||That Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse

Oh but you do believe when some Chi Kung expert in China says he can heal certain diseases with his hands. "There is transferrence of energy" people say, they speak of Chi and such... Even some religion bashers do not such things per se, they at least leave an open mind for such things. Why don't people extend the same courtesy to religious belief?

very few pagan faiths are completely dead.

i should know, i follow one. but i'm not such a fool as to follow it blindly by "faith" alone. i follow it because i LIKE it, much like people "religously" follow things like star trek.

exactly, when a religious person says, "gotta have faith", their admitting theres no good reason to believe what they believe.

Harris appeals to common sense. In my experience, this is the best approach in 99 percent of all religious conversations. However, I find that it is not the most rigorous or logical. And given that I left religion for an exploration of truth, my appeal by default is to truth.

It never works. Religious people refuse to think logically about their religious beliefs. If they did, they would not be religious. Although, they happily do so when it comes to most other beliefs, like having to pay taxes to fund wars they never wanted fought or the purchase and installation of $10,000 toilets.

But I can't help myself. And it isn't my fault that other people can't handle the truth. I like to think of the problem like this:

Blind faith doesn't exist. Faith requires an object and that object must be, at root, intelligible. So, faith must be, at root, intelligible.

At the same time, faith is belief in spite of the evidence. So, it is always irrational. Faith is a fundamentally intelligible belief extended in an unintelligible and, therefore, irrational direction. This explains why faith should not be prized.

"Faith" is a keyword for "It triggers something in my amygdalya". Like love, and other emotions, this is where faith lives.

Reason doesn't appeal to the amygdalya. It doesn't care about reason. That's why reason can't be used to disuade religion. Religion is emotional, not logical.

Run for your lives the Pagans are coming!! Christians are in a panic about Earth worship:

Earth Worship, The New World Religion http://www.ucmpage.org/articles/mgonzalez3.html The “United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (also known as Earth Summit II)” “advanced by the UN as the basis for a neo-pagan, earth-centered "spirituality."”

GAIA WORSHIP - THE NEW PAGAN RELIGION http://contenderministries.org/UN/gaia.php

“organizations such as former Vice President Albert Gore, broadcaster Ted Turner, and the United Nations and it's various NGO's. Al Gore's book "Earth in the Balance" is just one of many books that unabashedly proclaims the deity of Earth”

"Oh but you do believe when some Chi Kung expert in China says he can heal certain diseases with his hands. "There is transferrence of energy" people say, they speak of Chi and such... Even some religion bashers do not such things per se, they at least leave an open mind for such things. Why don't people extend the same courtesy to religious belief?"

I think that anyone who believes in Chi is a nut. I extand the same courtesy to religious belief. All superstitions are irrational, and all believers are too.

"Why don't people extend the same courtesy to religious belief"

You're failing to realize that religion is getting the exact same courtesy as kooky "healers" - that is, none.

Sam Harris says, "The conflict between science and religion is reducible to simple fact of human cognition and discourse; either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not."

This statement is very naive. Few if any people do things, or even believe things because of reason, even athiests. People do things because of such things as desires, ambitions, self-identities they wish to have or maintain, fears, and emotions. How else can you explain actions of such athiests as Lenin, Stalin, Chairman Mao, and probably Saddam Hussein and Hitler. Leaders in the development of the nuclear weapons included athiests, and there are numerous instances of athiests doing extremely evil things. Did their evil come from their reason? Of course not. But reason did not keep them from the evil.

A fundamentalist Muslim who straps on bombs and kills innocent people is doing a terrible evil; but so is the military pilot (athiest or not) who drops bombs on innocent men, women, and children or the commander who tells him to do so. Blind obedience is not the sole realm of religion.

Our survival as a species requires that people have courage to sacrifice their own self interest for the benefit of society and future generations. Does that courage come from reason? I doubt it. It is more likely to come from more primitive things like love, compassion, and religion faith.

