filtherton

Well, if we want to play the "religion is responsible for war" game I might direct you to a couple of folks who were popular in Europe and Asia in the 20th century. Perhaps it is a claim that could be made about specific theists in specific contexts, but Mondak was referring to general conversations between general atheists and general theists (at least as far as I could tell), which generally have nothing to do with wars or suppression of ideas, beyond flame wars and bannings.

On the great ideological road trip, reason has to do with how you get where you're going with whatever you started with, faith has to do with what you start with.

Solid reasoning can result in questionable conclusions if that reasoning is based on questionable premises. Uncertainty in the premises doesn't make the conclusion any less valid with respect to the reason used to derive it. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say (not that I think theology is garbage).

Speaking of congnitive dissonance and reasoning, yesterday's New York Times had an article about a scientist (mathematician maybe) who may have just invalidated a whole set of "classic" psychology experiments concerning cognitive dissonance in monkeys. All he did was show, using a fairly straightforward probability proof, that the researchers apparently assumed that apes choose things randomly, when it could have also plausibly assumed that they don't. The researcher's premises were flawed, their conclusion probably wrong, but the reasoning they used to get from that premise to their conclusion wasn't. In fact, the reasoning seemed so solid, that despite the fact that the science was bad, it seems it took over 50 years for anyone to catch it.

This is really only related to the present discussion tangentially, but I thought it was interesting.

That's what I'm saying. I also think that the problems of religion are also problems of ego.