and fair

here's the email that i wrote back to tripp. he was kind enough to send me the copy of his post entitled "balance" before putting it up. if you haven't yet, scroll down and read tripp's post first.

tripp

i was worried yesterday that you may have taken offense at my
enthusiasm for the subject. during brunch you became awfully quiet and
it occurred to me that you would rather not discuss religion.

i have no desire to censor you. i know that writing posts is how you
work through your thoughts.

the one correction i have is in paragraph 6:
"he acted surprised at brunch yesterday when rachael and i
countered a bit about the role of the parent's belief system."

i was not surprised, only incredulous that you would grant the
parents' belief system untouchability. there are plenty of parents in
the world that will pass on a variety of terrible beliefs such as
prejudice. i think you would agree with me that schools play a
significant role in shaping our society through providing a basic
standard of education.

the fundamental role of education is to provide a foundation of
learning, both knowledge and the skills to gather knowledge, that will
likely exceed what the parent knows or thinks he knows. i hope my own
children can exceed my accomplishments. i think that the tools of
reasoning and science will allow them to do just that. while you are
right that i will raise my children without religion, i will not foist
my beliefs upon them. while i myself am an atheist, i have no desire
to label my born or unborn children with that name.

and by the way, atheism is not a blind belief. i am adding this
because i don't want you to misrepresent my beliefs in your head.

-i do not believe that god can be disproved.
-i do believe that god's existence is extraordinarily unlikely.
-i do believe that science provides us the reasoning tools that we
need to observe then understand then describe our universe, an
especially robust process by which many surprising mechanisms have
been discovered and many intuitively correct theories have been
overturned.
-i do not believe that any good evidence supporting the existence of
god has been presented.
-i do believe that it is a mistake to fill in the gaps of science with
god. science is always seeking to expand our knowledge of the way that
things work. just because science hasn't figured something out yet
does not mean that it isn't accessible to us.

and:

-i do not think you are an idiot for believing in god. frankly, i do
not know what you believe exactly. from previous discussion and your
present behavior, i know that i can't identify your beliefs. i do suspect
that you believe what you do for reasons that are clear to you.

so maybe my last suggestion is that you should add an explanation of what you believe to the post,
if only so that the reader and i can understand in detail what it is
that you believe and why.

kurt