Quote Originally Posted by Sloppy Joe View Post
First off, props to Druff for making a user-friendly forum that seems to be on the right track. I have been a reader/small time poster since NWP and am glad that the right person is back making the decisions.

I have been agnostic for as long as I can remember and have always found organized religion to be cultish and brainwashing but never was comfortable labeling myself an atheist until reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Probably a moonlanding, but this book does a great job fleshing out the issues that had always hung me up from full blown atheism. After reading this book and some subsequent stuff on cosmology etc., I really don't see how any intelligent human being could partake in organized religion. I have lived in Nepal for the last year immersed in a culture of Hinduism/Buddhism and find the whole thing laughable. Are people just reluctant to admit that life has an expiration date? What the fuck is wrong with humanity waging wars over some shit some dudes threw together in books? How has the advancement of Darwinism and the EVIDENCE around the world not been sufficient to dissuade people from wasting their lives believing in fairy tale? How much more efficient and logical would the world be if the majority of humanity rejected religion?

/endrant
I find Dawkins' cult of militant atheofundamentalism just as troublesome as religious fundamentalism.

One of the problems is the conflation, for the purpose of attack, of organised religion and its negative effects and "belief in the supernatural".

The latter is and always has been, a feature of human consciousness and to argue against it is about as scientific as a bunch of colour blind people arguing that the rest of humanity are deluded in believing in colours.

You end your post by asking "How much more efficient and logical would the world be if the majority of humanity rejected religion?"; what if we rephrased that to "How much more efficient and logical would the world be if the majority of humanity rejected love? Not that I am arguing that religion is love, but instead that there are lots of things that folks believe in that are not efficient and logical, and that such beliefs are natural and in some cases good.

A world fully efficient and logical would be as loathsome as one ruled by religious fanatics.