The most important reason I'm xtian

[Jacob(smooth)]

Mr Spock here speaks of being consistently analytical. How far is this a good thing? I mean clearly there are times when being analytical is appropriate (science, medicine etc), and times when it gets in the way (sex drugs and rock and roll).

Is being consistently analytical a good thing? Personally I'm not convinced. Might be a good thread that.

I guess it depends on whether you care if your beliefs are true, or at least likely to be true, or not.

Most atheist want our internal map of the world to be as close to reality as possible. We understand that this is not entirely possible, but we do know the best way to go about it. And that is basing them on demonstrable evidence, reasoned argument and valid/sound logic.

However my right brain, the sloshy and emotional bit is still nausatingly in love with the concept of an all knowing and all loving force, loosely defined as "love". In many ways I would like to be an atheist, but to do so would mean giving up my comfort blanket / crack pipe / happy-moist-joy feelings on tap. So no, I'm nowhere near to atheism.

You obviously don't care whether your beliefs are true or not. You'd rather base them on the 'warm fuzzy' feeling they give you.

Almost true. It depends on the beliefs.

If its a belief about what the best mortgage is, or whether I should get the flu vaccine or that sort of thing where the outcome is significant and affected by the beleifs then I'll take the "true" belief.

If its a belief over whether Dalwhennie 15 is better than balvennie doublewood, or whether I prefer "dexter" to "lie to me", or whether I decide I love my wife, or whether I decide to follow a moral code from the bible or one I make up myself, and whether I decide there is something ineffable and mysterious in the universe, yeah I go for warm and fuzzy.

What kind of music do you like simon?

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Ok. This is by far the hardest question to answer.

I would like to ask you more about what you see the role of Jesus to be. Some will say that he took upon himself everyone's sins and thus made everyone worthy of being saved. Some take that in quite a literal way. To my mind this is reminiscent of human sacrifice to appease the gods.

Yes, its a direct parallel to the animal sacrifice in the old testament and many older religions.

When I believed in God, my bible belting father was away frequently as a navy guy. We didn't read the bible and my mother didn't talk about it, and she sure wasn't going to drag the seven of us to church. So I didn't have anyone intent on pounding a set interpretation into my head. As a result, the meaning I created for myself was pretty idiosyncratic. I just saw Jesus as an older peer, a kind of benevolent older brother. I didn't have a clear idea of God as such, nothing person-like. I just had this idea of Jesus as an interpreter of the good rather than as the mouth piece of God. God was something abstract having to do with what is best; Jesus was an accomplished practitioner of that. When I imagined an after life, I imagined hanging out with Jesus .. there was no God character in the picture. My only hope was to be a worthy companion, not by directly copying him but by figuring it out for myself and being that.

Its fascinating to see what impression someone got with minimal "interference" . Like many parts of the bible I suspect Jesus as a concept behaves as a sort of rorschach test, we see what we want to see (which is probably why republicans see him carrying a gun).

I enjoyed the mindset but by late adolescence chucked it all as not fitting in with the world/life as I found it. Now I don't find myself inclined to try and go back. I probably leaned on rationality as hard as anyone else until early adulthood when I got some insight into the totality of myself and the proper place of rationality.

Seems fair. I know a lot of people outgrow the need to believe.

I guess I could still think of Jesus as an esteemed ancestor/peer. What I can no longer do is imagine spending eternity hanging out with the guy. Afterlife no longer seems at all plausible to me. I wonder what you think about that. For me, eternity is more a desirable state of mind involving present moment than it is a span of time. Also, I wonder if you think of God as person-like or in more abstract terms.

As I've said before, I don't know. I think that the concept of a white beard on a cloud is rather obviously man creating god in his own image. Its an anthropomorphization, but what is it an anthropomorphization of?

Its probably another rorschach but what I think of as God is that part of humanity I find best and most noble. The instinct which had people running TOWARD ground zero when all self preservation and logic should have had them running away. The feeling you get when your child wraps their arms around your neck. The thing which makes me tear up when I listen to a certain piece of music. All things which psychology can explain, but somehow for me those explanations fail to capture the depth of them. I entertain the idea that there is something irrational and wonderful and somehow... joined up going on.

As for Jesus, take the story as a parable for a second. Whether he was a purely made up figure in the harry potter mould, a talented demagogue or something else is of secondary importance. The concept of somebody who was so in love with humanity as a whole, including all the broken bits, is quite a special one to me. Its a sort of extrapolation of the sort of love I feel for my kids, to a broader concept of mutural support and society. Can you imagine a world where everyone loved each other as much as you love your wife/kids/parent/cat?

All very nebulous and easy to dismiss, as I'm sure many here will take a childlike delight in doing (makes some people feel good to do so). But that's what God is to me, A word which sums up the feelings and actions which I think represent the best of being human, disassociated from specific origin or stimulus and accreted into something external. That's the model, and the crutch I've picked to lean on.