This style of atheist argumentation is my trashiest guilty pleasure since Strawberry Panic.
Are you Asian? If not, how on earth did you acquire such and interest/knowledge of all things Asian?
Just curious.
Nope, white ethnic mix, the sorts of ethnicities that you'd expect from somebody whose family is from the greater Springfield, Massachusetts area. I had a disproportionately formative experience with a Japanese exchange student when I was a lot younger (learning to use the kiln so we could make tea ceremony bowls together in second-grade art class was involved). I think I may have had a precocious crush on her but I'm not entirely sure.
Where is the source of faith?
Well, here’s how religion has this effect, in my opinion: it is derived from the childhood of our species, from the bawling, fearful period of infancy. It comes from the time when we did not know that we lived on an orb; we thought we lived on a disc. And we did not know that we went around the sun or that the sky was not a dome; when we didn’t know that there was a germ theory to explain disease, and innumerable theories for the explanation of things like famine. It comes from a time when we had no good answers, but because we are pattern-seeking animals (a good thing about us), and because we will prefer even a conspiracy theory or a junk theory to no theory at all (a bad thing about us). This is and was our first attempt of philosophy, just as in some ways, it was our first attempt at science, and it was all founded on and remains founded on a complete misapprehension about the origins, first of the universe, and second, about human nature.
isn't this just essentially stolen from Civilization and Its Discontents?
Hell, parts of her argument are stolen word-for-word from Christopher Hitchens. As well as not necessarily, um, serving the debate very well, I feel like this is also in somewhat questionable taste at the moment.
