Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artÃ*culo ,
the_constructor escribió:

So what do you have faith in Grimly ?

Why does he have to have faith in anything? Perhaps he's perfectly
capable of standing on his own two feet and aligning his own moral
compass without some guilt-tripping kiddy-fiddler in a frock dictating
to him?

Indeed. It seems to me after many years of taking up arms in defence of
if not atheism certainly agnosticism, that the average Believer is
incapable of living without Faith In Something. More, incapable of
understanding that life is even possible in such a condition.

Now whilst my forays into metaphysics have convinced me that, in the
limit to live a functional life at all, one must *assume* something - if
no more than that one exists in a phenomenal world - in order to be
able to operate in such a world - I don't feel the deep need to have
faith that this is in fact an accurate model of my experience. It's
simply 'what I need to assume to get to Tescos' as it were. And 'getting
to Tescos' is simply a part of a process that makes a feeling that I
call 'bad' get replaced by a full tummy and a feeling I call 'much better'

William of Ogham/Ockham/Occam made the point.

"Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"

"entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem"

Religion is a vain and unnecessary extravagance of intellectual and
emotional modelling. A way to control the sheeple by feeding their egos
and telling than that they are, rather than vague insignificant specks
of dust in a totally alien and uncaring universe, in fact somehow
important- if not central - to it, and what they do is of huge
significance to it..

I am always amused by a bit of dialogue out of one of Castanedas works:

"I have learnt that nothing really matters in the world"
"But how can you continue to live when nothing matters to you?"
"Because it no longer matters to me that nothing matters to me, of course!"




--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.