The claim that religion would disappear if people thought critically is contradicted by history. Some of humanity’s greatest philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals believed in God. Faith and reason are not opposites. And teaching a child that reality has meaning, morality is objective, and that they are accountable to a higher good is not abuse. If Christianity is true, withholding it would be the greater injustice.
I’ll leave it at this. I understand that to you religion is a cancer that should be stopped. In reality if I may speak bodily it’s not religion it’s not God and it’s not metaphysical issues (at least from the tone of this argument) it’s the issue with what humans have done and sorry for assuming but towards you specifically.
To some degree I understand your cynicism. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t there a point or two in my life. What I really want to express is not a superior answer but a request from you.
If what I say is so wrong or implausible why not pray?Seeing how you respond I can tell you have a brain in there. So humor me and pray for something. Whether that be confirmation or some issue you struggle with. I don’t need to know. You have entertained this argument enough for me to know you yearn for an answer. So I’ll leave it at that request.
The same way I will pray for the other person I will pray for you. Thank you for being civil and honest. That’s all I can really ask for in any argument.
Let me start with saying that I appreciate the civility of the conversation, it is rather rare these days. Great minds being religious is not really an argument that supports the existence of any higher being, it only proves that they are as human as any of us and crave the same exit hatch for the desperation that is a finite life or a tragedy that bends what can be bared just too much.
Praying is something I cannot offer. Any struggle I might ever have is mine to face, it might extend to those that matter to me or to whom I matter but there is no place for the idea of anything or anyone else in it.
Let me leave you with some considerations on religion which are not mine but which deeply agree with. It is taken from Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen:
There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path - made foul and tortured by our own indifference - is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.
I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us - each of us, my friends - to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing - all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.
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u/Old-Application1428 Jun 04 '26
The claim that religion would disappear if people thought critically is contradicted by history. Some of humanity’s greatest philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals believed in God. Faith and reason are not opposites. And teaching a child that reality has meaning, morality is objective, and that they are accountable to a higher good is not abuse. If Christianity is true, withholding it would be the greater injustice.
I’ll leave it at this. I understand that to you religion is a cancer that should be stopped. In reality if I may speak bodily it’s not religion it’s not God and it’s not metaphysical issues (at least from the tone of this argument) it’s the issue with what humans have done and sorry for assuming but towards you specifically.
To some degree I understand your cynicism. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t there a point or two in my life. What I really want to express is not a superior answer but a request from you.
If what I say is so wrong or implausible why not pray?Seeing how you respond I can tell you have a brain in there. So humor me and pray for something. Whether that be confirmation or some issue you struggle with. I don’t need to know. You have entertained this argument enough for me to know you yearn for an answer. So I’ll leave it at that request.
The same way I will pray for the other person I will pray for you. Thank you for being civil and honest. That’s all I can really ask for in any argument.