Most people who believe in God don’t do so because they have been convinced by the cosmological – or any other – argument for his existence. They simply believe, using the same faculty of belief that allows them to believe in such things as the reality of the material world around them, the reality of the past, and the fact that minds exist other than their own. It is an a priori knowledge founded on evidence that is internal to the believer. ...
That is the bit that is missing or deliberately suppressed in atheists: the ability to know God exists. It’s a shame, really.
[T]he superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times, once it is debunked, takes away one of the bulwarks that every society must have against expenditure out of control. . . . [O]ne of the functions of old-fashioned religion was to scare people by sometimes what might be regarded as myths into behaving in a way that long-run civilized life requires.
Thursday, January 05, 2012
The Stupid! It Burns! (missing piece edition)
Atheists have a piece missing
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