psychojosh13:
rather than spend my whole "short" life making sacrifices only to get an eternity of passive unconsciousness afterward.
Either you're not a mathematician, or you've attributed the possibility of there being an afterlife to a straight 0.
Remember the calculation. Which is larger:
90%*Lotsa fun*80 years + 99%*No Fun/Very UnFun*infinity years <- you put your stakes on enjoying now, and either your afterlife is limbo (you're right) or hell (you're wrong)
or
50%Lotsa fun*80 years + .00000001%*Lotsa LOTSA fun* infinity years <- you put your stakes on living after death and either you hit the jackpot (you're right) or you're in limbo (you're wrong).
We can reduce this to a simple cost ratio - is the difference between living WITHOUT religion vs. living with religion greater or less than one percent times infinity? Only when you are 100% undeniably certain you won't go to heaven does living without religion begin to pay off, and even then, you're ignoring the health benefits Heath brought up.
As an aside, Buddhism does look to be more restrictive than Catholicism. It starts with no drinking and goes on from there. But that's only the local temple we visited, I'm sure there are other varients.
quote:
Recent research suggests that some people are inherently incapable of the leap of faith required to accept God without empirical support (search for the phrase "god gene" to get some interesting reading material).
Really? Where have you read this? I'd not heard of it and I'd be interested in seeing the research, if you have it on hand.
quote:
All the research on the mental and physiological effects of religious belief must be affected by the fact that the research subjects are wired to more easily accept the mode of thought necessary for true religious belief. However, for someone like me (and I've tried the sincere religious belief thing before; it just doesn't work for me), religion would just be a lot of sacrifice for little to no benefit outside of a superficial affiliation with other people.
I would question the broad statement like that based on subjective experience. Have you tried every spiritual path? Have you tried psycho-spirituality? If you haven't tried everything, it's difficult to put forward the assumption like that. The path you tried didn't work (when you tried it), but there are many, many variables that would have an impact on this.