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@Chrispminis, Firstly I believe that up until about 1.5 to 2 years ago I was of essentially the same mindset as you. Secondly, somethings, such as aliens, are not mythical so much as currently unproven. By this I mean that ask any reasonably informed astrologer and the answer you will get is that mathematically and by the odds, there must have been, is or will be other worlds such as ours, with life. "
Oh, I absolutely believe that intelligent life is somewhere out there. My bad, I meant to specify the Roswell aliens.
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Now to the meat of the issue, while it is entirely impossible to share a divine expirience, if someone, anyone of the numerous people who have claimed to have such, had an actual authentic divine,... intervention if you will, then their expirience is rather valid, and would give them some greater insight into a subject. Lastly not all, in fact most descisions should not be solely based on reason, for down that path lies, pardon the expression, godlessness, and the cold cruelty of the exactitude of reason. Morals by need must enter the equation somewhere, and if those morals come down from the church, are they wrong because they come from a man who claimed to know god?"
Yeah, but it's impossible to distinguish a person with real personal divine experience from a con artist. I would rather not base my decisions on such uncertainty. I must profess, if I lived during Biblical times and saw all the miracles that were supposedly performed I would absolutely be a Christian. To see such is not faith, it's only reason. I demand the same evidence that those of Biblical times were given.
As to the question of morality and the coldness of reason I'll try to answer that... first let me state that I don't believe that religion gives us our morals, but rather it justifies them. The Bible and other religious texts are full of incidences and commands that we find morally horrendous. At one point many of these may have been considered very much the moral thing. The fact is that the passages of the Bible that we quote are discriminated by our own shifting moral zeitgeist. We don't get our morality from the Bible, we just pick passages from it and use that to justify our moral beliefs.
I will tell you that while I do not believe in absolute morality, I do consider myself to be a very moral/ethical person and I do not think we need God to be this way. Morality is very much a pragmatic adaptation given to us by evolution. As social animals we are forced to interact with many other individuals with which we may be in competition for resources or have differing interests. However, there is a distinct advantage to co-operating with other humans rather than murdering and stealing and whatnot. We can undertake greater projects, we can defend and attack in greater numbers and share that mutual protection, etc.
Humans that are completely immoral find their reproductive success highly stunted in a world where humanity is by and large very moral. Morality isn't determined by divine word. If you kill someone it isn't up to God to say that you have done wrong. It's up to the rest of us to punish you for your horrendous deed with the idea that it will deter future murders (possibly our own). Morality feels intuitive because a sense of right and wrong is part of our genetic makeup, enough so that psychiatric associations (though I take issue with them) have decreed that absence of this sense is pathological. Can you call it a fantastic coincidence that our morality by and large is that which allows us to continue to peacefully coexist and reap the mutual reward of co-operation?
On the metagame
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