There are recent trends in conservative religion taking on global warming as well as peace and justice issues. Take a look at Sojourners http://sojo.net (I am not affiliated with them).
Perhaps our best hope resides with religious people of this sort. It appears to me that they are more adept at giving up immediate self interest for what they see as a greater good than the non-religious.

Gerald

For those of you who profess to have no respect for religion or the religious, I would ask you to consider the following (parital) list of deluded fools:

Albert Schweitzer Dorothy Day Leo Tolstoy Ghandi Marth Luther King, Jr Desmond Tutu Mother Theresa

...and the ordinary people who work for the Salvation Army, Red Cross, Red Crescent, AFSC and Habitat for Humanity, among others

Not all perfect human beings, surely, but people we can all admire, whose strength came from their faith in something greater than themselves.

I would not argue that all great humanitarians are religious. And certainly great evil has been perpetrated in the name of faith. However, it the blanket condemnation of all faith and spirituality on this site seems naive at best.

Many people have a deep, personal experience that convinces them of a divine presense. You can deny that personal experience is a valid reference frame for a world view, but you are deluding yourself. All belief is based on personal experience, even when you think yours is rationally based. You cannot remove your own personal belief system completely from the society in which you were raised, which is founded on a mixture of Christian and Enlightenment beliefs. Apply your rationalism to someone born and raised in Communist China (with a healthy dose of Confucianism) and that person is likely to come out with a set of beliefs that may be fundamentally differet from your own).

Ayn Rand and Peter Singer are both rationalists, who arrived at very different world views.

Empiricism is not an anathema to rationalism. Science does not reveal Truth. It simply describes how the universe works.

people we can all admire, whose strength came from their faith in something greater than themselves. I would not argue that all great humanitarians are religious..

What is naive is to assume that their humanitarian instincts came from religion certainly the fact that there are so many non-religious humanitarians supports that.

It is as easy to point at the religious and say they are fools, as it is for the religious to point at those who do not share thier faith, or even have a faith they claim, and call them damned or infidel.

Why is faith so widely held and espoused (disregarding whether or not it is practiced, as that is another ball of wax).

1) "I was raised that way!" Many people are raised in a faith, and adhere to it out of nothing more than convienience and comfort. It is the veritable security blanket, or merely a layer of ignorance they have not shed, and may never shed.

2) Rebellion: Many people of the above catagory, seek another religion, often one that espouses views that their previous religion would not agree with, out of a sense of rebellion. Be it because they felt oppressed and smothered by the religion of their parents, or they were merely being teenagers. They can carry it into their adult lives, continually seeking validation for their erroneous choice.

3) Social Pressure. It is socially acceptable to be a Christian in many places in the "bible belt" of the South-Eastern states, and as such, many people are. It has nothing to do with lifestyle, or belief, but more to do with that's just the way people are.

4) Life Events. Some approaches to the devine are inspired by life events that the persons experiencing the events cannot readily explain. The events are traumatic enough, or personal enough, that they leave a lasting mark that the witness of the event may feel is a personal message or attach meaning too.

These are the four most common denominators that I have found why people follow a religion or faith. I have tried to be as objective as possible. However, I do not understand why people of faith are so bent on sharing it with those who don't share thier brand, and those without faith are so demeaning of those who have it. Faith has a place in today's society. Like money, or a knife, faith can be misused and become a tool of harm and social dischord. Or it can be a very strenthening facet of those who practice it.

The problem isn't faith or a lack of it.

The problem is just human nature. Faith can't fix what we are, anymore than a lack of it makes you a more rational and decent person. It is silly to attack a persons faith (though organized religions, like government, must answer to those they affect). If a person wants to hold a faith, let them. It is when they begin attacking you for not sharing it that problems arise. But being an aetheist, or one who only believes what they can see and touch, repeatedly, should not encourage a person to ridicule and patronize those who hold a viewpoint they do not agree with or cannot prove.

It is human nature, and our lack of ability to interact peacably, that we should focus on fixing. Not our differing life experiences and opinions.

~Jera Wolfe

P.S. Yes, I know science is not about opinions, but its a matter of perspective when dealing with those who do not accept facts in place of faith. Or vice-a-versa.