No such thing as God.

God did occur to man as an explanation of man's existence. However, God's role was not, and is not, limited to an explanation of existence...

...but further proposed that the idea of God was employed as a common understanding and objective authority for law that enabled hunter-gatherer tribes to come togther without one tribe submitting directly to the rule of another.

I have to disagree here. I think you have it backwards. God was not an objective authority for the law...God was not used as a way for various tribes to come together, tribes come together when one dominates another.

I see science and religion has having entirely different concerns, and when religion takes on scientific concerns, that religious attempt is misguided and dangerous...Science does not give us means to cope with the passing of a friend; science explain the process of the friend's life and death, but offers nothing in the way of dealing with emotions. Science can explain the functioning of emotions (the various neural impulses in the brain, ect).

And why should we expect science to find evidence of God?

...human curiosity found science, but it didn't find so much as a fingerprint to indicate the exitence of God.

'There is no 'mountain of evidence based knowledge' that discredits the notion of God - again, science has no way of amassing evidence either for or against God.'

not all faith traditions required blind faith 'drummed into children before the age at which they can make reasoned judgments'

You find a valid criticism for one notion of God and make the mistake of applying that criticism to all notions of God. Straightforward logical fallacy.

I have to begin to wonder if you can, if only for a moment, set aside those deeply held biases against religion at large, and consider the logic of my arguments thus far.

The idea of a car originated with man, but cars exist. The idea tree originated with man, yet trees exist.

'The moment we think something is something, we are succumbing to ignorance.'

Hope is, in every viable explanation of the term, no less valuable than faith. I would say that hope is less easily manipulated than faith, at least in a religious sense, but that's a good thing. And yes, less passionate is also a good thing. The passions of man ever confound his reason.

I don't think that belief in God's existence is so much the problem, as is the belief that, if God exists, we must do something about it. If God created existence, I should think that he would require no more of his creation than simply to exist. Misconstrued notions of salvation prompt people to do a whole host of ridiculous and unreasonable things. If God wants his children to be saved, then it's up to him to save them. Otherwise he doesn't deserve to have his children saved. What I find very odd about people who believe that God exists, is that they seldom believe that, if he exists, he has a responsibility to his own creation. What sane man or woman who creates something isn't responsible for it? If we do, then why not God? That people try to absolve God of his responsibilities, tells me that, in truth, they don't really believe he exists at all, or, if he exists, then we need to treat him like an infant, because he's obviously not mature enough to take on any responsibility. I should think that, if God exists, he'd be rather insulted by anyone who thinks this way.

"Not everything is like us..." well, here's the thing, we reason, and, we can assume, I should hope, that God reasons. In that way, at the very least, he, or "it" if you prefer, is like us. If you're going to say that God wouldn't judge, then you might as well say that God doesn't reason. Or are you saying that God can't reason?

So naturally we personify God. As we are the only beings in existence that we know of that do reason, why would we not familiarize a theorized being that can reason, such as God, to ourselves by personification? If our "measly judgmental ideas" are still reasonable, then exactly why wouldn't God share a reasonable judgement?

My point earlier was simply that people refuse to give God the credit due any rational, reasonable being, and you actually only expound it, by further derationalizing God.

'If God wants his children to be saved, then it's up to him to save them.'

I almost proposed it as a quid pro quo - contributing to the site for a day on the basis that I'm a believer, but i don't know how i could begin to address these issues without coming to despise a God who'd exacted such a high price for a single instance of disobedience, a God who would have us suffer the terrors and trials of reality when with a wave of his omnipotent hand they might be removed, a God who'd let good people suffer and die while the villianous prosper, a God who'd plant fossil fuels in the earth for us to find, and get addicted to in ignorance of thier climactic effects, a God who'd set one man against another like dogs in a pit. And toothache! What's that about???

The transition from hunter-gatherer tribes to multi-tribal and social ways of life couldn't have occured that way for any number of reasons. Imagine, you've got HG tribes - one tribes piles in, kills the menfolk and makes off with the women. They've now got to provide for these extra, unwilling people - but more than that, unless they want to suffer the same fate, they've got to up security. Enemies within - enemies without. That's no basis for a society.

