Which was first: Atheism or Religion?

[fr0d0]

Intellectual honesty, as far as they have intellect..

If the best you can do is "you're dumb!" then fuck off back to Legoland, okay? You could at least attempt rational discourse, even if we both know you'd fail.

We can believe intellectually by the power of deduction. You've seen how it works so don't go acting dumb on me now. The rewards of belief are evident. Here's the tricky bit, be sure to concentrate..... to a non believer those effects can be explained away.

Okay, serious question: when you talk about the rewards of belief, what do you mean? I ask out of politeness, because I don't want to put words in your mouth for my next question, which is: how do you know those rewards are from the god you believe in, and not some other source? You say they can be explained away, what are you using to verify that the source you attribute them to is correct, over the secular alternatives?

The trouble with using deduction alone is that it's very hard to be sure you're stripping out all the biases that come with being human, that's why evidence is preferable. Now, I see elsewhere you say that your beliefs are verified by the fact that other christians have similar experiences, and I somewhat accept that as valid reasoning, the problem I come across is the huge variations between individual christians and, more broadly, christian denominations. The variance of reported experiences is quite wide; at what point do we say that it's too wide to draw any meaningful trends from?

A commendable post Esq. Respect.

I don't find variance in the core experiences of all of who I would call mainstream Christians. ie Trinitarian Christians. The experiences I'm talking about are those promised in scripture. Church services depend upon testimony to prove that there's still life in their beliefs. The fruits of the spirit. Church goers can be very skeptical until they see evidence of what corroborates as God's work in someone's life. That's open to abuse too by those that might know what the group want to hear.

Sorry I can't give you a better, I mean more thorough or exact answer as you deserve. Really busy working a 16 hour day here.