Not at all. I always think of people living in the heyday of the Roman Empire or the Mayas. All was good and prosperous. Would they have been happier to have lived longer, or be around to observe, when it all fell apart and when all they knew and loved was destroyed? I’d rather not press my duck, I mean luck, myself.
To me, it seems you are fetishizing your personal feelings of unanswerability, it is your personal religion, it is the point on the triangle that you have staked out - religion and atheism being the other 2 points. Be careful you don’t suffer from dogmatism in your own way. You seem to be proselytizing your way against all comers.
And when was the last time an atheist knocked on your door and tried to push atheism? Where are the atheist groups pushing anti-homosexual laws, the mobs of atheists outside medical clinics harassing women, and so on?
Atheists are neither as illogical nor as obnoxious. They are simply held to a far higher standard, when they aren’t being just outright slandered.
You’d rather spend an eternity as the plaything of some demon-god? Either praising his greatness for billions of years in “Heaven” as a lobotomized zombie, or screaming forever in Hell? Oblivion is better than what religious people typically offer as their hypothetical “reward”.
I regard agnosticism as sucking up to religion. No one is “agnostic” about goblins and fairies and Santa Claus - they’re “agnostic” about religion, because religion is popular, powerful and the great majority of its adherents filled with insane hatred towards anyone who dares deny their fantasy.
Because what we are made up of falls apart and runs down. That’s like asking “why can’t my car last forever without repairs or fuel”?
We do know the answer, just as we know the answer to the question “is there a Santa Claus”. People just don’t like the answer. And yes, theists are just as “stupid and naive” as they would be if they believed in Santa Claus as an adult.
Yes, often fatally. The believers belief that he can fly will end when he hits the pavement. Prayer over your sick child won’t save him, medicine will.
Existence is the universe in which we are tiny specks. A universe that doesn’t care about what we think at all. The universe is what it is, not what we fantasize.
Because they won’t leave everyone else alone, they constantly hurt themselves and others in the name of their self delusion. Religion isn’t a harmless self self indulgence, it’s a mental disease that has caused and continues to cause immense harm to humanity.
We don’t **know **anything. I think that I’m sitting at a desk in Santa Monica typing these words, but I can’t be 100% sure that that belief is correct. Maybe I’m really a disembodied brain in a Matrix-like simulation.
The best we can do is form a provisional model of reality based on the evidence at hand and act upon it. We can’t be sure that the provisional model is correct, but it’s all we have.
Asking “So why cast judgement?” is a misunderstanding of the epistemological circumstances we find ourselves in. We have no choice but to pass judgement. We have to choose a provisional model of the universe and act upon it.
Agnosticism is really just a form of theistic special pleading. It singles out one question (“Is there a God?”) as something special while not applying the same standards to other questions (“Am I a brain in a jar?”). The only reason for this double standard is to appease the theists.
Let’s put it this way.
Suppose there is an existence after death. How does that give your life meaning? Doesn’t it destroy the meaning of this life?
If we’re going to continue on infinitely after this very short Vale of Tears, then what the fuck was the point of the Vale of Tears? Is our suffering here on Earth meaningless then? God’s gonna wipe away our tears, and we’ll agree that it was all just part of the plan? Or we’re going to evolve in some vast Cosmic purpose?
Excuse me, but I find that simply nonsensical and insulting. What’s the purpose of the so-called “larger purpose”? What’s the meaning of the so-called “larger meaning”?
Life is meaningless. The reason I don’t get upset or suicidal or nihilistic about it is that if life is meaningless, then the meaninglessness of life is also meaningless. It isn’t something thrust upon us by a malevolent deity, it just happened. If God waved His hand and made my life meaningless that would be something to get upset about. But He didn’t because there’s no such thing as God.
My life is just as meaningless as all the other animals and plants that have crawled and wiggled and flopped upon this planet since the Precambrian Era. A pterodactyl that struggled for food and laid eggs and cared for its hideous hatchlings did so for the same reason I do. I care about the sorts of things that human beings care about because I’m a human being, and human beings that for whatever reason didn’t care about those things never became one of my ancestors.
