I just went over some numbers that showed a bunch of religious people giving obscene amounts of money to a hospital to transport children that would otherwise die, in and save their lives.
God damn that harmful religion.
I mean, just last week the church down the street had their month’s “brown bread and beans” dinner that raises a couple grand a year for local impoverished youth and homeless.
If only we could eliminate that horrible, harmful religion…
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Always interesting to see the devout anti-faith/anti-religious/anti-God folks flock to threads like this one so as to express their faith.
Like moths to a light.[/quote]
I don’t know what the point of your post was. People believe different things. No reason to be condescending about it.[/quote]
Speaking of condescension and hypocrisy…no one in the history of this website has been more consistently condescending in discussions about faith than…YOU.
No one.
Not a single soul.
Seriously.[/quote]
Not in this thread though, my friend. Not in this thread. He seems to have had something happen to him that he cannot explain and he’s been nothing but respectful and open-minded. He’s started an interesting topic discussion and is facilitating it very well.
[quote]LankyMofo wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
I think you also miss the distinction between belief and faith. If you believe in something you are confident in it. However faith requires doubt. Faith is not believing in something. Faith means subjecting yourself to or giving yourself over to something you don’t have confidence in. For example, when God ordered Abraham to kill Isaac - if Abraham had believed in the righteousness of God there would have been no conflict. He would not have given it a second thought. It would not have been a test. Abraham instead gave himself over to faith. Your mistake is to think that faith is a blind and credulous belief. It is nothing of the sort. When someone struggles with their faith, they are not struggling between belief and disbelief. They are struggling to give themselves over to faith in something that they don’t have confidence in.
[/quote]
This was excellent. I’ve never differentiated between faith and belief myself and this breakdown was really kind of eye opening.
I’m really enjoying this discussion. Thanks to everyone who is participating![/quote]
I second this. That was a really good post and I too am enjoying the discussion.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
I never really believed in the whole ghost thing, until my Daughter started talking to our dag we had put down when she was an infant. She would walk over to the door of the room we kept his food, and say “hi doggie. Doggie, hi”.
Shit freaked me the fuck out after she did it a couple times. We were very careful not to encourage the behavior through our actions. We basically ignored it, so not to influence her doing it again.
Now I have no idea what to think. Because I’ve “sworn” I’ve seen the ghost of the old woman who built the house with her husband. She seems like a nice enough lady and hasn’t made me go blind from masturbation yet so…
I don’t know. I’m still leaning it isn’t real and all in my head, but man o man, I just don’t know. [/quote]
Oh really? Seen an old woman in the house?
It’s shit like that that I’m talking about. You may think you sound foolish talking about it, but once again, with the majority of the world believing in some sort of religion, I just don’t think it’s that absurd to believe in spirits here.
[/quote]
Yeah I “see” her, and pretty much chalk it up to the copious amounts of drugs I did when I was young and stupid.
I don’t know what to think about it, and you’re right, it really doesn’t seem absurd, and honestly the world feels a lot more interesting with it as a possibility than without.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
There are a few things, but to make a very long story very short, a close family member died and it has sent me into a sort of existential depression that I have never had before, even though I’ve had plenty of people just as close die and I’ve always read a good bit of philosophy.
So some intense reading has followed, and I’ve absorbed a lot of different beliefs about God and the afterlife and the possible lack thereof (mostly from physicists, but not always.) I’ve also been reminded of some things that occurred in the past with said family, things that 1. Have absolutely occurred and 2. Have absolutely no scientific for having occurred.
And so two weeks later I have found myself back at the start - affirming a belief in the sort of deism that Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson believed in, where God is here, maybe anthropomorphic, but definitely the creator of things. I still don’t think he answers prayers, or finds lost cats, or helps people get better, but I do think he’s there, and I do think that there’s something else going on that we as humans simply can’t wrap our heads around.
This is evident for me when I look at the history of the world, and I found a great quote that, I thought, explains it well.
“The materialist would have us believe that non-living, non-sentient energy accidentally assembled itself in such a way as to discover itself. That energy now ponders itself through chance chemical reactions in the brain of an insignificant life form next to an unremarkable star in a far away corner of the universe.”
