From: Jonathan Colvin (jcolvin@ican.net)
Date: Tue Jun 23 1998 - 17:31:36 MDT
Verdop wrote:
"If you think like this, you`ll never be religious. Religion is connected
with believe not with explanations. Either you can believe, or you can`t.
There won`t ever be an explanation in a real religion.
BTW I`m no christian or other conventional religion."
Sorry, but that is an incredibly facile explanation for religious origin
myths. Two thousand years ago, when people didn't even know what stars
were, there were many smart people who wondered why there was something
instead of nothing, and why the world was the way it was. In those days,
and even a few hundred years ago, the idea of a creator was a perfectly
rational, metaphysical explanation for the universe. Unfortunately for
religion, there are now better explanations for why this world exists
(although we are still working on why there is something rather than
nothing). But dismissing religion as mindless, unjustified belief does a
major disservice to what has been a central intellectual force in this world
up to the beginning of science, a fairly recent phenomenon indeed. I am an
atheist, but having studied the history of science and religion extensively,
I become irritated when religions are dismissed lightly. Fundamentalists
are loony-tunes. But science as we know it today would not have existed
without the Judeo-Christian belief in "rational explanation", which
contrasts greatly with Buddism for example, where the question of origin is
not really considered at all. The first scientists were theologists,
observing the universe around them and trying to explain it.
Jonathan Colvin
jcolvin@ican.net
Paraglide Ontario: http://home.ican.net/~jcolvin/paraglid.html
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