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Is it necessary to conclude that? All I ever had to do was conclude that I don't personally believe they do. I'm not sure how rationality affects lack of belief. The best "rational" reason I can think of for that is that a lack of belief in one thing frees up my thoughts and time for things that...

There's something a bit interesting about this question in that it involves self-applying the quality of rationality to the entirety of the person answering it. Nobody's completely rational- we have access to rationality, but only filtered through subjective experience. Am I a rational atheist...

You asked the wrong question in that you're ignoring or trying to conflate the difference between "converting" as a sort of performance, and "converting" as a literal change in beliefs and convictions. I tried to answer earlier assuming you meant the first type of conversion. In both...

I don't think I have too many skills that would be useful to a religious organization as a permanent employee, but I have done work for religion-related clients who didn't require conversion for contract work, luckily. I suppose it would depend on whether there were demands on my time outside...

It's a fair point, but yeah, I was talking about the offerings/promises of the religion itself. But it would be interesting if Unknown Soldier left Christianity due to a less-than-adequate gift shop.

Did the Catholic church promise you these things? What do you mean by that? Did they promise you, personally, would encounter Mary? Or were they examples of events to have faith in? "Products"? Bizarre term for sightings of Mary.

I was raised Catholic, and we were definitely never promised miracles. Or revelation. Perhaps you just went to the wrong church.

It's been a couple years since I've been active on this forum, and when I come back I immediately see this exquisitely funny post? I should not have stayed away so long. Well, if you would like actual answers to your questions, you should devise a scientific experiment to find them. A...

Because it's ubiquitous and polyglottal. Like donkeyballs. I hope someone gets that reference.

Nonsense. Think of all the most evil societies you can come up with. Societies full of people with immense power to inflict cruelty and misery on others, and who have no hesitation to do so. I'm willing to bet every single one of them were clothed and literate. Not only that, they were likely...

This is an interesting point. Syed seems to think that the only relationship a modern society could have with a tribal one is where we teach them our ways, and they listen. Any group of two cultures has much to learn from each other. I don't want to change people to be more like me, I want to...

Yeah, I'm Canadian. I'm going to have to remember what vaguely-car-shaped lump of snow is mine tonight after work and dig it out, and clothes definitely help for this. Definitely doesn't feel "civilized" though to have to scrape ice off your windshield. Peacefully fishing naked on a tropical...

You say that as a joke, but do you really think a peaceful world full of nudists would be a bad thing?

Show them examples of the benefits of literacy- "lead" by example. At the very least, the idea of preserving oral histories and traditions seems to be pretty universally appealing to humans. I might also show them, however, how technologically advanced, literate societies tend to destroy the...

Between my snarky reply to an old post and the smiley comment, I think I was just being grouchy this morning. You're clearly a really hoopy frood.

That's actually a pretty good point. I'm a HUGE Gary Larson fan. And Douglas Adams. Blowing up the world as a punch line in comedic fiction is always fun. But I certainly wouldn't be all smiles hearing that Earth would be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass just because it meant my...

The use of smileys while talking about the destruction of the world is really unsettling/horrifying.

EDIT: Whoa, I didn't realize this was a really old post I was replying to. Ignore- the conversation has moved on. Control? Eternal life is a pretty big carrot to dangle, even if the "eternal" part is pretty scary. So if someone PROVED that there's an afterlife, AND claimed there's a good...

... No. I'm saying exactly the opposite. It's people who ARE NOT suffering that are putting robots on Mars and treating cancer and researching clean energy. They can do these things because they're not worried about dying from an infected cut, or trying to keep their tiny patch of crops alive in...

Well, super! Hey, after a few million more kids suffer and die of cancer, they'll invent an even better kind of transportation for you to travel to far-away places on! Is there some kind of exchange rate going on here? Like, for every thousand people dying in a rockslide or wildfire or tsunami...