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I have a kind of respect for people who profess to believe in a "personal" God--I put that in quotes because there are theological arguments based upon its metaphorical meanings, but the people who state that as an article of faith typically mean it in its ordinary sense, and that's the position I'm talking about. They leave little confusion as to where they stand. But my respect is muted because I sense a limit to discussion, and I also value dialogue and openmindness as, among other things, paths towards genuine knowledge. Well, perhaps my view of knowledge is more utilitarian than pragmatic. That would be a flaw.
As I child I was very religious (Christian). As a teenager, I became an athiest and for many years I was comfortable with that position, even to the extent of expressing disdain for the indecisiveness of my agnostic friends. But with age I have become much more relaxed about what other people believe. That's why I prefer the label "nontheist." Maybe it's just cowardly. I'm not sure. I don't feel the need to argue that God doesn't exist. It really doesn't bother me.
For a while I was big on Epicureanism. One thing I took from that was a sense that people labor under all kinds of superstition. I think it's a case of people not knowing how to live well. It's as if they make themselves forget their true potential, which may be a corollary of forgetting about death--not to be Heideggerian, but in a general existential sense that's what I think the problem is.
One could make a case that these various faculties which obscure reality have their genesis outside of the structures of existence, for instance under certain views of evolution one may see them as adaptive traits, or as byproducts of much more determinative faculties, but if that were so I should imagine that the entity that calls itself homo sapiens should have little trouble transcending these little impediments to sanity. Is such transcendence in evidence? Only in select cases, and the transmittal of insights gleaned has been spotty at best. As a whole, humankind remains superstitious.
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