36 replies to this topic

[Jinny the Squinny]

#1 The biggest mistake is to try to disprove atheism by saying that we can't prove everything. For me, that's the whole point of atheism....admitting we don't know everything. That's my absolute favorite part.

I really wasn't trying, it was merely a wondering.

The good thing about not knowing something is the opportunity to have fun speculating, and maybe even finding out.

I assume you've opted for atheism (rather than "agnosticism") as your description because the evidence and experience you've seen/had so far leads you to work and live with the theory that there is no god and likely no possibility of one? Do you still find it hypothetically possible there's a God?

I'm in a similar position in that I'd be the first to admit how limited knowledge and language are, yet obviously I've reached a different working theory and will work with the theory that there is a God. I find it possible (though highly unlikely) that there's no God.

I'm wondering now if being open to the opposite possibility is what makes some people more capable of having sensible and interesting discussions about beliefs and belief than others.

#2 Evolutionary biology is in it's wee stages. Why do we have a sense of aesthetics? Possibly to find places that are safer. We tend to not find big crowds beautiful, and big crowds are where you are going to find diseases and whatnot. If our brains are not attracted to large crowds, we will try to avoid them, and hence we stay safer.

It certainly is, which is why I feel free to speculate and get all metaphysical about it. Please note my previously beliefs regarding "god of the gaps". I'm not at all trying to use a "gap" as an excuse to mock evolutionary theory or anything christian like that, hehehe. I love evolution.

I dunno, coz I can think of many types of occasions in which humans find big crowds comforting and a safe place to be. Football matches is the one that springs to mind, and concerts.

I'm wondering now if perhaps aesthetics is a development of the good to eat/bad to eat discernment that most animals seem to have?

[Ungodly]

[quote name='"Dax"] I think people initially used the word God to describe the entire Universe' date=' nothing to with a deity whatsoever. You just as well might call it Universe or Bwagachoochoo (whatever that is, just made it up).[/quote']

All things are in some place, so if God is everywhere then God must be everything, since it would be her being all of these things.

I understand this sentiment.

[Unbeliever]

Val, It was at the side of the canyon that I lost the God of christianity and found the God of nature. She is beautiful.

PS. Belle likes her too!

It was at the canyon that I really started appreciating how cool the earth can be. I'm one of those geeks that goes on tours, and I just couldn't grasp everything they told me about the Grand Canyon....it's just so cool!

I wanna go back!

Y'all ever been to Yellowstone? What a NEAT place that is! Unfortunately, it may be on the verge of blowing up, a MAJOR eruption of magma that very well might destroy the USA completely. Still a cool place, though.

[Sandy]

I can see no reason for there to be a God even in nature. I went to a luncheon in California where the first Lady "Lady Bird Johnson" was our guest. She, being the guest of honor took our addresses and promised to send us seeds cultivated in her Texas Ranch. About a month later we all received little boxes with her prize lupin and Texas poppies. I had a raised planter along my driveway and turned over the soil to prepare for the great planting. My youngest daughter was still living at home and I knew she would be pleased do to the honor of planting our box of seeds.

We had horses so we had the top of the line fertilizer that had been mixed with oak leaves and drained of the salts. The planting was done and topped off by the best stuff and within 6 weeks we had a show of the Texas wonders. We made no sacrifices to the earth god and the horses were more than glad to add to the planting.

We did not wait for the rain god to start the process as I had a hose attached to a hose bib and we watered our garden. I was able to keep the seeds from this planting and took them with me when I moved 300 miles to the north. I bought a house on a hill and when my daughter came home from college to the new house, she did the honors again and we had our second yard filled with Mrs. Johnson's seeds. As far as I know those plants might still be propagating in the village of Cambria.

God? What God?

[The White Coyote]

I've been to yellowstone too. I like the geysers and pools. Sitting at a picnic table scarfing up lunch and some pine needles drifted down. Looked up and saw a scruffy black bear in the tree. Suddenly I found myself all alone at the table with all my friends back in the car. Bears love marshmallows.
But the canyon is my first love and I am hoping to get a group together there next spring. (See my Desert post)

[Sandy]

Yellowstone is breathtaking as is the Grand Canyon. I lived for a couple of years on the Colorado River where a crazy man built the London Bridge from the shore to an island. I loved that river and we would ride the mini rapids for a day of fun. The Grand Canyon is lovely and it has been years since I visited it. I live in Arizona and I guess I should do it.

