I believe in God and I pray. Maybe I’m a crappy example, though, because I don’t understand God the way all the atheists on this board seem to. I understand God as love. The entire living spirit of everything. Jesus being the human manifestation of this. My emotion toward God is gratitude. A variable and complicated gratitude but that word describes it best. I do not understand God as “needing” anything in the sense a person does. What God wants, however, is obvious: infinite awareness and infinite compassion. Since we are pathetically finite and self-absorbed, the idea of looking beyond ourselves to something greater is a kind of spiritual exercise which it is hoped draws us toward that awareness and compassion which is what God wants for us. Who hopes it? God does. How do I know this? Because infinite love isn’t complete while selfish little oblivious sparks pretend there is no such thing. We are a kind of consciousness hole, a rent in the fabric that wishes to be healed.
I am expressing it very badly.
There are a lot of words like worship, obey, father, judgement, sin, damnation and so forth that don’t seem to have much meaning for me. And for some, that means I’m no Christian. But oh well.
Okay, I’m a practicing mainline Christian, which means I don’t take the Bible quite as literally as some.
Little Nemo has it right. We don’t know what God does or doesn’t want. We know what the Bible says, but the Bible was written by humans. Its* overall theme* is TRUE, (the Old Testament was about the Jews’ very special relationship with God, and the New Testament is a collection stories of what people remembered Jesus did/said). I, and many other people of faith, don’t believe that every single detail has to be literally correct.
I would suspect that every form of faith with some sort of sacred text has at least a few followers that feel the same way.
Maybe God doesn’t care about worship at all. Maybe God feels that worship is a good thing, but not a deal-breaker. Maybe the Old Testament is actually understating things, and God is an all powerful being who’s really judgmental, who takes offense, and who has no hesitation to let us know it. Maybe, just maybe, the part about worship was stuck in there by people with good intentions who wanted to make sure believers would stick together.
Czarcasm, you and I have been here throughout eternity (okay, not literally.) I’m not asking you to convert, but I hope you’ll accept my answer.
I’m not following you here, although I, too, have nothing against polytheism. I don’t think you were following me very well either, come to think of it. I wasn’t trying to establish Justice as a god. Please reread what I posted, thanks.
You were the one who brought up ‘divine justice’. If justice is worthy of veneration, then everything is; that is fine, but I don’t have the time or inclination to venerate everything.
As I said- the infinite gods (if they exist) don’t need our worship, or even our acknowledgement - they will continue to do whatever it is they do, with or without our god-bothering. And they definitely don’t need organised god-bothering every Sunday.
There are different levels of knowledge in religion, as in any other field.
If you have a medical question, you can ask a snake-oil salesman (who will try to sell you his snake oil), or a pharmacist, or an ordinary doctor, or a medical researcher, or a biochemist, or a professor of medicine specializing in that particular field. You will get different answers, with different levels of accuracy, detail and complexity. And different professors of medicine may have different theories and opinions, different doctors may prescribe different treatments.
But you will always get the best answers from the best-qualified people.
It’s similar in religion. It’s easy enough to laugh at televangelist snake-oil salesmen, or feel superior to an ordinary guy who goes to church on Sunday and doesn’t think intellectually about it, who can’t give good answers to your questions.
But if you sincerely want the best answers, you have to go to the greatest thinkers on religion, not to the lowest-level people. You have to go to Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or the Talmud, or the commentaries of Adi Shankara, or the great Buddhist philosophers. The answers won’t be glib or easy to understand, but they are the real answers.
If you want modern answers, I highly recommend the books of David Bentley Hart. He’s one of the foremost intellectuals writing about religion today, and he deals with 21st century concerns and responds to current atheist thinkers. As David Bentley Hart says in The Experience of God:
In this book he examines what the world’s major religions actually mean by the concept of ‘God’. Obviously it’s NOT the crude idea of ‘some big mystical person’ that many atheists (like the OP of this thread) seem to imagine. More interestingly, he shows that all the major religions have very similar concepts of God, despite their superficial differences.
If you can engage with or refute the arguments of David Bentley Hart - or if you can even reason at that level of intellect, learning, and clarity of logic - then your views as an atheist will mean something.
Otherwise you’re like someone who has a pet theory of physics and argues that distinguished mainstream physicists are all wrong, but can’t solve a simple differential equation.
If you want serious answers, they are there. But - as in any field of knowledge - you have to put in the effort to understand them.
