People are foolish, power hungry, have a need to comfort themselves at the prospect of their own mortality, and incapable of explaining things they don't understand. House has indicated the brains pleasure center is activated with prayer, which may or may not be true. It's House.
Why are you atheist?
- Thread starter AesronDrosseli
- Start date
People are foolish, power hungry, have a need to comfort themselves at the prospect of their own mortality, and incapable of explaining things they don't understand. House has indicated the brains pleasure center is activated with prayer, which may or may not be true. It's House.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
1. Person tells the greatest bull-story ever told, after tripping on mushrooms. Or perhaps they were drunk. Or they were mentally deranged. Or just a very creative storyteller. Or perhaps a cunning man who wanted to gain power through leadership... and without knowing how to actually lead or defend one's arguments using logic, the rule was "follow me or God will smote you!"
There also wasn't much of a grasp of science back then. Sneezes were evil spirits escaping your body... the sun went across the sky in a chariot, and it was a god. It helped explain nature and the weather and other phenomenon, and people believed it because it sounded better than the honest "I don't know".
2. Someone is crazy enough to think the story is real, not just another lie or hallucination.
3. Crazy person stands in front of a crowd telling them of a greater power, greater even than the King, a Dictator-for-life-who-rules-everyone-with-an-iron-fist-and-calls-himself-a-deity, who is cruel to them.
4. The oppressed masses hate their unfortunate situation of being the Dictator's cattle, and are enamored with the idea of there being a great and powerful invisible force that could blast dear Leader to bits.
5. Since life is such a painful, pointless experience for them, they hope for some kind of redemption or meaning after death. After all, there's no hope for them in life.
6. The story is told to many people, who are desperate for hope and now have something positive to believe in (well... positive in that God might destroy their evil tyrant, even though he's a bit of a Despot himself)
7. Eventually, enough people believe the story to create an army.
8. This army believes that God is on their side.
9. Army conquers the Dictator's army, eventually. Now, a new religion becomes the dominant faith, instead of Emperor Worship.
10. People have different ideas about what God actually said way back when, when the original guy was tripping on mushrooms, drunk, or lying his rags off. No one wrote it down, but enough people told the story that they have the general gist of it.
11. Cunning people learn how to make a profit off of people's belief in this mythology, by claiming to be closer to this God than others, and know more about the mysteries of the faith than you. They will tell you all about this God, if only you would give them money.
12. Different versions of this story eventually become different religions. People disagree on what the one true faith is.
13. People totally ignore the tenets of their faith (the part about not murdering) and declare war on people who don't believe in their awesome religion.
14. People who hear this bull-story who laugh at it are instantly shunned and declared evil because, after all, our faith is the one true faith, and all who oppose it are godless sinners. So they get conquered/forced to convert/enslaved/stoned to death.
15. Eventually, more people believe the bull-story than those who don't, mostly due to threat of oppression or because it is now a tradition. And they heard about what happened to the godless sinners. Talk about peer pressure.
16. Now, modern society has reached a point where I can speak all of the above aloud without being murdered. So I shall; every time I am asked, or have a chance to offer my opinion. Out of respect for the millions who are dead now because of other people's aggression and intolerance.
17. People can freely choose not to believe, with no consequences, now. Or they can choose to believe. Ultimately, no matter what, we still end up dead. And then, we will know if there is a God or not. Let's wait and see. In the meantime, I think life is worth living and worth exploring. Focusing on the eternal netherworld or the possible void after death is pointless because it wastes your life, which you have a finite amount of. Just be a good person and don't steal from me or murder me, and you're ok in my book.
BasketCase
Username sez it all
I like you. Marry me please?
Errrrrrr......I don't date online. Can't we just be friends??
