Personally, it never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in an all knowing, all powerful, and apparently all loving sentient being who lives 'inside all of us', has a host of angels, who judges you when you die and depending on who you hear it from was revealed to us in a hate-filled book through a man who found an angel in a cave and used this power to carve an empire out of the arab world or instead revealed to us as the father of an admittedly decent dude, the story of which also happened to be documented in another suitably hate-filled book.
Can you learn from their teachings? Yes. The same way you can learn from any other self-help book. The danger of religion is that it often comes loaded with a message that has been refined, over centuries, to become the perfect weapon of control over you.
For this reason, I have to agree with the original poster. Theists who buy into the above stories and others like them, do not impress me.
NB: This is of course referring to the Judeo-Christian God with a capital G, not the Deist "Supreme Architect" (which to me feels like a stepping stone for theists who feel kinda atheist but aren't ready to take the plunge yet) or the 'universe' that you feel a part of when you lose your sense of identity through drugs or meditation.
Also, spirituality and prayer aren't necessarily bad things. In Japan I bought what's essentially a talisman of the god of good entrepreneurial fortune and took it with me to job interviews. I didn't believe that it would actually increase my chances of getting a job, but it became part of my pre-interview ritual and it was somehow 'nice' to know that I'd taken it to all my interviews.
Can you learn from their teachings? Yes. The same way you can learn from any other self-help book. The danger of religion is that it often comes loaded with a message that has been refined, over centuries, to become the perfect weapon of control over you.
For this reason, I have to agree with the original poster. Theists who buy into the above stories and others like them, do not impress me.
NB: This is of course referring to the Judeo-Christian God with a capital G, not the Deist "Supreme Architect" (which to me feels like a stepping stone for theists who feel kinda atheist but aren't ready to take the plunge yet) or the 'universe' that you feel a part of when you lose your sense of identity through drugs or meditation.
Also, spirituality and prayer aren't necessarily bad things. In Japan I bought what's essentially a talisman of the god of good entrepreneurial fortune and took it with me to job interviews. I didn't believe that it would actually increase my chances of getting a job, but it became part of my pre-interview ritual and it was somehow 'nice' to know that I'd taken it to all my interviews.