grtwhtgrvty

I think that humans are terrified of the unknown, what we don't understand, everything that is complex, but we are also very naive and arrogant, so we trick ourselves into fabricating manmade contradictions like god or the afterlife because ignorance is bliss.

I don't believe in God. There isn't a God, because God is a manmade concept. God, to me, actually dilutes reality a great deal. We don't even understand our own brains. We haven't even explored our entire planet yet, let alone explored space, and yet we are making these half-assed, arrogant assumptions about the origins of existence which is ironic because we are trying to instill beauty and meaning but the fact of the matter is that whatever the origins of existence are, whatever made all of this happen, is so beautifully and completely out of this world, completely beyond our comprehension. I feel like religion is a mockery of what existence actually is, and I think that existence -- reality itself, is so much more beautiful than anything we could ever conceive, and even though that's terrifying, I find a strange sense of comfort in that realization -- the fact that all of this is completely beyond my comprehension.

I don't think that God would want you to worship him, or to sit in a church reciting the same things every sunday. It's all so arbitrary. I think that God would want you to ignore religion and to live and to experience and feel, to completely submerge yourself in the concept of the unknown and to question absolutely everything. There's so much more potency in not knowing.

Maybe it's because I've absolutely never been able to believe in God. I was raised Catholic and there was a time where I toyed with the possibility of God, but all of my childhood prayers were laced with "If you're there", or "if you're real" and eventually I realized that there is on possible way that we have any idea whatsoever what any of this means or what any of this is and I find that to be sort of tragically beautiful.

I'm not necessarily afraid of death. Obviously I'm afraid of the pain and the suffering of death, but what actually terrifies me is the loss of self. I don't care about this body even remotely but I care about myself and I don't want to lose who I am.

One thing that comforts me... have you ever met someone... The first person I ever fell in love with, the second I saw him for the first time I was immediately drawn to him. I just knew that I needed to interact with him. Have you ever met someone where you feel like you've known them for way longer than you've actually known them? You just get this tiny fragmented feeling of like... There's something there. You see them and you just instantly feel so much. You just know. And then you get to know them, and you realize that in so many ways you're the same person, and your lives are eerily paralleled and you feel the same things, and you think the same things, but the nuance of your opposing conditioning means that you're saying the same things in completely different ways. But it's still the same thing.

I really want to believe that love is forever. It makes me think that maybe there's a possibility that consciousness persists in some way -- like energy or something, and that these entities somehow interact with eachother, and our bodies -- humanity... It's just a platform for us to find eachother, to ignite the flame once more. I think that's so much more beautiful than God or Heaven.

Sometimes it feels like there are too many coincidences for this to all just be coincidence.

Have you ever noticed how genuine happiness feels like less of an emotion and more like a force? Like life is just a feeling of tragedy and loss and then something eerily perfect happens, and for the briefest of moments, you just feel this complete euphoria, this sense of just... unequivocal bliss, and it's so brief, and it's probably the most intense feeling that there is. I don't believe anyone is really happy. We can be content, but not happy and the thing about genuine happiness is that it's almost painful if only due to how overwhelming it can be, how brief it is.

Guybrush

^Nice post

I don't believe in an eternal self. I think the fact that you can change someone's personality by damaging their brains to be strongly indicative that the self is merely a product of the physical. The only "evidence" to suggest otherwise seems purely anecdotal.

I agree that we can't really understand all the specifics of reality, but we can understand the processes that shape our universe. F.ex, once one understands evolution, birds, elephants and insects may seem like a given. But to understand all the specifics of how billions of years of evolution with a countless number of chemical and physical interactions eventually gave rise to the mind and body of the person you love f.ex, is unfathomable. I agree that religion tends to cheapen this.

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Something Completely Different

Urban Hat€monger ?

After skimming through the back and forth between Larelip & JWB all I can think is I must have evaded the part of my social circle that call each other up and say 'Hey, you fancy coming round tonight and kicking back and debating some late antiquarian religious texts?'

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Chula Vista

Agreed.

Here's one that's always bugged me, and I've never gotten a decent explanation about it from any believers.