[The White Coyote]

Jinny, I've always thought and still do, that when Jesus talked of his "Father" he was speaking of God as I perceive God. Not as a being or amorphous blob in space, but rather as an energy, the creation rather than the creator. In my perception there is no conflict with science, evolution or the creation myths and bible parables. Each has it's own role to play and seeing God as the energy and as a verb rather than a being actually opens up so much more to ponder.

[Jinny the Squinny]

I think how we perceive God is very dependent on context, temperament and language. I don't see why God can't be both a verb and a "person", in fact I think that's a quite vital part of theism... seeing the transcendence of God as well as his immanence, God-as-verb in the immanence and God-as-being in the transcendence, perhaps?

Being so context dependent is why I'm more interested in the attitude and actions of a person rather than what words they speak or what religious jargon they favour or claim to believe.

God-as-described by Jesus seems to me to have that transcendence and immanence, one reason why I try and live as Jesus taught, because his God seems the most consistent with the theist position I feel compelled to adopt.

[Unbeliever]

I was raised to believe in the Christian God, the Yaweh of the Bible. I never really questioned his existence or the Bible until I began to have freinds at school who belonged to denominations other that the one in which I was raised, Southern Baptist. I guess they were all protestants of one kind or another, but all had different dogmas that they'd been taught to consider the One and Only Truth. We used to sit around at lunch or at recess and discuss (quite civilly) our various perspectives, and then I'd ask the pastor at our church questions that I vever got answers to that I thought were anything but sophistry (though I didn't know that particualr word back then!). So I decided to read the whole Bible cover to cover, which took several months, after which I studied many of the other world religions and the main branches of science.

To make a long story less long, I realized eventually that science made sense to me, and the Bible didn't, and neither did any of the other religions or any of the occult "disciplines". I concluded that since God was invented long before scientific knowledge was available, and science didn't have any room for God, that God probably didn't exist.

More later.

[Unbeliever]

Then, of course, I could list all of the atheistic arguments that I've come across in my reading over the years, but the one that became the last straw is what I call "the argument from Ockham's Razor": the concept of the supernatural is completely superfluous as any kind of explanation for existence (or anything else), so why hang onto it?

I came to the conclusion that there was no supernatural realm of any kind - no ghost, no goblins, no gods.

Everything I've learned since then has only confirmed that conclusion, and I've never regretted it.

[Ungodly]

A guy I know wants to debate Pascal's Wager with me, but I hesitate to get into it with him because I've had similar debates with him in the past, and he doesn't debate very well. He can't seem to understand the simplest rules of good debating, such as the use of hypothetical examples, like if I say "If A believes X on faith, and B believes not-X on faith, how do we tell which is correct, if either?", he'll say something like, "Well, there's your problem right there! There's no such thing as "A" or "B", and and there's no such thing as "X" and "not-X", so you're not even talking about reality!"

Please tell me this guy does not teach Algebra.

Pascal was an idiot. Living your life on a bet is stupid. Any sensible man simply follows what is obvious, for example a complete lack of evidence for any Imaginary Bearded Sky Daddy does suggest something about whether any such thing exists or not.

[Unbeliever]

Nah, he doesn't teach anything, he's just one of the examples of local "color", called by some "The mayor of Railroad Square". Just another homeless bum, like myself.

[The White Coyote]

Just another homeless bum, like myself.

We prefer the term "Transitional occupant" for those who have made a choice. A "Homeless Bum" would be a man whos wife kicked his ass out for not contributing to the household.

[Ungodly]

Or "non-residential individual" works too.

[Unbeliever]

Or maybe "housely challenged"?

I do have a home, it's where I sleep, I just don't have a house.

[Cousin Ricky]

They stood me up. All 2500 of them.

There was one deity (the gay Jewish god-man) that kept wanting me to eat Him, but all i ever got from Him was cheap wine and tasteless bread wafers. Delivered. I don't think He quite understands that eating one's date isn't a long-distance activity. Or that sending His priests as surrogates to be eaten is immoral and often illegal. Maybe He can get some pointers from His Daddy (Who also stood me up), Who is, to put it mildly, obsessed with dick.

[Unbeliever]

Here's a quote I like:

The Virgin Mary in a pee stain, Jesus in a waffle, Allah's name on a fish...the gods really are weak and useless, aren't they? If I had the powers of a god, I'd be using them to feed children, cure diseases, and stop war, not carve my name on an egg shell.

The feebleness of so-called "gods" seems to be common to all of them - they're all useless as screen doors on submarines!