Originally posted by normhead What a preposterous conceit it is, that you can explain the origins of anything. That would assume that the human mind is capable of understanding everything, that there is nothing beyond human comprehension... which is itself, an incredible conceit. Anyone who claims they have an answer for everything... is a con man. There are far more Christians in that camp than atheists. I'd venture that who you are as a person is more important than your belief system. I know the religionists tend to want to make it all about what you believe. People should be held to a higher standard. People with noble beliefs have committed horrible atrocities in the name of religion (witness residential schools forced upon native populations in both the US and Canada) . Sometimes religion makes you a better person. Sometimes the blind belief in the goodness of your religion makes you a monster. I suspect the folks who viciously beat native children for speaking in their native tongue in the residential schools honestly believed they were doing good.) Let's not get into deciding where the balance lies.
Smart religions like Buddhism avoid the debate altogether. "It's not necessary to know there is a god to achieve nirvana." But it seems to be a little more mature than Christianity.
Well, I was just giving another non-Abrahamic perspective on some stuff like this: Pagans of course wouldn't say 'Not Necessary' means 'You Can't Have' or accept the presumption fought over that 'Origin' and 'Ownership' are somehow the same thing to *begin with.* (Notice our language, here?)
There's 'avoiding debates' and there's ....tacitly reinforcing the notion the debate is even as important as some of the debaters insist by having the same 'arguments' for centuries on end.
Certainly, the absolute *madness* perpetrated on Native American kids is something the Christians practiced on all our *own* ancestors back in Europe and are still doing in Africa and South America and elsewhere.... and it's a madness and cycle of abuse that indeed caused many of the kin of *my* Catholic ancestors to pass on the same thing against the people who were here. (Still doing it, too, did you hear about the few priests that basically molested *everyone* (yes, almost everyone, male, female, anybody else that might have been around. Almost *everyone.* ) in that village in like Nunavut?) It's understandable for a lot of 'indigenous peoples' to think 'white people' have no spirituality at all, (The New Agers probably don't help in this regard in key ways, but I guess they're at least *trying,* and all. )
But this 'argument' between abrahamic monotheists and atheists who still basically think the same way, ...is very often based on that very idea that 'knowledge/origins=ownership' Even when they argue over 'Whether atheists or monotheists should be judged utlimately-right/righteous,' and then like compare body counts, what they can't see is that the common element between 'atheist regimes' and theocratic ones of any 'one true way' ideology is... The authoritarianism.
Pure and simple authoritarianism, and all the presumtions that come with it before you even argue over 'which authoritarianism overrides all else.'