Hey there. Love the avatar by the way. Its even scarier than yoyopuppy.
1) I don't believe in the divine - your god, I imagine - because I can see so many conflicting religions that to pick the one true one seems really hard - especially if hampered by predispositions inherited during my upbringing and from peer group. In order to arrive at a decision as to which one to follow, I would have to see some serious evidence to guide me.
Unfortunately, the evidence presented by each religion to demonstrate its truth seems in most cases seems to me to be utterly underwhelming, and no one religion seems to stand out on the basis of any evidence offered to support it. If there's no evidence then you are setting yourself an impossible task to try to find the "true" one - or else you, like me, decide that maybe the paucity of convincing evidence for ANY religion is significant in itself.
Ive come to the tentative conclusion that any religion is an attempt to come to terms with the big, scary questions like - where did granny go when she died? and the natural follow-on, where will I go when I die? And also the utterly perplexing ones like "why am I here?". That old Voltaire thing about God having to be invented if he didn't exist.
2) As far as I'm aware, I don't believe in anything without evidence. I'd be very surprised if you were any different. Its the kind of evidence thats the issue. That isn't to say that I believe only things that have been proved in controlled tests, or that you only believe things that are only supported by texts written by ancient barbaric peoples. I imagine that all humans, as only partially rational beings, probably mix and match.
Ive got a question for you, just for a laugh. I'm going to ask you to stretch your imagination a little, to imagine a universe in which human life, very much like ours, has arisen by blind chance. Do you think they would find it necessary to build fictions to explain the big scary questions and the perplexing one? Or not?
Cheers!
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