Quote:I said that a disposition to view certain kinds of act as externally instructed 'to be done' and thereby to be acts we have inescapable reason to do would confer an advantage.
As Robert Green Ingersoll noted in the beginning of his essay "The Gods."
Quote:Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own. All these gods demanded praise, flattery, and worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume. All these gods have insisted upon having a vast number of priests, and the priests have always insisted upon being supported by the people, and the principal business of these priests has been to boast about their god, and to insist that he could easily vanquish all the other gods put together.
These are clearly cultural gods with no supernatural power behind them. Doing what the priests demand "be done" might be useful in a self-preservation mode but only because these gods had a tendency to kill those who resisted them....or, rather their priests undertook to do it for them. Big difference.
I don't know what others mean by atheism. For myself it is that no believer in any god has ever produced the slightest bit of evidence that his particular invisible sky-daddy is real.
