Great news for everyone

[tackattack]

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could you please define how belief in a diety is confining or limiting to intellectual capacity?

If I may just take your Yahweh as an example; the characteristic of your deity is so contradictory and repulsive that no amount of reasoning will harmonize it with modern ideas of justice, purity, and morality. Yet, apologists like you continue to defend this character. A person of intelligence will definitely not defend this evil, imperfect concept.

As Thomas Jefferson rightly said:

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

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This has nothing to do with character, right and wrong or good and evil. I asked how it limits intellectual capacity. From your perspective, wouldn't coming up with endless answer to rational questions about something perceived as imperfect necessitate more brain work?

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could you please define how belief in a diety is confining or limiting to intellectual capacity?

A deity is a non-being that serves as the sum of all non-answers to the relevant questions of why do we exist? By what means do we exist? And what is reality?

God is an irrelevant emotional concept that prays on our hopes and fears, rather than one based on solid logic and reasoning that needs empirical and measurable evidence to flourish.

A personal deity is a comfort blanket that suffocates the human enterprise or pursuit for understanding phenomena and our universe. It damages the filter for evidence to discern fact from fantasy, thereby sabotaging one's capacity to learn and acquire new knowledge.

That's not to say there isn't a god or some higher-being out there, though any concept that mankind has come up with so far, or what we're tempted to imagine would be a deity right now, has been nothing but a pointless exercise in mental masturbation.

Believing in a god and uncritically accepting its existence, without actually bothering to investigate the cosmos for its existence first, is not just laziness but it prevents us from ever acquiring the truth as to whether or not it really exists.

I'm an atheist because there's no sufficient evidence available to me and therefore I have no good reason to believe in such a being.

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If the question of our existence is relevant, why is postulating a possible solution, limiting to intellect in any way? But this really isn't about relevance, emotionalism, or imagery of a suffocating blanket. Nor is it about how Thor, Abraham, pixies, or any belief at all is correct or incorrect. You haven't established clearly how discerning fact from fantasy sabotages one's capacity to learn and acquire new knowledge. If I believed in unicorns, how would that limit my ability to learn quantum mechanics or applied chemistry? You then further than that, assume that adherents to said belief do so uncritically or blindly.

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@Ace - As always I still can't see where you make the jump from wishful thinking and holding up progress to completely irrational?

Easily. Believing in something unsupported and improbable simply because you want it to be true is irrational and does stand against progress. It is wishful thinking. I still maintain that religion is the greatest insult to human intelligence. Fools fall so easily to their imagination, it's embarrassing just to watch. Seeing fellow human beings grovelling on the floor to their imaginary friend, on their knees talking to their invisible friend in the sky. It's humiliating. You probably don't see it, but I do.

I think Welsh Cake pretty much nailed it.

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Then the same questions and burden apply to you. Establish that any belief limits intellectual capacity.



Let me break it down for all the above a little. Let's say I have an equation to which the solution is unsolvable ATT:

3+5+6+2+9+x+y+z=?

and most materialsts and atheists find it (and rightly so) more practical to eliminate variables that are also unknowable, thus:

3+5+6+2+9=?

Then they come up with just as unprovable a solution as we had with the variables, because not everything is yet accounted for.

x,y and z= might very well be 0 and I'd be in the same place you all are.

1-I postulate the at least x or y seems like soemthing real to me and I'm more stupid because of it?
2-Isn't removing a subset (or relationally removing any possibility of evidence that could change your equation) in an equation more limiting than allowing for their possiblity?