IQ & Atheism

[David Meyer]

I sincerely like you all.



-- Sent from my Palm Pixi
Ian Livingston wrote:

Seems apparent to me that either belief system would require, at best,

a significant gullibility factor. It is just as impossible to

substantiate the absence of deity in the infinite realm of

possibilities as it is to verify the presence of it. Intelligence is

irrelevant, except as it determines, maybe, the extent to which

arguments provided by others shape your experiential narrative. The

question comes down to deciding what set of metaphors resonates most

consistently in your thoughts and sensibilities. The truth of either

claim is both irrefutable and indefensible, except on grounds of

faith. It is a question of what is beautiful, which is a subjective

(or an intersubjective) assessment. As a spiritual anarchist, I pick

freely from all camps, place my faith in none, and see awesome beauty

and ghastly horrors everywhere, as well as every shade between. I find

humanism the most difficult view to subscribe to, though, because

humans are responsible for all the greatest atrocities and only a

handful of sublime contributions.





On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 5:22 PM, alice wellintown

<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> I admit that I'm not smart enough to claim atheism. A product of the

> secularizing academy my agnostic angel does often wrestle with my

> Jacob.

>

> The great world religions continue to govern the way in which the

> majority of human beings understand things, and guide their lives.

> This is a fact that can not be simply attributed to ignorance or

> stupidity,  or to tradition,  or power,  or history, or even a

> combination of these.

>

> That so many of the faithful are smart, intelligent, creative,

> brilliant individuals, in fact one could make of list of brilliant

> people who govern their lives by the teachings of one religion or

> another, seems to belie the lie given.

>

> It's a little more complex than religious folk are dumb.

>

> Huck aint religious, but he does decide that Jim is white after Jim

> does what white Christians in the South are supposed to do but often

> fail to. There are good and smart religious folk and there are bad and

> dumb atheists with college degrees. As Forrest Gump sez, "Einstein

> said we can get from A to B with logic, but to get everywhere else, we

> need to imagine." Or something like that. Religion, like civilization,

> I think Freud said this, "Is man's invention, but he made it up for

> some pretty damn good reasons." Maybe those reasons no longer justify

> religion's influence on the lives of the majority of humans. Or maybe,

> we're all black on the inside.

>

>

> "I set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it.

> I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don't

> Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the widow

> get back her silver snuffbox that was stole? Why can't Miss Watson fat

> up? No, says I to my self, there ain't nothing in it. I went and told

> the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying

> for it was "spiritual gifts." This was too many for me, but she told

> me what she meant -- I must help other people, and do everything I

> could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never

> think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I

> went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I

> couldn't see no advantage about it -- except for the other people; so

> at last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it any more, but just let it

> go."

>

>  "Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz him dat 'uz

> bein' sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, 'Go

> on en save me, nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one? Is dat like

> Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You bet he wouldn't! Well, den, is

> Jim gwyne to say it? No, sah- I doan' budge a step out'n dis place,

> 'dout a doctor; not if it's forty year!"

>

> I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd say what he did say.

>







-- 

"liber enim librum aperit."


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20100226/2bb591f5/attachment.html>