Anaxagoras Was Exiled for Claiming the Moon Was a Rock

Isn’t it much more likely that if a diety exists that it isn’t described by any of the small handful of religions we have concocted here on earth?

I think the point the previous poster is making is not just a need or desire for a vague answer (i.e. the universe was created and no one really knows so maybe it was God), but then actually going from that step to believe every word of a holy book, or from a preacher.

There seems to be a big leap from a feeling of wonder at nature (essentially, unitarians as I understand it) and structured organized religion.

More specifically: why can't you pick and choose? Christianity has hundreds of sects, each of which adds or removes beliefs both big and small. Belief the Pope is infallible being the most obvious one that caused a lot of bloodshed.

I appreciate your comment, despite not relating to it very well and it seeming a bit strange to me.

I know that might come across a bit odd, but it's refreshing to actually try to understand other viewpoints and to do so inoffensively.

Sorry if I was insulting, I wasn't trying to be. That's why I called out my own difficulty as stupid, since in fact such people sure seem to exist (though, again, my problem is that I can't listen to them without a "no, but really, what are you after?" in the back of my head, so am having deep trouble modeling a fairly common kind of person I'm pretty sure is real).

The "this is all so great (though, I mean, at least as Lovecraftian?) that there must be something behind it" or "Buddhist practices do help you find meaning (and Pure Land and saviors and all the stuff about wild miracles are allegorical or else wrong-but-maybe-useful)" is the sort I can understand, actually.

It's the leap from there to "this specific set of stories is right—as in, actually true, or at least much of it is—and the rest are wrong. I've not picked this one to follow because the moral teachings and practices give me comfort and little offense, but because I think a large part of the specific supernatural episodes the faith considers true are true, in a real, actual sense". Supernatural angels and god(s) themselves really actually do stuff in real life—maybe now, and certainly in the past—that kind of thing.

A few hundred years ago the deist option seemed plausible to a lot of people. (Martin Gardner, a writer I admire a lot, developed a contemporary version of a deist view.)

This view agrees with what you described up until "if so then some religion has to be true": it affirms that we have reason to believe in a creator (and in some accounts, in divine providence of various sorts) but doesn't expect a divine revelation, or doesn't endorse any claims that we've received one.

I remember that Descartes argued that the creator was logically required to be benevolent and that part of that benevolence would then entail getting in touch with humanity and letting us know something about the divine nature. But other thinkers took various other angles on this, including the idea that the divine benevolence is already complete even without revelation, or that revelation occurs in a non-public or even incommunicable way, or still other possibilities.

Atheists and deists have both been very preoccupied with the idea that different revealed religions are all extremely plausible to people who are brought up in or around them (in modern times, even different schisms of revealed religions have this characteristic). In the deist account, this might be a reason to doubt that any of them is uniquely intended by the creator to be a revelation to all humanity, since which one people believe is for almost everyone a matter of luck. (Even if one account of revelation is more compelling than others, most people will never have the social conditions to verify this for themselves.)

There are lots of theological accounts about why God might allow only some people to discover the true revelation, but a deist (and atheist) alternative is that it's also reasonable to think that that wasn't God's plan.

> To me something had to cause all this, and if so then some religion has to be true.

The 2nd part of your statement doesn't follow from the first.

I'm not especially interested in the "uneducated fools"—prod your average Christian, say, and it quickly becomes clear they barely understand the core tenets of their own sect and the sources of their beliefs, let alone even basic apologetics. "Become more knowledgable about the foundations and core beliefs of [faith] than the average adherent" is usually the work of a few days of casual research. Those folks believe because they just don't ever question it at all, which I find kind of dumbfounding seeing as they also profess their belief that it's all of actual no-BS cosmic importance so you'd think they could at least be bothered to read a book or two, but it's not hard to understand why they believe. Their actions are baffling, but not their belief. Then again folks of all sorts believe tons of stuff they don't act on particularly well, so maybe that's all it is. The above about how it's easy to become more knowledgable than the average faithful is true of most stuff people believe, not just religion—but then again, climate change, to pick an example, doesn't claim to have significance to one's eternal soul, so I'd say the stakes of even that are somewhat lower. But anyway, this part's not that interesting to me.

It's the ones who have wrestled with the stuff that I have trouble getting in the heads of. Do they all believe? Do even most of them? Surely not in the same way as those covered above—surely their faith is qualitatively different from that—but then, how? Or those who claim to be devout but hold serious secular power—are they really? Even most of them? And again, my trouble is with specific sets of stories and dogmas, not general "I like to think there's a higher power" stuff, which I have an easier time "getting", and in fact it's hard for me to understand that any significant portion of thoughtful religious aren't more or less of that variety and do believe they've joined a mostly or entirely correct religion, miracles and supernatural occurrences and all being actually true.

And that's before we throw in cultural and time gaps. What was the faith of the abbot or abbess of a 13th century monastic community like? What was it like in their heads? To what degree did a Pope, considering whether to grant one of these communities recognition, see their duty as political versus carrying out the will and protecting the interests of an almighty deity that became a person (only kind of, sort of, but not really—it's complicated, if you want to avoid heresy) then died, then some fly on the wall might have actually seen the dude's corpse re-animate—imagine the sight!—and some real, actual angels push a stone around, and all that really happened. That's where I get lost, trying to tease out motivations based on faith versus those where the faith's something else—social posturing, maybe.

The sun is normally in the sky above us, we build buildings with lights on the ceiling or high up on the walls, so it's reasonable that an image with a light-source above would be more understandable than one with a light-source below.

It's very unusual for a light-source to be exactly aligned with the thing it illuminates, so unusual that if you see it, it looks wrong[1]. It's reasonable that an image with a light-source to the top-left or top-right would be more understandable than one with a light-source directly above.

As for why "left" rather than "right", I don't have a good answer. When Microsoft redesigned Windows 3.0[2] to make the buttons look more like buttons (instead of just rectangular or rounded outlines), they decided to put the light-source at the top-left rather than the top-right. Why they chose that direction I don't know, but I notice the mouse-cursor also points to the top-left, the most important menu (the system menu) is in the top-left, the title bar is at the top and the menus in the menu-bar are left-aligned, etc. etc. I don't think there's a neurological reason why shading should have a top-left light-source, but if you're making an interface for people who read left-to-right, top-to-bottom and you visually organise everything in that same order, it makes sense to align shading in the same way as everything else rather than have it be The One Thing Out Of Place.

[1]: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/04/lahaina-noon-when-shad...

[2]: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30