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Old 05-02-2011, 10:35 PM   #36
Urbane Guerrilla
Person who doesn't update the user title
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Southern California
Posts: 6,674
Y'know what, Zen? I eat wafers. Free wine on Sundays, too. (If the phrase sounds familiar but you can't put your finger on it, Google is your friend and Bob's your ungulate.)

And I was raised Unitarian if I was raised anything. I like to think the experience of youth plus that of maturer years gives me a broad and sensible perspective.

Atheism is much too cramped for me. Too much a belief in unbelief so its final reward seems so... picayune. Perhaps the most sturdily rational, or rationalist, atheist I ever heard of was Robert A. Heinlein -- a fellow I'd happily consign to Heaven.

Or is it righter to reckon of those who are atheistic "Verily, they have received their reward."

The list of despots who behaved all their lives as if there were no afterlife that might possibly be influenced by their deeds in this life is long and written in dried blood: Jenghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Josef Stalin and his enabler Vladimr Il'ych you-know-who, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler. Those are just the high points. Their nearest real approach to God seems to have been when they were swearing at somebody. There's always that whiff of dead folks around the anti-believers who operate on a large scale, who very often do not discourage their followers to worship them, mortal men, instead of something more abstract and with the right touch of the supernal.

What the small-scale antibelievers seem to lack looks like the opportunity to slaughter like the big boys.

Now I follow a trinitarian way, to the point of being an Episcopalian lay minister, duly licensed by the Diocese of Los Angeles. There's a lot of... brain going on in the Anglican Communion. You know that's the kind of thing I like.

The difference between religious thinking and superstitious (or magickal) thinking seems to me to be in what you do with it once you've thought it.
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