To all parties participating in this thread: I stumbled upon this site while doing some general searches on Yahoo (search: Cultural Fallacies & Truisms; Pattern Recognition & Belief Structures; Pattern Recognition & Primative Cultures). I'm not the type to sit in front of this machine for hours and surf the web, having spent a large part of my life as a CAD operator. This thread happened, for whatever reason, to be the one that came up, and I got sucked in.
I realize why those involved in science continue to bang their heads against the wall of stubborn and illogical belief structures. Many feel, like I do, that we have an obligation not to change others beliefs, but at the very least, by correcting the logical inconsistencies of their arguments that possibly they may move on and come to a higher appreciation of those very beliefs. The point seemed to be completely missed or misunderstood by the creationists in this debate that many men of science (good, real, consequence providing science) are indeed members of the faithful. True Christians. True Muslims. True Hebrews. True whatevers.
I am not. A believer that is. I am a skeptic and a true agnostic. By true agnostic I mean that through much study and research and reflection I have come to realize that there is no definative, final proof that god exists or does not exist. Nor the soul or an afterlife. It probably is apparent in my use of the lowercase that in my heart of hearts that I am actually an atheist. That is, if I must for some unforseeable reason make a definite choice as to what I believe I would have to honestly choose atheism, aware all the while that I am making a choice based on a subjective personal analysis of information in my possession and correctly understood by me.
Although there are many good arguments for a belief oriented philosophy I saw none of them posted in this debate.
The reason I decided to post a reply was because of Percy's idea of seperating the Forums into novice and expert class. The comments above shed some light on why the combatants are unwilling to disengage. I suspect that whatever criteria were selected to differentiate novice from expert would not be acceptable to one camp or the other and this site would devolve into irrelevancy. I do agree that this very long thread quickly became pointless to anyone who engages in critical thinking.
Thank you all for a very entertaining evening and now I must figure out how I am going to funtion today without any sleep.
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