THAT is a bridge too far for me.[/quote]
Wow, I’m sailing a very similar ship right now, but no one died that I was close with.
Sorry for your loss.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
[quote]IamMarqaos wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Always interesting to see the devout anti-faith/anti-religious/anti-God folks flock to threads like this one so as to express their faith.
Like moths to a light.[/quote]
I don’t know what the point of your post was. People believe different things. No reason to be condescending about it.[/quote]
Speaking of condescension and hypocrisy…no one in the history of this website has been more consistently condescending in discussions about faith than…YOU.
No one.
Not a single soul.
Seriously.[/quote]
Not in this thread though, my friend. Not in this thread. He seems to have had something happen to him that he cannot explain and he’s been nothing but respectful and open-minded. He’s started an interesting topic discussion and is facilitating it very well.[/quote]
There are a few things, but to make a very long story very short, a close family member died and it has sent me into a sort of existential depression that I have never had before, even though I’ve had plenty of people just as close die and I’ve always read a good bit of philosophy.
So some intense reading has followed, and I’ve absorbed a lot of different beliefs about God and the afterlife and the possible lack thereof (mostly from physicists, but not always.) I’ve also been reminded of some things that occurred in the past with said family, things that 1. Have absolutely occurred and 2. Have absolutely no scientific reason for having occurred.
And so two weeks later I have found myself back at the start - affirming a belief in the sort of deism that Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson believed in, where God is here, maybe anthropomorphic, but definitely the creator of things. I still don’t think he answers prayers, or finds lost cats, or helps people get better, but I do think he’s there, and I do think that there’s something else going on that we as humans simply can’t wrap our heads around.
This is evident for me when I look at the history of the world, and I found a great quote that, I thought, explains it well.
“The materialist would have us believe that non-living, non-sentient energy accidentally assembled itself in such a way as to discover itself. That energy now ponders itself through chance chemical reactions in the brain of an insignificant life form next to an unremarkable star in a far away corner of the universe.”
THAT is a bridge too far for me.[/quote]
Thank you for sharing. I wish we had a chance to discuss this at length while enjoying some good Scotch (my treat) but one thing I do want to address is the comment you made regarding prayers answered.
I have, for me, irrefutable proof that God is an active force in my life and that my prayers have been answered (often before I even prayed them - think on that for a moment).
If I may, the fact that you are a highly educated and well read man could sometimes interfere with the search for God. For example, our mind, armed with all that knowledge we accrued, often forms a definition of prayer, HOWEVER, what if the God we pray to has a different definition of successful prayer? It’d be like building a really good argument on the wrong premise. We’d expect a result from the prayer and when that result does not materialize we blame the One whom we pray to for not listening or not giving a damn (or not existing).
I challenge you to re-define prayer from the Creator’s perspective and pray accordingly. It will require you to reach out with an open heart and an open mind and let ‘that which we as humans cannot wrap our minds around’ guide you.
At this point, focus only on the Creator and your belief that there is one. When you reach out with a true desire to know (emphasis on true desire - not as easy a mind set as one might thing) you will be pleasantly surprised at ‘things’ happening in your life that, if you are open to it, will deepen your understanding.
I hope this made sense. I only had a few moments to type this at work.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
On Miltiverses and other Theoretical Physics are based on mathematics, hypothesis and the reality that there are observations that cannot be predicted.
With God and an afterlife, what reasons do we have to even go there other than our own self interest sans some kind of personal experience with God, or some near death experience?
At that point it’s not faith anymore but some kind of personal knowledge based on experience.
[/quote]
Sev, what if I told you that I had personal experiences that could not be explained by science - they happened, they’re true, I know them to be true because there is no alternative - what do you say then?
How does that change the game?
[/quote]
It doesn’t. I’ve maintained that people who have personal knowledge about God and an afterlife are fine.
If you have had a personal godly experience, I would be interested to hear what other explanations are out there to see if there are other people who have experienced similarly.