The Chicxulub Asteroid.

Cretaceous

If not for that there's a pretty large chance that man wouldn't be here today. If you factor in the size of the universe and the extremely miniscule chances of that event playing out - and then try to work the creator into the equation things get murky really fast.

So God creates the universe and everything in it. Then decides he wants man. He chooses one out of billions and billions of planets for his new creation but finds out it's inhabited by all sorts of nasty creatures. So what does he do?

The dude can create a universe and he chooses a random asteroid as the solution?

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

John Wilkes Booth

lol, all i did was listen to an audiobook on the historicity of jesus cause i had a long walk to school and needed something to listen to

i like history and i think the jesus question is pretty interesting considering that one way or another it gave birth to one of the world's biggest religions.

Xurtio

I get caught up in researching religious history a lot too. It's been Islam for me lately though and mostly as a side of being interested in how the middle east came to be in the socioeconomic conditions its in now.

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innerspaceboy

I call myself a rational skeptic / being of reason / man of science / seeker of knowledge, and any other title indicative of my preference for a quantifiable, evidence-based understanding of the world.

I have a great appreciation for the scientific method. While I uphold reasonable, peer-reviewed conclusions today, I remain flexible to consider and evaluate new information to refine my understanding with each new day that passes. This is the difference between blind and unshakable faith and objective and informed reason.

“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.” - Benjamin Franklin

I enjoyed Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses and surfed The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, Quran, and Book of Mormon, but over time it’s become difficult to find amusement in their self-contradictory texts.

The man-made concept of a higher being simply fails to stand when examined logically. The image of god, held by many of the world’s believers, was classically refuted by Epicurus (c. 341-270 BCE) who so famously postulated:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

In the last two millennia, not one man of faith has presented a reason for me change my position.

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Chula Vista

I come now to the last question in our discussion of Cosmic Purpose, namely: is what has happened hitherto evidence of the good intentions of the universe? The alleged ground for believing this, as we have seen, is that the universe has produced US. I cannot deny it. But are we really so splendid as to justify such a long prologue? The philosophers lay stress on values: they say that we think certain things good, we must be very good to think them so. But this is a circular argument. A being with other values might think ours so atrocious as to be proof that we were inspired by Satan. Is there not something a trifle absurd in the spectacle of human beings holding a mirror before themselves, and thinking that what they behold so excellent as to prove that a Cosmic Purpose must have been aiming at it all along?

Why, in any case, this glorification of Man? How about lions and tigers? They destroy fewer animal or human lives than we do, and they are much more beautiful than we are. How about ants? They manage the Corporate State much better than any Fascist. Would not a world of nightingales and larks and deer be better than our human world of cruelty and injustice and war? The believers in Cosmic Purpose make much of our supposed intelligence, but their writings make one doubt it. If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.

Man, as a curious accident in a backwater, is intelligible: his mixture of virtues and vices is such as might be expected to result from a fortuitous origin. But only abysmal self-complacency can see in Man a reason which Omniscience could consider adequate as a motive for the Creator. The Copernican revolution will not have done its work until is has taught men more modesty than is to be found among those who think Man sufficient evidence of Cosmic Purpose.

- Bertrand Russell 1935

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

innerspaceboy

Love it. About two months ago I went on a Bertrand Russell binge and downloaded 40 books comprising his complete writings. (Another point for digital, for those keeping score.) First on my reading list:

Ideas That Have Helped Mankind
Knowledge and Wisdom
Theory of Knowledge
On Youthful Cynicism
Free Thought and Official Propaganda

And I would absolutely welcome other recommendations!

RELATED NOTE: Also working my way through The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

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Xurtio

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way

-Bertrand Russel, International Relations chapter in "Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays"

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H̓̇̅̉yͤ͏mͬ͂ͧn͑̽̽̌ͪ̑͐͟o̴͊̈́͑̇m͛͌̓ͦ̑aͫ̽ͤ̇n̅̎͐̒ͫ͐c̆ͯͫ̋ ̔̃́eͯ͒rͬͬ̄҉