Morality without religion

I think religion makes people more inclined to follow the precepts of that religion's teaching.  Whether this is more moral or not depends on the details of that teaching.  A religion can bring about, instead, extremely immoral behavior.

The person without religion has to make up their own minds and assume personal responsibility for what they do.

Here is a view of the founders of the US -- I think maybe more objective than what one usually gets.  Every country seems to want to deify its founders.  The American Founding Fathers were, except for Franklin, white male aristocratic wealthy landowners (Franklin was probably America's first millionaire and was a self-made entrepreneur).  They were fairly spread over the political spectrum, from the extreme right (Hamilton) to the center right (Washington and Adams) to the extreme left (Paine and, slightly less extreme, Jefferson).  The actual constitution was written mainly by folk in Washington's camp, the Bill of Rights by folk in Jefferson's (Jefferson opposed the original Constitution).

They were of course all well educated gentlemen, with but a couple of exceptions not Christian but Deists, although except for Adams they didn't ever express much antipathy to Christianity in public.

Many of them owned slaves and to my knowledge only Adams ever expressed any dislike of this -- being from Massachusetts that would not be surprising.  Jefferson appears we now know from DNA evidence to have been a hypocrite on that subject, having had a slave woman for his mistress (this was about then but he adamantly denied it), and not freeing any of them until his death (such manumissions for slaves close to the master were common).

The political system they created was in my opinion not very good, and has not been among the reasons the US has been so successful.  Presidential systems are inherently subject to gridlock -- something that at one point led to the Civil War and which has always, except in a few periods of one-party rule (reconstruction), hindered American political action.  After the Founders passed, very few men of distinction made it up, and then by accident -- Lincoln, TR Roosevelt -- because the political election system and general franchise fosters non-intellectual and emotional and -- well politicians rather than statesmen.

Reincarnation (rebirth)

I have had experiences that I could interpret as traces of a past life, but if one lives in a culture where it is taken for granted -- much as many Americans take Heaven for granted -- such experiences cannot be trusted entirely, but are nevertheless suggestive.  I think people around the world have such things happen to them but unless their expectations are clued, they dismiss them.

The claims just can't be tested scientifically any way I can think of.  Therefore a rational person has to withhold belief, and leave it as an opinion that it seems likely, and no more.

I will say though that a universe where sentience is like electric charge or energy -- preserved but constantly changing -- the idea sure makes sense.  It is way too easy, though, to go overboard here -- this is speculation since no one knows what sentience might be or where it might came from (although actually much the same can be said of electric charge or of energy).

More belief mockery

Believers should not get away with putting their beliefs or their faith outside the limits of rational attack by arguing that each person has freedom to believe what they want (or with any other tactic, for that matter).  They don't want to question their beliefs and don't want any one else to bring up things that are uncomfortable to them and raise doubts.  Attacking such beliefs on rational grounds is not a personal insult unless one uses invective.

Faith is one of those things.  The meme called "Christianity" has this teaching -- that God gives you faith.  It is really clever.  If you don't believe, then God has overlooked you, so you believe and attribute it to God while in reality it is a cop-out for believing what you have been indoctrinated with and want to believe.

I've seen the testimonials of people who have "come back" and their testimony of the joy and relief they felt.  Breaking with indoctrination is hard -- one feels guilt and fear -- and giving in and going back to the indoctrination gives you relief from that plus a good dose of serotonin to boot.  Thus most of those who have been indoctrinated into rigid beliefs in childhood either stubbornly stick with them in spite of reason, or they become hostile (sometimes extremely so) to those who "did that to me" and hate their prior religion.  Neither is healthy.  Rational skepticism in the absence of "belief" or faith -- with just reasoned opinions -- is the best.

Some rules of English grammar that should be dropped.

1.  Eliminate the insistence on "complete sentences."  Sometimes sentence fragments are just fine and in fact effective.

2.  Stop fussing about correct use of pronoun case.  "Me want a cookie!"  is wonderful.  Of course in that case humor is intended, but a sentence like, "She gave pencils to Mary and I" has the benefit of avoiding the alliteration and is not usually misunderstood, sounds natural, and even if it is a case of being "over-correct," so what.

3.  In that vein, the language should eliminate "whom" except as object of a preposition (where "who" still is distractive).

4.  Ban "shall" from legal documents.

5.  In fact, only allow "shall" in the polite request, "shall we" to keep the distinction between it and the question "will we?"

6.  Stop being so fussy about agreement between subject and verb.  All kinds of subtleties would become possible if the rules weren't so rigid.

7.  Change the punctuation rules at the end of the sentence to be logical by stopping the insistence that closing quotes must be outside the end-of-sentence mark.

8.  Drop the fussing about comma splice and other uses of the comma and make its use optional depending on need for clarity and style.

9.  Agree that a period is optional after common abbreviations such as "Mr".

10. Don't worry about dangling participles.  So what if someone can read it in a ludicrous way -- they won't, and if they do that's their problem (or maybe gain in pleasure). 

11. Allow use of a period rather than a question mark except for sentences intended to be questions but are not grammatical questions.  "Are you happy."  "You are happy?"  Rhetorical questions should also not need a question mark.  (Basically that would mean the question mark would indicate up-tone).

Evidence of God

I would like to respond to the argument that atheists would not accept any evidence that God exists short of personal revelation.


It is not correct.  There is evidence I would accept, such as an asterism in the form of the Tetragrammaton.  I would probably accept the clear occurrence of a miracle done under controlled conditions, but religionists have an excuse for why this doesn't work similar to the one psychics use -- it goes away when you control the conditions.

Or, perhaps, the Bible were really the spiritual book people say it is, and the history of religions were not so bloody and hypocritical, or if religion really did have an uplifting effect on its adherents.  This would not be as persuasive as an asterism, but it would be good evidence.

If you want to claim something so important and so extraordinary as God, you have to realize with intellectually mature adults the default is going to be skepticism.

I should stipulate -- theistic religions.

I must say, also, that personal revelation is probably the last thing I would accept.  I don't have so much ego as to think such a thing would be real instead of my own mind.