I believe all practical religions have some conception of hell, and that it's probably not possible to believe in a good afterlife without believing in a bad one. Note that the few religions which have tried to do away with their ideas of hell (e.g., modern, ecumencial, American Christianity, for the most part) are all colossal wallowing failures.

thanx for being so nice!

bow'ls

I’m a believer sometimes and in some ways, nonbeliever in others, existentialist in feeling responsible for my acts with the dread and anguish that responsibility sometimes brings, moral sometimes and in some ways, amoral in others. Another way of saying I’m wishy-washy, changeable, and justified therein by virtue of womanhood? Every issue is like a new day for me, even if it’s been hashed over for centuries. My day is ending while yours begins, a result of our positions on the globe, and its position relative to the sun. My yours reveal some new slant or freedom from a new slant, maybe the knitting of an ancient culture into your own.

By all means, hop on the soapbox. By the way, please vote. 10 means you want me for President, 9 and below mean you're for those bums, Bush or Kerry.

While this is true for those religions that send unbelievers to hell, I was referring to the comfort of knowing your loved ones are safe and alive and that you will be reunited with them. I would like that comfort, but know I cannot have it.

"comfort is, I believe, the primary benefit religion gives to believers" I think that much of the 'comfort' believers feel stems from a reduced fear that they might end up in hell - a fear that religion put there in the first place!

1) There is little evidence that I am aware of to suggest that believers are happier than normals. So I agree with you. 2) Of course you would have to find some way of stranding a morally untrained colony on the island; perhaps by stranding newborn babies there and using morally neutral robots to feed them. It would be pretty difficult to invent a robot that was totally morally neutral, though. Perhaps it should, at random intervals, do something naughty for no reason, like punching one of the other robots in the motherfucking face. Even if the experiment could be performed and the colony didn't slaughter or do anything too untoward, it wouldn't be conclusive. My instincts say people have an innate sense of guilt at doing certain lewds; this also seems to be the case in the animal kingdom, and perhaps it would be best to do the experiment on monkey colonies or something. Anyway my view could be utterly distorted by the fact that my upbringing as a Scholar and a Gentleman has been so austere, so fundamental to my being, that to me it seems like second nature. 3) There seems to be very little correlation between high church-going levels and low murder rate. Britain, Canada, the rest of Europe all have much lower murder rates than the USA, but the USA has a much higher rate of church going. I think religion has very little to do with making people not murder-prone. I don't think most religions say murder is wrong because God told someone it was wrong and they wrote it down, or some madman heard a voice that said it was wrong so he wrote it down; it says murder is wrong because that's what most people instinctively feel is wrong. By and large, most religions share similar basic morals, and they aren't very different from those followed by normals. Is this just coincidence? Or are such religions more likely to survive because people feel more comfortable following morals that they already believe in anyway? Of course some wallyish morals slip through... A friend of mine is a lapsed Jewish, but he has relatives who are ultra-non-lapsed-jewishes. On a particular day of the week (Holy Saturday?) they aren't allowed to work, cook, drive a car, etc. One of the most wallyish aspects of this is that they can't turn on a light. They actually have a special device on their fridge which prevents the light from turning on when they open the door. There is clearly no practical basis for this moral, other than God told them to do it. Other, more serious wallyishnesses exist, like condemning homo lords. Now I actually think there is an inbuilt disgust towards gayness among many people, but normals can overcome this quite easily. Religious people can't because the prejudice, which was present in the elderlies who wrote their holy books, is now ingrained in their religion. So they can't tolerate gayness, lest they be deemed gay.

PS-If you envy (or whatever) the comfort of believers because you struggle with all these problems surrounding religion while they don't - well, that's kind of backwards isn't it? If you're going to be a nonbeliever, why don't you try just not worrying about God (or whomever) and whatever he or it is or isn't doing, since right now you just seem like a regular believer with commitment problems? You might as well be one of those Existentialist Frenches or Stephen Daedalus. PPS-If the "unanswered questions" you struggle with are Why is there so much suffering in the world or something such, you're still a believer! QED.

Bart Simpson

Everyone, including myself my first weeks here, kind of expects Islams to be some kind of monomaniacal robots. The first times we all saw Islams drinking liquors or associating with women or some other vaguely or specifically haram thing, we all screamed bloody murder at them. Then we realized Islam in most of the Middle East is pretty much just like Christianity in America with two important exceptions: 1) they occassionally blow themselves up, and 2) they pray about 5 times a day. Anyway, the short of it is that these two things - which incidentally, nearly every Islam doesn't do - are so anathema to Western thinking that we have to assume anyone who would consider doing them is an android or some freakishly orthodox fundamentalist. They're not. Really. If you must know, it's insanely easy to contemplate blowing yourself up, for political as well as financial reasons, and then give it some thin coating of religion. Especially here, where pretty much everyone just sits around contemplating all kinds of illogical actions and theories in ridiculously angry-sounding voices (hint: it's the language!) anyway. And the majority of people who blow themselves up don't know the Qu'ran from my ass, seriously. So anyway, talking about the Iraqi resistance or Al Quaeda as anything really connected to Islam is kind of bunk. It's probably, in fact, as much bunk as talking about the Crusades in terms of Christianity. And just look at the number of mostly-Christian Westerners who've self-righteously marched to their deaths in Iraq this year. Or nonbelievers, for that matter. Oh God, I'm afraid I've gotten you frightfully confused now.....

Sure, but I would avoid any of the following typical assumptions: 1) People with religion are as a whole more content than people without. Sure it sounds nice and believable, but how can you tell? I would guess they aren't, for the reason above and because I think believers are more likely than nonbelievers to be stupid and hurt themselves. Besides, believers can't, like, bang any chick they want whenever they want or do a fatty bag of smack, while nonbelievers can; and believers seem more likely than nonbelievers to be somewhat desperate and unhappy people to begin with. 2) If people were somehow utterly isolated, they would still, kind of instinctively, have a moral code, conscience, and sense of guilt. If you were to somehow strand an extremely young child on an island, he would probably smear himself in his own feces, pleasure himself whenever, and basically kill whatever thing he felt like for a pretty long time without any sense of shame. I imagine he'd eventually break out in a nasty rash or otherwise logically come to the conclusion that feces-smearing, self-gratification, and wanton killing aren't healthy, at which point he'd grow some kind of morality and shame. But there's nothing that's convinced me he'd just have it instinctively, like an animal or Aboriginal would. If there were a bunch of people stranded on the island, they'd probably get it faster, since, say, killing or stealing would be more likely to lead to a quick consequence. This is, I think, the only original basis for morality. But there's no way to tell, is there, since you couldn't strand a 4-year-old Irish on an island without him bringing some kind of moral training with him? 3) Religion has caused more slaughter or murder or et cetera than any other thing. Bunk. And how do you know? And it's probably also prevented more by making the majority of people not murder-prone. As far as "wallyish morals" go, I can't think of any. I think the wallyish part is just that most believers (like nonbelievers) have forgotten whatever practical purposes they had in the beginning and have likely added all kinds of garbage onto them, like genuflecting or, for Islams, entering a lavatory right-foot-first. Can you think of any which are purely wallyish?