Re: Why the right is unfair to Cain

On Thu, 1 Dec 2011 11:00:22 -0800, Miss Elaine Eos wrote:

On 2011-12-01 16:38:30 +0000, Mickey <Mickey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
"Faith" is a person's belief in a higher power. You can belong to a
religion without necessarily believing all their dogma.

This is true, but...

Faith is not required for one to be part of a religion.

I think that, to be accepted in a religion, most of them have SOME
requirement of faith. Most of the bigger ones have ceremonies to
celebrate the new initiate's pronouncement of faith and acceptence of
basic dogma.

The word to remember here is "ceremonies". These are formal
rituals, and that's religion. Participation in such rites does
not in itself determine your faith.

Hell, I am a member of the Catholic Church in good standing (did
I just hear Tony fall over?), doing all of the things a Catholic
is supposed to do and at more than the minimum requirement to
boot. The one thing I do not do is believe. This is cultural,
as far as I am concerned -- and hypocritical as anything, but I
don't care.




There is "evidence" of an intelligence behind the design of the
Universe all around

I believe us Deniers would say that there is no credible evidence. Not
because we don't like it or anything so personal but, rather, all of
the evidence is circumstantial, conflates correlation with causality or
fails miserably some other logical fallacy. To reduce one's standard
of evidence far enough to accept that "there is evidence of an
intelligence behind the design of the Universe all around", one would
also have to accept that "there is evidence of Invisible Pink Unicorns
all around." Any standard of evidence that refuses IPU also refuses
evidence of intelligent design.

Perhaps we should clarify who is what. A "denier" is a strong
atheist who actively denies the existence of deities and onsiders
any belief in such as false.

A proponent of weak atheism or agnosticism, by contrast, does not
make such a positive denial; we simply make a preliminary finding
that on the balance of probabilities and on the evidence
presented we have no reason to believe that any such entity
exists.

So who is what in this thread?



Some scoff at the silliness of the IPU, but they are not understanding
(protests & apologies noted) the bigger picture.

The trouble with the IPU is that all it would take to prove or
disporve its existence is a supply of virgins...
;-)

.

Relevant Pages

  • Why do biblethumpers get a free pass???
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    (alt.politics)
  • Re: Science versus religion fnord
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    (talk.origins)
  • Re: What are we doing here?
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  • Re: canRe: Moderatorial Note
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    (uk.religion.christian)
  • Re: The ToE kept alive by governement grants.
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    (talk.origins)