if you are offended, you explain why what I have said offends you. To be as lucid as possible: I am not asking that in order to mock such sensibilities; I simply want to know why my standpoint of there being no god is inherently offensive to you. I do not find other people's belief in a god offensive, that is until it spills over into areas that it shouldn't.
The universe, the world, all of existence is full of exquisite wonder that every single human would do well to appreciate. I am saddened that such wonder is reduced to being the creation of a sentient being, it somehow feels as though that would rob it of its wonder.
There, that is a small taster (a good one I hope) of what this thread could be if people take the time to consider their responses, rather than let their emotions do the typing.
I ask one more time that we do not allow this thread to decay into spittle and rage.
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