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Originally posted by Johnny Rotten
[B]Okay, I've scanned through the thread, and no one else seems to have touched upon this. I'm not arguing the nature or existence of God, but it sounds as though you are dismissing an entire thought model by using Occam's Razor, where one solves a mostly infinitely debateable problem by eliminating the more complex solution of the two provided. While this is efficient, it often comes at the cost of getting tripped up by bits and pieces of missed argument on your way out the door. Religion is so complex that, in my opinion, it can't quite ever be discarded as a point of view. You could spend the whole rest of your life studying the primary tracts and still get tripped up by a difficult question.
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I'm certainly not speaking for Hal, but I can speak for myself as to why I would be put in this same category that you're putting Hal in. I used to dig through the Christian texts and some theological historians to debate with Christians on the same grounds over their religion (and others in their respective religions). After doing this for several years, I realized that I was absolutely wasting my time. I was looking for answers, I wanted to be compelled... I never was, I always had a response for them on their own terms. Not only was I accomplishing nothing for myself (other than making Christians angry or frustrated, which wasn't something I was very proud of then and esp. now) but I felt that I wasn't even dealing with relevent issues about life, existence, and the nature of the universe. Religion to me is tangential when dealing with absurdity, which is at the core of all of these unanswered questions that science tries to empirically solve, and religion tries to solve with faith. Just as Hegel hated Christianity but stopped writing about it almost entirely after coming to his Philosophy of History, my dislike for religion has been trumped by my exposure to existentialism, ideas of the embodied mind, and extensive thinking about symbolism and metaphors in relationship to abstract thought. You could look at my arguments now and say that I'm leaving a lot out, but I've already been there... there is no need to go back.
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Respectfully, a gap in understanding is still a gap in understanding no matter who is trying to figuring it out. Ever heard of phlostigon? It and other scientific creations of days gone by sound fantastic by today's standards. And it was Aristotle and Ptolemy who decreed that the Earth was the center of the universe, not the Christian church. Science has served to explain most of the things we previously attributed to the divine, but remember, kids, it's called the Theory of Relativity for a reason.
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Neverminding that the Theory of Relativity wasn't discovered by it being pulled out of a hat randomly... The Church
did adopt the idea of a geocentric universe, if you're uncertain about it, ask Galileo. Science continues to shape the knowledge construct that we use to evaluate the world religiously and philosophically.