Quote:
Originally posted by chavos
wow....JR may have just won the TFP Philosophy sweepstakes with that answer. very well thought out, and i really appriciate what you said.
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And thank you for not taking it the wrong way. It is my
personal belief that religion is a construct of man. At the same time, atheism is, in my personal opinion, rooted in a fundamental logical fallacy: Deciding that something does not exist because it has not been proven to exist. But whether or not atheism is itself a leap of faith is better left to another thread.
Even though I think of religion as a construct, that does not take away its power, for me at least. In a way, I think it makes religion even more powerful, that we could create such a complex and often intimidating abstraction in order to bridge the gap between fact and mystery.
Whether or not God exists, the kind of devotion that makes people build something like St. Paul's Basilica or the Parthenon is a devotion with more beautiful power than any other force I can think of. The poetic sanctity of baptisms, weddings and funerals--I wouldn't want to live in a world that didn't have ingrained respect for such events. Religion helps to make us better as a group than we usually are as individuals.