Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/"Dawkins and Pinker are jerks."/reply (20)

There is actually nothing irrational about belief in most religions. Let's look at the rain dance. You are starving, there is no rain. You don't know where rain comes from, cause you are primitive. One day you are out dancing, cause you are trying hard to do something other than think of your starving kids. Rain starts. Your mind, being a human mind that is biologically driven to make connections between events (cause and effect) assumes quite naturally and logically that what you did made the rain. Cause you did it, and rain started.

We do that with everything in life - from sports superstitions to science. we say "x was the status, I did Y, X changed to a new status". That is the ground work for most religious actions.

But beyond that, there is a host of religions and religious beliefs not nestled in the blatantly irrational like "god sent jesus to cure all ills". We have no idea what might have started the big bang. any theory we have is just a guess, and really we can never know. Saying "goddidit", when you define god as "something bigger than what we know" is as rational as saying to membranes touched and the contact point was the big bang.

Surveys suggest the slight majority of people who are religious, do not think of a personal god like Fundamentalists do. They think, at best, of something merely "bigger than what I can know". Their monotheist god has grown up, to be "beyond" a guy worrying about who sleeps with whom. But those people aren't out talking to you, trying to change your views, trying to make you worship their way - so most of us don't even realize that's what they think. What we here is loud fundimentlists changing laws, screaming at "others', and even bombing people to get their way. But that is not what most religion in the world suggests.

your own view of religion as bad, is itself irrational. especially when you are doing it from a position where you (likely) don't know what most religions actually teach.