Comments about ‘Pew study: Religion plays key role in deciphering public opinion’

@ Candide, 10:51 a.m. Just because you haven’t received “personal” revelation from God yourself, doesn’t mean it is non-existent. You have your “opinion”, and that’s all you have. I, and many others who post here, know beyond a doubt, that the heavens are not closed, that God can and does speak to us. I personally experience it nearly every day of my life. And while it cannot be explained to a person who has never experienced it; it nonetheless, is an experience that when it occurs, I cannot deny it — because I feel and know of His presence and pure knowledge flows from Him into my mind and heart. No one can help you understand this - It would be like me trying to explain to you what salt tasted like, if you never had tasted it before. Those of us who experience these communications, are simply left with no doubt. And the point is, God is no respecter of persons. He loves us all equally — To know what the word of God is, all we need to do is exercise our faith in Him and live worthy to receive His guidance.

@Keith, how do you know I haven't received a "personal" revelation? My revelation is just different that yours. How do you know yours is right? Because you feel deeply about it? I feel deeply about mine as well. Feelings cannot be trusted. Human beings are so easliy fooled, especially by things they desperately want to believe in. It is called wish fullfillment. I can't experience something doesn't exist because I have a close personal relationship with reality.

To "Candide | 1:57 p.m." here is what is interesting about your arguement against there being a God.

You said "I feel deeply about mine as well. Feelings cannot be trusted. Human beings are so easliy fooled, especially by things they desperately want to believe in. It is called wish fullfillment."

You have feel that God does not exist. Yet, you say that you can't trust feelings and especially when it is something you want to believe in. So, using your logic, you can't be an Atheist either because you base your atheism in a feeling.

How do we know that your deep feelings that being atheist are not just a "wish fullfillment" of yours?

I'm glad you pointed that out, RedShirt. It's interesting how people flip the coin to meet their own perspective, without realizing it's what they're accusing others of doing.

Candide, I respect the fact that you're an atheist. I may not agree with you, it doesn't make sense to me, I can't look at a protein molecule under a microscope or read about the human eye in an anatomy book and believe these things happened accidentally.

But I don't call atheists brainwashed and stupid. I ask the same in return.

Morality of the body vs. morality of economics. I think it's an interesting contrast for religion.

It's easy to talk about morality of the body and condemn homosexuality, or abortion, or any number of other sexual "sins" but as we've seen with many religious leaders, they can hide those sins which are exposed in scandals.

Economic morality though is harder to deal with for religion and maybe that's why it's not talked about very much. When you follow the money, you follow the values of someone. If you don't talk about economic values or morality then you can do what you want with your money.

All this to me shows the hypocracy of religion because we talk about what you can't see and ignore what you can see. Personally I think a lot more people are hurt because of poverty. Poverty also causes many well healed religious people (not all) to condemn the poor because poverty comes with so many other problems with are immoral.