<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Jan 12, 2011, at 2:34 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote:</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>Faith in god, like many things, can be used for good or ill. Just because we<br>see how it is so often (arguably the majority of the time) used for<br>ill, does not mean we must disavow that it can ever have purely beneficial results.</div></blockquote><div><br></div>Faith in god is very widespread so it would be unrealistic to expect that it had never done some good somewhere sometime, but I can say with some confidence that it is NEVER purely beneficial and is as close to being purely detrimental as anything yet known. <div><br></div><blockquote type="cite">you could alter the faith in god to, say, faith in humanity<br></blockquote><div><br></div>Then you would passionately believe in something about humanity that the evidence does not support and may even contradict; that doesn't sound like a very good thing to me. Believing in something for no good reason is not a virtue it is a vice.</div><div><br></div><div> John K Clark<br><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>