GuD

That's exactly what I'm saying except written fancierly.

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I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc

Paedantic Basterd

Right. I just like to discuss stuff, but nobody's interested in airing their minds with me.

GuD

I'm confused. My first post on this page was directed at GB.

What is going on?



I think I'm too stoned for this.

__________________
I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc

Paedantic Basterd

You might be. I was jumping in and clarifying my feelings because you made a point I agreed with and felt I could elaborate on.

GuD

Hoookay. Gotcha. S'all clear n gravy now

__________________
I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc

GuitarBizarre

The thing is, the concept of a higher being is a human concept. Its weighed up on its own merits. To ascribe the responsibility of explaining it to some nebulous higher being is to miss a key part of the puzzle - at some point, man created religion. Why?

Historically there have been two answers. Delusion or political leverage. Not one religion in all of history has ever been born lived and died without being either explained as the ramblings of a madman, or the tool of a political leader. It lets madmen tell themselves they understand the world, and it lets rulers tell their subjects they understand the world.

If neither of those things were factors, and if religions of the past had ever had a valid explanation for things science has subsequently disproven (Apollos chariot for example), the there might be an argument for it. But as far as i'm concerned, religion is a human tool created for human reasons. To address it as if humans have simply stumbled upon something by accident stretches things in my view.

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Paedantic Basterd

Terror Management Theory suggests that religion (and culture) developed as a tool to comfort the human mind when confronted with its own mortality; the idea is that being a species that can foresee our deaths and be preoccupied with the prospect, religion was developed to help keep us from coming unglued about knowing we're all going to die.

It is of course a theory, but studies indicate that feelings of mortality and one's strength of beliefs are linked; if subjects have their mortality made salient in an experiment and are afterwards prompted openly or covertly about their thoughts on other cultures, people tend to feel stronger in their own beliefs and feel more threatened and closed-off by those of anyone else.

The Batlord

Anything is possible, but that doesn't mean we have to treat those ideas seriously if they haven't provided any kind of compelling evidence. For instance, we don't treat the ideas of Flat Earthers seriously. Why should we? There beliefs have been proven to be nonsense. But for all we know there may be some great, all-encompassing conspiracy that may be tricking us believe that the Earth is round, or some deity may be pulling some kind of hoo doo on us. You can't prove otherwise with one hundred percent accuracy. It's impossible. But since there is no evidence to believe this is true we don't treat this idea with any seriousness. The only real difference with religion is that there are a bunch of people that do treat the idea seriously without any better evidence, so we live in societies where believing in this idea without evidence lacks the same stigma as does the belief that the Earth is flat.

The reason I'm willing to make the logical leap that God actively doesn't exist, as opposed to simply not having a belief that he/she/it exists is that humanity has shown a willingness to see agency in everything from the changing of the seasons to the spilled intestines of ritually sacrificed cows that is so extreme and nearly uncontrollable that without any compelling evidence as to his existence I think it is logical to come to the conclusion that the whole idea was made up by people who just can't help but see faces in the leaves.

I used to play video games with at a friend's house when I was a little kid. We both have a tendency toward gamer rage, so we often ended up yelling and cursing at the screen. We even claimed that the game was "cheating", though we obviously knew that an inanimate object wasn't capable of cheating and that there was little chance that the game programmers had designed it to cheat for no apparent reason. It almost seemed like there was some intelligence that was feeding off of our frustrations in order to piss us off ever further in ways that felt premeditated.

Nonsense obviously, but come on, you know you've felt it too. Don't lie.

We even came up with little rituals about it. Don't scream at the game. You'll anger it. Apologize for your temerity and praise the game. Nonsense obviously, but I swear to the Lords of Kobol that we half believed it. It just felt so natural to appeal to something that showed even the slightest signs of unexplainable agency, no matter how much we knew otherwise. It didn't require any kind of legitimate doubt in what we knew to be true, all that was required of us to pray to a deity was the slightest nugget of irrationality.

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GuitarBizarre

A very succinct way of pointing out that one of the main reasons we even have this debate, is that religion is something people invest greatly into, and therefore it's very difficult to actually enter into a discussion about it where it doesn't come to a match of who can simply shout the loudest.

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The Batlord

Well my point was more that people have been acculturated into thinking that god belief is at least a somewhat logical thing to believe in, so they don't treat it the same way they do other things that really aren't any more seemingly ludicrous. Even atheists probably subconsciously feel that god belief is at least worthy of consideration merely because they've been raised in a majority theist society, even if intellectually they don't. What's inherently more logical about a god then a flat Earth or a zombie apocalypse or Harry Potter being secretly a documentary? There's no more legitimate evidence for any of them, and the concepts are all equally ludicrous enough that quantifying which might be more likely is pointless. I mean I think George Romero has actually provided a more convincing case for a worldwide epidemic turning people into animated, flesh-eating corpses than anybody has water being turned into wine or that a being so powerful that he may as well be magical who created the universe and everything in it actually exists. And yet people still say, "What if?" about god, but would openly mock anyone who tried to warn them of the coming hordes of the undead.

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