Enkidu Warrior
Ultramagnetic
I have to say that you're line of argument here is very weak. I'm not even really sure the two are comparable. Of course induction exists as a concept, and is routinely used to form what most people might call 'knowledge', but people can't really be said to believe in it, and nobody with even the most rudimentary education would claim that knowledge gained by induction is necessarily true. The fact that I routinely rely on calculated judgements based on induction which I've evolved to make so intuitively that I might not even realise it doesn't in the slightest trouble me philosophically. All the things I've ever learnt have led me to the ever stronger conclusion that many of the things that we 'know' are little more than highly evolved shortcuts. That doesn't make our 'knowledge' useless - it just teaches us that we should learn to deal with a little more uncertainty, and an educated individual should have learnt that lesson long before they've had time to consider the finer points of philosophy.
I'd address your other points in much the same way. I'm well aware that I can't solve the problem of consciousness, and I don't think that it would be a fair assumption to say that 'most people' have considered it and came to the conclusion that other people do experience consciousness like they do. Not only is it likely impossible to know either way, but it's also not clear what tangible result weighing on either side would have on how we live our lives.
AesronDrosseli
Chieftain
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2008
- Messages
- 70
Errrrrrr......I don't date online. Can't we just be friends??
If that rocks your boat, then tis no problem.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
I never experienced any evidence of God, neither empirical nor personal.
So what reason would I have to not be an atheist?
So what reason would I have to not be an atheist?
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
I feel as though I am at home here.
Where are you guys when I make such comments over at forums.totalwar.org and then I get dumped on by like 25 fundies at once?
Where are you guys when I make such comments over at forums.totalwar.org and then I get dumped on by like 25 fundies at once?
Just to make a random general comment that doesn't apply to a lot of people in this thread; it seems that a lot of arguments for being an atheist are more arguments against being a follower of a certain religion. For instance, there is the argument that 'there is no proof of a being with a big beard up above the clouds'. But this does not exclude the possibility of a God existing; it just works as an argument against that particular interpretation of God not existing.
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
I got kicked out of the total war forums when I posted tests for the save/load bug in Rome Total War, since Shogun was claiming there is no bug.I feel as though I am at home here.
Where are you guys when I make such comments over at forums.totalwar.org and then I get dumped on by like 25 fundies at once?
I was unbanned shortly after, but I never went back
When I type God, I mean any god. Thor, Zeus, you name em.
I don't see why only the Abrahamic God deserves to be capitalised.
edit: I hate the way the winky smile comes over all conceited. Can't we have the regular smilies back?
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Well... that's a specific argument for a specific deity. Although "God" can be a very generic term. There's no proof of any generic deity or supernatural being either.
Now, there's evidence which can be interpreted any way you like; or rather, things cited as evidence of God. Name a specific bit of evidence and I'd suggest why it isn't compelling. But it should be obvious why it isn't conclusive.
There is no reason to believe in the (umbrella term) supernatural. No ghosts, no angels, no devils, no Allah virgins, no demons, no faeries, no gods. To a non-believer, these are all the same; fictional creations of man's imagination.
Completely discounting the possibility of any deity, as opposed to a specific one, seems to be a rather large leap of faith, though. How can you be any more sure that no God's exist than someone else is that a particular God exists? Both are essentially merely hypotheses.
Well, it's not a complete certainty that no gods exist. But it gets boring investigating putative gods. How many do you have to reject before you've taken an honest go at it?
Well that's a good point. I mean, I could just come up with a number of gods so large that it would be impossible for anyone to disprove them all. But I think it's more important that the principle of a God existing is addressed rather than the principles of a particular God existing being addressed. So even if you do disprove every God currently proposed by anyone in the world, then that doesn't mean that there isn't the possibility of a God existing. If you could disprove the existence of every single possible God (and it's impossible to establish every possibility), then it would exclude the possibility of any God existing, but disproving some basic and obviously incorrect hypotheses as to what God is does not suffice, given the infinite scope of what God could possibly be.
I don't think that makes much sense, but I'll go with it.
I don't think that makes much sense, but I'll go with it.
I think that makes sense to most people.
