Originally posted by Satori
You have to be born into a religion to be dominated and hurt by it, trying to get an adult to believe such incredibly outlandishly laboured rhetoric is futile, even the dumbest and most gullable of adults wouldn't fall for it. This is why it's forced on children, religions are very aware that if they don't brainwash someone as a child then they've lost them as a member. They know how unbelivable their story is.
Satori
Actually there are a fair number of people who convert after they come of age, and are apparently intellectually matured. I would like to propose an explanation, if I may, because I would tend to agree that religion is a hard pill to swallow.
It happens during times of hardship and duress, to people that may feel that they've been abandoned by their familiar forms of support. Churches often act like support groups, they listen, comfort and offer a way out. Many churches can provide financial support to new members. The fact that conversion tends to happen during harder times is demonstrated perfectly when we see members of the faithful who are not so devout, who tend to rely on the church as means of emotional support when the are suffering.
People who have close calls with death or disease tend to search for something...and end up finding god. I think we can all admit to having felt inconsequential at one time or another. What Satori said about the flawed logic in believing an omnipotent god would be desperate for one human being to believe is true; but to someone who has just felt that they are no more than a blink in the eyes of time, the prospect of being an essential part of something bigger can be pretty enticing.
Personally I think there are many good philosophies contained within the christian doctrine, stuff like 'love thy neighbor', it wouldn't hurt if a few more people acted a little more civil. I guess the problem is in the presentation. To much uneccessary rhetoric about being faithful, and too many contradictions to the essentially 'useful' directives.
For us, we must beware that our reactions may be too extreme. When we dicover that most christians misrepresent their own religion, we may dismiss it completely. This would be a shame, as there is something to be gained from everything. As someone said earlier about anarchy, and how the people who are into anarchy just so they have an excuse to break things are no more than foolish children. This too misleads most people into thinking that anarchy is senseless and to disregard anything positive they might gain from its study.
It's a pity that most people dismiss things as a whole after having a bad first impression of just one aspect. It happens all the time, from satanism to heavy metal to christianity, people don't take the time to discovery the beauty or good held within every single thing.
Even once we have husked the bran from the grain, there is still use for the bran.
) Atheists are people for whom the OBVIOUS impossibility of such a phenomenon is aparent. Some of us just can't even begin to understand how simple-minded the majority of society is to fall for something so utterly impossible. There is absolutely no difference -- zero, nada, none, zip, zilch -- between our God and the mythical gods of past civilizations. When we can't understand something, we give "God" credit. How about just accepting that we simply don't know how life was created? And don't say, "if we don't know, then how can you rule out God," because there are certain things that we know DON'T make sense. Science may not prove what *IS*, but it does prove what *IS NOT*. I think if you believe in God, you probably can't be convinced otherwise -- because the absurdity of it is so obvious that, if you had the mental capacity to understand it, you already would. there, i said it. i shouldn't have, but i did. let the flaming begin.
