(And thanks for the coffee offer!)

The Evangelical Atheist: This is the idiot who hates religions that proselytize, so he proselytizes against religion. That’s a violation of Q1.

The “All Religions are like the one I have knowledge about” Atheist: This is the atheist who was raised, usually, in a predominant Christian society and she consistently goes back to arguments against Christianity, regardless of the religion she is faced with. For example, “Hinduism has so much misogyny in it, which is just like Christianity because of X….” This is a violation of Q2, because the same atheist would condemn a religious person if they criticized atheism via their own religious point of view.

So in short, if you hate it when people try to convert you stop trying to convert me, and for the sake of rationalism please stop assuming that any issues you found with Christianity are also present in my religion. I have met my share of misogynistic atheists so it’s not as if I leave my beliefs I’ll live in a world full of magical unicorns and gender/racial equality.

Oh and I’d love to have coffee with the person who wrote this article. It’s very well written and I think it’s a great tool for everyone, regardless of their faith.

So just by observation alone, that person very well could have a logical and reasonable reason to believe that there might be someone in the room with you that shouldn’t be there.

I think, when you take away the fairy tale, magical intervention part of what the ‘subconscious’ is (meaning the trendy popular stuff that people do just because they think it looks cool or something) all you have are people who notice and take quick mental pictures of stuff and it gets put in the “back of their mind” until there is a reason for it to surface and serve a purpose.

My two cents.

I think I probably violate q2 very often because I am uncertain about many things. Like the question, “would you slap a baby to save a kitten?”

Though I am laughing because it is still funny, when taking the question seriously and there is an already defined criteria of what constitutes a slap, yes I probably would slap a baby on the bum or something (not really hurt them) to save a kitten. My reasoning is that “my” baby would get over it because as the mother, I know I could never really hurt my child.

I would want to save a kitten as the expense of a swat on the bum of a child I don’t know because I know that “I” wouldn’t actually hurt the baby, yet it is not my baby. However, I would disregard the mother’s feelings about a swat on the bum to a her child if it wasn’t just a kitten and let’s say it was another child’s life, I would slap the baby.

I really am not sure if it is right or wrong, I just know that on the other side there is a mother and there is a consequence that cannot be over come. That consequence being a child’s life and I do take into account that I might piss one mother off but it is far less devastating than a mother losing her child.

I really don’t know what it makes me but I do feel like I am a moral person but I do have to make choices, some are simple choices, others are hard.

To me, all I do know is that if my kid had to take a swat from a stranger to save a life, I would accept as reasonable just don’t ask me to answer any questions like, suppose that person who slapped your kid caused your child brain damage to save the other. Those are things I don’t know how I would react to and I don’t know that I could NOT feel guilty about inevitably, in some sort of way wish that it didn’t have to happen to my child, like to somehow mean that I think my child’s well being was more important than the life of the other.

Really not sure if that makes me a hypocrite, human, stupid, selfish, unreasonable or bad. All I know is I would be grateful that the other didn’t die but resent that my child was inevitably dealt a really shitty hand.

As for skepticism and faith. I don’t know about that either. I know what I don’t not believe or accept or think is in anyway shape or form valid as some vehemently proclaim to be the only truth.

I do understand how some consider my thoughts ‘ignorant’ for saying those gods do not exist and they are made up but asking someone to disregard all evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt for me that it is all a lie is like asking me to approve of lies and I don’t approve.

That goes against my ‘moral’ grain. As for aliens. I am skeptical, part of my says, it is NOT IMpossible and there is a bit of me that really wants it to be true but I wouldn’t go around ‘preaching’ that it is true but I would discuss the probability and evidence of it.

If I saw a UFO, I would say I saw a UFO but to me, I take the term at its word. Unidentified Flying Object. I don’t believe there should be anymore to it other than saying exactly what I think.

Yet much of that gets lost in the mainstream. UFO seem to always mean little green men, or when someone says UFO then they must be insane.

Okay, sorry about my ramble, just good food for though.

“I have three conflicting beliefs:
(1) I [believe it is OK to] eat bacon;
(2) I do not [believe it is OK to] eat cats;
(3) I believe there are no morally relevant differences between cats and pigs.

Conclusion: I have conflicting beliefs, and if I am honest and rigorous it is my job to fix that problem.”

The sense of another in proximity can be caused by a tempoary failure of the neurological system that partitions self from non-self (I can’t recall the formal name). But I would not call that intuition. A better example might be sensing the attention of someone whose past advice could be relevant to your current circumstances.