h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

'For the sake of argument we can assume that all these religions are wrong.'

Well, ok, but this is hardly 'no point of view'. In fact it's a minority opinion. I do appreciate the article had to start from somewhere, but it's ironic to find this in an article on 'belief'.

'Thus we have to try and work out why people made these ideas up.'

Presumably this means 'why people made ALL these ideas up', if 'all these religions are wrong'. I don't believe they did.

Well, the project was "the structure and function of Belief" not individual beliefs, so it was looking at why we believe and how we believe, not at what we believe.

The project as a whole is slightly uneven, I would have liked to have had something on non-monotheistic religions, for example, and there are a couple of entries I had written previously about money and about the self-help movement which I would have liked to have been able to include.

I choose to see it as a plus that there are so many different starting points and voices in the project.

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the other entries in the project.

Ben

Thank you for the message. Yes, I think the project is worthwhile, and although I have not read all the entries I did like some of them. In fact the one I commented on was logical enough, given the assumption. I just thought the assumption itself led to avoiding some of the issues that are central to belief - if some of these beliefs happen to be true (e.g. that there exists a creator), then the answers to 'why' we believe them might (!) differ from the ones suggested. But fair enough - I wonder whether you can 'do' social science otherwise. Take my comment as a growl, nothing more!