I know there have been experiments done to people with various drugs such as mescalin that are able to create out of body, Godly experiences. But it seems like the sort of hallucinations that come about are dependent on what one believes going into the hallucinations.
I’m not saying you had a hallucination, I’m saying that we should find the commonalities in such experiences so we can better understand them, if they are at all understandable.
I know that is actually right up Dr. Ramachandran’s alley, A few years ago him along with some other big minds were studying such, and I’ve heard a little information in the Q&A’s about people believing with one frontal lobe while disbelieving in an alternate frontal lobe. Also, that was the location where most out of body experiences seemed to happen in the mind.
Look up, Beyond Belief, Dr. Ramachandran. There are some discussions/ Ted Talks like lectures you can check out from a few years ago. Some of the people asking him questions are guys like Degrasse Tyson, Dawkins, etc.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
It seems very elementary to me that we can base an entire Ethical system on Empathy alone if the information is correct about Mirror Neurons. [/quote]
Oh good grief, you’re nothing but an animal now. An atheistic animal. You don’t need empathy nor ethical systems.
Be consistent. Walk away from connotations with religious systems. Just survive to eat and sleep another day on this terrestrial orb. The celestial one doesn’t exist, remember?[/quote]
I do believe we are really smart apes spinning around on a rock in space!
The thing is, I’m a really curious ape. I want to understand and make sense of more.
Maybe it’s that you are all wired to be religious and I’m the oddball who is wired a little differently and continues to ask why questions. Maybe it’s not that others are cowardly but that myself and the other minorities who don’t believe in God or break away from religion are wired differently.
I’m an animal, yes! I’ve been saying we are rational animals for a long time. Aristotle came long before me and declared the same. Then, people took his Ethics, this man who believed we are animals and adopted them as their own.
The thing is I’m not a self described Atheist, I’m very familiar with Dawkins’ framework but I don’t buy into it. Really for two reasons, one of which is because of the way faithful people are categorized by him.
[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Who believes in it, and why?
Your thoughts?[/quote]
Me.
Because it pleases me to do so and there is no evidence to the contrary.[/quote]
No it’s because your parents threatened you with eternal damnation or a proxy as a child.
That’s why it pleases you in place of actually doing good while you were alive.
In fact, the idea of virtue and pleasure in the afterlife in diametrically opposed to achieving virtue and happiness in this life.
[quote]TooHuman wrote:
No it’s because your parents threatened you with eternal damnation or a proxy as a child.[/quote]
Utter bullshit. I was indoctrinated in the tenants of Militant Atheism growing up and have had a very hard time coming to terms with the fact I do actually believe in some sort of “thing” where it be God, G_D, Alah, nature, karma, what ever you want to call it.
You’re using assumptive conjecture to project your own individual feelings on the whole. Stop that shit.
Something about Emily makes me believe she does a awful lot of good while she is alive… More than most.
There you go assuming and projecting again.
I’m sorry but this is utter nonsense. Just… stop now.
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]TooHuman wrote:
No it’s because your parents threatened you with eternal damnation or a proxy as a child.[/quote]
Utter bullshit. I was indoctrinated in the tenants of Militant Atheism growing up and have had a very hard time coming to terms with the fact I do actually believe in some sort of “thing” where it be God, G_D, Alah, nature, karma, what ever you want to call it.
You’re using assumptive conjecture to project your own individual feelings on the whole. Stop that shit.
Something about Emily makes me believe she does a awful lot of good while she is alive… More than most.
There you go assuming and projecting again.
I’m sorry but this is utter nonsense. Just… stop now.
[/quote]
The proxy for god and heaven/hell for militant atheists is the State, so nothing changes there.
Also, without a objective and secular morality, all the good she may have done will be clouded by all the evil in support of state violence, parental violence against children, domestic violence, that is not even apparent to her because of the quite literal disconnect from reality that is God and the many proxies for God.
People talking about evidence of afterlife don?t understand one or both of the terms. An afterlife is supernatural, evidence is the presence of physical clues. There can be no evidence, because the notion is non-sense. It?s like discussing the existence of purple based on what you can hear. I?ve never heard purple, therefor I don?t believe in it, never-mind that purple isn’t a concept bounded by hearing.
