Atheist with crisis of conscience. Please help. (page 2)

shamus100

Someone started another thread where we're supposed to all get together to become some kind of a large army or something. Does this mean that anything that I do / believe in I have to join a group?

Dang.

When's the meeting? ** sigh **

beksbks

Are we supposed to go door to door? What do we say when we get there?

parakeet

jwfacts:

I think you are supposed to feel unfulfilled and show it. This can lead to practicing one of the two forms of atheism:

Appearing miserable and doing whatever you can to tear down happy followers of God
Being Hedonistic, sin as much as possible as therein lies true happiness for the non-believer

Oh no! The faith of atheism is already splitting into schisms??

Harassing theists or living a degenerate life. I don't like either of those choices, jwfacts. Are you sure there isn't some other way for a true-blue believing (or non-believing) atheist like myself to live a happy, moral life in keeping with the atheist faith and lifestyle?

Christians, help me out here! You seem to know more about atheism than the atheists do. Please enlighten me. I'm suffering here!

SirNose586

All of this is very helpful. Special T-shirts, Darwin as deity, Dawkins as prophet, bad manners to all.

There are no brothels in my small town (that I know of). Any suitable alternative sites? Remember I'm female and in my late 50s.

It would be especially nice if those who insist atheism is a faith and a lifestyle to weigh in on these questions. I want to be the very best atheist I can be.

I suppose a sufficiently seedy dive bar will have to do in a pinch. A drug house is a fine choice, but that's a bit more dangerous and they tend to get raided by police every so often. Jwfacts has got the right advice: hedonism is the key. Without a pesky diety to fear, you're free to drug/drink yourself into a stupor and engage in as many vices simultaneously as you can.

I know I can't feel good about myself if I haven't done my morning line of blow off of a hooker's a**, followed by a hearty round of cheers for Dawkins and Darwin, before I take my lunch of clubbed baby seal sandwiches. Mmmm! Delightful.

shamus100

Without a pesky diety to fear, you're free to drug/drink yourself into a stupor and engage in as many vices simultaneously as you can.

I'm going out to buy crack right now. And it's going through a needle, too. (is that even possible?? No matter, I'll make it possible...)

THANKS SIR NOSE!

noni1974

I've been told that I have the devil in me when I told someone I didn't believe in god or Jesus. So apparently I'm evil.

parakeet

SirNose: I know I can't feel good about myself if I haven't done my morning line of blow off of a hooker's a**, followed by a hearty round of cheers for Dawkins and Darwin, before I take my lunch of clubbed baby seal sandwiches. Mmmm! Delightful.

I can see that you're strong in your atheistic faith, SirNose, and I applaud you for it. However, for me, blow, hookers, and seal meat are difficult, if not impossible for me to obtain. Is there some other way that a sincere, believing atheist can practice her faith?

I guess what I'm searching for is not so much examples of atheistic faith and lifestyle, as I am the guiding principle, the source, the origin (and not of species), of atheistic faith that Christians are certain we have. I've not been able to find it, and so far, Christians are not helping to clarify this problem for me.

dgp

I don't think Mr. Christopher Hitchens will object to my copying this here (source: god is not great).

"Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically; the disagreement between professor Stephen Jay Gould and professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication... We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mistery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and -since there is no other metaphor- also the soul. We not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way). We are reconciled with living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary also holds true - that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow".

"Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says "I am so made that I cannot believe". In the village of Montaillou, during one of the great medieval persecutions, a woman was asked by the Inquisitors to tell them from whom she had acquired her heretical doubts about hell and resurrection. She must have known that she stood in terrible danger of a lingering death administered by the pious, but she responded that she took them from nobody and had evolved them all by herself. (Often, you hear the believers praise the simplicity of their flock, but not in the case of this unforced and conscientious sanity and lucidity, which has been stamped out and burned out in the cases of more humans than we shall ever be able to name)."

"There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow on our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow..."

shamus100

I can see that you're strong in your atheistic faith, SirNose, and I applaud you for it. However, for me, blow, hookers, and seal meat are difficult, if not impossible for me to obtain. Is there some other way that a sincere, believing atheist can practice her faith?

Parakeet,

If I may butt in, I'll tell you what makes you a better atheistic prick or prickette...

A) Spank your kids and love it. It's kool!

B) Do drugs / drink booze. It's the best. Now it doesn't have to be coke - horse tranquilizers work swimmingly!

C) Sacrifice kittens to Satan. PRAISE HIM!!

D) Eat some other type of cute animal... bonus points if it's endangered. Shark Fin Soup is a big plus! Bear parts - the best. I have several bear paw ashtrays I use to butt out my marijuana in.

dgp

Parakeet, you're falling prey to the idea that only religion can give you morals. That's just not true. And it seems you miss the sense of a clear direction, of someone telling you what is right or wrong. Well, that's the fun part of being an atheist: you give yourself direction. Your mind and your heart tell you what is right and wrong. You are free to analyze things and decide what is correct in your opinion. You don't have a faith to impose on anyone, and you can live in peace with all. It's usually the religious who can't suffer the existence of someone who doesn't share their faith.

Do you need a religion to tell you that killing is bad? The answer is, no. All you need to do is to see yourself in all your brothers and sisters (and, they don't have to share your religion for you to see them that way).

You may be lost now. Hang on. Keep going.

I was deeply religious. I can't be religious anymore. And, sorry as I am for this because it means I won't have someone by my side, I can't be any other way. This is me.

Atheist with crisis of conscience. Please help.

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