[iconoclast]

Didymos Thomas,

'You are right, taking such language literally is misguided, but these criticisms you have presented miss God notions founded in a figurative understanding of the language.'

If you want me to concede that the Bible, Talmud, Koran, ect consider deep and meaningful ethical/moral issues and communicate these in a compelling way - fine, i have no problem with that, but where there is a requirement of faith in something that cannot be known, this cannot be purely figurative, and is not presented as such.

When Cannon Nicholas Sagovsky (CofE) visited my university i asked him if he thought God really exists or whether God is a cipher for the moral authority of the social whole - and he indicated the former.

So here's the problem. If God, a supernatural entity, actually exists then the cause and effect relations that seem to bind reality together, and render it knowable, within reason, but without absolute certainty, are nullified.

If you want direct evidence against a thing that doesn't exist, anything, then you're asking me to engage in a task greater than showing all religious notions to be false. Assert the existence of a 10ft chocolate statue of Ghanid's grandad - and challenge me to disprove it. I can't. The same with God's, ghosts and goblins. What i can do is try and understand the origin and nature of these ideas and compare them to what i can reasonably, but not certainly know.

If the world and everything in it, including our memories, came into existence ten seconds ago, we would have no way of knowing. God or no God, milk or no milk, this is a legitimate problem with empirical information.

No, we couldn't absolutely know, but that hardly gives licence to claim validity, figurative or literal, for unfounded assertions that have such massive implications for who we are and what our purposes should be in the world - particularly in face of reasonable knowledge that has been hard won, and offers such potential benefits.

Religious ideas holding fast to a skeptical defence are offensive - an insult to man's greatest achievement and to the very essence of man - the learning animal. We need to embrace the spirit of knowledge and religion kills it stone dead with cliams to secular, relativist and skeptical protections for notions that are fantastical, supernatural and unreasonable.

I do not think people have a right to believe whatever they like. They have a duty to truth - a duty religion absolves them of as they pursue the agendas of thier little circles of the faithful.

You keep saying this and i don't know why:

Instead, I've offered you actual arguments - arguments which you do not respond to as you prefer to simply restate your own intolerant and illogical beliefs.

I've tried to be as forthcoming as possible - though admittedly, in my own terms. I am hearing you, i just don't agree with your analysis, or the terms in which it is made. If you wish to make this point again, please do so, but indicate which arguments you think i have not addressed.