And so, willy-nilly, I’m a human being, and I can either live my life as a human being, or blow my brains out, or wallow in despair, or set bombs in trashcans, and it’s all equally meaningless. Except I don’t want to hurt anyone, blowing people up might be meaningless but it wouldn’t make me happy, so what would be the point? It makes me happy to care for my children, it makes me happy to love my wife, it makes me happy to do a good job at work, and so on. And so, that’s what I do, even though it doesn’t have any meaning outside of making me–a totally meaningless walking flopping organism on a totally meaningless planet–happy.
I’m not reading the rest of this thread. My reason is that there’s no “debate” in the OP. Everything he says is based on his subjective feelings . . . no facts, no evidence, no justification, no reason . . . just subjective random feelings, and kind of wishy-washy ones at that. Do you expect us to counteract that with our own subjective feelings? Perhaps I haven’t been sitting near the right waterfall, feeling the sun dappling on my skin.
What drives me is a Ford Escape hybrid, at least till I trade it in.
I don’t believe in any deities, but I do believe in something greater. This is the thing from which the space-time emerged (at The Big Bang). However, since your mind is limited in representation (everything has to be spatially and/or temporally represented) then it is physiologically impossible for you to imagine the nature of this thing, therefore you can never know.
Strangely, it is this unknown that drives me since well, you never know! Humans are born, they move about, then die. The mind emerges, does some thinking then vanishes into oblivion, surplus to requirements. The universe is far more awesome than anyone can possibly imagine! So I take comfort in the belief that whatever explanations the human mind comes up with for existence, will pale into insignificance compared to a complete understanding of it’s true nature, which I fully expect to be awesome beyond belief.
I do believe however that the afterlife exists in the minds of the those you leave behind, so if you want to go to heaven, be good to all multicellular lifeforms that have a central nervous system!
I’m not going to try to convince you that you should be an atheist. Clearly, religion is strongly intertwined in the human experience, and some people seem to be much better for their faith.
I think there is harm in believing something that isn’t correct. You make uninformed decisions. We may never know certain things, but I don’t think that wishing something were so is sufficient to act as though it were so.
Why should you relate to atheists? The difference between you and the fundiest fundamentalist is at best one of degree, and I’m not even sure about that — you believe in things (like an afterlife) for which there is no evidence, just because it makes you feel better.
Most mainstream Christians have never read most of the Bible, and they ignore or explain away the parts they don’t like in the little of it they have read. So the fact that you don’t subscribe to an organized religion makes you no different from the many, many Christians who use church as a chiefly social function, and neither know nor care the details of their denomination’s tenets, or its differences from other denominations.
Well, individually they can be. (No, I swear I wasn’t looking at anyone in particular…). 
En masse however, I agree with you.
Perhaps odd, but I’m rather more agnostic about goblins and fairies than about gods – particularly illogical omni-max ones – because the claims are so much lower. That said I go about my daily life as though goblins don’t exist… so I’m pretty much a-goblinist… but I can’t prove their non-existence. They’re something that appears in old stories across cultures and suggest perhaps some half-forgotten memory, or (more probably) something in the human psyche or psychology.
I’m glad I don’t live in your described environment. (And for what it’s worth you have my sympathies… it doesn’t sound like much fun).
Sort of like religions.
Birds gotta fly, birds gotta sing. monstro gotta live. This is the only thing that drives me–the biological imperative to avoid equilibrium. And to appreciate, savor, and never take for granted.
Frederich Nietzsche wrote of the eternal return, whereby you repeat your life for all eternity. A trillion gazillion iterations of the same, exact thing. Would this be heaven or hell for you? It sounds hellish to me. But one day maybe I will think it’s not so bad. And then, maybe I will fully embrace it.
I’m agnostic, but occasionally I’ll entertain the thought that God is waiting for me in the afterlife. Will he be disappointed that I didn’t worship and “serve” him slavishly, blindly, mindlessly? Or will he be heartened to see that I tried to lead the life of a good, thoughtful person, with nary an expectation of an eternal reward nor trembling in fear over a wrathful punishment? If he is as wise and loving as they say he is, I don’t see why he wouldn’t be. And if he’s not, well, at least I would have defined my own purpose and stayed true to it. If hell is the price to pay for this kind of arrogance, then I guess I’m just gonna have to burn baby burn.
