Choosing a faith

If that's your definition of "matter", then I guess I'm a materialist.But it looks to me as if you have just admitted that religion is bullshit.

You don't understand progressives.I don't always understand them either, but I'm not nearly as far off as you are.

Panic stricken white supremacists -- that's who.Why they are panic stricken, and why they are so worried about reparations, I do not know. Perhaps it is a guilty conscience.

Perhaps you haven't noticed. It is the Democrats who are supporting education, while the Republicans are usually trying to cut it back.

Yes, I grew up in that kind of world. But, by the time I reached the age of around 15, I began to notice that many church members did not practice what was preached. That it to say, there was a lot of hypocrisy. A member of my high school class committed suicide. But, back then, suicides were generally hushed up and you wouldn't hear about them. The death would be explained in some other way. I really doubt that the suicide rate has increased since then. That seems about right. But again, such deaths were likely hushed up and explained as having some other cause. Our kids went to school by themselves. We may have walked them to the subway station, but they then took train and bus without us accompanying them. This was in Chicago. Growing up, I was warned not to talk to strangers. Women were warned to be careful. This was in suburbs of Perth (W. Australia), a small town compared to Chicago.I think you are blaming too much on secularism. You are looking at an earlier time with rose colored glasses. You are not allowing for other changes. The newspapers today report what would previously have been hushed up. Today, automobiles are everywhere, while back then people walked a lot. Today people are sitting inside watching TV while back then they were out watching what was happening in their neighborhood.

The Mormon story has traveled worldwide, and has many adherents today.Why aren't you a Mormon?

I don't know. So what?There isn't anything I can do about it, so it doesn't seem to matter one way or the other.

Resisting peer pressure does not seem like an "easy way out." I don't see a world view (if there is such a thing) as either true or false. There is no standard by which its truth or falsity can be judged.

I can't recall any pressure to be secular. There's occasionally pressure toward being Christian, but fortunately that is infrequent. Most people, both at home and at work, have respected personal privacy and avoided saying much at all about religion. And this was true when I lived in a small townhouse complex and two of my neighbors were pastors/ministers. I assume that Phat experiences some anti-religious pressure. I try to avoid doing that, though I do press him on his social conservatism. I do have strong opinions about some things. But I try to avoid any appeal to absolutes.

Oh, we did question. That's why we no longer believe.It turns out that "Because God is with everyone" is indistinguishable from "there is no God." And if I cannot tell the difference, why bother with a useless belief.

I was a Christian at one time, and it did seem to make sense to me. I left Christianity because so many people who called themselves "Christian" were not behaving as Christians should. Jesus said "By their fruits ye shall know them" but those fruits were not showing.It was only after I had left Christianity, that I began to realize the absurdity of those beliefs.

That's an appallingly bad argument (by CS Lewis)."Truth" is a human concept. If he wants to say that humans are an accident, then he should also be saying that the existence of the concept of truth is an accident.

For that matter, all apologetics arguments are bad.This is what happens when they have no actual evidence to support their arguments.

Whereas, by contrast, you are using it to serve your personal need for an intelligent designer

Yet when we look around at people who say they are Christian, most of them do not seem to be practicing this stewardship.