In my country we have largely moved beyond god-bothering. Empty churches show how irrelevant this activity is here.
Indeed, a case could be made that there is an element of disrespect involved in organised religion - if you choose one form of worship you are denigrating the others. I’d go as far as to say that there are an infinite number of ways that humanity could interact with God, or with the gods, or with the non-personal concept of non-god that is at the heart of Buddhism, and they are all wrong. So long as we realise that the act of worship is entirely divorced from the divine, we can do whatever we like to entertain ourselves in this respect.
As a child, I hated getting dressed and going to church every Sunday. By high school, I was tired of the same thing every week: Stand up, kneel, sing hymns. I found the Bible difficult to comprehend. When my parents stopped forcing me to go to church, I stopped. Then, a few years ago, I stumbled across the Skeptics Annotated Bible. That was the cinder block that broke the camel’s back. To summarize, let me quote Richard Dawkins:
The same David Bentley Hart that openly admits to avoiding dealing with the core atheist argument that he claims no theist can answer – that there is evidence of a just or benevolent god. The same David Bentley Hart that claims that he has no tolerance for fundamentalist religious claims while offering up the same tired old excuse for the lack of human understanding of god because, you see, ‘god works in mysterious ways’.
David Bentley Hart is trying to pull the same parlor trick that every reasonably intelligent (I’ll give him that) theologian does anymore. He tries to distance himself from the common religious texts (because they are obviously flawed) and moves the goal posts in a way that makes god an indescribably vague and impossible target. He has reduced god to pseudo-scientific sophistry and dares atheists to prove him wrong.
Believe whatever you want. But, if you want a serious discussion, put forward a compelling theistic argument. I will understand it if you present it in a manner that does not insult my intelligence or require me to first suspend my critical functions.
You can spend years contemplating the blind guess you make, but in the end it is still that-a blind guess. When it comes to the making of the universe, the hereafter or the entity that might be behind it all your “greatest thinkers” have no more an inside track than Pat Roberson or Creflo Dollar. Puffery and and a well-used thesaurus does not a “real answer” make.
It’s not a strawman if it’s in response to people who actually think that and have clout.
Perhaps, when atheists make reference to dumb shit like Creationism, they’re more concerned with actual Creationists who want to actually change school curricula than they are with an academic who writes about “art, literature, religion, philosophy, film, baseball, and politics” (wiki).
If you want atheists to stop talking about the supernatural as “some ghostly cosmic mechanic invoked to explain gaps in current scientific knowledge”, you should convince more religious people to stop using that way of debating and thinking. As long as they exist and have clout, it will be worth responding to.
Maybe you’ll say: “That’s not my problem.” Ok, but then don’t expect atheists to stop addressing that because it doesn’t apply to you. Because this kind of debate isn’t about you or your personal existential and metaphysical questionings, as important as they may be to you.
If religious political and social clout mainly took the form of Mr. Rodgers, John Shelby Spong or Rob Bell, there would be as much opposition to religion as there is to horoscopes.
tl;dr: You want atheists to stop addressing moronic arguments? Get more (co)religionists to stop using moronic ways of thinking and trying to influence government policy. That’s what it’s about even if that’s not what you wish it were about.
Now, if you’d like to start a thread where you expound upon what you found interesting in Hart’s book, I personally would find that interesting.
If it matters, I’m not sure if I’d call myself agnostic or atheist, these often come down to definitions which are ill-disguised attempts to frame the issue favorably to one’s side.
I don’t care about getting a gold star for my views as an atheist meaning something, I care about homosexuals not being beaten, planes not flying into towers and dim & scared people not having a banner to rally behind to fuck up the world for the rest of us.
Mysterious unseen forces conspired to prevent me from posting within the 5 minutes timeframe: I spoke in the first person, not because it’s about me, but because I think it’s reflective the main thrust of atheist arguments. I may be wrong about that but, like I suggested above, it’s not just conceptual disagreement, it’s conceptual disagreement to the extent that it can enable a very messed up undercurrent of obscurantism and oppression. Take that last part out and far fewer people would give a fuck, theology would just be people geeking out on an especially foofy… I’m sorry, lofty, topic.
No QuickSilver, you’re supposed to read and meditate on hundreds of pages of text because someone on Internet said that if you don’t do that, you’re being unfair.
Now go read 500 pages of the latest Marxist academic analysis before saying anything bad about the USSR.