Ask the atheists...

Great Debates
1

After not finding a thread already, and from my poll of “what happens after death?” finding that around 70-80% of those who responded believe nothing happens after death, first let me say that
1)I put this here with the prediction that it may turn into a GD…
2)I am hoping to get answers since I am not an atheist

•Do atheists put faith in chance/coincidence/luck?
because I find death to be selective…
example-» My mother-in-law works in a gas station and one night, in the middle of the night, a man came in and robbed her, taking the money, her jewelry, purse, and then said “I’m gonna knock yo ass out now” and beat her up side the head. But she wouldn’t get knocked out. So he said “If you ain’t gonna get knocked out, I’m just gonna have to kill you…” and started choking her. About that time a man walked in, saw her suffocating, and pulled him off of her and held him down until the police came to get him. He later told her the only reason he was there was because his wife woke up with a bad headache and wanted him to go get some tylenol.
-You are welcome to say that is just a coincidence, but it looks to me like divine intervention.
example-» How is it that there are so many amazing survival stories but people die from really stupid stuff and everyday activites as well? Looks to me like when it is your time to go, you gotta go. I don’t think that people were in the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances (or vice versa). The “chances” seem too dependent on external factors for that to be true.
•Do atheists believe in sin?
•From an atheist perspective, would there be anything wrong with going out and killing as many people as possible, since there is no punishment for me if I die, and it doesn’t matter if anyone dies because nothing happens to me or the victims after death anyway?
•Also check out this site… pretty interesting…

2

I’m confused, what are you asking?

—finding that around 70-80% of those who responded believe nothing happens after death, first let me say that—

Malformed question. I don’t know much about how my experience works when I die, but I’m pretty sure lots of things DO happen after death: just not to me. :slight_smile:

—The “chances” seem too dependent on external factors for that to be true.—

Pose the counterfactual. How could chance events NOT be dependant on external factors?

—From an atheist perspective,—

There is no “atheist perspective”- that’s only just a little more silly than speaking about the “theist perspective.”

—Also check out this site… pretty interesting…—

Not really. First of all, how would you suggest that god could go about “determining” the decimal places of pi? Second of all, pulling any sort of message out of a string of numbers, especially when you have to THEN juggle around the sequence MORE to pull out a message in English, is a trivial exercise. I’ve no doubt we could pull out all sorts of statements, some of which contradict even this. The chances of finding any particular sequence are small, but the chances of finding lots and lots of sequences are high. You might want to read up more on the Bible Code to get a sense of how this phenomenon works.

3

Well, I can’t give you the “atheist perspective”. I can give you my perspective, as an atheist, but of course, there’s no real set of “atheist beliefs”, so it’s quite possible 10 more atheists ill come in here and all disagree with me (and each other). With those caveats, though:

The thing about death is that it’s not selective. We all will die eventually. While I’m glad that your mother-in-law survived her experience, the situation does seem coincidental. Gas station attendants/clerks have been killed by holdup men before, without people coming in to rescue them, and likewise, people have been forced by their wives to buy aspirin in the middle of the night before without stopping robberies. If it was divine intervention, it seems pretty random to me…why would your mother-in-law be saved, for example, while other people in similar situations wouldn’t.

As for sin, it’s a religious term, and so I don’t use it. I do believe that people make moral choices, and people can act morally or immorally, though: people can do good or evil. From my perspective, going out and just killing as many people as you can would be wrong, because killing someone is generally an immoral, evil act. (with certain exceptions, of course, like self defense)

4

I think the concept of “sin” may not pertain to all “religions.” But I don’t know.

5

Are you saying that atheists do not have moral values?

6

**

You took the word (coincidence) right out of my mouth.

You are using a selection bias to account for divine intervention.

**

So in order to confirm your belief in a deity you cast aspersions on “circumstances?” C’mon now. There are others here more qualified than I to tear this one apart.

**

Do Hindus believe that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammed is his prophet?

