"I consider myself an atheist, but am pretty uninterested in convincing anyone to see things my way, mostly because I don't think that belief is a matter of choice. I can no more choose to believe in any sort of god at this point in my life than I can choose to believe in the tooth fairy or the moon landing. I assume the same is more or less true for theists."
As spoken, and well put, by Brian in the comment section of the previous post.
I've run the spiritual gamut from atheism toward eventual Catholicism. That is just how my life went, and to get into particulars right now would not make the point I'm trying to make here.
The point is: Brian is right.
I could not choose to believe in anything until I was capable of 'seeing' it.
At that point, choice was not an option.
As it was never an option at any time previous, whether I was an atheist, agnostic, exploring deist, Christian fundamentalist or eventually, a Catholic.
And I beleive this is true across the board, because it's not just Christians, but members of almost every other faith I've ever discussed or debated with (and both are forms of exploration and searching for the honest at heart) all claim, in some form or another, that their faith is a gift from God, or whatever other higher power they pay homage to.
What we do choose is what to do about it.
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4 comments:
Thanks for the kind words.
I'm kinda disappointed no one took my bait on the moon landing, though...
well, it was the tooth fairy part that almost set me off.
heh. I thought about taking you up on the moon landing ...
I have to say, Brian, that mentioning the moon landing really drove your point home--because dude, if someone doesn't believe in the moon landing, there ain't *nothin'* gonna change their minds. I've watched people who deeply believe in the moon landing (and couldn't imagine seriously not believing) try to convert them ;).
(Myself, I believe it happened. But then, we know people who worked in JPL at the time. But there is certainly enough suspicious hush-hush activity in our theoretically scientific space program to legitimately fuel conspiracy theories. Whose the hell idea was it to spend billions of public dollars on 'public' science and then classify huge chunks of the data?)
I'm kinda disappointed no one took my bait on the moon landing, though...
Me too -- it would have been amusing.
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