David Hume was one of Britain's greatest philosophers and the one whose opinions on religion most closely and certainly more profoundly express my own. The quotes below, which I ripped from Wikipedia, reflect paucity of reason found in religion and the self serving and sometimes perverse nature of it's adherents.

"Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men's dreams", and "Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgement appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject".

My own disappointment and skepticism about what contemporary people call organized religion is tempered by the fact that I'm not entirely willing to discount the possibility thst a diety could exist. The fact that mankind has for the most part gotten it wrong doesn't mean that that the existence of God isn't possible.

O'Connor (2001, p19) writes that Hume "did not believe in the God of standard theism. ... but he did not rule out all concepts of deity". Also, "ambiguity suited his purposes, and this creates difficulty in definitively pinning down his final position on religion".

Hume also said something to the effect that debates about relgion are a waste of time because nothing can be proven. That may be my favorite thing about him.

Thank you for this. I've seen several references from time to time to David Hume. Do you recommend any particular works of his as good introductions to his thinking?

These are a couple good books, Timotheus:

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Anthony Flew

David Hume, Philosophical Works, ed. by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose

Thank you.

Oh and that Anthony Flew..... I can't believe he bought into some of those ID arguments....

i perfer Ayn Rands take on religion, never read any of Hume.

I've avidly read all of Ayn Rand's books except I never finished the novel that involved Russia.. and I cannot currently remember what it was titled. I cannot believe I am forgetting the name of one of her books. 

I started Atlas Shrugged when I was 17 or 18, but I didn't finish it. I think it was the 19th century railroad man who "threw down a flight of stairs the man who suggested he take money from the government." That is ridiculous on so many levels. From a literary stand point, it's melodramatic and sentimental. It's stupid and illeagal, and from an historical perspective it's unlikely to the point of being laughable. The robber barons who built the trans-continental railroad  were awash in federal money. To portray one as some kind of hero of laisez fare capitalism is not something I can endorse. 

If you would have finished it, you would have identied her points better I think. She was absolutely not endorsing or agreeing with that violent act, or even the thinking behind it. Each of her characters were to demonstrate specific lines of thought. That was specifically a line of thought she was condemning.

She took each line of thought to its logical conclusion to show the incorrectness in the premises behind some lines of thought.

Fortunately, most people don't take their incorrect premises to their logical conclusions in reality, or the world would be much worse off.

The value of doing that in literature is to show the absurdity of some assumptions.

Kind of like the FSM..... most are not ID'ers, but are trying to show the absurdity of ID premises and reasoning.

lol! Maybe I should have been more patient!