**

The atheist perspective doesn’t base ethics on some hypothetical “judgement” that comes only after death. Surely you can see the difference between not commiting an illegal act because you believe it is wrong as opposed to not wanting to go to jail.

7

Firstly, all atheists have to agree on is that they don’t believe in god, so asking whether atheists believe something is a bit like asking if black people (say), believe in something. My answers are my own, and other atheists may disagree completely.

On chance, yes there may be some really incredible survival stories, but I suspect there are many more cases where someone doesn’t incredibly survive, that we never hear about, because no-one attaches any significance to such things.

There may be something influencing things, but don’t consider reports of things that seem unlikely to be evidence of such, and so the idea of it being a coincidence seems to make more sense.

On the subject of sin, it depends on what you mean by sin. Obviously, an atheist won’t believe in rules dictated by god, but I think that the idea of morality makes sense, although it many cases it can be hard to work out what the right thing to do is.

Your third question is rather leading, I think. Firstly, I don’t think that punishment is needed for something to be wrong, I would try to do what I felt was the right thing, even if I won’t be caught for doing the wrong thing.

Also, the question seems to presume that without an afterlife it doesn’t matter if people die. I would argue the opposite, without an afterlife, this life is all we have, so if you kill someone, they have lost the chance they had to enjoy life, whereas with an afterlife, if you die, that’s not it, you are only depriving people of the limited life on earth, they still have the afterlife to look forward to.

Finally, the problem with the website, is that we don’t know if the set of digits is actually contained within Pi, and the position of them within Pi isn’t given. Also, given given long enough, I would suspect if you wait long enough, you can find any pattern you want in Pi, and here we don’t even know if the author tried to find other patterns and failed. So given those doubts, you will not be supprised to know I’m not convinced in the existence of god because of that.

8

Proof of God’s Existence

HAHAHAHAHAHA… so not only does God speak to us through pi, he has apparently chosen to use the English language. This is only interesting if you aren’t familiar with how creative interpretation of essentially random numbers can tell you anything you want. Read up on some of the debunking they did when those morons tried to use a similiar method to find “hidden codes” in the Bible.

9

Are you insinuating that the only reason you’re not a serial killer is because you don’t want to go to hell? That if there were no God, you’d happily go out and kill people

10

I’m just wondering if the convenience store incident according to the OP lends itself to more of the mythological beliefs in fate as opposed to divine intervention. (Not that in my book Christianity doesn’t fall under a mythology, it’s just a currently held one).

As an atheist (or more precisely, a humanist for me) I’ve created my own standards of moral code. I tend to examine and reexamine them to make sure they’re congruent within a society so as not to make me a pariah and so I know I’m doing the good and right thing. The Bible allows you to extrapolate ethics from it that can justify anything, thus setting up your own moral code. “Think about it, won’t you? Thank you” MST3K

11

I wouldn’t put to much faith in this. You can achieve almost anything with the right set of numbers.

12

-Given that there are a lot of ordinary occurrences happening all of the time (“I didn’t win the lottery :(”), I’m not too surprised that there are a few extraordinary occurrences that get thrown into the mix (“I won the lottery, all thanks to God ;j”) – standard deviation and all that jazz.
-As has been said by the previous posters, sin is a religously-loaded term. Morality/ethics, on the other hand, are not loaded. I do believe in morality/ethics.
-I would see something immoral about randomly killing people. Let me post the counter-question to you: “If God ordered you to go around killing innocent people, but promised that you would be rewarded for doing so, would you obey God’s command?”
-Personally, I’d say that the fact that e^(i*pi) == -1 is a whole lot cooler than any “bible code”…

13

Just so you all know, that site is a joke. I wasn’t sure 0rbytal knew that though.

Personally, I can’t believe that I spent years of my life without realizing that the sqaure root of any number divided by that number is equivalent to 1 divided by the square root of that number.

Or, even worse, that you can easily tell what day of the week it will be if given any arbitrary number of days from today. I can’t believe I never realized how before now.

