How did you stop believing?

[Interbane]

Indeed, no religion is perfectly consistent, or even mildly at that (and I would challenge anyone to disprove this contention) when it comes to doctrines, ideas, and history.

I know a little fishy who will bite this bait. Not I. Just watch.

[Robert Tulip]

It is difficult to credit any one religion as being True or any one god as being True when there have been so many throughout human history. None appears to have any greater claim to being more credible or reliable than any other. Why Christianity and not Judaism? Why Islam and not Hinduism? Why monotheism and not polytheism? Every position has had its defenders, all as ardent as those in other traditions. They can't all be right, but they can all be wrong. I am sure Im preaching to the choir, but I would like to include one last reason for not believing, or rather, why I stopped. Indeed, no religion is perfectly consistent, or even mildly at that (and I would challenge anyone to disprove this contention) when it comes to doctrines, ideas, and history. Every ideology, philosophy, and cultural tradition has inconsistencies and contradictions, so this shouldn't be surprising — but other ideologies and traditions aren't alleged to be divinely created or divinely sanctioned systems for following the wishes of a god. The state of religion in the world today is more consistent with the premise that they are man-made institutions. Simply put, faith, is an unreliable guide to reality or means for acquiring knowledge.

You equate tradition and faith. Traditions all have untrue accretions, but the faith at their heart can be true. Religion involves public agreement on dogma over time, and tends towards a lowest common denominator. If faith is apophatic, ie open to mystery, it resists the codification of dogma.

This is relevant to Sam Harris's new book The Moral Landscape, Booktalk's next non fiction selection. Harris observes that science has an anti-faith tradition, but the price has been failure to define values, with the view that science is only about facts. The problem in assessing the truth of religion is how to find true values that are not grounded in error. Often religion speaks in allegory and parable, with ability to point to deep truth.

[President Camacho]

For X-Mas, I give everyone one Robert Tulip in their stocking. You're welcome.

[UPENN-Skeptic]

"Often religion speaks in allegory and parable, with ability to point to deep truth."[/quote]

How can one speak in allegory and parable IE fable, while speaking "deep truth?" And, please define deep truth. I would hope, one needs to provide extraordinary evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
Perhaps it's because I don't understand how people can even vaguely justify theism (or even agnosticism) that I find myself continually in debates about the issue. I find myself explaining my stance on religion at least once a month (I do however welcome this new outlet). At one stage (While at Penn) I went through a bit of a phase of reading other people's books on why they didn't believe in 'god'. These books were routinely extremely boring, because fundamentally the intellectual labour involved in making a highly convincing 'anti-god' case is so trivial that it feels out of place in the mouths or books of scholars. Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian was one of those books. I read it to see if I could find a new way to translate the obviousness of atheism to the people I routinely found myself in argument with. But fundamentally, it was the same as every other book of its kind. Obvious. Self-explanatory. Tedious. Repetitive. And yet - despite the banality of the arguments, religious people just don't seem to get it.

[UPENN-Skeptic]

Indeed, no religion is perfectly consistent, or even mildly at that (and I would challenge anyone to disprove this contention) when it comes to doctrines, ideas, and history.

I know a little fishy who will bite this bait. Not I. Just watch.

Well said.

[UPENN-Skeptic]

Indeed, no religion is perfectly consistent, or even mildly at that (and I would challenge anyone to disprove this contention) when it comes to doctrines, ideas, and history.

I know a little fishy who will bite this bait. Not I. Just watch.

Indeed, I need to entertain you with something Frank Zappa once said, "Beware of the fish people, they are the true enemy."

[Robert Tulip]

Indeed, no religion is perfectly consistent, or even mildly at that (and I would challenge anyone to disprove this contention) when it comes to doctrines, ideas, and history.

I know a little fishy who will bite this bait. Not I. Just watch.

Indeed, I need to entertain you with something Frank Zappa once said, "Beware of the fish people, they are the true enemy."

Do you mean the people with the Christian fish?

The deep truth of this symbol is that Jesus marked the moment when the position of the sun at the March equinox precessed from Aries the Ram to Pisces the Fishes. This event supplies the cosmic ground for Christian mythology of the fish as the symbol of the new age.

Visitors and fish smell in three days. What about after 2000 years?

By the way, here is a nice diagram from the stars of the three kings (Orion's Belt), the star in the east (Sirius), and the manger with three wise men at its foot (deck of Argo).

[UPENN-Skeptic]

Speaking of smelliness... Poor Jonah...
"For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Genesis

[Robert Tulip]

Speaking of smelliness... Poor Jonah...
"For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Genesis

Jonah is another Bible myth with an interesting stellar parallel. The sun appears to stop in its southward journey on the solstice on 21-22 December. It then appears to begin again moving northward on Christmas Day. Hence Easter, Christmas and the Jonah story are linked by things standing still for three days between an ending (the cross = solstice = swallowed by whale) and a new beginning (resurrection = days begin to get longer = arrival in Nineveh).

In fact, the Bible says the crucifixion was on Friday afternoon and the resurrection was on Sunday morning, only 40 hours later, but on the third day, so the prophecy linking to Jonah got it wrong. If it was three days and three nights the resurrection would not have been until Monday afternoon. Maybe the fish pong in hell got too bad after forty hours. You may have verballed the author of Genesis here.

[laurcunningham]

My favorite atheist story, so far, comes form Ricky Gervais.

http://www.vido1.com/QWxEFeSdVMtN1MW1WU ... and-being-

I wish my de-conversion story was as elegant as that.

[...]

What's your story?

I never "believed" it to begin with. My family is from Ireland, moved over to Pennsylvania in the late 1800s, and adopted the Catholic belief system. We're a big Irish Catholic family, and my childhood was based on Catholic beliefs, to an extent. We didn't go to church, but my aunt was fantastic at making me go along with her when I went to visit her. I guess she was trying to save me, or something. I remember having never, ever believed the bible to be anything other than a really long book I had no interest in reading. It wasn't until about five or six years ago that my mother realized that both my sister and I hadn't ever believe in god. She was a little shocked, but relieve in a sense. She was raised believing she was a horrible person if she didn't vote Republican and if she didn't believe in god. She had no idea how she wound up having two intelligent, liberal, non-god believing daughters, but we inspired her to look outside of her sheltered box and to investigate other ideas. She is much happier now, and has realized that her long life of voting Democrat is not a sin.