Very good, John P. ;-)

However, I don't believe for a moment that you have no faith in what your culture has told you. All people take for granted much of the stuff that is passed on to them by their culture. It begins as soon as they can hear, walk, and talk, and they're unaware of a great deal of it, but take it on just as a bird "patterns" on its surrogate parents, whatever they may be.

I also think you must have faith in much of what your government has told you during your life..certainly not all of it...but much of it. You just like to think you're completely independent of them, because that appeals to your sense of your own independence.

We all like to think such things. ;-)

Other than that, your answers make good sense, and they sound much like the answers that I would give.

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Now, let's see about this paraqraph you wrote: "Just in case you are actually having trouble keeping up, I was offended by you, once again, saying that the "faith" in "faith in god" is the same as a "faith" in the disbelief that something exists for which there is no evidence. "Some people make science their religion" is bullshit if "religion" includes faith. And, yes, before you start spouting off again, I know that the word "religion" doesn't automatically include faith. You'll just have to have faith that it does in the context in which I'm using it."

Hmmm.

"The disbelief that something exists for which there is no evidence" (?)

John, how can there be evidence for something that is, by definition, not part of the physical time-space continuum as we know it? One is not obliged to prove the existence of something which exists outside of time and space by looking within time and space FOR it. One cannot either prove or disprove it by looking for it in a "room" (so to speak) which it is not contained in.

One can only state: "It's not in this room."

Similarly, some scientists have proposed theories of parallel universes...not as a religious proposition...as a scientific proposition. You can't find evidence for those HERE either, because they are, by definition, NOT manifesting HERE. Yet they may indeed exist...just not here.

Most traditional ideas about the Spirit world are based on a rather similar idea...that it's real...but it doesn't exist here in this time-space continuum.

To say that some people make science their religion is not bullshit, and I'll tell you why. Many people know relatively little about science, yet they have absolute faith in it...that is, in the latest scientific statements and theories they've heard from the media and popular culture around them. They may be almost completely ignorant of what is actually contained in those theories...and those theories may yet turn out to be utterly wrong...and yet they have absolute faith in it merely because it came authoritatively, through the media, from the world of science.

Their faith is based, like the faith of any religious fundamentalist, on a set of vague assumptions they take for granted, but they're basically ignorant.

For such people, science is their religion, and they trust it without question.

I understand your concern about people's unquestioning faith in God...but before you judge them you must know what they think "God" is, and why they think so. They don't all envision the same kind of "God". Furthermore, you should recognize that the world is full of people who have equally questionable faith in all kinds of other things for which they have no real knowledge or evidence...not just "God".

What is it that actually concerns you here?

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Dorothy - Yes! Must of us love pontificating. It's a way of passing the time and excercising our verbal skills, as it were. It also helps us reinforce our fickle sense of our own identity, and that's probably the main reason why we do it.