Obviously, if an individual feels that a certain god exists, it's worth time looking at whether it exists. When I was younger, I certainly felt like God existed. So, this is the god I learned about, investigated, and then realised was bunk. At that point, a couple of forays into mass belief might be warranted: a billion people like curry, so I tried it out. Why not the same with their gods?
If you've never felt like a god existed, then the onus is a bit different. It might be worth investigating a common belief amongst a billion people anyway. If someone didn't believe in the Moon landing, I might say 'have you looked at the evidence carefully? There're a billion people who're satisfied with the evidence'. It's not proof, obviously, just a reason to be suspicious.
Obviously, if an individual feels that a certain god exists, it's worth time looking at whether it exists. When I was younger, I certainly felt like God existed. So, this is the god I learned about, investigated, and then realised was bunk. At that point, a couple of forays into mass belief might be warranted: a billion people like curry, so I tried it out. Why not the same with their gods?
If you've never felt like a god existed, then the onus is a bit different. It might be worth investigating a common belief amongst a billion people anyway. If someone didn't believe in the Moon landing, I might say 'have you looked at the evidence carefully? There're a billion people who're satisfied with the evidence'. It's not proof, obviously, just a reason to be suspicious.
Askthepizzaguy
Know the Dark Side
Doubt is not the same as faith.
I doubt greatly there is any supernatural creature. I do not place faith or wagers on that, this is why I am an agnostic. I am not saying there is conclusive proof there is no God or gods. I am saying there's massive amounts of evidence that the kind of God man imagines is just his imaginings, primarily because he's imagining it, not actually witnessing it.
I will place an opinion on it though; in my opinion the idea of a God (such as the Biblical God) is beyond ludicrous. Especially as written in the text, because he's often contradictory, wrathful, jealous, hateful, racist, uncaring, misogynistic, and a mass murderer. He's also the embodiment of mercy, compassion, and infinite wisdom. And he will send you to hell forever if you do certain things. So, God is either a psychopath, or there are grave errors in the description of him in the bible.
Add to the fact that this book is written by ancient men, you can account for all of the wrathful, ignorant, unscientific, hateful, racist, uncaring, misogynistic behavior of God. Makes perfect sense if it comes from the imaginings or desires of ancient man. It also explains the historic and scientific inaccuracies.
It also explains the concept of hell; God is full of love, infinite power, infinite wisdom, infinite compassion, and his solution for a person who doesn't believe in him because he caused that person to be of a skeptical personality and therefore doesn't accept the fantastic story of him or his son, is to burn that person (his creation, mind you) forever. Even man is not so cruel and ignorant, callous and cold. That and thousands of other discrepancies show the Biblical god to be a fiction of man, in my view. Not a very advanced man, either.
Now, why only that God? Why not a God just like that, except with flowing white hair and no beard, instead of one with a beard?
-Essentially they are the same God, and the same fiction.
What about a God that doesn't have Jesus as a son?
-Changes one aspect of the fictional character, doesn't change the fictional nature of the character.
What about a seven-headed serpent that will come and devour the world on the 7th hour of the 7th day of the 7th month of the 7th year of the 7th millenia C.E.?
-As cartoonish and predictable as Wile E. Coyote. There's no reason to believe in this obviously fictional deity either.
What about Chaos, Uranus, Gaea? By the beard of Zeus, don't you believe in any of them?
-Why should I? These are all poorly conceived fictional characters, too. Though they make excellent fodder for Hercules and Xena television shows as well as video games.
What about gods from Lovecraftian (Cthulu) mythology?
-Why should I believe in a deity I know was conceived by man's imagination?
What about a nameless, faceless generic Creator... don't you believe in that?
