Lord and Saviour ?

[Lohman446]

CP wants his authority and reason to be valid and those that do not conform to his to be wrong.

In the process he labels religion as "evil". I don't believe he is as stupid as he comes off in these conversations I believe he is simply that arrogant and lacking of any degree of intellectual honesty.

As his assertion was that all religion was evil and he has not been able to back it with anything that resembles a premise (that he does not immediatly deny is evil) I find his ability to apply propositional logic poor at best. If the premises do not support the conclusion (IE its evil because of X but X is not evil) it is the logical fallacy of begging the question.

Can religion be good? Yes.

Rothbaum, Weisz, and Snyder in explaining the two-process model held that religion was one possible replacement when locus of control was threatened (1982). This was built off of early writings that control helped to psychologically buffer people from feelings of randomness and chaos that were in fact detrimental to them (Antonovsky, 1979). Further studies have strengthened the value of religion to psychological health and shown, throw empirical psychological testing, that God (or gods, or another nonhuman entity) does provide an alternative locus of control when personal control is threatened (Kay, Gaucher, Callan, Napier, and Laurin 2008).

Now CP can sit there and whine about it and tell us all about his knowledge of the empirical sciences. The above information was readily found from the project I did for my capstone course in Psychology. He can whine about the lack of logic all he wants - I figure I should mail him my coursework from my study of propositional logic. He can demand the empirical testing that shows the positive value of religion - which I have provided. I would simply request that he provide similiar evidence that religion is inherently evil, as was his initial assertion. He can demand that we simply grant him authority to decide what is rational and logical. His title of "engineer" does not make him an expert. At best he simply is not good at expressing an opinion. In reality he is likely either trolling or is actually that full of himself that he thinks we should treat him as some subject matter expert in all things. The end, reasonable decision, would be to activate the ignore feature.

The studies and discussion if you care to hunt them down.

Antonovsky, A. (1979). Health, stress, and coping. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Kay, A., Gaucher, D., Callan, M., Napier, J., & Laurin, K. (2008). God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 18-35.

Hafer, C. L., & Begue, L. (2005). Experimental research on just-world theory: Problems, developments, and future challenges. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 128-167