Atheism/Theism thread

[Cavernio]

"When an atheist rejects belief in God, he rejects any source of confidence beyond his own level of reasoning or understanding."

Yep, and that's why if my Dad gets alzheimers like his mom did, he's going to be impossible to manage if he doesn't recognize his kids, like his mom did.

In regards to what you wrote earlier mollecephalus, about being in a personal loophole and that being the dangerous thing and that's why religion causes wars/harm, etc, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gone around harming people if I felt God wanted me to. Because my own morality, like everyone's morality, religious or not, comes from many places but nearly always involves an inborn innate feeling of feeling bad when someone else is getting hurt. So I strongly think that even if I had gotten feelings from God to kill someone or some such, I would not have done so. Or in another situation, if I had gotten feelings to kill someone and acted on that, I may afterwards convinced myself God had wanted me to do that, which clearly the cause of religion. I mean, seeing that god doesn't exist, individuals have to get their morality from somewhere, and even a religion that preaches immoral things are going to have to get passed and silence the innate empathy that we all seem to have.

I see that the thread about burning a witch (which I assume isn't a troll or fake, I didn't want to watch the video), you say that religion caused it. But I would say that it's the need to belong and be a part of a group that caused it, and although religion binded the group together, the idea of burning independent women for witchcraft is something that's been passed along outside of religion. The Salem witch trials weren't particularly founded in religion but superstition, and could easily have been avoided even if people illogically decided 'hey, she's a witch' but morally decided 'but killing her is still wrong'. For what it's worth, I myself am not entirely convinced this 'loophole' is as easily brushed off as I'm making it, (in that the illogical person will not believe it in the first place, or someone like me who is logical but chooses to believe anyways wouldn't question it when it gets to a certain point), but I'd like to think it is.
(On an aside, it really is crazy to see people get carried away by groupthink to persecute. If you've ever seen it happen from an outside viewpoint, it's pretty disgusting.)

Religious people who try to convert you are honestly just trying to the spread joy they experience from knowing God, a joy that they feel they only get from God. I'm still trying to decide if such a feeling is what everyone would call belief in something, God or some sort of connection to the universe or spirit or what have you, is always characterized by belief. As in, if someone would feel the need to call the sort of emotional experiences I had would have to feel like it were...supernatural to some degree. Certainly if imbedded in/part of the feeling itself is the notion that there's something more that you're a part of that is unknown but since you experience it then you DO know it, then perhaps hardcore atheists can never experience the sort of happiness/fulfillment that so many people have.

[Hakulyte]

What if faith into a superior being was against law tomorrow until it's proved/disproved?
What if philosophy was enforced instead of religion @ school etc. ?
What if you had to show that you can think for yourself before having the right to believe into something when it's proven to be valid or not?
I mean, I had to get a driving license to drive, why I don't need a preaching license to pray or something?

I will never understand religion..

[korny]

Originally Posted by Hakulyte

What if faith into a superior being was against law tomorrow until it's proved/disproved?
What if philosophy was enforced instead of religion @ school etc. ?
What if you had to show that you can think for yourself before having the right to believe into something when it's proven to be valid or not?
I mean, I had to get a driving license to drive, why I don't need a preaching license to pray or something?

I will never understand religion..

Good points and superb logic. I think we're getting somewhere.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

"When an atheist rejects belief in God, he rejects any source of confidence beyond his own level of reasoning or understanding."

Yep, and that's why if my Dad gets alzheimers like his mom did, he's going to be impossible to manage if he doesn't recognize his kids, like his mom did.

In regards to what you wrote earlier mollecephalus, about being in a personal loophole and that being the dangerous thing and that's why religion causes wars/harm, etc, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gone around harming people if I felt God wanted me to. Because my own morality, like everyone's morality, religious or not, comes from many places but nearly always involves an inborn innate feeling of feeling bad when someone else is getting hurt. So I strongly think that even if I had gotten feelings from God to kill someone or some such, I would not have done so. Or in another situation, if I had gotten feelings to kill someone and acted on that, I may afterwards convinced myself God had wanted me to do that, which clearly the cause of religion. I mean, seeing that god doesn't exist, individuals have to get their morality from somewhere, and even a religion that preaches immoral things are going to have to get passed and silence the innate empathy that we all seem to have.

I see that the thread about burning a witch (which I assume isn't a troll or fake, I didn't want to watch the video), you say that religion caused it. But I would say that it's the need to belong and be a part of a group that caused it, and although religion binded the group together, the idea of burning independent women for witchcraft is something that's been passed along outside of religion. The Salem witch trials weren't particularly founded in religion but superstition, and could easily have been avoided even if people illogically decided 'hey, she's a witch' but morally decided 'but killing her is still wrong'. For what it's worth, I myself am not entirely convinced this 'loophole' is as easily brushed off as I'm making it, (in that the illogical person will not believe it in the first place, or someone like me who is logical but chooses to believe anyways wouldn't question it when it gets to a certain point), but I'd like to think it is.
(On an aside, it really is crazy to see people get carried away by groupthink to persecute. If you've ever seen it happen from an outside viewpoint, it's pretty disgusting.)