-No... because then that runs into the problem of who created the creator, and what was he doing for ALL ETERNITY before creation happened. Especially since Eternity is so long a time that it isn't over yet and will never be over.... so if there is an Eternity that exists before the universe is created, the universe will never be created. So what began time; what created God? There's nothing that suggests a Creator poofed into existence. If that is the case, so can the universe also just poof into existence. No God required. And we are stretching the definition of God to suggest He is merely "that which began the universe". Then it might not be a God at all, but a natural event. It's certainly not conclusively or even compellingly a God.
There's nothing to suggest a God except man's imagination. And like all random thoughts I have in a given day (The Fire-Breathing Leprechaun is my own creation) I do not believe these are real deities that rule over me.
There's no proof, no reason, and it is rather vain of man to think that if there is such a being, he could comprehend such a thing, and speak with any authority on what it could possibly be. So especially when men say they know what God is, or they understand what God wants, I call that hubris.
The best answer is "I do not know" and "there's nothing suggesting it is so" when it pertains to the supernatural.
If you randomly imagined any god, any diety... surely you realize that there are literally endless other variants and configurations to what comprises this God. Why on Earth would one assume they have got God pictured correctly at all, if such a thing exists? And why would one presume that they know something exists when there's no evidence for it whatsoever?
The Great Fire-Breathing Leprechaun has a mythology of his own. He has a Great Magic Box that he hides inside, and that is why no one can see him. Inside this box with him are an unknown number of items. Either zero or any number.
Describe those items in detail.
Now, why would you assume you know what is inside the Great Magic Box? Why would you think you know that with any level of certainty that suggests you should spend more than a nanosecond of your life thinking about it?
Why would you turn it into a religion and teach others what you think you know about what is inside the Great Magic Box? Why would you dedicate your life to an entirely random, pulled-straight-from-one's-hindquarters GUESS.... and why would you presume you know enough about the contents of the Box to tell others their religion is incorrect, or their guess as to what is inside the Box is incorrect?
It's totally random. it's man's imagination.
You are essentially arguing, ah, what if man could guess what is inside the Magic Box that can never be opened, and describe its contents. What if someone could. What if they were right. What if they were absolutely, 100% right. Or, even partially right. What if they guessed the exact number of things in the box. What then?
Who cares? There's no proof. And still no reason to believe it. No rational mind should waste any more time thinking about it. Yet we have wasted THOUSANDS of years debating the existence of God, what he thinks, and what he wants for us, and what other supernatural beings exist. It's the most pointless, fruitless exercise I've ever seen. And the amount of suffering, hatred, and devastation, the holding back of scientific progress, and the handicapping and fracturing of mankind, based entirely on theories of God, has set humanity back untold generations, with losses of innocent lives, freedoms, and creativity totaling an unknown but staggeringly devastating amount.
Not even a tiny fraction of the time we've wasted on God has been dedicated to turning this world, this human civilization, into a better place. Instead of relegating the status of God and questions about the unknown to its rightful status as a daydream or a hobby, it has been one of the main focuses of the combined might of billions of minds, and the result has been absurd. Most of us disagree. Many of us fight over it. Nothing conclusive has been reached. And we will never, ever settle on who or what or if God is. What might have been a fun diversion and mental exercise has become the intellectual plague of mankind.
Since the odds of any one imaginary mythical beast being real are essentially zero, and there's no evidence for any of it, AND it's obviously our imagination since we have to come up with it ourselves, then it seems entirely logical to suggest "I don't know if it is real, but there's no reason to believe any of it is."
So God, along with an infinite number of other fictional creations, all get placed in the "creative, but useless" section. No 500-foot tall sheep who can travel through several dimensions.... no Invisible Pink Unicorns who are both invisible AND pink at the same time.... no flying Spaghetti Monster... no Fire-Breathing Leprechaun... no Jehovah.... no Santa Claus.... no angels, no demons, no hell. All of it, nothing more than our imagination.
Now, let us suggest, what if God were an alien creature, evolved from a distant planet, who traveled here and made the earth as a science project for school? Ah, now you're in the realm of still absurd, but in the realm of the natural world, even if it is science fiction. That's a theory, just as God is a theory. Well all hypothetical beings are theories of equal weight, without any supporting evidence.
