Of course, I would too. The spirit of the thought experiment though is that there is probably something about our reality that, if unchanged in the alternate reality, would make you accept it reluctantly, kind of like how you would first feel if your trickster friend won the lottery. You’d probably still be skeptical even after they started showing you the documents, winning ticket, etc…
I realize this sounds like I’m posing a leading question trying to get people to admit they hate God or something like that but that’s not my intention at all.
Religions contradict each other, even about very fundamental things.
Therefore, most religions are wrong about most of what they teach.
Therefore, religious thinking is, in general, a lousy way to go about understanding life and the universe.
Therefore, barring some sort of empirical corroboration, religious claims about the nature of reality should be given no more credence than random, made-up crap.
But no religion has provided any empirical evidence in support of its claims.
Therefore, trying to understand the universe through religious teachings is no better than just believing in random made-up crap.
One thing that always bugged me - the idea of choice or ‘picking’ a religion. It’s like somebody has said “Today I’ve decided that I believe in the tooth-fairy” You can’t just decide what you believe in! You either believe it or you don’t, or you go through a lengthy process of being convinced either way - you never decide!
The things you say are correct Tethered Kite and yet I don’t feel any less inclined to totally dismiss the idea of God.
In fact if we humans are flawed as you describe, why do such a vast majority of us believe in this thing??
The difference here is that the loons in your analogy are very much in the minority and the vast majority are the sceptics. With religion it’s the other way round.
I happen to also not believe in spirituality.
It’s not so weird when you consider a religion to be a code of conduct or life philosophy, rather than getting all metaphysical and talking about belief in supernatural beings. What you’re doing there is trying to find a codified set of rules that roughly match how you yourself feel about the world.
Yeah, it’s a lot like starting with a personal opinion and finding evidence to support that opinion, but when you’re talking about a nebulous thing like how to live your life I don’t think it matters too much.
I really dislike the Supreme Being part of religions. I much prefer philosophies.
There are no arguments or evidence I find compelling at all. I’ve read of miraculous displays of sunlight dancing in front of thousands of people. I’ve heard of statues crying human blood or lapping milk. I’ve heard stories of NDEs and ghosts and incorruptible corpses. Those may be “miracles” to some people but to me they’re just instances of people misunderstanding what’s happening. Like seeing the face of Jesus on a tortilla. It must bring the people experiencing it a huge amount of comfort but it’s silliness to me.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to believe in anything and I really want to. I’ve asked other people how they get faith, but nobody has ever been able to give me a sensible working answer. If someone like me WANTS so badly to believe in something, you’d think I would. If I did, I guess it wouldn’t matter whether there was evidence or not. As it is, I doubt much would convince me. Even if a god came and made magic or healed someone right in front of me I’d probably think it was a trick or that I was mad.
Remember that time when there was that big civil war in Rwanda, with one group of Christians massacring another group of Christians, and Yahweh said, “Oh, HELL no. FUCK that shit!” and then he was all, “Mike! Gabe! Get your celestial asses down to Africa and get to smiting in my name! Take as many seraphim as you need to get the point across, and if if you see anybody about to gang-rape a twelve-year-old girl, feel free to assume that I want that guy carried bodily to Hell. I’ve already put in a call to Lucifer and he’s all set to receive.”
I would have described myself as agnostic for quite a while. My atheism corresponded with the Indonesian tsunami in 2004 in which 230,000 people died. How could a beneficent god allow such a massive loss of life? Did all of those people deserve to die? I think not. They died because of a random act of nature. Their goodness or evil, their belief or non-belief, their prayers and their religion were irrelevant. This convinced me that there is no “personal” god – hence a-“theism”.
As for a-“deism” – that is, is there an omnipotent being that doesn’t act in the universe, the point is moot. He/she/it doesn’t care about me, I don’t care about he/she/it.
I don’t think I could pick out a specific point which I find most compelling, but if generalisations are ok, I would say “inconsistencies”. I don’t find the fantastical stuff all that unreasonable - well, I do, but it’s unreasonable of me to find it unreasonable, if that makes sense. It’s inconsistencies and contradictions that seem the most compelling points to me, at least in terms of a lack of proof.
If a believer came to me and set out a theory of belief which I considered to have no contradictions or problems of logic, then even if they include seemingly fantastical things I would at the least hold no active disbelief in it. I guess it’s equivalent to saying “they must have a working argument”, which isn’t that helpful.
Meh. The latter usually tends to be a subset of the former. “This/these supreme being(s) exist(s) and say(s) you should act this way.” In addition to the creation myths and the like, of course.
Yeah, Rwanda and the Holocaust pretty much sealed the deal with me. Stalinist Russia, too. These two events pretty much directly contradicted everything we learned about a kind and loving god in the Judeo/Christian/Islamic holy books. Sidney Hook, my favorite philosopher, and the closest thing I have left to a real life hero, once called the Holocaust the twentieth century argument against the existence of God. He died before Rwanda, but I have little doubt he would have included that in his description.
There is simply no way to rationalize around these events. I’ve heard everything from the self-contradictory (The Holocaust was created by man, and God, while all-powerful, couldn’t intervene) to the disgusting (The Jews brought it on themselves by rejecting Christ.). But some things you can’t argue your way out of, and that’s why I’m an atheist.
Pentecostal Christians of my acquaintance are quick to blame Jews for the Holocaust, and to explain away Rwanda as being due to the Rwandans not being real Xtians. I am waiting for someone my own gender, age and size to say this in front of me so I can kick his ass.
The psychology that explains the God of the Gaps is the concept that is most compelling to me.
It’s so understandably human how ancient people, when confronted with something they didn’t understand, decided that “A Wizard Did It”. It’s easy to see how many things used to be the province of deities and are now actually understood, and to see how modern religions are rooted in the same kind of “if we don’t understand it, it’s god” magical thinking.
The fact that natural disasters and long, painful diseases like cancer and AIDS exist (or hell, any diseases). You’re telling me that there’s a force in the universe that created humans and can do anything it wants, and that it cares deeply about human suffering? Doesn’t that mean that it could just snap a finger and eliminate all pain from humanity? Since it can control nature, why do things like tornadoes and tsunamis even exist? Maybe I could believe the idea of an omnipotent something if the idea weren’t so fantastical (as Patty O’Furniture said), but it’s also benevolent? Nuh-uh, no way. Seems like the daily newspaper has enough evidence to dispute the existence of this God. If the physical suffering and countless senseless deaths in world history aren’t a figment of our collective imagination, then there isn’t any God who cares a whit about us.