Dr Frankenstein: "It’s ALIVE!!!"
The post/poster name combo was just too good to ignore
I’m not aggressively atheist. I just feel there’s no real evidence to support religion. The fact that people devoutly believe in contradictory religions shows me that faith doesn’t mean something is real. You have to concede there are people who have faith in religions you don’t believe in. To me, the obvious question isn’t why don’t you believe in a religion? To me, the obvious question is why do you believe in one religion when you don’t believe in any of the other religions? To the OP (who I assume is a Christian) what drives you to not be a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist?
As for an after-life, that really doesn’t bother me. I like being alive but I don’t fear death. Why should I fear something I won’t experience? I’ll be non-existent. I’ll no more be suffering after my death than I was before my birth. (And if I’m wrong then an afterlife will be an unexpected bonus for me.)
If anything, I consider myself a “shrugnostic.” I’ve been debating the god question for over 50 years, and it no longer interests me. If pressed, I’m an atheist, but I’ve got more important issues to occupy my life.
What drives me, I guess, is what Einstein called ‘a holy curiosity’. There’s such a brilliant, beautiful, fascinating world out there whose every aspect amply repays attention and study, that I just can’t fathom looking at it and asking, ‘meh, but isn’t there something more?’. What more could anybody need?
Relegating the true meaning and purpose of everything to some inaccessible, spiritual realm effectively removes it from access; this is the reason the religious balk at the idea of then denying the existence of the whole realm: to them, it would truly be like taking away any purpose they might feel. But what atheism does (at least on my understanding), is not just ‘cutting away’ the spiritual, but questioning the need for it in the first place. In this sense, atheism is not a negative, but a positive philosophy of being in the world.
Just because you feel like that doesn’t mean that’s how the universe actually is. It’s just your feeling at the moment, after all. When you were a child you probably felt the universe centred around you and you’d live forever; you got over that as it was patently false. You can get over this too, in the same way
That’s not the underlying argument of atheism at all. It’s simply that there is no actual reason to posit that there is a god or gods, and in the absence of any evidence in that direction then the only reasonably position is that there are not. Which is atheism. Having realised that, one has to put everything one has into one’s life right now, as it is - not how you might wish it was.
Do you understand this is a personal feeling, and unrelated to external reality? The universe is not obliged to conform to your feelings and desires. There either is, or is not, god or gods however you perceive them. Your discomfort with both alternatives does not have any relevance to whether god(s) existed before you were born. You would be far better off accepting reality, than denying it because it makes you feel uncomfortable.
I doubt many atheists reconsider and become agnostics, I rather suspect most such movement is in the other direction - theists choose agnosticism as a half-way house they are comfortable with for the time being, then move further on the spectrum to fully-fledged atheism.
So no, since I arrived at atheism 40 years ago there has been no reconsideration, simply because there has no reason to do so. I am as certain as one can be that there are no gods. If I experienced any such discomfort as you describe (which I don’t) I would ascribe it to my own mentality, realising it was entirely within my head and had no external reality, and not fool myself that my own foibles and qualms required the universe to conform to them.
That’s what faith is - belief without proof, as opposed to science which is faith in proof! Proof is a central feature of the scientific method, it’s not applicable to religion, by definition. I also don’t see, at a fundamental level how these religions contradict each other, it’s more accurate to say that they all say essentionally the same thing, they just use a different language to say it. For instance, you can be Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist and a devout scientist simultaneously with no contradiction.
I think that science tells you “how” and religion tells you “why”. You need both for a complete picture.
‘Proof’ doesn’t figure in science at all; no theory is ever proven correct, just accepted on pain of falsification. In fact, if it’s not possible to rule out a theory, it’s not considered scientific (by most).
You can be a Hindu, believing in the concept of Atman, i.e. the true, unchanging self, and a Buddhist, following the doctrine of Anatman, i.e. the non-existence of a true, unchanging self, only if you don’t really know anything about either.
The answer any religion gives to most ‘why’-question is: because god. The answer it gives to the question ‘why god?’ is typically: shut up.