Tuesday, July 19, 2011

For my friend...

A couple of months ago I got started on a conversation about God with one of my friends which got dropped into the middle of a Facebook thread. She's an atheist, and she raised a question that goes back more than 2000 years, to a guy named Epicurus. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who decided that most of what people thought about "the gods" was ridiculous. He upset a lot of people, and so most of his works have been lost. I'm not going to quote him, but I think this is a decent way of saying what he thought:

If you pray to the gods, you're acting like the gods needs your help to find out what you want. If you make some kind of sacrifice to a god you're acting like the god can be bribed into doing what you want. That's  really disrespectful. We can't do anything to hurt or help a god and it's egotistical to think that anyone who's actually a god is going to spend time rewarding and punishing us for what we do on this planet.

What do you think? I'm going to share my own response to this in a couple days--but I'm also going to write some much more down-to-earth stuff.

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