But I can say that the idea that we are the product of random chance and there is nothing else is completely self-defeating. If existence is random then humans are a randomly produced product of mindless functions without a point. This means that if that idea were true then the idea itself is an entirely random product of arbitrary laws and there is no reason to even discuss it as true or not because it is the random meaningless product of a mindless universe. What reason is there to believe your brain if it is just a random accident? If the idea is “true” then there is no reason to believe it.
I believe in more than we can see, not because I have evidence for or against it, but because it?s the only actual answer I know of. Everything else I?ve ever heard is self-contradiction or just plain avoidance of the question.
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
People talking about evidence of afterlife don?t understand one or both of the terms. An afterlife is supernatural, evidence is the presence of physical clues. There can be no evidence, because the notion is non-sense. It?s like discussing the existence of purple based on what you can hear. I?ve never heard purple, therefor I don?t believe in it, never-mind that purple isn’t a concept bounded by hearing.
But I can say that the idea that we are the product of random chance and there is nothing else is completely self-defeating. If existence is random then humans are a randomly produced product of mindless functions without a point. This means that if that idea were true then the idea itself is an entirely random product of arbitrary laws and there is no reason to even discuss it as true or not because it is the random meaningless product of a mindless universe. What reason is there to believe your brain if it is just a random accident? If the idea is “true” then there is no reason to believe it.
I believe in more than we can see, not because I have evidence for or against it, but because it?s the only actual answer I know of. Everything else I?ve ever heard is self-contradiction or just plain avoidance of the question.
[/quote]
Good post. this concept of some mystical world that is forever outside of our observation like the Platonic world of perfect forms is absolute nonsense.
Abandoning this mysticism and embracing the Aristotelian philosophy of an observable universe and, as an extension of our senses, the scientific method is the driving force against violence in this world.
[quote]TooHuman wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
People talking about evidence of afterlife don?t understand one or both of the terms. An afterlife is supernatural, evidence is the presence of physical clues. There can be no evidence, because the notion is non-sense. It?s like discussing the existence of purple based on what you can hear. I?ve never heard purple, therefor I don?t believe in it, never-mind that purple isn’t a concept bounded by hearing.
But I can say that the idea that we are the product of random chance and there is nothing else is completely self-defeating. If existence is random then humans are a randomly produced product of mindless functions without a point. This means that if that idea were true then the idea itself is an entirely random product of arbitrary laws and there is no reason to even discuss it as true or not because it is the random meaningless product of a mindless universe. What reason is there to believe your brain if it is just a random accident? If the idea is “true” then there is no reason to believe it.
I believe in more than we can see, not because I have evidence for or against it, but because it?s the only actual answer I know of. Everything else I?ve ever heard is self-contradiction or just plain avoidance of the question.
[/quote]
Good post. this concept of some mystical world that is forever outside of our observation like the Platonic world of perfect forms is absolute nonsense.
Abandoning this mysticism and embracing the Aristotelian philosophy of an observable universe and, as an extension of our senses, the scientific method is the driving force against violence in this world.
[/quote]
I don’t think you understand what I meant. According to science, there is no morality, so why would one avoid violence? If there is nothing mystical about you, you (including your thoughts on this subject) are nothing but randomly caused meaningless physically dictated reactions. If we throw out the mysticism, your thoughts are the nothing but a chemical reaction akin to metal rusting.
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
[quote]TooHuman wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
People talking about evidence of afterlife don?t understand one or both of the terms. An afterlife is supernatural, evidence is the presence of physical clues. There can be no evidence, because the notion is non-sense. It?s like discussing the existence of purple based on what you can hear. I?ve never heard purple, therefor I don?t believe in it, never-mind that purple isn’t a concept bounded by hearing.
