Would you ever get into a discussion and try to be wrong about yourself and be inferior to others? Are you also open to the possibility that I understand the arguments from other side and disagree with them not because of my arrogance, but because I am genuinely unconvinced by their arguments?
I would get into a discussion and ask a lot of questions and learn first, judge second. The difference is in judging first and then looking for patterns in the observational data to fit your preconceived hypothesis.
This is getting deep. Not sure how much more I can handle before I need to go vent in the player threads. I'm trying though.
So essentially you're saying that some things that happen, certain phenomenons that can't be explained are a result of something we don't know or may never know?
Have you ever seen the South Park episode where Kenny gets sent to an agnostic foster home?
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying something along the political, paradoxical lines of "There's nobody more intolerant and narrow-minded than a tolerant and open-minded liberal".
Saying b.s. like "we may never know" smacks a little too uncomfortably close to intelligent design to me. That's just a solution in search of a problem and the data to support it. It really has little credence beyond flying spaghetti monsters.
What I'm saying is that there are great, unanswered questions in why are humans such magnets for both healthy and unhealthy religious beliefs. I tend to believe that everyone has religious beliefs of some sort -- and that the people who regard themselves as "superior to animals" because they believe they uniquely lack "religion" are, in fact, expressing their own form of a religious belief and are in a sort of childish denial of their own reality.
Ultimately, it comes down to not being able to escape your own humanness -- the fact that we've been coded since birth, and perhaps even before for thousands of generations, to express an innate need to explain the universe, how it came to be, and how we came to be. "Myths" is a loaded word in modern scientific context, but we all live by these myths... even if said myths are myths in the traditional sense: the traditional storytelling humans use to unfold a world view.
Which isn't to say that a believer in Prometheus is more "correct" than someone who believes fire is really just a form of energy of matter transformation into heat and light -- and not yet another thing the Greeks can claim to have invented. The question is really what is the glue or the genetic encoding or the dark matter of human life that is the source and engine for all of this, regardless of how each set of peoples expresses or tries to explain it. And not just "what", but can we ask why it is there? Is there a higher function it is serving that we may or may not understand much yet? Could even natural selection be a reason for its existence?
And yes, I did see that
South Park episode. I thought it was hilarious. Agnostics do not get publicly made fun of enough. It's the belief system that everyone chooses to ignore, so it was actually kind of cool that someone actually addressed it publicly.