mikerussell

[mikerussell]

Andrew Brown wrote:

“Faith is not a path to truth.”

 

I’ll have to try that one 😉

[mikerussell]

I believe that we all have to believe in something. For me, it is science, music, art, friendship, respect and love, etc.

My mother is an extreme ‘godist’ – she’s a Franciscan, which is supposedly some sort of really godly sort of person – she used to be a nun, so I’m told, so I wonder how I got here.

Anyway, I live with her as her carer and we get on by simply refusing to discuss it. She’s too old to change her mind now and in a lot of decades, I’ve never seen any evidence that would convince me that religion isn’t a nasty, delusional cult.

So we ‘leave it there’ with the statement that she believes one thing, I believe another and that anything else is OK to talk about (but she’s religious so I must avoid any topic that would open the ‘can’).

It isn’t ideal, but she’s of a similar age to the UK’s monarch and so I have to weigh up the impact of the inevitable arguments that would ensue, vis a vis, her blood pressure and my boredom at having to return endlessly to the same futile argument.

[mikerussell]

I’m finding it hard to understand why someone would need the term ‘worldview’ to express their ‘atheist’ standpoint – surely ‘atheist’ is enough?  Why bother with all this definition?  For me, at least, I simply don’t think that there is a god and have never heard any argument that convinces me otherwise and so I don’t need a word to define what I don’t worry about, but I see that people do want some sort of label, because they often ask for one and ‘atheist’ is short, to the point and conveys the message to most people that no gods exist for me.

[mikerussell]

It’s in our language, “Would you bed Madonna?”  “Oh god no!”  We might swear and say, “Fucking hell!”  Etc, etc, etc.  Many Western societies were built by Christians.  As it is today, we of the atheist persuasion are in the minority and so we are likely to see children brought up in this verbal environment, thus perpetuating this sort of thing.  But you are right David, priests don’t deserve to be called ‘father’ or anything like that, a simple first name and last name will do.  Resist your programming!

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