Chula Vista

If there is "something" that created the entire vast universe and everything in it, I'd be pretty arrogant and delusional (as a microscopic piss ant living on only one of billions of worlds) to sit here and proclaim I comprehend everything about it.

Those 50 or so (probably many more than that) dudes who composed the bible over the course of about 1,500 years wrote a wonderful work of fiction that includes some nice life lessons and words of comfort.

Along with some megalomania, homophobia, misogyny, jealousy, murder, genocide, filicide, greed, and a whole host of other nasty stuff.

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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.”

Lord Larehip

I wouldn't believe in a religious god either.

EPOCH6

Growing up with non-religious parents I was never introduced to the concept of God until I was maybe 9 or 10, asking why my grandparents would talk to somebody who wasn't there before Christmas dinner. Being introduced to the idea at that age it had no chance to gain any traction in my mind, having discovered the farce of Santa Claus a few years earlier I wasn't about to be fooled again.

In my mid teens I revisited the idea and started reading about it, discovered Carl Sagan in the process, and found his perspective most believable. The evidence describing the laws of physics and the formation of stars, galaxies, solar systems, planets, and eventually mountains, rivers, and the evolution of species and culture etc is staggering, and it's the most beautiful story I've ever known. When I occasionally discuss things like this with religious folks (who really do seem few and far between now) they always ask how I could bear to see the universe as so meaningless and random, but it's not like that, it's incredible, the things that can happen over ~14 billion years are absolutely mind boggling, and so much of that journey can be inspected in such intricate detail at your leisure. A well written book on organic chemistry, perhaps by Isaac Asimov, will blow anyone's mind, it gets your blood pumping once the pieces start falling together. The vast, dark, and unimaginably dangerous scale of the universe is without question intimidating from our tiny, minuscule, seemingly irrelevant vantage point, but being able to examine it from the comfort of a park bench, or your bedroom, or a beach, is a remarkable opportunity and breathtaking when you give it a chance.



But wide-eyed science worship aside, I think the easiest and quickest way to find common ground with religious folks is to ask them in return why they don't believe in the gods of other world religions, and then explain to them that you've just taken that reasoning one god further.

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Lord Larehip

They are the same thing--Santa Claus and god. One sits up in heaven and watches everything you do and rewards you for your good deeds and punishes you for the bad while the other sits at the North Pole (really the North Celestial Pole) and watches everything you do and gives you gifts on Christmas if you were good that year or a lump of coal if you were bad. Although i could use the coal.

EPOCH6

I'd believe in God if he would hook me up with presents every year.

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Lord Larehip

I'd believe in Santa Claus for the same reason.

DwnWthVwls

He does. Just say 10 hail marys.

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...

Neapolitan

So the Judeo-Christian model replaces anthropomorphic gods that has all the faults and folly of humans with a transcendent Benevolent God. Take away a Benevolent God and what is left? Do people then transgress to back to the belief of anthropomorphic gods, not of the same of those in antiquity but modern ones? Those who are sports figures, Hollywood Stars, reality show personalities even musicians, singers and performers. Is the modern female pop singer a reinvention of Venus?

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Chula Vista

Plagiarist.

(Dawkins said it first)

__________________

“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.”

EPOCH6

Yeah I heard it first from Dawkins too, maybe I should send him a royalty cheque or something.

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