FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. (Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary)
Those who profess a belief in god in some form or another are beyond persuasion on that matter. Even if the scientific and philosophical evidence were presented to them so that they could understand it, they would still rebel against reason and evidence because religious belief is essential to their psychological well-being - so much so that they could not abandon it. Perhaps if they were very young they might listen to reason, but when there has been time for indoctrination and parental authority has had it's way with them, then at that time they are so emotionally charged that they simply cannot and will not think rationally or objectively about giving up religion in favor of reason. They are so absorbed by their faith, so resolute, so dependent on their belief being true that they simply cannot relinquish those irrational mythopoeic religious ideas.
I'm certain too that psychologically it is probably helpful and healthful for them to believe - to surrender to their faith. Those people, as I have stated herein will never be persuaded - nor is that my intent. I do however intend to oppose irrationality and if their religion gets in the way of truth and reason it will be challenged on those grounds just as I believe it is necessary to challenge any bad ideas anywhere which ultimately causes harm and death and destruction and/or justified and blessed by religions.
Those who believe in belief will condemn my sacrilege and intolerance for unreasonable ideologies as heresy, impiety, immorality and all the other obscurantist smokescreens used by religionists from the time they were invented to today when George W. Bush receives his messages to kill bad Iraqis from his god.
This I vow: They will not deflect my criticism, ever.
If we think that this search for God is a vain search, and that there is no reality to be discovered, ... then the history of religion becomes a study of the aberrations of the human mind.
(Cyril Bailey - The Greek Atomists and Epicurus)
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people. (Karl Marx - "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right")
"Darwinism, unlike `Einsteinism' seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance. I suppose one trouble with Darwinism is that, as Jacques Monod perceptively remarked, everybody thinks he understands it. It is, indeed, a remarkably simple theory; childishly so, one would have thought, in comparison with almost all of physics and mathematics. In essence, it amounts simply to the idea that non-random reproduction, where there is hereditary variation, has consequences that are good grounds for believing that this simplicity is deceptive. Never forget that, simple as the theory may seem, nobody thought of it until Darwin and Wallace in the mid-nineteenth century,nearly 200 years after Newton's PRINCIPIA, and more than 2,000 years after Eratoshhenes measured the Earth. How could such a simple idea go so long undiscovered by thinkers of the calibre of Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, Hume and Aristole? Why did it have to wait for two Victorian naturalists? What was wrong with philosophers and mathematicians that they overlooked it? And how can such a powerful idea go still largely unabsorbed into propular consciousneess?"
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Wathmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design "96"
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Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)