Which is very rare.

Its not that I require logical proof. Its not even that I require reason- its that I think all of mankind should strive to hold reasonable beliefs, especially when it comes to those beliefs which most drive us in our actions towards our fellow man.

Is it a far stranger place than dream't of by my, or any philosophy? Undoubtably so. But does the strangeness and vastness of the universe mean that I 'might as well' act according to the myths associated with a creator deity who sent his only son to be brutally beaten and nailed to a board, moreover did so as a supposed act of love? Or how about follow the voluminous teaching of a divine facet, who rode around with a king in a chariot killing people by the droves in a bloody fashion while dispensing to that king various truths...

And these are some of the less silly notions from the 'great' spiritual traditions who bestride the planet.

Because the metaphor maters, Alcarey. We pass this stuff down to our children. These are the lessons they learn- lessons of old men strapping their children down on rocks for sacrifice because god was 'testing them'. Nailing people to boards to die as a story of love. Killing as helping souls along the karmic cycle (As Arjuna learns at one poi during his epic chariot ride).

These are bloody dark things, forged in bloody dark periods. Moreover they are silly, silly things. What illustrative power they had is long lost, as is the world that they were forged to understand. We have much better things and much better metaphors to understand the world now, none of them entailing the belief in silly things. None of them that require lessons and love forged in blood.

The urge is to say: 'Oh! But we shouldn't take these things so seriously'. Of course we shouldn't, thats part of what I'm saying. But even as a fuzzy myth, its silly. What lesson do we reasonably extract from a scenario where god tells arbraham to kill his son, where Abraham agrees nd gets ready to do the deed, and god says: 'Hah! Just testing you'. What lesson is that- that holiness and killing your child are congruent? What of the son, I say? What was his lesson about the love of his father? And gods riding around in chariots helping kill people? And divine fathers having their son nailed to boards so that he can finally not care about the sins of his very own creation?

Yes, lets not take these things seriously. They are silly! As much as phlogistone and 'fire demons' and homunculi... they need to go, off to the ash heap of silly ideas that failed to help anyone do anything.

I say lets be reasonable, and do what reasonable people do. Stop propagating these silly things, stop looking at them as rubrics for understanding life, stop respecting them. God is naked, in the exact same way the apocryphal Emperor was. As long as we insist on respecting these silly things and insist on making way for them in our culture, they will plague us forever.

Yeti