Religious people who try to convert you are honestly just trying to the spread joy they experience from knowing God, a joy that they feel they only get from God. I'm still trying to decide if such a feeling is what everyone would call belief in something, God or some sort of connection to the universe or spirit or what have you, is always characterized by belief. As in, if someone would feel the need to call the sort of emotional experiences I had would have to feel like it were...supernatural to some degree. Certainly if imbedded in/part of the feeling itself is the notion that there's something more that you're a part of that is unknown but since you experience it then you DO know it, then perhaps hardcore atheists can never experience the sort of happiness/fulfillment that so many people have.

I'm glad you mentioned superstition. How is religion any different from superstition?

Furthermore, your own personal morals do not mean that religion has not caused/is causing a lot of harm in "god's name". Even today it's still happening, with the anti-gay bill in Uganda for example, and many other sorts of oppression. Too often is it used to promote bigoted and outdated ideas. You can argue that "well herp derp Joseph Stalin, Napoleon Bonaparte etc. were atheists and they did a lot of bad things too! derpityderp" but their wars and their lack of belief in a deity are two unrelated issues. They didn't kill in the name of atheism (as if that's even possible lol). Instead, they did what they did for various reasons such as politics. I'm not making excuses for them, as what they did is still morally wrong. But before people blame atheism, it had nothing to do with their decisions/actions. Many of the world's events however, were fought in name of a religion.

As far as happiness goes, I find it incredibly humbling and fascinating to realize that despite the vast knowledge we've already gathered, there's still so much more there for us to discover. It's far more interesting than a reassuring fairytale that's supposed to be the answer to everything.

[star reaper]

(I'm glad you mentioned superstition. How is religion any different from superstition?) from what spitfire said... forgot how to quote...

Just jumping in really quickly here, but i was wondering why you think it's superstitious. What i mean is what are your exact reasons for believing this. People have different views, and if you don't explain your view and say why, then an argument is bound to happen from a difference of a starting point for your view, and everyone else's.

[retching oesophagus]

@ Cavernio

It is pretty obvious that religion was the single biggest driving force behind the Salem Witch Trials and that it wasn't done as some sort of group-bonding exercise. Group-bonding may have been an after-effect but it wouldn't have been the primary cause. You need a stronger motive to do that, something which religion can provide. The puritans believed that God would punish them for committing sin and they also believed that the Devil was living amongst them inside people to spread sin.It was their religion which inspired this thinking and they used their religion to persecute anyone who they thought were deviating from their puritan lifestyle. Ergo,it was religion that caused it.

You say that trials weren't particularly founded by religion but by superstition, but what is religion if not one giant superstition. A belief that a God in the sky will favour you if you follow his supposed teachings word for word. Religion is a superstition like any other and one that has inspired other crazier superstitions in the past like burning witches. And something like that could not have been easily avoided by thinking logically because these people operated out of fear of God ingrained in them by their faith and they would have struggled to think outside of that. The idea of burning witches clearly came from their religion because they wouldn't have burned the witches if their religion said that they weren't evil and did not have to be punished.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by star reaper

Just jumping in really quickly here, but i was wondering why you think it's superstitious. What i mean is what are your exact reasons for believing this. People have different views, and if you don't explain your view and say why, then an argument is bound to happen from a difference of a starting point for your view, and everyone else's.

Superstition:
"Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any physical process linking the two events, such as astrology, omens, witchcraft, etc., that contradicts natural science."

Sounds a lot like any religion to me; Linking/attributing natural events or misconceptions to supernatural explanations.

[star reaper]

"Superstition is a belief in supernatural causality: that one event leads to the cause of another without any physical process linking the two events, such as astrology, omens, witchcraft, etc., that contradicts natural science."

Well, from a Biblical point of view that doesn't match up. I have seen many arguments that don't look at all the things written in the Bible. You have the fall of Adam and Eve from eating the forbidden fruit. Sin enters the world through that, and that's why we die. We are disconnected from God and since God is life and we are separated from him, we die, and are dead from our sins.

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by star reaper

Well, from a Biblical point of view that doesn't match up. I have seen many arguments that don't look at all the things written in the Bible. You have the fall of Adam and Eve from eating the forbidden fruit. Sin enters the world through that, and that's why we die. We are disconnected from God and since God is life and we are separated from him, we die, and are dead from our sins.

From a Biblical point of view, neither does existing plantlife (created on the third day, while their source of energy (the sun) was created on the fourth day).
Basing your views on fiction rather than facts won't help your case. I can cite a book about a magical adventure of unicorns as the basis for my views but that doesn't make the premise of these views any less ridiculous.

