What If God Disappeared?

This made me chuckle.



hat tip to Pharyngula

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I used to read Pharyngula posts religiously (pun intended) but his plethora of atheistic(sp?) and politically charged posts overran his other more science/education related posts. Ranting about Dawkins and Creationism and Christianity made him very popular/renowned/reviled on ScienceBlogs though.

And in many ways, I do agree with a lot of the things that he says as a staunch defender of the Atheistic ways.

However, his contempt and dislike for religious people does rub me the wrong way. My personal feeling is that a lot of people happen to be religious and they happen to be good people as well. In many cases it provides as much guidance (as there is mischief and misguidance,) but that could be said for any other institution.

Atheism is not immune either despite its rational and empirical/experiential roots.

One of my dreams/nightmares is that the world as we know it may get wiped out someday and all that would be left is our books, our information, our knowledge. Rebuilding civilization on these documents would be interesting. Institutions would be created that would worship Rationalism in defiance of common sense things -- despite an ability to blast off into space and take a picture of earth for example, the newbies would assume that the Earth is round.

All of the things that they might be taught would still be founded on assumptions -- and who is to say that these people would not lose their sense of skepticism when so much of what they read turns out to be true anyway? They'd take things at face value. Unquestioning. Unyielding. Yet, still right for the most part.

I guess what I'm getting at (before I get lost in a tangent again) is that it is not about being Right or Wrong. I used to focus on this a lot, when I held some disdain for the truly religious -- especially classmates in science. How could they hold such different concepts in juxtaposition without considering themselves to be hypocrites? I'd wonder.

It's all about the perspectives that we hold and slowly becoming Aware that we only see things from a certain angle. Sometimes we are blessed with new points of view and these glimpses help us to understand others as long as we keep our eyes open. That's the point of religion, in my opinion. Through understanding comes love and acceptance for our fellow man.