No one should ever take anything on faith and in most aspects of life, everyone seems to understand this. You don't just step into the street and begin to cross on faith, you check traffic first. You don't spend your money on faith (except church tithing and even then there are expenditure records), instead you want warranties, guarantees and expiration dates. You don't drive a car on faith. You watch the lights, pay attention to other drivers and match your speed to the driving conditions. You don't select a babysitter on faith. You try to get references or at least talk to others who have some knowledge of a person's ability and trustworthiness. You don't fire a gun on faith. You do almost nothing on faith in your whole life because it's so obvious that to do so would be catastrophic, fool-hearty and careless... until it comes time to select a belief in a proclaimed after-life.
Then it's suddenly all about what appeals to you. The choice is to choose to believe that you'll continue on to a paradisical existence with your loved-ones all around you or that you'll die and cease to exist as any kind of sentience. Given such a choice, most people will abandon reason, ignore evidence and side-step logic to pick the one they find most desirable. But desire is not a good measure of reality. So most end up submersed in a belief devoid of any demonstrable connection with reality and will even insist that their belief is true, despite having absolutely nothing with which to support it.
I was asked why I was so insistent and "aggressive" when stating my case and the reason should be clear to all. The fact that many don't understand that reason is, in itself, a demonstration of the reason. People are selecting a belief without reason, without logic and in contrary to the evidence and yet, seem not to have any clue why such a choice would alarm anyone. We have The Crusades, the Salem Witch Trials and the Inquisition to serve as warnings as to what happens when people engage in making emotional choices and hold them as true and real. We have the Holocaust, the war in Iraq and legislation against teaching evolution to warn us. We have dozens of murders on the books where the convicted killer plead his case that he was acting under the direction of God or a demon and still people ask such question. We have the tragedy of the "People's Temple", "Heaven's Gate" and the Branch Davidians and people still aren't getting the message.
Choosing beliefs in avoidance of logic, evasion of evidence and servitude to one's desires is a harmful, tragic practice. It has played out in dramatic and sickening fashion over and over throughout history. Now we see a country like the United States which was founded on the idea of individual rights prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying. That's a direct violation of their rights. Should they marry it harms no-one. And yet it is now prohibited in most states simply because people are placing their unevidenced, desire-based beliefs before the primary foundation of the country -- individual rights.
We have government imposed limits on stem-cell research for exactly the same reason. The treatment of the American Indians was done under the premise that they were savages, not actually humans like the Caucasians who invaded and took their land. Slavery in American was founded and perpetuated under the same kind of faith-based, unevidenced beliefs. People of African decent weren't considered to be fully human. It was thought that Caucasians had souls and African blacks were just human-shaped animals without souls. And the treatment of animals today continues under this same unevidenced and illogical premise.
Take a good hard look at the results of such beliefs and then look to your own references to people who believe they are possessed yet left you with no feeling that their beliefs were accurate. Would they be going through such self-imposed torment if they had been raised to pay attention to the rational and to dismiss the irrational?
It's harmful and damaging no matter how you slice it. And the one point that people should never over-look is that claims of spirits and demons go back to well beyond the founding of Christianity, beyond the first pagans, to the most primitive and ignorant phases of mankind. This is from where such ideas arose. Most of the failed beliefs from that time have been unquestionably extinguished as real knowledge has replaced superstition. But the idea of an afterlife, angels, good & evil, ghosts, spirits and demons lives on only because people find the concept of an afterlife extremely desirable. It's a belief that has had more time than just about any other belief to demonstrate itself and yet, it has never moved beyond the very first step -- to be imagined as possible. There is no more evidence to support it now than there ever has been. Man traveled to the moon in a few decades of determination. We've conquered the worst of the diseases which used to cut people down in their prime and limit the chances of a child to reach adulthood. We've discovered galaxies beyond our own and found out that space-time itself is neither empty nor without specific properties such as the ability to drive mass toward mass simply through its distortion. We've discovered neutrinos -- particles so small that every second billions pass clear through the Earth touching absolutely nothing, and they do so at the speed of light while changing their properties. And we confirmed these in just 26-years from suggestion to confirmation and another 20-years to actually counting them accurately.
Yet spirits, ghosts, demons, gods, angels and all of the rest; after tens of thousands of years, remain no closer to any kind of confirmation today than do mermaids, fairies, goblins, gremlins, unicorns, Leprechauns or zombies -- and very likely, for exactly the same reason.
