Reply #26: Well, of course theological arguments accomplish nothing.

[Spider Jerusalem]

Because belief is impervious to either reason or logic, and reason discards belief and faith in favour of demonstrable fact. The existence of a god or gods cannot be demonstrated, and so someone of minimal "spirituality" (for lack of a better term to describe religious susceptibility) discards it as irrelevant at best and an absurdity at worst, while someone whose perceptions give him a sense of the numinous KNOWS that something is there, because not only does he feel there HAS to be, he has on occasion had some rapturous experience of it (or thought he had, which comes to the same thing). The nature of the experience is generally the same, across cultures; only the rituals and names associated with it differ. What a Buddhist monk experiences as nirvana, a Sufi dervish or Catholic mystic experiences as the ecstatic rapture of God's love, a Protestant charismatic experiences as "being slain in the spirit", et cetera. All the same experience, more or less; all with different names. They can't all be right; so it's likely that none of them are, and this experience and the religious impulse are simply a quirk of human psychology.