Thread: Atheist zealots a heavy cross to bear
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Old 09-21-2010, 09:58 AM   #145
WT Sharpe
Bah, humbug!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenMonkey View Post
Cool thread. Even on one of the better politics / other boards I frequent (DVDtalk) this kind of thread gets out of hand pretty quick.

I consider myself agnostic, barely, because to me some things we will never know - we can't possibly know. I don't object to religion to fill the space of unknowable answers. But I'm a man of science and I look to it for man's way to find these answers - not a mystical holy book. Science and rationality first, religions second if you must have it, to fill in the gaps.

I consider there is a tiny chance that the Christians are right - or the Jews or the Muslims or the Buddhists - but I do consider some as slightly more ridiculous than others. My background is kind of liberal Mormon (RLDS or whatever they are called now) and I find there version of American continental history laughable. I just avoid the subject around my grandma and other religious people in my family though - I'm not a confrontational almost-atheist.
When you say there is a "tiny chance" that one of the traditional religions may be right, you are in good company.

.....I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the Gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
..........— Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British mathematician, essayist, author, philosopher. What I Believe, I: "Nature and Man" (1925).

Even the great Lord Russell admitted to what he called, "superstitious moments."

.....On the contrary, the present state of the world and the fear of an atomic war show that scientific progress without a corresponding moral and political progress may only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about. In superstitious moments I am tempted to believe in the myth of the Tower of Babel, and to suppose that in our own day a similar but greater impiety is about to be visited by a more tragic and terrible punishment.
..........— Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950), IX: "Ideas that have Helped Mankind."
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