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To: f.Christian
"Religion, says Freud, is the "universal obsessional neurosis of humanity", and it is destined to disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is, resisting the tendency to edit it to suit our fancies."

False man made religion(atheism/darwinism/evolution) based on denial of reality/God(creator/creation)...

is the 'universal obsessional neurosis of humanity'---

and it(false science) is destined to disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is(positive science)...

resisting the tendency to edit it to suit our fancies(normative science)."

2 posted on 03/01/2002 3:40:18 PM PST by f.Christian
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To: f.Christian
Small correction(foot note)...Whoso would deserve well of his fellow in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away. [1]

He adds that if a belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our body and spread to the rest of the town. [2]

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.[3]

(It is not hard to detect, in these quotations, the "tone of robustious pathos" with which James credits Clifford.) On this view theists without evidence-my sainted grandmother, for example-are flouting their epistemic duties and deserve our disapprobation and disapproval. Mother Teresa, for example, if she has not arguments for her belief in God, then stands revealed as a sort of intellectual libertine-someone who has gone contrary to her intellectual obligations and is deserving of reproof and perhaps even disciplinary action.

3 posted on 03/01/2002 3:45:41 PM PST by f.Christian
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