CelticBear’s Musings

The Skeptic Circle (of which I’m a part! Yeah!) has released its 40th edition of interesting members’ posts. I think it’s a monthly thing. This time it’s been released over at Daylight Atheism (note: I do not endorse atheism any more than I promote fundamentalism, which, in my opinion, atheism is the fundamentalist version of agnosticism,) in an article: http://www.daylightatheism.org/2006/08/skeptics-circle-40.html.

I wish to draw your attention to a couple of blogs that caught my eye and I found to be good and thoughtful reading. I’ll probably add them to my links.

One is from Debunking Christianity called: “Which Part Fits in Which Slot, Again?” in which the author discusses the weird tendancy for a lot of Christians to believe the supernatural miracles performed by God and Jesus, but then try to mix naturalism into it to make the miracle make sense in the world. You have to read it to get what I mean.

The other one is from Agnostic Mom called: “Evolutionary Psychology and Materialism As A World View” where she discusses how humanity has evolved ethics and “morality” out of necessity and not from a deity. Fascinating reading.

She has another post I just read that I found really good, called “An Accurate Guess is Still Just a Guess” where she describes a lesson for her son in reasoning, the effect of chance on our understanding of the world, and the ingrained desire we humans have to find patterns in our reality where patterns may not exist. Her blog is deffinitely going in my links!

A commentor on that article posted an excellent comment supporting the absurdity, and emotional crisis, magical thinking can bring about. I want to quote a piece of his comment here, without permission:

Another friend of mine is dying in the hospital – she is 55, and it came as a surprise to everyone who knows her. There is little that can be done, we are informed by her family, except they are asking for prayer. The people who are praying for her have described their feelings about it – saying how unfair it is that my friend should die. One has told me how much this has ’shaken her faith’ because our friend is such a good person. When reality encroaches on people with a supernatural worldview – they suffer more greatly because they feel betrayed by their magic.
How much less suffering would be in the world if people were less likely to attribute supernatural causes, and spent their time learning how things really work?