you make some good points. however, it's naive to assert that people deploy nuclear bombs or fly planes into buildings for purely religious motivations. ideology has much more to do with geopolitics, historical conflict, and, ultimately, economics than it does with religion.
i also disagree that there are "billions of people" who believe in the god you describe above. i live in china, where virtually no one (statistically) is a monotheist. there are a multiplicity of Single Gods that people subscribe to without consciously acknowledging the differ... (read more)
"evolution polemics"
There's a beam in your eye (and it's distorting your perception).
-1Jack
This is why we require comments to use correct capitalization.
7ata
I don't know about the "rational" part (the God of the Old Testament, Koran, etc. is a bloodthirsty, narcissistic lunatic), but other than that, billions of people believe in such a god, and it's worth attacking. Hardly a straw man.
Of course there are the Sophisticated Theologians with their moving-target god whom they're constantly redefining so as to avoid subjecting it to any empirical study or allowing it to have observable effects on the world, but why waste time with them? They're not the ones willing or able to start a nuclear war to defend their god, or to fly planes into buildings for his glory, or to oppress people in his name. They write books and give talks, and they're mostly harmless.
I'd be delighted to see this persuasive evidence. Presumably, "persuasive" includes "persuasive to people who aren't already Hindus", right?
Truth is not defined by persuasiveness. One of the big themes of this site is understanding the ways we come to be persuaded of things that are demonstrably untrue... and there are a lot of them. Reason and empiricism and may not be able to discover every truth (hence the name "Less Wrong" rather than "Never Wrong"), but it's the best we have. Religion -- the central point of which is faith, belief in the unknowable -- is exactly such a "zero knowledge" mechanism. If you can have faith in x, you can just as easily have faith in ~x, with precisely as much justification. You have gained no knowledge.
you make some good points. however, it's naive to assert that people deploy nuclear bombs or fly planes into buildings for purely religious motivations. ideology has much more to do with geopolitics, historical conflict, and, ultimately, economics than it does with religion.
i also disagree that there are "billions of people" who believe in the god you describe above. i live in china, where virtually no one (statistically) is a monotheist. there are a multiplicity of Single Gods that people subscribe to without consciously acknowledging the differ... (read more)