Is Atheism/Evolutionism Dangerous? Questions for Unbelievers

by Perry 156 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • Seeker4
    Seeker4

    Perry,

    I've been trying to follow this thread, at the same time keep up with the one I started on the evolution exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History (I used your board name in the title), which has also been flying along!

    The issue I have with your personal experience of Christ, is that it, or something very much like it, is duplicated by other Christians who believe quite differently from you, and also by Muslims, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Scientologists, Wiccans, and believers in a thousand other gods and demons.

    Just substitute a different diety and the experiences are completely interchangeable.

    My take on this is that these are all self-delusional. We think we're a special child of god, therefore we experience life as god's special chosen one. It's self-fulfilling - and has nothing to do with our relationship with a supernatural being. It is simply a self-created form of personal reality, which is why it is duplicated by every religion on the face of the earth - past and present. There is nothing unique in your belief, nothing that makes it only the domain of those who believe in the god of the Christian bible. It is the basis of ALL religion, and has its roots in religion's ability to delude us into thinking that we and our beliefs are different and more special than all others - when in reality they are all just slight variants of the same thing.

    S4

  • Perry
    Perry

    Seeker, I'm getting sleepy. But real quick:

    Do any of the religionists that you cite above have a way of bridging the gap between them and God? By gap I mean the sin that separates them. How do they acheive justification for their existence since it is so easy for us to be condemmed by our own standards much less God's?

    I don't believe they do when looked at closely. Of course we're all familiar with the WT shell game with the F&DS and Jesus and Jehovah. But the fact remains that we all rejected Christ every Memorial.

    The self-fulfilling prophecy idea is just plain wrong to my and my wife's experience. She is from Czech Republic... very atheist. She will confess Jesus the same as me. Millions of other born again Christians will too.

    When I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I spoke in tongues for 7 to 8 hours each night for almost a week and woke up fully rested. It felt so good that I didn't even notice it until the third night. I prayed for God to stop it one night as a test but to continue the following night. He honored that request. What am I supposed to do..... ignore God's Grace? My wife is a witness to this fact. It was quite an experience and does much for my faith. It was never repeated.....that's been three years now. I just happened to ask for it one night in prayer....no big deal. I had been a believer for about a year and went to a church that doesn't really believe in that sort of thing.

    The fact is that God is the one who chooses. Nothing we can do can trigger his selection other than coming to Jesus. Jesus said he'd accept all who come. Do all come? No, only those called. You must be called. To attempt to justify yourself or to meet God on any other terms will only incur his wrath. "Otherwise Christ (himself) died for nothing". I guess I wouldn't be too happy either if I paid a ransom price and the the kidnapped told me that they wanted a cut too....hehehe

  • Seeker4
    Seeker4

    Perry,

    The Christian god chooses you and your atheist wife for an estactic experience, converting her, convincing you. The god of Moses chooses the fundamentalist orthodox Jew for a similar experience, Allah chooses the Moslem believer. On and on it goes.

    Let me share this: When I was a Witness, I had a cleaning business (how unusual!!!), and one night I was cleaning the lunch room at this company, and there was this magazine someone had left on a table. It was an evangelical Christian magazine, and I picked it up and began to read it. I was shocked to find that experience after experience in the magazine about how god or Jesus had been personally involved in someone's life was exactly the same experiences I had heard at dozens of Witness assemblies and conventions. Then, later, I happened to be reading about Mother Teresa, and lo and behold, I'm reading about the same exact experiences happening in her life.

    Now, the Witnesses would explain this in that it's Jehovah and Jesus doing this for them, but it's Satan, acting as an "angel of light" doing it for all the other religions. The "false" religions.

    My take on all this? It's ALL self-delusion. Religion is just a way of making people think they are special to some higher being - Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Zeus, Thor, whatever. In actuality, it's just human deception - and most often we're deceiving ourselves. Why do I feel that way? Because it is an experience that is basic to ALL religions, and all of those religons consider that THEY are the ONLY true faith. Yet that experience is universal in religion.

    I see the human mind as capable of remarkable self-deception. We all want to feel special, we all want to feel that we are god's chosen one.

    S4

  • wanderlustguy
    wanderlustguy

    It always kills me when someone does this baiting thing...looking to help straighten out those darn athiests. Especially when you get something like this:

    When I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I spoke in tongues for 7 to 8 hours each night for almost a week and woke up fully rested. It felt so good that I didn't even notice it until the third night. I prayed for God to stop it one night as a test but to continue the following night. He honored that request. What am I supposed to do..... ignore God's Grace? My wife is a witness to this fact. It was quite an experience and does much for my faith. It was never repeated.....that's been three years now. I just happened to ask for it one night in prayer....no big deal. I had been a believer for about a year and went to a church that doesn't really believe in that sort of thing.