No. You have to suppose some kind of consensual agreement - and because it's known that God is a concept central to the lives of socities throughout history, and around the world, it makes sense to suppose that sharing a God concept is how HG tribes came together in the fisrt place. Stonehenge - what's that about?

Otherwise, what's God for? Even if you suppose that God revealed himself to generation D, would generation E,F,G,H....Z still be banging on about it? Or would it be yesterday's news wrapped around tommorow's fish and chips.

Use of the term 'Lord, Our God' is not just a way of expalaining yesterday's news to the masses - it's a way of intertwining the power structrues of the state with divinity. It's a leftover from the feudal system and Coverdale's Bible - translated from the Latin for King Henry VIII.

Science and religion are both worldviews with considerable overlap. They are approaches to understanding the world we live in - and because science proceeds on the basis of demonstrating hypotheses with reference to empirical evidence, rather than demanding faith in some unknowable, unquestiobale, absolute - scientific knowledge is more valid.

It would be crass in the extreme to try and console you in scientific terms for the passing of your friend. I don't seek to do so. But that's not because there's nothing to say. Individuals die, and the species lives on. That's the way it is and the way it must be if each subsequent generation is to evolve to enjoy the faculties that make life so bitter-sweet.

You either misunderstand or misrepresent me. I'm not suggesting that science can prove the non-existence of something that doesn't exist - what i'm saying is that human curiosity has certainly tried to prove the existence of God and failed to do so while a mountain of evidence based knowledge about the world amasses largely ignored for the sake of adherence to a concept that persists solely on skeptical grounds.

You go on to say that science has nothing to say about good or evil, beauty and so on. I disagree. If we consider the human being an evolutionary animal we can begin to understand good and evil as social constructs, and the golden mean - or golden section, 1:1.618, as drawing upon the proportions of the human face and body.

Christianity, Islam and Judaism certainly do, and i suspect that in practice, if not in principle, Bhuddism does too. But are there no 'coming of age' rituals in Bhuddism?

When you say things like this it makes me laugh and cry, i would dismiss you as idiotic but it makes me furious that in all seriousness you have the temerity to propose and defend belief in the existence of some supernatural entity, without a shred of evidence, and then accuse me of logical fallacy.
As i have already indicated an inductive inferrence is jutified in this case as i have identified the origin of the concept in the evolution of man. Are you suggesting that primtive man got it wrong, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, they all got it wrong, but Bhuddism...now that's true!?

The idea of unicorns originated with man, mermaids, ghosts, golblins, Gods... I'm sorry, but your capacity for logic seems somewhat undermined by your faith in that which cannot be shown to exist. As i've said, you might reasonably hope that God exists - but to belive something without evidence is illogical.

Posted by DT:
Again, Buddhism for example, explicity teaches against blind faith.

Allow me to also add that Christian documentation also teaches against blind faith. Paul said to believe a doctrine if it is sound. So believe it if it makes sense to you. He didn't say believe it just because someone said it, and much of Christian doctrine is based on Paul's writings.

Heh heh, I never said it was a generalization over all Christianity, believe me when I say that I am not arguing on behalf of Christianity, cause I'm not. All I am saying is that it is written in the Bible. (Oh no, Solace used the B word! :-p) Paul, nor people who take his good advice to heart, can be faulted for the fact that, generally speaking, Christians don't take his advice. As I said, it is part of Christian documentation... so maybe more Christians ought to read it.

Well, I don't really see a difference between a religion and a church, since a religion is really all about the people who believe certain precepts. A church is a group of believers, whatever they happen to believe is what actually is their religion. Thus Christianity, as a broad overview, isn't really a religion in and of itself, rather whatever each particular denomenation believes concerning Christian ideas is their religion. Christianity then becomes a manner of generalizing anyone who claims to believe what's written in the Bible. In that sense, some might say I'm a Christian, but I don't really see myself as one, simply because I don't like being lumped together with people who believe something different about the Bible than what I believe.

As for the general thrust of what you're getting at about the other thread, I think I agree, (though I suppose I'd have to actually read the thread to know for sure). Christian documentation is often misrepresented within churches in order to prompt people to do something that the documentation itself says not to do. I'm no expert on Islam, but I don't doubt that, at least in some cases, the same can be said of Islamic writings. Any religious precept or documentation can be, and often is, misrepresented to believers, sometimes knowingly, often times unwittingly because the person representing it simply doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.