I believe the believer's present problems which exasperate mans dilemmas. Non religious people have more focus to look at solutions more objectively IE not searching for deistic/theological solutions, but concentrating on the humanistic causes .Too many atrocities are still committed in the name of whatever god!!
Talking with a nonbeliever...
by suavojr 48 Replies latest watchtower bible
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suavojr
Punkofnice said:
The human race will cease to exist. We will never know because we'll be long dead.
Very true, because evolution does not distinguish any species and thus the strongest always survive. But we also have to be honest to ourselves and admit that no one has the answer to the source of life and all the energy that surrounds us. At the same time, I also understand that an entity like an all-powerful God with an unlimited amount of energy is a more complicated and improbable hypothesis than having no God.
Galaxie said:
Non religious people have more focus to look at solutions more objectively IE not searching for deistic/theological solutions, but concentrating on the humanistic causes.
That is what I mean! When take out the God of the gaps, we realize that we can do more to bring change.
Can we go beyond what we have accomplished? How can we bring a positive change into this world as a species?
But mankind suffers from a darker side as well, i.g. greed, lust, wrath, envy, pride, etc… I also suspect that this is the reason why the God of any literature reflects these human features.
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galaxie
Yes!! ? We can go well beyond what we have accomplished more quickly( solving the worlds problems ). But it is dragged to a snails pace because of the continuing belief om millions that god has the solution .Humans working together for mans benefit NOT GODS would accelerate the process .
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Seraphim23
Interesting discussion! Being a believer, my view is that the current state of affairs with the so called problem of evil and freedom of choice and so on is a temporary matter. I.e The body and the universe is not all there is in my view. All one can do is point to near death experiences and other such interesting phenomena to show that understanding itself has limitations while providing evidence for something beyond that does not conform to physical modes of comprehension. The brain is physical and so is the universe and so any understanding will at some point become chicken and egg because anything outside of this paradigm is outside by definition. Sign posts is about as good at it will get but it’s a temporary situation.
Logic also helps to provide a few sign posts along the way. I.e anything that has a beginning has an end logically. Why is there then anything,? because something has always been that did not have a beginning and so will not have an end. What this might be is beyond comprehension because comprehension is by definition finite as is the brain. To argue that this is not the case is a problem in logic. However I find the word God a good label for this something as it seems to have a purpose as far as I can tell going by the evidence.
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jgnat
We can’t force people to be/do good
Yet we do all the time. It turns out people have an innate sense of justice and to prevent harm. There's reverence for life, sanctity, respect. How do we enforce goodness? Through laws, consequences, and peer pressure.
We can’t magically eradicate all sickness
Yet, with the help of scientific discovery and aggressive deployment, we have eradicated some diseases, incapacitated others, and reduced deaths from preventable diseases like Typhoid.
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/diseases/typhoid/en/
We can’t stay young a longer time
Ooh, but we are. Longevity is on the rise.
We can’t end wars, rape, murder, famines, etc.
Yet violence is on a downward trend. And we are getting smarter at reducing it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_slutkin_let_s_treat_violence_like_a_contagious_disease.html
Are these the critical issues of our time? Have we resolved all our problems as a species if we have these whipped? A fair number have to do with comfort; an imagined paradise where there is no death, disease, or hunger.
I imagine rather an ideal future where everyone has the opportunity to excel to their potential, a connectedness across all societies to work on world-busting problems together. Children who "pay it forward" and excel at helping each other succeed. I imagine a future where we save our world, it's stunning diversity, and ourselves.
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Finkelstein
No one is born an atheist. People choose to become atheists as much as they choose to become Christians. And no matter how strenuously some may try to deny it, atheism is a belief system. It requires faith that God does not exist.
(1) Atheist says, "There is no God."
A person would have to be omniscient and omnipresent to be able to say from his own pool of knowledge that there is no God. Only someone who is capable of being in all places at the same time - with a perfect knowledge of all that is in the universe - can make such a statement based on the facts. To put it another way, a person would have to be God in order to say there is no God.
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Wrong all humans that have been born on this planet were atheists, its just that there was an cumulative amount of ignorance of the
world/universe in which they lived, so gods were created from and out that ignorance out of necessity.
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God(s) = human ignorance
The reason why most gods worshiped today were created and developed in ancient time thousands of years ago.
.....including the ancient god Yahweh from the Hebrew sect.
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galaxie
Seraph...Why would it take a near death experience to show something beyond?. Beyond what? If you mean beyond our limit of understanding what would give someone a near death experience. Are you saying its a sign from god, would that be the same god as you use as a label? Wouldn't you feel he/ she would be playing a mind game with that person. Perhaps you are hinting at another realm entirely?
I am however sympathetic to your slant on the limitations of our understanding / consciousness .Yes I have similar thoughts about that although if there are "things" beyond our understanding, then by its very question how will we ever know?.But I don't close my mind to the possibility as our brains by their physical makeup must have a limit. CouldIit be god on the one hand...Big bang/ black hole/ anti matter on the other.
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cofty
suavojr - There is a blatant bait-and-switch going on in the OP.
no matter how strenuously some may try to deny it, atheism is a belief system. It requires faith that God does not exist. - Ron Rhodes
As an atheist I would not claim that god does not exist for a certainty. I have examined the evidence for god in great detail and find it to be unconvincing. If new evidence came to light I would want to look at it objectively. The sort of atheist that Rhodes refers to is a strawman.
Atheist covers a wide spectrum of unbelief. Anybody who finds themself unconvinced by the gradiose knowledge claims of theism is an atheist.
What does Rhodes mean by "god"? Is he referrring to the god of christain theism or a vague notion of an impersonal first cause? He is deliberately vague.
We can show beyond all reasonable doubt that the god of christian theism does not exist without resorting to faith. For a start we can strip god of his title of creator. Every living thing evolved from a common ancestor, this includes humans. Therefore there was no Adam and Eve, no original perfection and no fall. These are facts beyond all sensible dispute.
An objective study of the evidence shows clearly that the bible cannot be inspired of an omniscient deity.
We know that nobody gets their morality from the bible, they bring their ethics from elsewhere and then use the bible to try to support then. At the same time we have to ignore the most appalling ethics in the bible of the sort that would make a Taliban leader blush.
We can show that claims of answered prayers amounts to confirmation bias and special pleading.
Add to that "the hiddenness of god" and we have strong reasons to conclude that we can safely dismiss the god of theism.
On the other hand no rational person would assert they could prove there is no impersonal first cause. If such a thing exists then existing is all it does so why worry about it?
His attempt at apologising for god's inability/unwillingness to deal with suffering is pathetic. Let's take free will out of the equation and simply ask why god invented "natural evil"? Once a theologian comes up with an answer for that then we can talk about the rest.
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Finkelstein
suavojr used the word belief in describing atheism which is quite wrong, the proper wording should be
acceptance from acquired knowledge. or non-acceptance of spiritualism.
Some people believe in mythological stories to reach their beliefs in gods/spirits.
Atheists reject these stories as being just that fictionalized stories.
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NewYork44M
I went through the mental gyrations that you appear to be going through. Eventually I figured out that I got bigger stinkin problems than figuring out the source of live.
If you never get this resolved, don't consider this a deal breaker in your quest to happiness and freedom.