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Frank 013: My observance here is not really evidence per say, it is more of a rebuttal to Theists who claim that if you read the Bible and go to church that you will "see the light". Many theists really cannot believe that the objects of their faith have no power over some people.

Very true. It's a mistaken that you seem to have taken care not to repeat -- they assume that whatever particular appeal it had to them must be universal without ever suspecting that what made their religion so inviting in the first place was something specific to their experience.

Of course this could also be attributed to the possibility that God/gods are man made. As a skeptic I find this far more likely.

I'd say it's pretty much obvious. But the fact that we "make" our gods is not proof that they don't exist. Our sciences are man-made as well, and I don't think many people recognize how artificial they are. That doesn't make them false, though. It's just a matter of correspondence. I have no problem with the idea that God, as we conceive God, is a man-made symbol; the same is true of the atom, of gravity, of evolution.

But remember that the black plague in Europe was attributed to sin, it was believed that sneezing was caused by demons forcing their way out of your system (hence the term God bless you) you did not want the demons getting back in.

It's difficult to assess what belief of this sort really entails. Did the medieval believe that plague was caused by sin to the exclusion of all other explanations? It doesn't appear so. For that matter, the ancient Greek seems to have maintained his belief in the gods but to have simultaneously embraced naturalistic explanations of the universe. Only insistence that the two are mutually exclusive makes them so -- it would seem that humans are quite capable of holding quite contradictory beliefs but of applying the beliefs in their proper context, provided that they put some effort into it.

The so-called religious explanations for natural phenomenon are not, I think, explanations at all, and there is anthropological and historical evidence to the effect that the same societies who claimed to have descended from kangaroos were also capable of devising and embracing more naturalistic explanations, even of preferring those explanations when it was practical to do so. This seems like pretty clear-cut logic to me, but to understand the question, you have to understand that the idea that myths are explanations of natural phenomenon is not something that comes from myth itself -- it's an explanation given by the critics of myth. Even an African myth that begins with a question like, How did the elephant get its trunk, isn't as straightforward as all that; there is, after all, a great deal of humor and playfulness in such mid-wife stories, that betray and underlying sense of reality.

Here's the difference between the way that I look at religion and the way that a lot of classical critics of myth look at it. We both see a discrepency: ancient Greeks were just as rational as we are, even if they didn't have the methodology of modern science at their disposal, so how is it that myths persisted if their function is to explain phenomenon that could be better explained along naturalistic lines? Now the classical critic is likely to assume that the fault lies in the ancient Greeks -- they weren't very good at reason, or they preferred silly explanations, or modern man is inherently more intelligent. Those are, themselves, a sort of explanatory myth. I think the better way of handling the discrepency is to question whether or not we're really sure of our definitions. And if you look hard at the evidence, it becomes difficult to maintain the idea that myth is as clear-cut as the "natural explanation" theory would like it to be. And it seems to me that myth is very rarely concerned with explaining the natural world at all.

The etiological myths aren't explanations -- they're ways of integrating symbols taken from the natural world as modes of cultural organization. Thus the Australian aboriginal myths of relationship to an animal or half-animal Ancestor only really make sense in the context of the organization of society. Greco-Roman myths about the rape of Demeter, to give another example, provide symbols for the intergration of agriculture as a cultural mode. It's likely that an classical Greek youth hearing the myth for the nth time was just as prone to respond, "But why do plants really grow as they did?" and the adult just as likely to give as much of a naturalistic response as they knew how. We do the same thing all the time.

Getting back to your plague example, the myth about the plague being caused by sin probably wasn't intended to explain the plague at all. It's emphasis is on sin, on the social order, and the way in which the culture arranges itself and the individual fits into that social order. There were, of course, individuals in medieval society who spoke of infection along perfectly rational lines. And some of those commentators could at the same time maintain the myth as well. The two explanations weren't in conflict, because they were aimed at achieving different things.

We are born without any beliefs in gods. We are born Atheistic.

Those two statements are not equivalent. We're born without any opinion on the matter. But it doesn't seem to me that Atheism is a simple lack of opinion. It's a bit like saying that we're capitalists by default unless we happen to grow up to embrace communism. Until we know what either is, we're not, by nature, either.

Our gullibility may very well be biologic and a survival skill - allowing for the acceptance of religious beliefs.

No, our primitive "gullibility" is what makes possible culture. Otherwise, from an evolutionary point of view, it's not terribly useful. We'd likely be better served by solid survival instincts. Our native neoteny is a distinct weakness, save where it's compensated for by the benefits of culture -- organization of labor, for instance, or the precision of language. And as I've pointed out in other threads, a great many -- most, I would say -- of our cultural institutions are premised on religion.

Glad you're getting away from some of the topics of debate. I was starting to feel a little guilty about steering your journal thread away from, well, you.

I've been called an old soul, too. Which is ironic, given that most people can't tell how old my body is.

I did want to comment on two things in you last full paragraph: (1) I find that many of the religious doctrines fall in line with what I consider to be ethical, but many others are simply contrary to human nature. "Human nature" strikes me as one of those terms that's so open to interpretation that it's only really meaningful in closed contexts. Much of what we regard as human nature these days is influenced by Freudian psychology, and so forth, and those disciplines are not beyond dispute. On the whole, human nature seems to me so mutable a thing that there's very little that I would discount out of hand as belonging to that province. What's worrisome is not social institutions, like organized religion, overstepping the bounds of human nature, but rather overstepping the nature of specific individuals. For instance: (2) Child molestation by priests is an example of this. I think there's more to this than probably meets the eye. We're in the midst of an outbreak at the moment -- or at the least, the aftermath of an outbreak, since a lot of the scandals hitting the papers these days involve adults coming out about molestations that took place when they were children. I think there's a very good chance that these cases are not directly due to the fact of a vow of celibacy, but rather to other social factors in the priesthood. It would be worthwhile, I think, to take a close look at the ways in which the church is recruiting its priesthood, paying attention in particular to whether or not they appeal, unintentionally or otherwise, to people who are already troubled by their sexuality. It seems to me that a great many people are attracted to the priesthood as an escape from their own problems, some of them psychological, and with the number of people applying for the priesthood in dramatic decline -- even moreso after such scandals -- it may be that the Church has been rather lax about weeding those individuals out or placing them in less precarious positions.