[star reaper]

Originally Posted by _.Spitfire._

From a Biblical point of view, neither does existing plantlife (created on the third day, while their source of energy (the sun) was created on the fourth day).
Basing your views on fiction rather than facts won't help your case. I can cite a book about a magical adventure of unicorns as the basis for my views but that doesn't make the premise of these views any less ridiculous.

So, how do you account for existence?

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by star reaper

So, how do you account for existence?

In what way? This question is too ambiguous to be answered in full.
How life came to exist? How we define our existence? How anything came to exist? Be more specific

[star reaper]

Originally Posted by _.Spitfire._

In what way? This question is too ambiguous to be answered in full.
How life came to exist? How we define our existence? How anything came to exist? Be more specific

Sorry about that. What I mean is how is it that we exist. what do you think brought about our creation.

[Nullifidian]

That's still a vague question, but how humans as we know them today came into existence is through evolution.
edit: If you're talking about how life originated, that's abiogenesis, but there's no definite answer to that yet. Again though, be more specific in what you're asking.

Here's a vid on one of abiogenesis's models that helped me understand it better:

[Hakulyte]

Any reasons why "It hasn't been discovered yet" wouldn't be a legitimate answer?

Edit: Oh, Spitfire is getting somewhere.

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by star reaper

Sorry about that. What I mean is how is it that we exist. what do you think brought about our creation.

If you're talking about humans: Evolution
If you're talking about "what gave rise to evolution": Abiogenesis (the origin of life) -- it can be thought of as the origin of biological natural selection and competition
If you're talking about the Earth: Accretion
If you're talking about stars/galaxies/etc: Gravity/dark matter/dark energy/supernovae/etc, all that jazz
If you're talking about the universe itself/The Big Bang: We don't know yet, but there's good reason to posit that it does not need a Creator

[Mollocephalus]

Speaking of the origin of the universe as a whole, i always wondered this: how come, by religious standpoint, it is OK to say that god always existed and THEN created universe, but having the universe to always have existed - maybe going through a cycle of inflating and deflating, we don't know yet - is not?

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by Mollocephalus

Speaking of the origin of the universe as a whole, i always wondered this: how come, by religious standpoint, it is OK to say that god always existed and THEN created universe, but having the universe to always have existed - maybe going through a cycle of inflating and deflating, we don't know yet - is not?

Answering the question from a naturalistic perspective is really hard, because as humans we don't have any other sort of reference point for our intuition. If something's here, it "came" from somewhere. It something is complex, it was "designed" intelligently like a computer or watch. Even though we have plenty of examples of things coming out of nowhere (on the quantum scale) or complex things arising naturally from simplicity, it's a counterintuitive framework people aren't comfortable with, especially on a macroscopic everyday-life scale.

And so the default answer for many is that our universe is just a creation and God must have done it -- but of course when you ask what created God, God is "beyond comprehension / outside space / outside time." The idea of a universe coming about naturally keeps God out of the picture, which many dislike.

Again, God is largely an emotional appeal. There's no rational defense for it (even Ken Jennings, a Mormon, acknowledged this), but plenty of people would rather be happy than be right. I think for someone who grows up always believing in God, the mere thought that God doesn't exist feels blasphemous/dirty/guilt-ridden and they quickly push it out of mind and dig in their heels harder to defend what can't ever be beaten (because God is defined in a way that is always outside of whatever evidence we have, no matter how much we know).

Personally, even on an emotional level, I much prefer natural science to God. Our existence is like an everlasting series of LOST or something -- or a huge mystery novel with all sorts of awesome twists/turns. I want to know how the puzzle fits together than just give up and accept a nonexplanation.

Stuff like this touches me on an emotional scale I can't even describe in words, lol. When you really try to wrap your head around just how much is out there -- when you try to make sense of the scales -- it's mindblowing. It leads to a slew of really interesting questions... and I hate that I won't live long enough to see the ending and know the answer to it all... but you have to take what you can. :P

Richard Feynman on not knowing things (and one of my favorite quotes ever):

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
— Richard P. Feynman

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

Richard Feynman on not knowing things (and one of my favorite quotes ever):

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
— Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman's words are among my favorite quotes too. :')

[RNGRX]

I think this belongs here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufUEx9vUyA0

[RB_Spirit]

Originally Posted by _.Spitfire._

That's still a vague question, but how humans as we know them today came into existence is through evolution.
edit: If you're talking about how life originated, that's abiogenesis, but there's no definite answer to that yet. Again though, be more specific in what you're asking.

Here's a vid on one of abiogenesis's models that helped me understand it better:

Are you referring to darwins theory? curious, because i know nothing about evolution, or other forms of it. I'm just a bit curious as to what improvements have been made since his supposed, "flawed theory".