But I can say that the idea that we are the product of random chance and there is nothing else is completely self-defeating. If existence is random then humans are a randomly produced product of mindless functions without a point. This means that if that idea were true then the idea itself is an entirely random product of arbitrary laws and there is no reason to even discuss it as true or not because it is the random meaningless product of a mindless universe. What reason is there to believe your brain if it is just a random accident? If the idea is “true” then there is no reason to believe it.
I believe in more than we can see, not because I have evidence for or against it, but because it?s the only actual answer I know of. Everything else I?ve ever heard is self-contradiction or just plain avoidance of the question.
[/quote]
Good post. this concept of some mystical world that is forever outside of our observation like the Platonic world of perfect forms is absolute nonsense.
Abandoning this mysticism and embracing the Aristotelian philosophy of an observable universe and, as an extension of our senses, the scientific method is the driving force against violence in this world.
[/quote]
I don’t think you understand what I meant. According to science, there is no morality, so why would one avoid violence? If there is nothing mystical about you, you (including your thoughts on this subject) are nothing but randomly caused meaningless physically dictated reactions. If we throw out the mysticism, your thoughts are the nothing but a chemical reaction akin to metal rusting.[/quote]
Evolutionary psychologists hold that morality is partially a product of evolution and partially a social construct to establish social norms and hierarchy. Altruism, for example, can be observed among species with whom Homo sapiens share a commmon ancestor. Why must a deity exist for morality to be a biological and social practice?
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
[quote]TooHuman wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
People talking about evidence of afterlife don?t understand one or both of the terms. An afterlife is supernatural, evidence is the presence of physical clues. There can be no evidence, because the notion is non-sense. It?s like discussing the existence of purple based on what you can hear. I?ve never heard purple, therefor I don?t believe in it, never-mind that purple isn’t a concept bounded by hearing.
But I can say that the idea that we are the product of random chance and there is nothing else is completely self-defeating. If existence is random then humans are a randomly produced product of mindless functions without a point. This means that if that idea were true then the idea itself is an entirely random product of arbitrary laws and there is no reason to even discuss it as true or not because it is the random meaningless product of a mindless universe. What reason is there to believe your brain if it is just a random accident? If the idea is “true” then there is no reason to believe it.
I believe in more than we can see, not because I have evidence for or against it, but because it?s the only actual answer I know of. Everything else I?ve ever heard is self-contradiction or just plain avoidance of the question.
[/quote]
Good post. this concept of some mystical world that is forever outside of our observation like the Platonic world of perfect forms is absolute nonsense.
Abandoning this mysticism and embracing the Aristotelian philosophy of an observable universe and, as an extension of our senses, the scientific method is the driving force against violence in this world.
[/quote]
I don’t think you understand what I meant. According to science, there is no morality, so why would one avoid violence? If there is nothing mystical about you, you (including your thoughts on this subject) are nothing but randomly caused meaningless physically dictated reactions. If we throw out the mysticism, your thoughts are the nothing but a chemical reaction akin to metal rusting.[/quote]
Evolutionary psychologists hold that morality is partially a product of evolution and partially a social construct to establish social norms and hierarchy. Altruism, for example, can be observed among species with whom Homo sapiens share a commmon ancestor. Why must a deity exist for morality to be a biological and social practice?[/quote]
That is exactly the stance I’m taking. Without the “diety”, morality it is a social construct that happens because it tends to make itself more prevalent when it happens. There isn’t any actual right or wrong, morality is just the random result of certain physical properties of the universe.
If you believe that, there is no right or wrong, and no actual morality, just a biological explanation for the physical behavior we think come from moral judgments which are actually just social survival mechanisms.
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]TooHuman wrote:
No it’s because your parents threatened you with eternal damnation or a proxy as a child.[/quote]
Utter bullshit. I was indoctrinated in the tenants of Militant Atheism growing up and have had a very hard time coming to terms with the fact I do actually believe in some sort of “thing” where it be God, G_D, Alah, nature, karma, what ever you want to call it.
You’re using assumptive conjecture to project your own individual feelings on the whole. Stop that shit.
[/quote]
I, too, grew up in a militant atheist environment back in Holland with atheist parents and friends and from an early age I could not shake the feeling that I in fact believed in God.