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Old 12-11-2006, 12:20 AM
thylacine thylacine is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 1,175
Default Re: Religion A perfectly rational belief

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Where the retina connects to the optic nerve, the mind forces itself to fill in the details of the missing information. Don't believe me look here. Filling in the details of the unknown is a marker of a healthy brain. When people say that the religious are being irrational it's not entirely true. If you don't want to hear any of this mumbo jumbo regarding your brain filling in the details regarding religion, because you think it might change your mind. Don't worry it can't. Thinking rationally cannot override the brains directive to fill in the details. So go ahead and for a brief moment it time, imagine what the world would look like if we filled in the blind spots regarding our origins, and unknown causes of natural phenomenon.


You should be very familiar with what you would expect. It's a well known concept of the god of the gaps. Gods control the lighting, and the winds and volcanos and the moon and the sun, when our brains fill in the details that we are blind to. We now know that evolution is a much more likely story than creationism in the bible. But it was perfectly rational to believe creationism before we had the knowledge that we have now. We did not have a choice but to fill in the details.

Although god of the gaps is a descriptive what. It doesn't address how or why. How is that the brain forces you to fill in something regarding ones unknown knowledge about your existence. You have no choice in the matter. You can not stop it from doing it. And it's a damn good thing that the brain does this, without asking our permission. We would be lost without it.

So we atheists come at xtians with charges of irrationality, it is a weak charge. They are being very rational. Their mind has filled in the details regarding the context of their surroundings. ID as a religion might be a fairly perfect filling in of details. But it fails when we use ID to overwrite the knowledge we have.

The main two things that are left are the creation (cause of creation) of the universe, and the emergence (cause of emergence) of life. I implore you to not go down the same road that is proven to be at least in part the quite intelligent and necessary context based making stuff up.

edit: horid typos

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I think there are many many orders of magnitude difference between ...

on the one hand, a single brain processing an incoming torrent of incomplete-and-sometimes-inconsistent-information in split seconds and having to make a best guesstimate of what's happening that will do for the moment,

and on the other hand billions of people with entire lifetimes to communicate, experiment, theorize, and apply all kinds of checks and balances in a long term cooperative search for the truth.

Of course the latter malfunctions in all kinds of ways too. But it's a completely different malfunction.

In any case there is really no excuse for religion existing.
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