Re: virus: Does God really exist?

Ingrid H. Tarien (ingrid@ee.stanford.edu)
Wed, 21 Aug 96 12:50:59 PDT


>I have no doubt two people can live w/o personal religion being an issue.
What
did that have to do with my original email?

----------------------------------------------

Everything! You yourself are very troubled by the personal religion
issue. You feel it necessary to attempt and put down those that may
think differently, or to relegate them to a category of those less
complex or capable. You talk about gods using power that some just
don't understand, and you talk about the "necessity" of hope, belief, or
faith -- but in a religious sense.

You might look up a book by Tillich (Paul?), What is Faith; it talks about
things that you refer to and it discusses hope and faith in some detail,
and in a very broad sense.

In all of your discussion, you overlook one thing -- there are people
for whom it simply isn't an issue whether there is or isn't a God.
Being that it is impossible to prove and unlikely, we don't feel inclined
to bother with the semantic arguments that surround the issue. This
view of atheism is consistent with Tillich's view of what real faith and
religion is (in his view, atheism can become an ultimate concern as much
as any god can); the only way to be a true atheist is for god to really
be a nonissue, to not matter.

There are lots of forces in the universe, and lots of physical and chemical
laws of interest. Nature is amazing, as are many other things in life.
If you feel inclined to have a god, then by all means have one -- but
please don't try and get others to justify this for you. You can have
a god and I cannot, and we still have much more in common than not, simply
by the fact that we share the human experience.