Why can’t a good one be worthy of worship while being only ludicrously powerful?
I mean, consider a creator-god who needs six whole days to create a universe and then settles in for a day of rest; that’s not omnipotence, but it’s still pretty danged impressive compared to what you or I (or everyone on the planet working together) could do in a week. Why should omnipotence be a “worthy of worship” criterion?
Well, like I said in another thread, I had an experience that makes it hard for me not to have at least some faith.
Not in the part of the world my people come from.
Shangri-La?
Ah, so your stone age hunter-gatherers were more enlightened and civilized than stone age hunter-gatherers from elsewhere? :rolleyes:
All my ancestors vanished without a trace.
I don’t know if I’d call it “insanity”. I’d say that religion is the result of the accidental interaction of a constellation of behaviors that taken individually provide survival value.
For example, we tend to see patterns where there are none, because a false negative is more dangerous than a false positive. If I jump a hundred times because I see a panther where there isn’t one, that’s preferable to not jumping ONCE because I didn’t see a panther when there was one.
We also tend to assign explanations to patterns to help us predict how they will repeat. An explanation that is even a little correct (even if it contains a lot of error) is better than no explanation at all. So we tend to come up with all sorts of half-baked ideas to make sense of what’s happening around us.
And since we’re social animals, we put a lot of weight on what others tell us, particularly elders, particularly elders we’re related to. This helps us pass down useful information from one generation to another, but it also makes us particularly susceptible to not examining the beliefs we acquire when we’re young.
The result is religion and faith. We pick up a set of half-baked ideas from our family and community that explain a lot of things pretty well if you don’t look too hard to find all the holes and gaps. And we selectively observe a bunch of false positives that confirm what we’re expecting to see. It’s not insanity any more than our natural cravings for fats and sweets is insanity (even though both are counterproductive in our modern times of plenty).
The problem isn’t that he’s not powerful enough. The problem is he’s still too powerful.
The POE can be summarized as “If I could help everyone in the world improve their lot, and it wasn’t too hard or personally taxing, then I probably would, because I’m a halfway decent guy. God could, but clearly doesn’t, which proves either he’s not a halfway decent guy, or he’s not real.”
God could help out a lot just by making manna appear from heaven on everyone’s doorstep each morning. Starvation - gone! But he doesn’t. And because he doesn’t we know he either can’t - or won’t. And it’s a pretty sorry god who can’t make a relatively modest amount of food appear. So we’re left with either evil or nonexistence (or complete unawareness of our plight).
Now, as an atheist, I’m perfectly willing to entertain the idea of evil or unaware gods. I don’t beleve in 'em, not any more than I do in Darth Vader, but I can at least entertain the idea at a theoretical level and allow for the possiblity that there might be higher-level beings ignoring our plight, or that Star Wars might be a (suconciously recieved) documentary of distant past past events.
But nobody seems to want to talk about the evil, insane, blind, stupid, or dead gods for some reason - they always want to talk about the impossible ones. And there’s little point in waxing theoretical about dieties that can’t even exist in theory.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
Well, the Greeks and Romans certainly had their fair share of messed up gods. I still think a pantheon of mutually conflicting gods makes a lot more sense re the state of the world than the idea of a single omnimax one. And Jehova used to be just one god out of many.
Of course - which is probably why satan is so popular (or was) as an excuse for the ills of the world. Though in practical terms the dieties would have to be preemptively preventing each other from acting at all - we don’t see manna appearing and then disappearing repeatedly as the competing gods keep undoing each others’ good/bad works, after all.
It should also be noted that the Greek/Roman gods weren’t really actively competing to influence mortals’ lives that much; they got by by largeley being apathetic most of the time, which made them a plausible fiction that played well with confirmation bias.
Organized religion is probably too new to have been selected so much. What I think is more likely is that religion is an appropriation of naturally-selected behaviors. Much of it was for complex social interactions. Part of it involved intuitive reasoning. Basically making up shit to fill in the blanks in information. People (and probably other animals) needed to do this to survive especially when snap judgments were required. Also humans, being social beings, anthropomorphize everything (including an overuse of causality to create a purpose for a phenomenon) to be able to fill in the holes in their information so that they can problem solve and make decisions. This is why some people insist on filling in unknowns with supernatural things that have human characteristics (gods). This is also why theists simply can’t accept the answer, “I don’t know.” Finally, this is why theists keep starting these types of discussions. They can’t believe that atheists aren’t filling in the blanks with some kind of sciency fantasy.
Typically, knowledge will overcome this natural god-creating in many people. Unfortunately for us, natural religion-making became organized with civilizations. Here, people become brainwashed so much that they are incapable of accepting information to replace their fantasizing. Even worse, people are threatened either by violence or, just as bad, social ostracism for not believing.
Here’s a youtube video of Andy Thomson’s talk
I didn’t say anything about “organized”. Religion in general appears to go back as far as we have evidence about human behavior. It’s easily old enough.
Nope there was plenty of genocide and murder and avarice in Asia but there weren’t a lot of holy wars over Buddhism, Confucianism or Shamanism. We managed to kill each other for things like land and wealth without pretending it was about God.
Doesn’t that undercut the notion that religion was bred into us by centuries of religious prosecution and wars that made religiosity a survival trait?
I realize this is kinda late, but I felt it only right to respond to the following to clarify:
I think you misunderstand my point…which was not about your mental state, but your statement (and its accuracy/ramifications).
All I did was to take your original statement (“my religious faith is not grounded in facts but I believe nonetheless”), provide definitions of psychosis and fact, and show you that IF your original statement is true AND you accept my definitions, then you (or any religious believer who says their faith is not grounded in facts) suffer a psychosis by definition.
I have little to no desire to argue as to whether you are psychotic, delusional, or stone-cold sane (although, as my response to DanBlather indicates, I do hold an opinion) and I’m in no position to confirm nor deny that you experienced a “vision”. Evidently, using the definitions I supplied, you feel that that experience qualifies as “fact”. If so, then your original statement was incorrect and should have been something like: “my religious faith is grounded in a personal experience I had; I cannot deny its vividness, impact, nor truth, and it is why I believe.”
That seems to me to be a stronger argumentative position (not to mention a better reason for belief) than to posit irrationality from the start.
Atheists: Why are you so certain of your non beliefs?
Two words: Rush Limbaugh
And I’m still going to go with it being a result of the mystery of birth, as opposed to the mystery of death. Until homo whatever made the connection between sex and birth, that would have been the biggest puzzle of our existence, and seems to fit the early reverence for Earth Mothers perfectly.
Religion, belief in a spiritual world.
I have that thought constantly, it has never led me to entirely lose faith.
So Athiests can be Buddhist?