by Beagle Scopes Jr.
I understand why you publish articles by OneVike. He is hopelessly wacky on the subject of religion, but he does draw in lots of comments, pro and con. I wonder why you don’t express your own opinion? Maybe you’ve decided there is nothing more to be said.
Nobody can be persuaded by any logic when the subject is religious faith.
I remember having a discussion with an old friend many years ago on this topic. He observed that every religion and every denomination has one thing in common. Each one claims to be the one true religion and that all the others are false. Since they can’t all be right, they just cancel each other out, and you are left with zero. I thought about that when I studied Boolean algebra in relation to computer engineering. Computers don’t really think. They just compute in binary processes. There are only two states for the transistors that represent the brain of a computer.
The transistor is either on or off, which translates to yes or no. In Boolean logic, a problem has to be expressed in such yes or no terms. It can be very complex, with many side trails, such as if this is yes and that is yes, then this is yes, or that is no, and so on, in a ridiculously long stream of yes/no and and/or values. After the math formula is written out, the engineer designs a series of transistors to express that electronically through a series of and-gates and or-gates. The electrical impulse either passes through or does not, or goes to another gate. Anyway, I tried to think of the one true religion question in terms of Boolean logic. Sure enough, all the contradictory claims of exclusivity do cancel one another out. However, it is possible to express the problem with one condition: they can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong.