Star-signs!

[tlclark]

I will always remember what a monk on Mt. Athos told me the last time I was there. He said that the most important things in life are the ones we feel and not think out, family, friends, love. All the things for which we can't give rational justifications.

Travis, how is that Divine? I don't understand how something that can't be readily explained has to be attributed to God and religion? Why can't it just be instinct?

I didn't say it was divine. I said it was irrational. It may be instinct. I have to concede that. There are a lot of evolutionary biologists that say our preference for our loved ones is just an evolutionary glitch. I also know that most people (myself and many atheists included, you may not be one) feel an inherent disgust at such a thought! That love and attachment are no more significant than say opposable thumbs is something most people find repugnant. (Yet that too may be instinctual!) Eventually it's circular. You are forced to reply "instinct" to anything, or you are forced to suggest it's something more. Nothing can break that cycle, unless it's some emphemeral inexplicable witness, and like I said, I can't explain it.

Like love, faith is either aesthetics (an arbitrary illusion of how things should be) or its real, but unprovable.

But's that's all I'm going to say about that. I'll let Thomas Aquinas take the rest. :wink:

Now as a believer, I realize I can't give this witness to anybody else. It's the exactly the antithesis of science where I can communicate it.

Dawkins calls faith a "mind-virus" but I think that's deliberately pejorative and bigoted. Sagan and Russell were never so crass. When it comes to my favorite Atheist however the prize goes to Albert Camus.

None of this BTW has any bearing on my belief in people's morality. I find most atheists to be very moral. Believing in God is a lot less about morality than people think and a lot more about meaning anyway.

As far as astrology goes, I don't believe in it all. But for the sake of intellectual honesty, I simply can't condemn those who believe in it, but I think my last post explained why reason requires us to distinguish superstition from faith.

Thanks again!

Travis