Whiskey_Lord
Deity
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All the cool people are in hell.
Ask an atheist
- Thread starter Askthepizzaguy
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Ahovking
Cyber Nations
Whiskey_Lord
Deity
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More likely we all just rot in the ground. Sorry to bruise your human ego, but there's no reason to believe in any of what you seem to be implying. Heaven itself seems more like a hell anyway: your only right being unceasing thanks and praise to an unalterable, inescapable dictatorship. It would be an eternity of abject slavery.
Ahovking
Cyber Nations
so i still take it ill still be hearing from u down their anyway (im not going to bother arguing about if their is a god or not or if their is a hell or heaven or not)
To an unworthy being, to boot -- what kind of pathetic entity would need worship? I don't think a proper deity would even tolerate it.
Whiskey_Lord
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Yes, you'll be hearing from us down in hell. But in exchange, do tell me what it's like having to bend the knee to a bloodthirsty, spiteful, vindictive, sadistic, racist, homophobic, sexist, ego-maniacal tyrant for the rest of time.
Ahovking
Cyber Nations
sounds like my sort of party 
Fr8monkey
Deity
Ahovking
Cyber Nations
Moderator Action: It feels like this is becoming a chatty spam-fest. We could increase the quality of the dialogue, or the mods could close the thread as a done story. I'd prefer it staying open
The Christian god doesn't, really - by going to church and learning about religion people learn to live their lives how he wants (that is, in the way that's actually best for them), and I don't think a bit of thanks is out of the question for someone who did, well, create the entire universe for our benefit.
I think that the assumption that this 'gift' is 'worthy of thanks' is a fairly indefensible one. Yes, some people may be glad that they're alive, but it's not 100% of people and we certainly never consented to this 'gift'.
The only counter-argument is subjective, that I'm personally glad that I'm alive. But this is subjective, and anybody should have enough empathy to understand that it's not "moral weakness" on the parts of people who're not glad that they're alive.
The only counter-argument is subjective, that I'm personally glad that I'm alive. But this is subjective, and anybody should have enough empathy to understand that it's not "moral weakness" on the parts of people who're not glad that they're alive.
Well, good British manners would say that it is, but I don't think that He ever went to Eton, so you're probably right. Really, being glad that you're alive is enough in a way, because he can see that and so it's as good as telling him so, but I think he'd much prefer it if you actually live as if you're glad to be alive as well - that is, in the way that allows you to make the most out of your life, which happens to be the way you'll learn at church.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Yeah I know this one isn't as popular as the "Ask a [religious person]" threads but you know what? I'd still rather keep it open in case anyone actually had a question for an atheist instead of "LOL U GUYS ARE GOIN TO HELL".
I note the delight and approval whenever someone suggests such a thing. We don't always execute our convicted murderers and we do it very humanely when we do, and that's the worst punishment we have in civilized society, which is maybe one or two notches above barbarism.
It is rather telling that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity with infinite wisdom, infinite patience, and infinite creativity could only come up with a combination of death, torture, and eternal incarceration for the grievous crime of doubting his doubtful existence.
Again, I've always maintained, only human beings would wish such things on one another. We're the only ones who are so disgusting.
It's really an insult to your God to think he's basically a mass-torturing genocidal maniac. But hey, you worship him, not me. Strange that you'd worship such a being. I have more faith in God than that, and I have no faith in him.
I note the delight and approval whenever someone suggests such a thing. We don't always execute our convicted murderers and we do it very humanely when we do, and that's the worst punishment we have in civilized society, which is maybe one or two notches above barbarism.
It is rather telling that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity with infinite wisdom, infinite patience, and infinite creativity could only come up with a combination of death, torture, and eternal incarceration for the grievous crime of doubting his doubtful existence.
Again, I've always maintained, only human beings would wish such things on one another. We're the only ones who are so disgusting.
It's really an insult to your God to think he's basically a mass-torturing genocidal maniac. But hey, you worship him, not me. Strange that you'd worship such a being. I have more faith in God than that, and I have no faith in him.
Akka
Moody old mage.
If he's all-powerful, then he really doesn't deserve any thanks, because he could have made a world where everyone is happy, rather than a world where the very act of living require you to feed of the lives of other beings, and which is filled with vices and the like.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
If God is the creator of everything, the maker of free will, the designer of the mind, then he is also the author of every unspeakable evil imaginable. Everything that has happened has done so according to his design. If he's all powerful and designed everything, then everything in existence is his work. That means there is no way that Satan could be his enemy. Satan is God's hand puppet, a wind-up toy doing exactly as God has instructed. We are no different; he has made us imperfect and punishes us for being imperfect. Temporary mistakes in life warrant eternal torment, according to the master planner. That seems like bad planning to me, or sadistic design. I can't ascribe either thing to a benevolent all-powerful.
God is a contradiction in terms, if God is defined the way religions define him.
God is a contradiction in terms, if God is defined the way religions define him.