    The power of the human mind always amazes me, both in the effect suggestion has on it and the delusion it can suffer to support a belief. God stopped you from "speaking in tongues"? Or did you stop yourself? Pretty easy one to pull off even subconsciously.

    But that's not the point. As long as Christians or Muslims or Spaghetti Monsterists continue to think it "their God given mission" to straighten out everyone else and make them beleive in "their" interpretation of the Almighty and Truth, there will never be any kind of peace.

    Athiests probably know better than anyone that we are all in this together, the whole planet. Their disbelief in God is probably better for mankind than any other religion you could choose. Religions find fault with everything about the world, instead of finding the beauty in it. So the answer is eveolutionists and ahtiests don't depend on God or Jesus to make it better, they take responsibility for their own actions and decisions, realizing there is no savior aside from themselves.

    For the record, I'm not an athiest, but I don't beleive God killed (or killed by allowing people to die) hundreds of millions of people that he "loves" because our great grandaddy to the thousandth degree took a bite out of something handed to him by our great mamaw. And I definitely don't beleive he would want people killing each other over what they call Him.

    Hell, even calling God God or Him or Jehovah is a real slap in his face if you ask me, he ought to be pretty pissed off at all the folks who are taking others lives and liberties in his name.

    I think of all people, Athiests may be the only ones that truly cherish the gift we were given, because they assume this is the only life we have and make the very best of it...how ironic is that?

    WLG

  • bernadette
    bernadette

    Perry

    I've been following the two complimentary threads with interest -

    Have also just finished reading Sam Harris' book The end of Faith. There's an interesting chapter entitled 'The Eithics of Good and Evil'.

    The point it makes (from an atheistic standpoint) is that the pursuit of happiness for oneself leads to the pursuit of happiness for others. Here is a quote

    "the point is that the disposition to to take the happiness of others into account - to be ethical - seems to be a rational way to augment one's own happpiness"

    bernadette

  • DanTheMan
    DanTheMan

    You misunderstood Dan. You imagine me to be a religionist. I am not. I am of God now. He lives inside me by means of the new spirit He put in me. When I read the bible, many times my spirit confirms what is true therefore providing two witnesses.... the word and the spirit. God speaks through both. That is my testimony to you. Millions of others would testify the same to you. I'm not lying.

    When I go through my day, I'm not dominated by the discrepancies between what I believe are my standards and what I practice are my standards. I don't sin (less) because I am trying harder, I sin less because I learn to yield better to the spirit that lives inside. It's completely opposite than the JW experience.

    Perry, you feel you that you're doing right because you feel that God's spirit lives inside you, confirming truth for you. What if you're wrong? What if this 'yielding better to the spirit' is all psychology, all synapses firing according to the laws of physics that made this universe and sentient life possible? How can you be sure?

    It seems to me that you've created a very circular logic: when non-believers say that they feel they are doing the right thing that they have no justification for this, but believers do because God tells them so, and that they know God is telling them so because they can feel it inside, and we non-believers just have to accept this. I don't accept that this "spirit" inside you comes from a supernatural being, and therefore I don't accept your method of confirming truth as having validity.

  • AuldSoul
    AuldSoul

    DanTheMan,

    If it motivates me toward what I consider a positive life, what does it matter how I intellectually frame the experience? How can I be better off doubting the source. Perhaps I'd be a mass murderer otherwise. Are you sure you want people off the sauce?

    Respectfully,
    AuldSoul

  • DanTheMan
    DanTheMan
    Are you sure you want people off the sauce?

    Oh absolutely not! I would never have this sort of discussion with my 64 year old Catholic mom, because religion is her psychological cornerstone, as it is for millions. I'm not an anti-religion crusader, but if people come on this board insisting that they know they're right because God tells them so and thus they are in a morally superior position to the atheist, I'm going to have something to say in response.

  • funkyderek
    funkyderek

    Perry:

    Does the belief that there is no all-loving Diety in which to be accountable to make it easier or harder to treat and judge others they way that you want to be treated and judged?

    Definitely harder. Believing that there is an absolute good and evil which can be checked by reference to a holy book/man is a lot easier than having to consider moral dilemmas on their own merit. However, the trouble with taking the easy way out is that there's no way to distinguish between an action or behaviour that is genuinely harmful and one that is merely condemned by the holy book. For example, you and I would both think stealing is wrong. I think it is wrong because it is depriving another person of the fruit of their labours, it is gaining an unfair advantage at someone else's expense. You would (perhaps) think it is wrong because the bible says so. Doesn't really matter so far, does it? The end result is that neither of us will steal from our neighbour. The trouble comes when bad advice gets mixed up with the good, and it all gets muddled together in the holy book. You might therefore think homosexuality is wrong because the bible says so, whereas I, seeing no victims of such behaviour, do not see it as wrong.

