Many, previously non-religious people - atheists and agnostics alike - have had religious or supernatural experiences that they lack the ability to explain.

What's telling is that if it shifts them toward religion, it almost always steers them to the religion most generally accepted in the culture they grew up in. That's pretty strong evidence that it's still very much a "because somebody said this" phenomenon and not a revelation of some deep universal truth.

Here is why thr tea pot doesn't fit. Not only are you saying you hsvn't convinced me, but it isn't true and you are stupid too.

You see, the second two parts are affirmative asertions outside what you were asked to believe and require just as much weight as you place on the burden of proof yourself. Its like you saying you spilled wine on the carpet a couple of weeks ago and it didn't stain it. You have no way to prove it to me so i can either trust you or not. But when i say you had no wine and you didn't spill anything, i do need to validate that.

This is likely more true than not. Society and even familiy has historically sought to increase its safety in security as well as resources like food and of course labor by increasing its population. Homosexuality would deprive such benifits as so would masterbation that until recently was taboo too.

Whether this dislike of what would defeat population growth and hence the security of the unit is instinctual or learned might be a good question to explore. But it is something that doesn't need religion to flourish.

I have no interest in proving whether God does or doesn't exist. But why does it matter?

If God is telling me what to do and what not to do, the question of whether or not God exists seems pretty important.

I don't doubt what he says because i think i know who he is in other posts. He likely walked into a prayer meeting held by some jocks before a football game and started refering to god as a sky fairy then attempted to explain the fiction of religion and how he was too smart to fall for it like those idiots.

You can see people like that all over /. And they pop up in odd places too. I remember some kid walking into a bar with a fsm shirt on and proudly explianing to anyone who asked how it was making fun of religion in school. He was asked to shut the hell up about it several times and said it was a free country. I think i heard one if the regulars say then i'm free to do this just before mopping the floor with him. The bouncer stood there and told him he was lucky he wasn't hurt more. Of course he called the cops from the parking lot and claimed he didn't do anything but the cop saw that he was trying to incite people. We told the cops the guy who hit him came in with him origionally and left right after kicking his ass. Nothing was done about it.

I cannot tell you why people are living in those places. I imagine there are lots of reasons ranging from economics to resorces to preference. I just know that we have the abilities to mitigate the risks should we want to.

Are you really that daft? Dams control the flooding. No one even hinted about causes. And yes, fire breaks contain fires long enough to get to them and keep them under control. Controlled burns is like having one large fire broken into segments and spread over a number of years. It is not dificult.

No, it absolutely does not make me feel good that you are stupid. In fact, it makes me sad for you. You asked what my point was and it was pretty obvious the first time.

But hey, i like the way you dealt or didn't deal with those inconvienient facts laid in front of you. I guess trying to name call instead of dealing with being wrong is just one of you coping mechanism so i won't get upset. I'm just more sad for you now though.

It certainly is up to you to prove something doesn't exist when you assert it doesn't exist. At the moment, you have no idea if there is a god, just whether or not there is enough evidence to convince you of one. But when you push ypur beliefs onto others, you are going beyond you being convinced or not and activly asserting something as fact which you simply have no evidence of.

Let's see, you ask me what kind of Ferrari I drive, I say 'none', and you say that's a kind of Ferrari.

And you express that idiotic view with a glaring logical fallacy: If religion is a collection of beliefs, it does not follow that every collection of beliefs is a religion.

Hope you were just out for a troll...

No, that has to wait until we all get to Hell.

Except for those who think that means they *should* run rampant.

Yeah, I found his observation really offensive when I was a church-going schoolboy. But now I don't think many religious people even know what he meant: it's not about religion-as-a-drug, but rather about religion as a way to keep the masses under control. Apparently *lots* of famous leaders throughout history said the same thing, in their own words.

I vividly recall GWB at a memorial for some people he sent off to die in Iraq stating confidently that they were in a better place now. As if he (or anyone else) would actually know.

Apparently the neocons behind "intelligent design" were following the script from Plato's Republic: religious beliefs are good for the masses, though the Guardian class knows better. And they humbly consented to bear the burdens of being the Guardians and dealing with reality so the masses won't have to.

I disagree. Anyone who actually reasons about their religion will shuck it in a heartbeat. There's not the slightest evidence to support one religion's claims vs. another's, so the only rational choice is to set your standard for evidence low and believe all of them, or set it high and reject all of them. And since they are mutually contradictory, reason requires you to throw one of those options out.

Religion is a culturally transmitted phenomenon, almost like language. It's no accident that if you know when and where a randomly selected person lives or lived you can predict both their language and religion with fairly high accuracy. Reason indicates that religion all about tradition, not about some objective reality.

That's kind of how I feel about it. I don't believe in anything supernatural, period. But I don't need to join a club, go to meetings, fanboy some heros, and all that jazz. It starts to be a cult, even if not a religious cult.

Of course, rational argument isn't going to lever anyone out of religious beliefs, so maybe this kind of jazz is what is needed to break religion's stranglehold on public policy.

I suppose I'm just not the club-joining type.

This is wrong. Bacteria are not evenly distributed throughout both the small and large intestines. Look up small intestinal bacterial overgrowth sometime.