Manfred Belheim
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Ayatollah So
the spoof'll set you free
I think Fr8monkey's cartoon is brilliant. Once you posit immensely powerful beings whose motives we can't possibly understand, then anything is (posited to be) possible. A sadistic deity with an could make it appear that doing X gets you into heaven, then condemn the X-ers to hell. A whimsical deity could tell you all sorts of tales, just because. Or a whimsical deity could make a universe which appears to have no divine intervention at all. Now that last one might be a god I could believe in 
Not quite - people living in a time when death, torture and eternal (well, life-long) incarceration were the stock punishments for awful crimes couldn't come up with anything worse to scare people into toeing the line. Remember that the Bible and anything of that sort is just another historical document, and the understanding of God that they had during the time that most of our non-scriptural conventions about religion (the nature of hell, for example - the Jews markedly disagree with small-o orthodox Christians over that) were thought up and propagated (the Middle Ages) was heavily influenced by their culture, and since most people had almost no understanding of the world at large their views on God can perhaps be taken as seriously as their views on physics or medicine. Theology is a science like any other, remember - do we need reminding of how much medicine progressed while people relied upon one book (Galen's) to teach them almost everything?
Indeed. Nowadays we know that God accepts everyone into whatever 'heaven' is, and the best explanation for the word 'Hell' where we see it used would be the dramatically reduced quality of life that you would get if you lived your life completely opposite to the way God wants you to.
Quite.
A world in which you're forced to be happy - does that really sound all that great? Free will is God's great gift to us; without it we could never be at all fulfilled because we wouldn't overcome or achieve anything, we'd just follow programming. Remember also that it's very likely that there's more than just this world in the grand scheme of things; it may not make sense that this world isn't perfect to us here but if we had a blueprint of the entire creation it would probably fit in very nicely. A pattern with a rule that we cannot understand looks the same as chaos from where we're standing.
No more than Mr Hitler senior is responsible for the actions of his son. God certainly gave us a lot of instruction - some of which is in parts of the Bible and other scriptures - and a remarkably good basic nature, and then let us loose over here. And to those who say we haven't got a basically good nature, remember that of all the ways we could have turned out every society ever has had a system of laws, some form of inter-familial co-operation, and made some sort of scientific progress - not half bad considering all the things we could have ended up with.
No! That was true the instant that the world popped into being, but if you look at how it actually runs it's apparent that he may well have set it up with no idea of how it would turn out. Look at evolution, I mean. Do you really think God is playing with every sperm and egg cell in every creature on the planet to systematically design the next generation? Similarly, even if we were to take the biblical account of creation as truth, it's ridiculous to say that God designed Adam, so God designed Michaelangelo, so God designed the paintings on the Sistine Chapel. That's frankly an insult to humanity. In a similar way he didn't design the Salvation Army or, on the other side, al-Quaeda - even though all of these were inspired by religion.
Considering that 'Satan' almost certainly means 'human capacity to be selfish, stupid and to generally screw things up royally' (the Muslim idea of it is fairly close to that, I think - they believe that everyone has their own Satan, as, interestingly, did Socrates I believe) that's rather an oxymoron. That's the sort of thinking that comes from using the Bible and our established traditions as a gold standard, when in fact we ought to just be looking and referencing what we're told about God with what we can see of him and how he works every single day.
As I said before, he doesn't punish us, in fact he forgives us - remember that whole Jesus business?
And therefore, our common sense should kick in and say 'God either punishes people for not living well, or he's an all-benevolent, all-powerful being - which fits best with what I, personally, from my own experience, know of him? Clearly he won't send me to hell for thinking dirty thoughts about Annie from down the road'.
Precisely! We all have the same set of evidence open to us, but there are so many different religions - that is, ways of interpreting the evidence - isn't the only thing we can reliably draw from this that God is unbelievably complicated? It doesn't help that parts of the problem are almost impossible to solve because they require thinking of concepts and rules that simply don't exist to us.
I am agnostic, i like to believe there might exist some sort of higher entity that is in some manner linked to humans, or to everything in the universe, so that it supplies it with meaning. The nature of such an entity is obviously impossible to theorize upon, we can only make anthropomorphic idols of it no matter how deep the thoughts about this issue go (and potentially they go very deep).
Atheism has many manifestations, and not all are equal obviously. For example there is the atheism of the adolescents (the majority of them) which comes in retaliation to what they perceive as a symbol of the order of the older people. This is false all around, both the perception and the stance itself, which usually from an intellectual point of view is utterly trivial.
Then you can have the atheism of people such as Nietzsche, which was (in my view) again a retaliation, but to an infinitely more delicate fallacy than that of the adolescents. Nietzsche thought that theism had to be an idealism, and he was against all forms of idealism, while at the same time becoming heavily dependent on that which he was fighting against.
Another form of atheism is that of nihilism. I find nihilism to be an awful stance towards life though. But from an intellectual point of view it might be the most honest form of atheism, although i find it to be deluded as well.
Then Agnosticism may come as a better stage of quasi-atheism, an amalgam of weak atheism and weak theism.
I could write more but i am not sure if there is interest.
Atheism has many manifestations, and not all are equal obviously. For example there is the atheism of the adolescents (the majority of them) which comes in retaliation to what they perceive as a symbol of the order of the older people. This is false all around, both the perception and the stance itself, which usually from an intellectual point of view is utterly trivial.
Then you can have the atheism of people such as Nietzsche, which was (in my view) again a retaliation, but to an infinitely more delicate fallacy than that of the adolescents. Nietzsche thought that theism had to be an idealism, and he was against all forms of idealism, while at the same time becoming heavily dependent on that which he was fighting against.
Another form of atheism is that of nihilism. I find nihilism to be an awful stance towards life though. But from an intellectual point of view it might be the most honest form of atheism, although i find it to be deluded as well.
Then Agnosticism may come as a better stage of quasi-atheism, an amalgam of weak atheism and weak theism.
I could write more but i am not sure if there is interest.
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