{"id":1353,"date":"2010-01-22T11:19:02","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T11:19:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/wordpress\/?p=1353"},"modified":"2025-04-03T18:29:53","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T23:29:53","slug":"letters_is_beli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2010\/01\/letters_is_beli.html","title":{"rendered":"Letters: Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant? by Preston Jones and Greg Graffin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>subtitled: A professor and a punk rocker discuss science, religion, naturalism &#038; christianity.<\/p>\n<p>I found this book super annoying.  While in many ways, I would agree more with Graffin&#8217;s arguments, I thought he was being kind of a dick the whole time.  You shouldn&#8217;t agree to be in a CONVERSATION with someone if you aren&#8217;t actually interested in conversing.<\/p>\n<p>While Jones, the religous one, was coming at things from a &#8220;this is interesting to think about \/ it&#8217;s interesting to hear other viewpoints and try reconciling them with my own and pondering&#8221; viewpoint, Graffin seemed to coming from a &#8220;what I think is right and you are wrong and I will just tell you YOU ARE WRONG over and over again&#8221; viewpoint.<\/p>\n<p>Graffin seemed to only want to talk about THE EXACT FACTS and how anything else was RIDICULOUS; Jones was interested in exploring WHY do people believe, whether it&#8217;s right or wrong.  (It ain&#8217;t all about the facts.)  Most of the time, Graffin&#8217;s response was basically &#8220;NO.&#8221;  Then why even respond?  Why bother discussing it?  It really didn&#8217;t seem like he even heard the other point of view.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, I understand. There&#8217;s a reason I don&#8217;t discuss politics with Republicans. I don&#8217;t fucking care what they think. But I wouldn&#8217;t bother writing back to their letters and saying &#8220;NOPE YOU&#8217;RE WRONG&#8221; everytime either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>subtitled: A professor and a punk rocker discuss science, religion, naturalism &#038; christianity. I found this book super annoying. While in many ways, I would agree more with Graffin&#8217;s arguments, I thought he was being kind of a dick the &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2010\/01\/letters_is_beli.html\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-readin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1353"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1559,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1353\/revisions\/1559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}