[religion] A bit more, promoted from the comment thread

Both daveraines and ellameena are challenging me on definitions, both of my own thinking and my perception of Christian thinking. Promoted from comments, here's a bit more from me:

The universe, however, runs itself, and fundamentally I am nothing more than a highly organized island of negative entropy, to misquote Ilya Prigogine. I am responsible for myself.

I applaud that God exists for you, for daveraines, or anyone else. He provides His followers with comfort, structure, and a myriad other blessings. I fully support this, and your right to believe in and act on those blessings.

My management chain has an empirical existence, which I can respond to either by cooperating or by exiting the organization. God does not. As I said to daveraines over on his thread, I have no burden of disproof with respect to the existence of God, any more than I have a burden of disproof with respect to the existence of Marduk or the existence of leprechauns who live in cereal boxes.

My personal quarrel with faith is precisely that: personal. I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else that your faith isn't valid for you.

My public quarrel with faith is that it far too often leads its followers to confuse empirical and mythic truth. Often deliberately, it seems to me.

This is why I see, for example, a direct relationship between Islamic terrorism and Intelligent Design — both are based on deliberately counterfactual thinking and an inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between the empirical and the mythic. Believers in a mythic truth take an action to correct what they see as errors in the empirical world. Wahabbist Muslims and ID advocates are committing the same error, differentiated only by degree.