Quote Originally Posted by Taunton Blue Genie View Post
I can't disprove the existence of fairies, Shiva and goblins and the boogie man don't exist but that doesn't mean that every deity ever worshipped existed until they are disproven - and the argument that atheism has some sort of equivalence with a religious belief system is errant nonsense. The fact that you refer to a singular god and 'He' suggests that you seem to have, unsurprisingly considering your cultural background (English speaker and European) bought into the Abrahamist god and without disproving all the alternative deities - and many of the stories that involve your Abrahamist god existed in previous religions.

I regularly travel the world (and a lot of that time off the beaten track) and have spent time visiting religious locations of all description and finding out about more about various belief systems. I've spent time visiting Indian temples, Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, the Wailing Wall, native American kivas, Taoist temples, the Temple Mount, Icelandic spiritual locations, mosques, cathedrals, The Golden Temple of Amritsar, Greek Orthodox churches, Native American kivas, Aztec Culture, Bethlehem and Jerusalem and a myriad of pagan sites around the world.

I have made some effort to learn about about animism, Native American religious fetishes, Roman gods, Sun gods, voodoo, Brahma, Hinduism, Greek gods, jinni, religious petroglyphs, animism and a lot else. I also couchsurf in order to get to know local people - and I have stayed with people of various religions.

All the above doesn't make me the world's expert in the field of religion across this globe of ours but I may have a made a bit more effort in studying the phenomenon of religion than those who, very predictably and extremely parochially, believe in the first belief system that is passed onto them by their immediate environment and who usually consider all other belief systems and deities to be false and for non-believers to be deluded/self-deluded/ill-informed/stupid/illogical/adhering to an alternative type of religion or merely unfortunate.

As a kid I used to imagine sitting on the moon and looking down on this planet and its people in order to develop an overview of Mankind - and I still have that attitude and perspective. For me, the opposite of that overview is to have the very blinkered approach of shoe-horning your understanding of the world into the one belief system that is foisted upon you.

Equivalence it ain't and if you were born in a different time and/or place most believers would, no doubt, be equally dogmatic in buying into a totally different deity/set of deities altogether.

Thanks but I'll keep my blinkers off.

Perhaps you are coming to this from the wrong end, looking for a spiritual conclusion from physical data.
If there are many mistaken attempts at something ,does that mean that the thing itself is impossible or not worth further effort ?

I could give the example of manned flight for example. There were innumerable different attempts and complicated ideas about it over millennia which were all wrong , yet in the end a simple principle which had somehow been missed by all of them proved effective and enabled you to visit all these exotic locations.

It's quite possible to approach this subject from an intellectual starting point, but it's not for everyone and it's very complicated, so this is probably not the place to do it. Be that as it may, it does fly in the face of your suggestion that people simply accept the first thing they are told and believe it. Very very many highly intelligent people have unexpectedly and often reluctantly come to the incontravertable certainty of God by considering alternative possibilities.

I hope that you become one of them.