At tonight's Thanksgiving, Erin remarked on how this was her first real Thanksgiving dinner away from her family, and that it was an odd feeling to just sit down and eat without any prayer beforehand. (Yes, she's a solid atheist in no danger whatsoever, thank you for asking.)
And as she said this, it reminded me of how wrong it is to give gratitude to God for blessings that actually come from our fellow human beings putting in a great deal of work.
So I at once put my hands together and said,
"Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this. Amen."
I really fail to understand this entire issue of anti-theism. If we think about the question logically, I think we can all say humans are defective and that we are not terribly moral agents. Whether God exists or not doesn't seem to be very relevant in the sense that whether one be an atheist a theist or whatever the idea of becoming a better person morally etc is still important. I would argue that whether you believe in God or not if that belief unfounded or not drives you to behave in a more moral way then so be it. I think it is a fundamental waste of time to debate the unanswerable question of whether God exists it not being provable beyond circumstantial evidence which is open to interpretation. If Goes does exist it makes issues of evolution easier to explain and less surprising that it managed to evolve human intelligence and if not; if the idea of God drives people to be better then great. Sitting here bashing God seems like a bit of an illogical thing to do in the grand scheme of things.
I'm aware this is from 2008, but I just can't let this stand in case one day an undecided visitor wanders past and reads GenericThinker's comment. (I also can't resist pointing out that his handle is rather appropriate.)
1.) Belief in God doesn't necessarily drive people to behave in a more moral way. Consider Muslim fundamentalist terrorists, for example.
2.) The question of God's existence is not unanswerable. The evidence for or against God is no more open to interpretation than any other evidence. If God affects the material universe, we can observe the ... (read more)