DGS49
Diamond Member
In this film clip, noted deceased atheist Christopher Hitchins addresses the question of whether certain notable religious figures truly believe the theological tenets that they preach. Billy Graham, Mormons, and Scientologists are addressed. Not surprisingly, Hitchins thinks they are all charlatans.
I maintain that faith is a choice. At some point, you must decide what it is that you believe, or that you believe basically nothing at all. That choice should be made rationally.
I would like to draw an analogy from our real lives. There is a massive conspiracy among the people who write scripted television programs, films, plays, and so on. It is both unspoken and undeniable.
It is a conspiracy to create the illusion that if you commit a crime in America, you will be caught by police and ultimately you will either punished by the legal system or come to another undesirable end (e.g., get killed in a gun fight). Virtually every scripted program contributes to this conspiracy. Some of you may be old enough to remember the old Alfred Hitchcock drama shows, and he used to have fun with appearing to subvert this conspiracy. Sometimes his criminals would end the program not having been caught, but he would explain in his epilogue that they had later been caught and prosecuted.
Having done relevant research on the matter, I can say authoritatively that this state of affairs is laughably far from the truth. If you commit a single burglary, the chances that you will be apprehended, charged, tried, and convicted are less than the chances that you will hit the lottery. It is a little "worse" for car theft, robbery, and rape, and if you commit a homicide, your chances are about fifty-fifty of ever being caught, indicted, tried, convicted, and go to prison. But as a general proposition, if you are not an idiot and you commit the occasional crime, the chances are very good that you will never be caught.
But getting back to the aforementioned conspiracy, there is a purpose for it. If the population believes that crime does not pay, the population is less likely to engage in a life of crime. In fact, if the population realized how UNLIKELY it is that you will be caught (etc), crime would be much more common.
And that is my position on Faith. The world would be a better place if we all believed that, (1) there is a God, (2) moral rules are long established and valid, (3) a virtuous life will be rewarded in an afterlife, and (4) an evil life will either be punished or extinguished in the afterlife.
The details are not terribly important, except where religions are perverted to excuse (or even mandate) conduct that is anti-social. So I don't care if a person is a Jew, Christian, Mormon, Bhuddist, or something else, as long as s/he basically believes 1-4 above. It makes the world a better place.
I personally profess the Roman Catholic faith, with alacrity.
