I've been meaning to answer this particular post:

Quote:
I notice that both you (Jeff) and Brad essentially base your claim that your God (Gods?) is correct on the fact that you feel that your version is right. I guess I just don't understand how either one of you can base your life on an assumption. I mean, there are certain things that I feel are inherent to my being, things that I feel that don't have any particular basis in rational thought, like an aversion to spiders or the desire to not kill or the desire to argue, etc. But I don't see these things as having been created by a supreme being (that is, I don't feel the necessity to anthropomorphize these feelings) but I just see them as parts of my personality as filtered through both evolution and experience.

Hmm. Do you view your personalities as having been created by God?
I think that you've gone down a pretty logical path toward the way I think about faith. We all make certain assumptions based on our experiences, but we don't know anything for sure. If we were properly skeptical about everything we didn't have absolute proof of, we'd end up like that guy in Hitchhiker's who is reduced to inactivity because he can't be sure if his recollection of what a pen or cat is is reliable.

We base our lives on assumptions all the time. We assume that everything we remember experiencing up until this point in time has really happened to us, we assume that the universe reacts the same way when given the same stimuli- it's those assumptions that allow us to operate reasonably. Do we know that nightfall will come tonight or the sun will rise again in the morning? Our science and recollections tell us so, but those could be faulty (Dark City, anyone?)

What we each try to do is make what we believe are the most reasonable assumptions based on what we've seen and experienced, and then base our lives on those things. Faith is one of those things for me.

And yes, I believe a large part of my personality is created by God. I also believe He sometimes uses events of this world to do it.

I suppose my return question would be, why follow things like a desire not to kill if it is only an evolutionary instinct? Not that I am trying to encourage that, but if given a situation where you could be sure of not being caught (no penalty for the act) where the positive benifit to you would outweigh your instictive feelings on the matter, would you commit murder then (and I mean murder, not self defense or anything like that)? Or is the instinct that strong that you are beholden to it even to your own detriment?
_________________________
-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.