I don’t believe in Her either.
But, like Popeye, I believes in ghosks an’ evil spiriks.
I DO believe in the power of zombie killing moderators.
So, guess I’ll wait and see if the prophecy happens as it was foretold.
This sentence is a bit convoluted, but I read it as saying that most believers just want non-believers to leave them in peace. Right. Believers don’t even do this for other believers. Do you think missionaries go out and ask that the people they visit just leave their belief system in peace? Not to mention forcible conversion. Not to mention monotheistic religions where atheism is punishable by death. Not to mention religions trying to enforce laws based on the morality of that religion.
Perhaps the only religious people you know are Unitarians, for whom the statement seems to be pretty much true.
There are proselytizing religions, and non-proselytizing. Even within Christianity that’s true. And there are religions that attempt to stay out of the affairs of the state and other people.
However, I’d have to say that if you look around the world, the vast majority of religions have attempted to enshrine aspects of their religion into law. Christians, Muslims, Hindus… All have a history of punishing nonbelievers or attempting to control the laws to force them into compliance with the faith.
Your analysis sucks because you totally missed the point. Plus, you’re a pompous judgmental asshole who sucks.
Think about this from a scientific perspective, which the OP implied that atheists aren’t using: I wasn’t addressing the “methodologies” of amoebas. I was saying that amoebas are just as capable (meaning incapable) of understanding humans as we are (meaning incapable) of understanding God. No one can agree on the true nature of God. We’ve been fighting about it since we crawled out of the ocean.
My point is that humans are incapable of interacting with amoebas, just as they are incapable of interacting with us. If God exists, he would have the same problem, simply because of the matter of scale, not importance. If he created the entire infinite universe, with its multitudes of heavenly bodies and worlds, then we are as sizeable and significant to him as one-celled creatures are to us.
Sure, he may occasionally take interest and observe our behavior under adverse conditions, like a kid with a magnifying glass and an ant farm on a sunny day, but he doesn’t observe every individual human 24/7, much less hear their prayers. Why would he? We’re just a collection of dust specks in an infinite universe. There’s an infinite amount of things that are more interesting.
I wonder how amoeba #10 zillion is doing? It prayed to me and asked if wriggling its cilia was sinful.
So, in order for God to really matter in our lives, we have to admit he’s not all-powerful and considerably less than perfect. No religion is going to advocate that.
Knowed Out, part of the problem here is a shifting definition of God.
Religions tell us that God is very much interested in us. He created the world for us. He made us in his image. He sent his only child down to us for our salvation. Or more simply, he has rules given to us that he expects us to follow.
I didn’t send down a bunch of rules for ants to follow, I didn’t create the world for ants and send a part of myself down in ant form to save their souls. If I did do that, I think it would be supremely shitty of me to now act like I don’t care about individual ants. Like, I could look down and see a bunch of ants who worship my rules brutalizing a bunch of ants who don’t worship me and say “who cares, they’re just ants?”
Your definition of God, a creator of the universe who has much better things to do than follow the lives of barely sentient humans, is perfectly fine. It just doesn’t mesh with the definition of God that religions use, and doesn’t lend itself to a God that needs to be worshiped, or even thought about much at all.
“No religion”, you say. I thought I read somewhere about a God who — well, took maybe six days to pull off a feat of creation, and then rested on the seventh. Which, y’know, is danged impressive — but it’s not a matter of doing it in six minutes, to say nothing of six seconds, with no time spent resting. But it’s still pretty good.
And if you ask those that follow that god why it took a week to get the job done if he was so all-powerful, you’ll get a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about allegories, metaphors and parables and about how their god’s time isn’t like our time. What you won’t get is an admission that their god had to take entire week to create one planet.
First of all, I understand God just fine. The reason I can’t reach agreement with anybody about its true nature is because everyone but me’s an idiot.
Secondly, I pretty much never hear about religions where their god ignores humanity. That’s just not something people invent, because religion has exactly two purposes (compensating for the unfairness of reality with false promises of future justice and making the believer feel special and important) and neither is served by an uncaring god. Making an argument based on the assumption that the god is uncaring seems specious to me, because that’s just not how gods are. Gods are supposed to love and care for their followers, no matter how many followers there are, like a father or caring leader. And they’re supposed to kick the asses of everybody else, because justice/vengeance/fairness. That’s what gods do.
Talking about a god that doesn’t notice individuals is like talking about a sith lord that’s honest and kind. It’s not how they’re made.
That’s exactly my point, which everyone seems to understand except KO, who has developed his own unique definition of god found nowhere in any major religion and is now trying to use it to prove (AFAICT) that he’s the only one with any insights on the matter.
Atheism is really only meaningful as a rejection of the traditional precepts of God put forward by the major organized religions. Neither atheism nor science has anything useful to say about notions of God that are so abstract as to have no evidence-based resolution and no practical meaning.
Disagree. Atheism at its core is the refusal, on principal, to accept the existence of any deities based on faith, without evidence or reason or cogent argument.
At least, that is the basis on which I consider myself to be an atheist.
His/Her/Its schedule was thrown off by the subcontractors. It’s a wonder it was ever finished.
Deists?
I consider atheism to simply be the state of not being a theist. So anyone (or anything, arguably) who hasn’t gotten around in believing in some god or another (abstract or not) would be an atheist. It doesn’t require a refusal, just a lack of belief, or even ignorance of the subject would do.
That said, he didn’t say it was impossible to be atheistic towards flying spaghetti monsters and the sentient color orange; he said atheists have nothing ‘useful to say’ about abstract and undefined entities. Perhaps “nah, not buying it” isn’t considered useful?
I pretty much never hear about deist religions.
Err… can anyone say anything useful about so vague a notion?
I consider atheism to be simply the state behaving as one would if one didn’t give a crap whether there are any gods or whether there aren’t.
So, like most Americans about six days out of seven…
The problem is that introducing an open-ended term like “any” can lead to an epistemological rat-hole, since I can define “God” in abstract ways that atheists may well accept: “God is why there is something rather than nothing”; “God is the Hartle-Hawking state, the wave function of the universe”, etc. These are not the anthropomorphic gods of the Bible, nor are they falsifiable on the basis of empirical evidence. They are more like semantic games that acknowledge the boundaries of science and declare God to be that which lies beyond those bounds.
I don’t think there’s a lot of point in atheism trying to attack such concepts. Maybe I’m wrong but I’ve always seen it as attacking the traditional deistic beliefs of organized religions. Certainly when a crusading atheist like Richard Dawkins gets on his soapbox, that’s what he attacks. One of his famous quotes is “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world”. Which I think is often true. But I doubt that he would have a problem with cosmologists who say that their work sometimes gives them a sense of awe about the universe that verges on the spiritual. That’s the other kind of God.
Probably not. Which was really my point. The problem with most religions is that they have comically specific and nonsensical things to say about the nature of God.
I have nothing to add except to say I am glad I am not the only one who might say such a thing.
I’ve never done any reading on, or inquired into religion or gods, but as I age, and smoke legal weed after a hiatus of almost fifty years, I am beginning to think along those lines (with a lot of trappings, mind you!)
It was Norway. Putting all the fiddly bits around the fjords took forever. Still, he won an award.
And all seven during football season.