I don't believe humanity was created by an alien being. Which is essentially what God would be, just phrased differently than is commonly stated. Where did the alien being come from? What created that? Who created that which came before that?
Because the probabilities are so greatly in my favor.
How can you be sure the Great Fire-Breathing Leprechaun doesn't exist? Well, it doesn't. I made it up. It's total fiction.
Odds of GFBL existing: as close to zero as mathematically possible.
Odds of GFBL being imaginary: as close to conclusively proven as a negative that can be possible.
I didn't just blindly guess the exact nature of the universe by inventing a fictional deity. The odds are against it. I'm not even done writing all the back-story for this absurd creation, so you know it's still wrong.
Now, the odds are basically the same for all imaginary deities, because they are the same as the Great Fire-Breathing Leprechaun. Without any evidence, you, a flawed mortal human being, with your limited (or my limited) cranial capacity, made the absurdly unlikely exactly correct guess as to the nature of something that is not of this universe; that is outside it, beyond it, superior to it. Right... An ant has an infinitely better chance of calculating the exact number of grains of sand there are in the universe.
That humanity thinks it can conjure up an image of something supernatural in their heads and then also think it is real... and I'm not talking about vehicles that can colonize human beings outside of the solar system, I'm not talking about anything with a rational scientific basis, I'm talking about an indescribably powerful being of pure fantasy, pure fiction, based on absolutely nothing. Then think they know this being exists, even though they just made it up.
The only way I can describe it is a disease of the mind.
And that's just it, everyone's interpretation or imagining of God is slightly different. Are we all correct? Does God look exactly like what Askthepizzaguy imagines it would be? Or is it more like Dave's God, in Butte, Montana? Or Long Chin Pao's 6-headed deity in Asia somewhere?
There's well over 6 billion of us. The odds are near zero that any of us are correct. And then you realize that only one of us would have the correct image of God in our heads, because we all imagine God slightly differently. So only one person, possibly, even remotely, could conceive of this God correctly. Everyone else is wrong.
You see that it is utterly ridiculous to place the non-existence of any god as a "leap of faith". It doesn't take a leap of faith to not believe in a 17-armed plasma-based creature from a dimension so alien from ours that we could never possibly imagine it, because we lack any familiar frame of reference with such a plane of existence. If that were what God was, we would never know, because it is beyond our imagination and comprehension. You factor that in with the stupefyingly ridiculous odds of successfully guessing that there is a God, and what it wants, and what its plans are, what it's nature is, and what it looks like... and you add on top of everything the fact that you probably are literally incapable of intelligently comprehending such a being, and it seems clear to me that man is deluding himself when he thinks he understands God, or knows there is one.
There is an inherent value to a hypothesis... if one tries to guess how many fingers someone is holding up, there is a reasonable assumption that one could eventually guess correctly.
If one tries to guess the exact date and time of the birth of someone now dead for two millenia, that might be possible, depending on how exact you want to be. It would be extraordinarily difficult.
If one tries to guess the exact distance between two random atoms in the universe, 100 years into the future from now, there is no reasonable expectation that you will EVER guess this distance. However, it is still possible. But what would be the point anyway?
If one tries to make a hypothesis about the nature of God, there is no reasonable expectation you will ever know a darned thing, ever. And, I might add, it's very, very likely that it is literally physically impossible because there just doesn't seem to be one, and it is exactly the sort of thing man's mind dreams up on a constant basis, none of it having any relevance. And then you add on the fact that there's no logical method of arriving at that conclusion.
To put it simply: God would have to prove its own existence, since man cannot. And since God is just another name for the creature of one's own unique imagination, out of billions of minds, in a universe too vast to comprehend, it's quite silly to think one has it right. Like all other absurd things, it's only rational to start off placing such concepts in the "No reason to believe it is true" bin. If something changes, then yeah, pull it out of the bin. But until then, I'd prefer to make hypotheses with a far better and real chance of being relevant.
