The Blasphemy Challenge

Really? I've had the privilege to travel the world and see, first hand, much of Europe's greatest masterpieces of art, music, and architecture; as an English major I studied the great poets of my language (and translations of others.)Not a single time do I recall a sign at the door saying "you must believe this much to enter." Your assertion that the beauty and meaning of art are inaccessible to any but the religious is demonstratively false. Indeed, if anything is true, the beauty of art is heightened for the atheist, because we believe those works to be the creations of humans every bit as flawed and ephemeral as ourselves; not breathed from high heaven by a God who surely could be doing something better with his time than telling Michaelangelo how to paint a ceiling.Religion does not have the corner on experiencing beauty, and your arrogant presumption to the contrary is wrong-headed, ignorant, and quite frankly, deeply insulting. I suspect you've never really known any atheists at all, have you?

It doesn't take "god-sense." Making up a deity is how the ignorant make sense of phenomena they don't understand (an effort starkly pointed out by the emerging religion of "Ana", the goddess of anorexics. Of course, make up a goddess of anorexia, you're labeled "crazy." Make up a god, and you're labeled "holy.")Of course, making up a religion is how the unscrupulous make money. "God-sense" has nothing to do with it. I'd say most religions have a lot more to do with OCD.

Well, here's one, for starters. It would be nice if I could live in a society where I wasn't considered the crazy one for refusing to believe in Santa Claus for grownups, and didn't have to hear from people like you about how I can't apparently hear music, or something, unless I bow to your magical sky-man. (My ears and eyes work just fine, thank you, and a sunset is no less glorious simply because I understand how light from a star refracts through atmosphere.) Of course it is. How many believers do you know who talk about their faith being the only thing that saw them through a difficult time? Your people are falling all over themselves to tell me, and tell each other, how they use faith as a crutch - as in, something to be leaned on. Isn't that exactly how your religion is described? One step ahead of you. Aren't you aware that there's a portion of the brain that, when stimulated (by meditation, for instance, or drugs), produces precisely the same feelings of religious euphoria and spirituality experienced by believers?Stop going to church and get yourself some 'shrooms. Shortcut to exactly the same feeling, as it turns out.

I don't think it's a malfunction. I think it's our brains doing exactly what they evolved to do - seek explanations and patterns in complex phenomena.It turns out that if you operate that part of your brain without an epistemological framework like the scientific method (or something similar) you "discover" connections that aren't there, like "I always win at pool when I play stripes" or "I get laid more often when I wear my lucky underwear" or "if I pray to God, I won't die of cancer."But come on. You don't look at things like praying the rosary or stations of the cross, and see the fingerprints of OCD all over that stuff? Clearly most religious ritual comes from people with legitimate mental illness in the form of compulsions. But religious faith in general comes from the all-too-human need to seek relationships to events that happen in proximity.

Nonsense, and I already explained why this isn't true. Honestly I don't see the first thing in your post that's an actual response to what I wrote - just more of the insulting arrogance of the believer, who claims sole dominion over the best of man's achievements but no responsibility for its greatest evils.

And you believe them? LOL!

No no, I'm not saying that it's not.But honestly what's the difference between praying the rosary and the guy who's compelled to touch every parking meter as he walks down the street?

For once you're not being arrogant. Can you accept that others can turn their backs on all that without ceasing to see the beauty in the world?

Hey, yeah. I mean I guess there's the possibility that Santa Claus really does deliver toys to all the children of the world in one night, too!

Nothing accidental about it, my friend.

The thing is, the imagination is not limited to the creation of things that are true. Which is its strength, obviously; but that same strength basically discounts imagination alone as a tool for truth-seeking, which is something I think you admit here: I agree, but we definitely should not make the mistake of confusing this process with one that leads to truth. Which is what religion's proponents invariably do; which is what results in so much bloodshed when people with made-up beliefs assert theirs are true and others are false.People like to assert that there's no harm done when make-believe is substituted for truth, and it seems that you just did that. But the history of human religious conflict makes it very clear indeed how harmful that behavior can be.

Indeed. There's nothing insane about killing two women in a ditch because the local religious belief dictated that they could be sold for more money as "ghost brides" than as living brides, as recently happened in China. It's a perfectly rational financial decision, based on make-believe.