Actually, I was thinking “meh, if Amanda is really that keen on believing in God, this seems to be a relatively harmless form of God to believe in”.

The only bit that got any negative reaction off me was:

“I choose to pursue MY salvation, tell others why I chose the path I’ve chosen, and then realize “I have no dog in that fight” when it comes to how THEY believe.”

and that’s only because I’ve had people abuse this same logic as an excuse to drop a religious debate with me. So that’s just oversensitivity on my part.

As per Techskeptic, I think a lot of it is kinda nonsensical. For example:

“When there is something I don’t understand I just look deeper for the meaning, and after awhile if it still frustrates me I just leave it alone.”

would indeed work just as well for your average Dr Seuss book. What Donny really seems to be advocating is less a prescriptive religion and more a sort of mental graphite that you can sprinkle over the notepad of your mind to see what hidden messages you might have left for yourself. Religion as brainstorming tool.

This is IMO a fair reason for belief - the only concern I’d have is that it could result in too much confidence in the results of said brainstorming. It’s harder to discard a dodgy conclusion if you were under the impression that God had sent it your way.

There are two things that drive my “stance”. First is the requirement that data or evidence exist before i beleive in it. So I’ll choose western medicine every single time over homeopathy and “ancient chinese secrets”. I wont even waste ym time with that other nonsense. If my kid had autism, i wouldnt waste my time with chelation or trying to convince poeple not to immunize their kids. When politicians try to justify their actions, I want concrete evidence of say… for example…WMD, before we go in there shooting peoples heads off.

So with respect to god, I would need God level evidence. stuff that can’t be otherwise explained. Healing in general is poor evidence because in that case miracles happen in hospitals all the time, they just arent given credit. God level evidence would be that someone regrows a limb, that a mountain is moved 1 foot in a day, the moon dissapears without any residue, or that someone teleports themselves from one place to another (although we have even done that at the sub-atomic scale). God level evidence is this type of thing becuase the hypothesis is that there is this magic being, that we can not measure in any way but who has complete control over every single electron in the entire universe.

if God level evidence would be made available I would believe in god (the evidence should make clear which god Im supposed to believe in, for all i know the Zoroastrians are the ones who are right).

The second aspect of my beliefs comes to bear when considering where we get our morals from. If care, I’ll expand further.

There is also this back and forth.

I can understand how you’d feel that way.

I haven’t read your blog yet but could you summarize for me what your stance on the subject of God happens to be? And why you think you feel that way?

Just curious.

here goes..

I truly don’t mean to be offensive. I am just having a hard time being eloquent..

If you do a search and replace and change every “God” to “Dr. Suess”, and every “Jesus” to “Cat in the Hat” and then try to read it, seriously, I think you will get the idea.

I agree with him, though, that beyond accepting Jesus’ gift, the rest is just a yolk.

So you think the rest is just the yellow part of an egg?

I knew it would evoke some pretty strong reactions from you two in particular.