From: Zero Powers (zero_powers@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Apr 24 2000 - 21:40:10 MDT
>From: Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net>
>
> > Zero Powers: Curious, what was it that freed you from your
> > belief?
>
>I took my college girlfriend to a physics seminar featuring Carl Sagan's
>Cosmos, because she thought Sagan was the most gorgeous man on
>two feet. That changed both our lives: she soon threw me back
>for another guy who looked more like Sagan, and I was led to study
>Steven Jay Gould, which led to Douglas Hofstadter's Escher Godel Bach,
>which led me to realize that my religion and all religions I know of are
>self referential systems, unverifiable. Changed my major from theology
>to engineering. Atheists make poor ministers.
Funny. I came to it from quite the opposite path. I was looking for
"rational" evidence to support my belief when what I found had the opposite
effect. I started reading stuff by the Jesus Seminar, notably _Honest to
Jesus_, which was an attempt to ferret out what might be left of the
"historical" Jesus buried under 2000 years of ecclesiastical, political, and
sociological mythological build up. The Jesus I discovered there had little
resemblance to the guy I was hearing about in church every Sunday.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060627581/qid=956633297/sr=1-1/104-0822137-7456424
That started me on the slippery slope to stuff like _The Varieties of
Religious Experience_ by William James, then to more scientific stuff.
Before long I found that what was left of my "religion" had completely
evaporated, all except for my love for my fellow man and awe at creation.
-Zero
"I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past"
--Thomas Jefferson
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