Not all hypotheses and theories are conceived equally, after all. If there are things that don't exist, there is an endless number of such things. Our imaginings are a subset of those things which don't exist except in our heads, and hypotheses about imaginary things existing in the real world, especially when they are based on nothing but our own fantasies and desires, not evidence or even rational deduction, are very likely to be false.
You also have to consider how many other imaginary beings besides God we know are just fictional creations... why would God suddenly not be one of them? I honestly feel, at times, that God is the Santa Claus that adults can't bear to stop believing in.
I'll try to reply to all of that sometime in the next few days; but right now I don't have the energy, so I'll just address this:
Well, that's essentially what I'm arguing for. I'm saying that whilst agnosticism is something reasonable, I don't really think atheism is anymore reasonable than any given specific religion. And given that atheism purports to reject that very same idea of believing in something that is impossible to prove that it embraces, it seems to me to be rather contradictory. Now, I'm a Christian, but fair's fair, agnosticism clearly makes more sense for the average person to believe than Christianity (a particular explanation of what 'God' may be, with multifarious subsets of explanations within itself). What I'm arguing against is atheism, or the acceptance of something that is impossible to prove due to the fact that the opposite is impossible to prove.
Well, that's essentially what I'm arguing for. I'm saying that whilst agnosticism is something reasonable, I don't really think atheism is anymore reasonable than any given specific religion. And given that atheism purports to reject that very same idea of believing in something that is impossible to prove that it embraces, it seems to me to be rather contradictory. Now, I'm a Christian, but fair's fair, agnosticism clearly makes more sense for the average person to believe than Christianity (a particular explanation of what 'God' may be, with multifarious subsets of explanations within itself). What I'm arguing against is atheism, or the acceptance of something that is impossible to prove due to the fact that the opposite is impossible to prove.
AesronDrosseli
Chieftain
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2008
- Messages
- 70
One thing I've recently realised that it is impossible to come up with any logical empirical proof for a god's existence. The only proof I have that the god I believe in exists is the things which have happened to me. However, same thing goes for those who don't believe in said gods. It's practically impossible to prove the non-existence of a being, supernatural or not.
At the same time, one thing I have found myself constantly looking for is hard, concrete proof. It's a plea asking the big guy in the sky to show me that he exists. I know how I feel, but come on, is a carefully-placed lightning bolt too much to ask for? After all, you did do it for your people in the Old Testament. Of course, when going to churches I hear of miracles which happen. Only problem is that it always happens to other people, or the friend of a friend of a friend.
It gets even worse when they tell you that "you need faith to believe", i.e. if you don't believe you won't see the miracle.
Erm... Are you sure about that? If I were to see a person's cancer being miraculously cured, or if a blind man could suddenly see if blessed by a pastor, I would be pretty convinced of God's existence. The "fact" that it only happens to believers sounds pretty unfair to me.
Apologies if I've kinda gone off tangent from what you were addressing in what you said, but this is one of the reasons why I sometimes find it hard to believe in what Christians propagate. It seems to encourage mindless sheep. If God gave us brains, wouldn't he want us to use them? It seems as if the churches certainly don't think so.
And yet I still keep on searching....
Honestly, I'm surprised too, especially after what Elta told me. I'm wondering whether it's because I made it clear that I want constructive discussion. Or whether it's because there's a large non-believing population on CFC. Or both. Whatever, I'm still quite glad.
And.. You just don't believe? You mean.. Just like what Basketcase claimed, it's
?....an act of FAITH.
Lillefix
I'm serious. You can.
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2003
- Messages
- 5,699
Here I disagree with you. In theory I suppose I'm also an agnostic, since I can't exclude anything for sure. But to say atheism is just as likely as any religion is something completely disagree with. Do you really believe that the possibility that the Christian God exists, the flying spaghetti monster exists or that none of them exists are equal?
