God & the Fairy Tree

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Humanity needs God. We don't need religion, however.

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I'd say the exact opposite has been observed.Religion allowed stronger clan ties and enforced common purposes and order within societies, and that bolstered survival.God's existence, on the other hand, is irrelevant to if belief in the supernatural enforces in people the requirement to subsume their individual wants and needs in favor of the group.

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A man who is so skeptical as to stand for nothing inevitably spends his entire life searching for something that was with him the whole time, IMHO.

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Who says you have to search for something your entire life if you don't believe in God?

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Its all about world views and comfort levels. I feel uncomfortable imagining a world with no Creator. The Creator is personal to me...I believe that He loves me,

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Where is it written that the universe, or truth, owes you comfort?

Is belief in fairies (held by an adult) absurd?

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People generally assume that fairies don't exist so the sign is an obvious joke. People don't generally assume that god doesn't exist so it is to be taken seriously.

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But just becasue a lot of people take an assumption or belief seriously doesn't mean that the particular belief or assumption in question is an intellectually mature belief.For a long time, people generally believed and assumed lots of things that you would laugh at today, and think "My, how silly and childish it was for people to believe that Zeus lived on Mount Olympus, and that Apollo pulled the sun across the sky in his firey chariot. They were so backward and I am so modern."There is no difference whatsoever in the belief that Apollo moves the sun in his chariot and the belief in any other supernatural thing.Edited by nator, : No reason given.

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But instead of immediately obeying your desire to compare them with God - check the composition of each belief and what it involves.

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But they are both supernatural beliefs.The reasons someone chooses to maintain a belief in any supernatural thing are many and varied, but usually take the form of some kind of easing of discomfort (fear) about the unknown, or the delight and stimulation it provides in thinking that magic really does exist. In short, it is a comfort.

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Why would an adult believe in God?

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Because they were taught to, and it is socially acceptable, and in many places it is fully expected of them. Further, in many places, to not believe in God is to suffer social stigma.

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Why would adults generally not believe in fairies?

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They were taught that belief in fairies is childish and not socially acceptable in an adult. Society's reaction to an adult who believes in fairies is to believe the person crazy or at least odd.To an unbeliever however, the nature of the belief in God and the belief in fairies are the same.

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1. Do adults care about feeding the poor? Clothing them? visiting the sick, loving their fellow man, preaching hope to those with nothing, etc..etc..?

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2. Tell me, do fairies involve such matters, or are they mind-candy for babas?

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So, what you seem to be saying is that when adults grow up and have grown-up concerns like feeding the poor and dealing with pain and despair, the fairies they believed in when they were children change to a big, important, serious father-figure God.All you have described is changing the type of mind-candy from kid sweets to grown up sweets. The purpose and effect is the same. Edited by nator, : No reason given.

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I'm saying that being intellectually mature and having the belief allows it to be taken seriously, not that being taken seriousy makes it intellectually mature.

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But what I'm saying is that believing in things like fairies or gods or anything supernatural isn't intellectually mature.

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But then we can include subjective evidence and perhaps even the argumentum ad populum as some evidence. That way, god has more evidence than the fairies and then you have your difference.

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Of course, if you want to go this route, astrology has more evidence than god.

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In this day and age, we are quite assured that there is no such thing as magic. The terms, supernatural and magic fall into pointless descriptions bound from an earlier time.

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And yet, everyone who believes in God is using exactly the same thought processes as someone who believes in magic.

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I don't think that belief in astrology is neccessarily intellectually immature either.

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OK, so how do YOU define "intellectually mature"?I put Astrology in the same category as belief in Tarot, free energy machines, and Atlantis.

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different people find sufficient answers in different places. for some, only science is sufficient; for others, only a god can fully answer their questions. despite the claims of the atheists, they also ask these questions and also receive comfort from their answers.

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...except that I don't have any answers. There's a whole lot of "I don't know; nobody does." when I ask the big questions.There's no comfort, but then again, I never figured the universe owes me any explanatins.

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That's the problem right there - you insist they're the same even if the argument is illogical.

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That is not what I said.What I said was: All such belief can be reduced to, well, irrational belief. The motivations of the believer are irrelevant.

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And infact one is a magical entity and the other is a supernatural entity, so there's our first difference.

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"Magical" and "supernatural" are the same thing.And belief in either is, at the root, the same sort of irrational belief.

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Damn, I was going to say that 'being taught' could explain my particular flavor of theism, but the belief in god, itself, is of its own accord.

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So, do you ever remember a time when you didn't realize that people believed in and worshipped an invisible power that they called "God"?I was raised a Catholic and was brought to Mass every Sunday from infancy on, and attended CCD starting at age 5.There was never, ever a time in my sentient life in which I was not made aware of people's belief in God(s), and I suspect the same is true of you, and of most people on the planet.

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Just don't tell Shraff that you poor deluded insane brain-washed comfort-seeker.

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Apparently we can't string a sentence together without our religion having preached it to us.

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You know, it is a sign that one has a weak argument when one has to resort to gross negative exaggerations of one's opponent's arguments.

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In spite of all the bluster by theists, we have no way of knowing if there is a God or fairies or both. And in spite of all the bluster by atheists, we have no way of knowing that there isn't.

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That's why the most intellectually honest position is Agnosticism.

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So are you agnostic about fairies and ipu's or is it ok to dismiss them as entities made up by people?

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I can't say, with 100% surety, that fairies or gods do not exist.It is impossible to know anything with 100% surety, since nobody is omnicient.

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I think the only intellectually honest position is, given the history of religions and their gods, is to be an atheist about all human religions and their gods.

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That would only be true if you hold all knowledge.Do you?

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No of course I don't have all knowledge and of course we can never be 100% sure about things that there is no evidence of.

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Actually, we can never be 100% sure of anything, no matter how much evidence there is.That's what scientists call tentativity.

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But as an educated adult with a working brain I can be pretty damm sure that fairies, ipu's and gods are constructs of the human brain and exist nowhere else.

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Sure, me too.But that is not the same as knowing, for sure, that they do not exist.

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Let's say I'm an atheist about fairies and gods until someone can provide some evidence for their existance. I think its more rational to not believe in things for which no-one has every presented evidence for then to withhold judgement forever.

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If you would accept evidence for their existence if it was presented to you, then you are not an athiest regarding their existence, you are agnostic regarding their existence.At least, this is how I understand the difference between Atheism and Agnosticism.