I occasionally sit in with my parents Sunday School class when I head down for a visit. My folks know that I'm a skeptic today, but most of the people there have known me forever and don't really know my feelings about religion today. You might be amazed to hear some of the stuff that is said in that Sunday School class...not necessarily hateful, but just bizarre, off-the-wall stuff.

I'll never forget the woman who insisted that the book of Jonah had to be true, because no scientist could prove that it would be impossible to survive inside the belly of a whale for three days.

I tend to stay quiet and sip my coffee in amazement when I visit.

It's no wonder that "faith" and its overall importance in organized religion is ponded into the heads of the believers on a daily basis. It takes faith to accept the absurd as being the truth.

I've never understood why so many people buy into this garbage.

It's the slavish devotion to the Bible as literal history that is so puzzling. Why fight it? Much if not most of it is completely fiction.

As a practicing (albeit moderately rebellious) Catholic, I don't understand biblical literalism, either. I mean, we were learning about the four authors of Genesis and the multiple creation stories and variations among the gospels in high school. What educated adult thinks that Jonah really spent three days in the belly of a whale? Heck, I was taught evolution in my Jesuit high school biology class.

I do have to say, I rather object to Hitchens's characterization of believers who speak of metaphor and doubt as weak or wishy-washy--to me, those are hallmarks of a mature faith, of someone who understands that religious belief is not about an old guy with a white beard in the sky and it doesn't provide easy answers. If your faith does not make you humble and willing to entertain uncertainty, ambiguity, and mystery, it's not a faith I'm interested in. I realize people like me are not as much fun for someone like him to debate, but it's unfair to paint all religious people with the same brush--we are not all fundamentalists. If you don't believe in God, there's probably nothing I can say to convince you--faith is a response to a lived experience, not primarily an intellectual assent to a factual proposition.

I'm wondering this isn't just a case of bad writing and that what he really meant was just people who actually know all of the tenets of their professed faith as opposed to those who don't. It is puzzling, what he was getting at.

BritBailey:

I occasionally sit in with my parents Sunday School class when I head down for a visit. My folks know that I'm a skeptic today, but most of the people there have known me forever and don't really know my feelings about religion today. You might be amazed to hear some of the stuff that is said in that Sunday School class...not necessarily hateful, but just bizarre, off-the-wall stuff.

I'll never forget the woman who insisted that the book of Jonah had to be true, because no scientist could prove that it would be impossible to survive inside the belly of a whale for three days.

I tend to stay quiet and sip my coffee in amazement when I visit.

The only way your amazement makes sense is if there is NO God involved. If God IS directly involved, He could certainly make a whale you could live in for three days, the whale could even have hot and cold running water and a big screen t.v.

If you accept that God exists, miracles wouldn't suprise you.