A story of a girl and the concept of God.

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You do snake a lot of respect by saying that.


Most people really don't define religion well and frankly, I don't think that concerts and campouts really are representative of a truly Christian faith too often. I disagree with your definition of a true religious figure. Neither being solitary nor eccentric seems to imply faith to me. Not only that, but I also don't see that really happening so much as many "true religious figures" as they were regarded were great leaders who pushed a different path. You could call them eccentric, but part of the real issue is really just a matter of identification. People see the eccentric man and then they notice his religion, or the religious figure goes down in history for embarking a different path, but really very few people get well known for being normal. Really though, I have an odd usage of the term religion.

I really don't think that snake is speaking of real science either. Perhaps I am just being a bit mean by saying these things, but I don't see snake as being the rationalist that I am, but rather an odd mystic who considers himself rational simply by not challenging his own assertions and eating of the fruit of skepticism. I dunno, I really don't think I hurt anything by arguing this point either as I know he has no respect for me and considers me practically the embodiment of evil.

Yeah, your right AG, rational means defending child molesters

So far, as long as I've been here, I've heard you defend sweat shops, child molester rights, and torturing house pets for fun. I don't find any of those things rational.

No one ever came to me and said, "You're a fool. There isn't such a thing as God. Somebody's been stuffing you." It wasn't a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn't any more, it didn't shock me. It seemed natural and right.

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn't believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. "I am clean, now. I've never been as clean. I'll never be cleaner." And somehow, it was God. I wasn't sure that it was … just something cool and dark and clean.

That wasn't religion, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof-tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, "God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children." That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, "I am clean. I am sleepy." And then I went to sleep. It didn't keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less. I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes. "Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings." It usually worked. God became a super-father that couldn't spank me. But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? I began to see that he didn't have much to do about hats, people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was…nothingness.

I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from any one. It puzzled me that other people hadn't found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn’t they see it? It still puzzles me.

I'm very logical, like you. That is why I'm a philosopher and not an artist or an astrologer.

I'm a nonconformist, like you. Unlike too many people I have met, I cannot define religion as a community of people who go to Christian rock concerts and campouts. People regarded as true religious figures were often extremely solitary and eccentric.

I am mathematically challenged, but I try to learn as much physics as I can with that handicap. The universe is both more chaotic and more ordered than people think it is.

So far, as long as I've been here, I've heard you defend sweat shops, child molester rights, and torturing house pets for fun. I don't find any of those things rational.

Ah. An argument from intuition? The most rational of all forms indeed...

twoshots, were you being sarcastic?

Excuse me but I think empathy is rational. All sentient life has certain unalienable rights, the right to be left alone to live a comfortable life free from victimhood.

If you wanna see where greed and selfishness and ignorance will lead society, look at ancient rome. America was modeled of of Rome. Greed is why the people are getting shafted in this fascist twist our economy is taking. It is because the people pushing it are greedy, selfish, ignorant.

Ask 90% of the free thinking people in society and they'll defend empathy.

twoshots apparently also, your not really human, you do not understand what humanity is.

Intuition claim.

A variant of rational egoism?

consensus gentium.
And define "free thinking".

Yes perhaps. I do need to read the newspaper in order to feel anything at all...
"Pity in a man of knowledge seems almost ludicrous, like sensitive hands on a cyclops."