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I think there're some unwritten rules on conduct in this thread that dictate maximum length of quotes, and that anyone exceeding such a limit should be attacked by generaleeeeeevilthings, but it seems to me as though just cutting this post down to one paragraph isn't doing it justice... Tom Coates in the Choosing a Spiritual Path thread:
I came to my position on God by dint of living in the world for a few years. It became clear to me quite quickly that the bible stories I was told did not have any relationship to the gradually establishing criteria of truth that I was starting to use to evaluate whether the front door would still be there when I went home, whether air would remain air or turn into chocolate or whether brie would spontaneously fly out of my arse. It also became clear to me quite quickly that individuals will convince themselves of counter-factual things for a whole range of reasons - because it makes them feel better, because they've been told things by other people who they trust, because they don't know any alternatives or because they're ill-informed, or because they're desperately looking for meaning where there may not be any. As a result, I came to the conclusion around my fourteenth birthday that the whole issue was kind of vaguely ridiculous and that I was living in a world populated, in large part, by absolute bloody lunatics who were able to so compartmentalise their viewpoints that they would quite cheerfully talk and rationally about how plausible it was that Jesus brought someone back from the dead but would totally freak out and be incredibly confused and alarmed and even terrified by the idea that two men could want to snog.
... And I've been beaten by Ariadne to being the first to say that that seems to sum up pretty perfectly my views on god, and exactly why, "Why don't you believe in god?" seems to rank alongside, "Why don't you think bin Laden is your mother?" and, "Why do you believe cheese-grating your hand wouldn't be particularly good fun?" in the non-question ridiculousness tables. |
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