14

I don’t have a lot to say that is different from what the other atheisis have said.

I think that what happened with your mother-in-law was a coincidence. I would also echo Captain Amazing’s comment that other people in similar situations have NOT been saved. I would also add that God could have just as easily chosen not to have had your mother-in-law assaulted at all, and wouldn’t ythat have been a more “moral” choice for God?

I don’t believe in “sin” any more than I believe in “souls,” but I do believe in ethical and compassionate behavior towards others. I don’t kill people primarily because I have no DESIRE to kill people. Leaving aside the legal consequences, which are bad enough, I would not be able to endure the EMOTIONAL consequences, both to the victims and to myself. I would FEEL bad. I would hate myself. I would not be able find any joy in life.

I have been an atheist since I was a child. I can remember sitting in church at about five or six years old and realizing I just didn’t believe it. I remained interested in religion anyway. I was entranced by Bible stories in sunday school, and I still love them, even though I never believed in their literal truth. I majored in Religion in college and continued to study many world religions after college. I practice Zen meditation, but I don’t believe in karma or reincarnation.

I have done a lot of volunteerism in my life, including working in homeless shelters, ringing bells for the Salvation Army, laying sod for Houses for Habitat and spending two years in AmeriCorps tutoring and mentoring inner city kids. I currently work with DD adults in both residential and vocational settings.

I don’t do this stuff because I expect any divine reward or fear any divine retribution. I do it for purely selfish reasons. It makes me feel good about myself. I’ve never made any real money at anything because I prefer to do work which does some good for other people.

I am not trying to make myself sound like a saint. I am an asshole in many ways. I’m lazy, I think I’m smarter than everybody else and I have a short temper. I guess some of what I do is an attempt to alleviate my own feelings of assholishness. I’m starting to ramble here, but my point is that that there are plenty of motivations to be a good person besides the fear of God.

15

[quote]
Also check out this site… pretty interesting…

[quote]

OK, this site is so clearly a joke. At the bottom of it it says that if you wanna calculate pi yourself, just measure the circumference of the universe (!) very carefully and then divide by the diameter. Puhlease.

And as others have pointed out, even if it weren’t a joke it still wouldn’t “mean” anything.

That site is so obviously a joke that I’m now wondering whether o not the entire OP was too.

16

If you go up to Tagonist’s front page you’ll find analyses of Britney Spears’ songs and a Cosmogirls quiz, I’m not sure why you’d question the veracity after the other facts are there;) Sounds like a couple more ideas for Great Debates.

17

[God]My dear, it’s not your time to go, but it is your time to get yo ass knocked around a bit, and choked for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience.[/God]

18

Ditto others’ statements that atheists only speak for themselves. For your anecdote, do you really believe your mother-in-law is for some reason more worthy of God’s mercy than some poor shmuck who didn’t get saved? Did god intervene to stop someone from getting there in that case? What happens if an atheist got saved by luck. (I once did not get injured because I got out the right side of a car. Just as I was closing the door, a car rolled down the hill and hit the car on the left side, right where I would have gotten out. Was god saving me to not believe in him?)

I don’t believe in sin - I do believe certain actions are unethical.

As for your third question, please always believe - since you would appear to be dangerous to society if you can’t imagine any other reason to not kill people. As for me, I know that others are thinking beings, and as such should not be harmed. No need for any god.

As for you - if God told you to kill someone, would you? Don’t say he won’t - check out the slaughters commanded by God both in Canaan and in the desert.

19

Your M-I-L story would, it seems to me, imply that god had sent the would be killer along just so god could save her in the final reel.

Or alternatily it could be the result of the sort of random events that you would expect to see if there was no god around to play games with us for his own amusement.

As to the pi thingie. As best I could tell we have only the author’s word for it that that string of numbers is actually part of pi.

And I rather resent the insinuation that, as a non believer, I have so little morals as to go around killing just because once I’m dead it won’t matter to me any more.

20

Well that was fun 0rbytal, got any more?