From: "Alan"
Subject: Re: Atheism, another religion or is delusion universal?

You might be wondering how I managed to be reading your WebPages; I was searching for information relating to Sunni and Shiite Islam but I was sidelined by the informative bites of information on other faiths particularly my own, Mormonism, and on others such as The Southern Baptists and Roman Catholicism. You are to be congratulated on your facetious trivializing of these faith systems, and you are right, there is a whole lot of humbug in organized religion.

It is true that I have quite a lot of information on this site about many different belief systems - none of it, however, is designed to be "facetious trivializing" of them. I think that I have been successful in this because I have received quite a few emails from religious people as well as students of religion who have found the material to be useful and informative.

I asked Alan to support his allegation above that I have engaged in the "facetious trivializing" because, after all, it is very disingenuous to accuse people of things without also being able to defend those accusations. This is how he responded:

I do not detect in your work anything that would seek to make one feel comfortable with a religious approach. Your generalisations regarding my own faith and that of Roman Catholics for instance are facetious and trivial.

I asked him to support his allegation and what does he do? He repeats it. He doesn't seem to understand that repeating a claim doesn't serve to support that claim.

Why does he insist on repeating it? Perhaps because he hasn't read very much material on this site and decided, upon the basis of very limited data, to make his own generalizations about someone he doesn't know and has never met. If Alan ever had any intention of providing a positive and attractive face on Mormonism, he completely lost it right here.

There comes a time with every individual when a clear choice has to be made as to whether or not to live up to what is being taught within the faith system, and when one does practice their religion in spirit and in truth...

What constitutes "practicing religion in spirit and in truth" is something religious people disagree on. To argue that another person isn't doing that is often just Begging the Question. What Alan considers the "spirit and truth" of a religion isn't necessarily the same thing that another person will consider the "spirit and truth" of the same religion. Who is right? Well, it's certainly possible that Alan might be - but then again, he might not. Especially for outsiders there is little basis for being able to tell who is right and who is wrong - and that's assuming that there is one right answer in the first place.

Because of this, I cannot accept arguments that are premised on the idea of there being one true way to practice a religion in "spirit and truth." Different religious believers have different ideas of what that might mean and I won't get very involved in second-guessing them.

What most religious people find themselves arguing over has nothing really to do with true religious faith which is the process of knowing God as God truly is.

There he goes, Begging the Question again. He is assuming the truth of a position in order to defend a position, which is a logical fallacy. To be more specific, he is trying to argue against the idea that "practicing a religion in spirit and truth" is something people have legitimate disagreements on by assuming that there can be no legitimate disagreements on what "true religious faith" is. But of course, the existence of only one "true religious faith" (knowing God) means much the same as saying that there is only one way to "practice religion in spirit and in truth."

So, when asked to defend an accusation Alan responds by repeating that accusation; when challenged on the idea that there is only one legitimate way to practice religion, Alan argues that this is so because there is only one legitimate conception of "true religion." I'm getting the impression here tha Alan doesn't have the first clue as to what means to construct a logical argument or to reason coherently.

...the highlighting of the weakness of organised religion and its founders become irrelevant in the face of an unimpeachable perception of the reality of a higher authority than the humanist consensus. ... Yes truly, and the higher authority can be known and obeyed if one chooses to do so.

Unimpeachable? Hardly. I and other atheists who were once religious - often Christians - are living proof that Alan's claim is mistaken.

I didn't ask his to try and support this claim because I had already done that once and was sorely disappointed. There is only so much time I'm willing to beat my head against the brick wall of someone else's impenetrable obstinance.

Finally, I asked Alan not to bother writing back unless he intended to write something of substance. I have wasted far too much of my life repeating over and over to theists, and Christians in particular, that they need to learn how to support their allegations - only to read, in response, the same statements repeated in different words but with nary a letter of support in sight.

It's tiresome and, quite frankly, depressing - interaction with people like Alan is precisely what causes atheists like myself to develop negative opinions of Christians and theists. Emails like Alan's are precisely the source of the impression that Christians are uneducated, unreasoning, and illogical twits. I know that 6

isn't the case of most Christians and it probably isn't even the case with Alan - but so long as he insisted on trying to prove my optimism misplaced and refused every invitation to think positively of him, I just wasn't interested in what he had to say. I have better things to do than to expend intellectual and psychological energy on a worthless and futile task.

Alan's response was to accuse me of being "angry." Am I angry? Perhaps I'm a bit angry at wasting time on worthless emails from individuals who don't have the slightest idea of what it means to use logic and reason to analyze a problem. Perhaps I'm a annoyed at having to deal with the smug, self-righteous ramblings from people who are certain that they have something to say but who can't write their way out of paper bag. Perhaps I'm peeved at the large numbers of dishonest religionists and theists who think nothing of making accusations they are unwilling to support (and who in fact don't even seem to understand the importance of supporting an accusation) even they argue that atheists have no reason to be ethical.

Who wouldn't be?

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