    So while it's harder to think about your choices independently of a one-size-fits-all book of rule, it's definitely more intellectually and emotionally rewarding, and it promotes more tolerant and compassionate behaviour to our fellow humans. Of course, you don't need to be an atheist to have a solid moral foundation, but you need to be advanced enough not to automatically accept any text.

    Since evolution supposes that life and ultimately man who is at the top of the chain

    Man is not in any important sense at the top of the train. The evolutionary history of life on earth is more like a tree where all the top branches are all organisms alive today. A simplified version is below:

    alt

    got here through a process of the fittest dominating and killing off the weaker

    This is a misinterpretation of the idea of "survival of the fittest". Organisms survive and reproduce by being better able to survive and reproduce in the environment in which they find themselves. The way different organisms do this varies immensely - there are some 10 million different species alive today (give or take an order of magnitude!). Very few do it by regularly killing members of their own species, and for many organisms, survival depends on other members of their species. Wolves, for example, hunt in packs and share the spoils of the hunt. A wolf who didn't cooperate wouldn't survive very long. Humans similarly hunt in packs (or nowadays, work in groups) and need to cooperate to survive.

    and since most modern evolutionists in democracies no longer think that this is good to practice, how do you deal with the fact that you are a living contradiction of your own belief since you pronounce the same thing both good and bad?

    I hope I've demonstrated that evolutionists do not believe that survival depends on "dominating and killing off the weaker", but even if they did, that says nothing about whether the situation in which we find ourselves is good or bad. I know that if I jump off a cliff I will fall to my death but that doesn't stop me believing in gravity.

    If the process that brought us here (which I'm assuming is good since the A/E position is that we are a good thing by nature, correct me if I'm wrong)weeded out competing others (a failure of would be that we would not be here and that's bad) by a survival of the fittest, then why should people interfere (offer assistance to the weak) with a process that has worked so far?

    Evolution may have produced us by a process of survival of the fittest but that does not necessarily mean that is what we want for the future. You might only exist because your grandmother's first husband was hit by a bus, but that does not mean you'll be happy to be hit by a bus, just so your wife can remarry and eventually produce grandchildren.

    Evolution is a slow and clumsy process with no goals. We as humans have evolved large brains capable of understanding the world and predicting the future. We have our own goals which may not coincide with the random meanderings of evolution.

    Many people just do not connect with this heritage of violence that athiests maintain gives them freedom from religious servitude. Many wonder if athiests have split personalities since there is such cognitive dissonance between what they believe is their origins and what they publically practice.

    I've never heard of anyone wondering that but it seems you do. It seems you can't get over the idea that the way things are is the way they ought to be. I'm sure you wouldn't have to go back too far in your ancestry to find instances of untimely death, rape, arranged marriage, unwanted pregnancies and so on, all of which were absolutely essential to produce you, whether there's a god or not. I'm sure you don't think that those were good things even though you like the end result.

    The next logical question is how do you know when you are "doing good"? What do you base that on? If you do good, but I maintain that it's bad, how do you know the difference as an "evolved athiest"?

    Well, how do you know? Is something good because your god says so, or is there an independent standard of good to which your god adheres? If the latter, then there's no difficulty. Atheists can use the same standard of good that your god uses. If the former, then "good" is simply another word for whatever God wants. It means might is right, which, ironically, is what you seem to think atheists believe.

  • Little Drummer Boy
    Little Drummer Boy

    First comment on this thread and I know I'm coming into it late and it is pretty much getting sealed up, but I have to say that I find this thread to be deeply, deeply, disturbing.

    Why? Well, read on...

    Even though the question was directed at Dan,

    AuldSoul said:

    DanTheMan,

    If it motivates me toward what I consider a positive life, what does it matter how I intellectually frame the experience? How can I be better off doubting the source. Perhaps I'd be a mass murderer otherwise. Are you sure you want people off the sauce?

    AuldSoul, what Dan didn't quote from Perry's last post was the following:

    Perry said to Dan:

    In your depraved state, you have only two options. (1) You can create an illusion of righteousness and justify yourself even though you continue to commit crimes against your neighbors and against God, (even if they seem to get less as you age). If you do this God is justified in punishing you the same way you already admitted you would punish other "uncivilized people". How could you complain if God judged you by your own standards?

    Who the hell is Perry to say that Dan is depraved (and yes I understand "depraved" in the "spiritual" context of this thread) ? So am I depraved, dishonest, unethical, nasty, evil, blah, blah,blah, whatever because I no longer believe in the - oh, so loving jeeheebus and his not so loving - kill the small children - daddy?

    NO I'M NOT!

    "Christians" like Perry disgust me for their conceit.

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