Atheist and God
I’m confused about the understanding of what a true Atheist is. An Atheist is someone that does not believe in God and that life is just a biological experiment. We are all test tube babies made from another test tube baby and there is no significance to our lives other than to be a larger part of the living world that we exist in.
I disagree with the theory that there is no God. I bare no ill will to my friends that partake in the theory that God does not exist. For the most part I congratulate them on thinking out what is a very difficult theory. The end of that theory is that we are here now and worm food in the end. It does have one simple flaw.
Hope.
Hope is an amazing virtue of the human race. We can have hope that our children will grow up to be better than we as their parents could ever be. We can have hope that our parents will live longer than the average expectancy for a human being. We can have hope for numerous reasons and inside that envelope of the definition of hope is the thought process of prayer and guidance from God.
Many times in my life I have asked God for help to understand the things going on in my life. It is when I am at my weakest point that I need my faith the most because that is the last point of hope for me. I would like to think that I promote my sense of hope on others but I may be lacking the skills to do so. I’m not a preacher but I am someone that tries to make a difference in every life I touch. No matter how small a difference
I’m not a bible thumper and never want to be one. I just come to odds when someone that once believed in God is suddenly detriment to the theory that I can still have my faith in God.
The saving grace in this whole dilemma is that I am thankful that I live in a country where I can not be prosecuted for my religious beliefs and neither can my friends for their lack of belief. That is the beauty of America.
God Bless America!!!!
Papamoka
Labels: America, Atheist, Freedom of Religion, God, hope, Liberty, Religion
posted by Papamoka at
4:54 PM
7 Comments:
[Part I]
People often get confused about the difference between and agnostic and atheist. I am one of those people. An atheist means out of the context of a God and an agnostic means that whatever the real God is, He would be unknowable to us. The dictionary often defines atheist as one that does not believe in God, but that is a loose definition that most atheists do not embrace.
Atheists say that the Christian Gods, the Jewish God (and the old Jewish Gods), the Islamic God, the Roman Gods, the Zoroastrian Gods, the Greek Gods, the Persian Gods, the Egyptian Gods, the Hindu Gods, do not exist. They do not always say that there is no such thing as spiritual existence. Nor do they necessarily say that mankind is the most advanced creature in the universe.
They do tend to state that it is illogical to assume the following:
1. The earth or the universe was created by God.
2. The Christian Bible is the word of God.
3. Any specific God we know of exists.
Assuming there is something we could label God, we would logically assume the following attributes for Him, all attributes that Christians tend to deny:
1. He is not all-perfect, as that it a meaningless term, thus impossible to achieve. It is like saying something is all-purple. Things can be more-purple than other things but none of us have a concept of all-purple or all-perfect.
2. He is not omnipotent, or all-powerful. It would be illogical to assume such a thing, even if we think He created us. Spiders would see me as a God if they could even understand my wonders, and yet I cannot fathom how they secret silk or weave mathematically weighted threads and structures with no calculator; not even an abacus. The engineering skill of spiders surpasses that of the designers of our finest bridges or even of beavers.
3. He is not omniscient (all knowing). A God would have no method of knowing everything, so to assume He does is illogical.
4. He is not immutable (unchangeable). Were He unchangeable, He would be paralyzed and His life and everything it touches would be meaningless. Something that cannot change, must, by definition be inanimate. If He is inanimate, then His intellect cannot surpass ours, or even operate.
5. He is not all-loving (and He probably is not even loving, by our standards). Additionally, he is not all good. The only records we have of the theoretical existence of God suggest that He is an evil tyrant. All other species we have ever encountered was ultimately less than enlightened, so why should we assume a divine one would be all good? Are you not aware that absolute power corrupts absolutely? I do believe the more powerful something becomes, the more tyrannical it becomes. To assume God is the exception is not logical. To assume that a God would see us differently than the way most of us see a germ or a flower is illogical. To ascribe in kind of goodness to a God without evidence in support of it makes no sense. Everything species we have encountered lacked goodness. If there is a God and He has made himself known to people in history, then they reported evil actions perpetrated by God. If the rumors of God are all based on fiction, then there is no reason whatsoever to assume a God exists, as the rumors were all we had (the existence of God does not remove any contradictions in the world or solve any real puzzles).
6. There is no puzzle that is solved if God exists, that is not solved if He does not. However, there are plenty of puzzles that His existence would introduce.
This is not intended to be a debate, but an explanation.
[To Be Continued …]
[Part II]
Interesting you use the existence of “hope” as evidence for God. The apostle Paul did the same thing when he coined my favorite biblical quote, which I will now cite from memory and probably interpolate: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Like you, Paul hitched his faith to a wagon full of hope. He has this opinion no longer, of course, because he is now deceased.
There is another blogger, Arash of Arash’s World who posted something in December of 2009 that made an impression on me. He implied that hope is the explanation for evil and that evil was needed for faith in something better to exist. That is a very liberal interpretation, but it is what I got from it. The idea I think was that in order to know that a benevolent God is on your side, you must know something other than benevolence. After that post, I became a fan of Arash's World and proceeded to satirize his post immediately.
While speaking of Pandora, the Greek Eve, who was responsible for unleashing evil upon the world, leaving only hope in the box that contained it, Arash said one thing that I agree with:
Yet the message in Pandora's case does have an uplifting tone. We need to hold onto hope. Blindly and stubbornly, against all odds of logic. We need to believe.
I would believe if I could. Paul and Arash tell me I should and I am loath to disappoint either of them.
Many times in my life I have asked God for help to understand the things going on in my life. The illusion of a friend to hear your sorrows and share in them is very strong. I have those needs also. I do not turn to God. I typically choose a different friend, who no more shares in my misery than God shares in yours, but it feels like he does at the moment I am sharing. My faith in Greg is not very strong intellectually, but emotionally, he works. We do not need our friends to share. We merely need to believe they that they do.
[THE END]
An Atheist is someone that does not believe in God
True.
and that life is just a biological experiment.
Wrong. An experiment implies an experimenter. Life is a product of the ordinary workings of the laws of nature and there was no conscious entity that played any role in its origins or development (except at the tail end of development in the last few millennia, when conscious humans started domesticating animals).
and there is no significance to our lives other than to be a larger part of the living world that we exist in.
Wrong. My life has the significance I choose to give it, rather than being cluttered up with some "higher purpose" imposed by a supernatural dictator which has nothing to do with what's significant to me.
It does have one simple flaw. Hope.
Even if you were right that atheism has no room for hope, that wouldn't be an argument against atheism. Whether an idea makes us happy or not has no bearing on whether it's true.
We can have hope that our children will grow up to be better than we as their parents could ever be. We can have hope that our parents will live longer than the average expectancy for a human being.
Nowadays most people do grow up to have better, and longer, lives than the previous generation. The reasons have to do with technology which could only be developed after the rise of the scientific approach to understanding the world.
We can have hope for numerous reasons and inside that envelope of the definition of hope is the thought process of prayer and guidance from God.
"Hope" is the feeling we have when we want something and have an expectation that it might likely happen. Prayer and God have nothing to do with it. Hopes are realized when people get out into the world and work to bring about what they want. Prayer has never accomplished anything, anywhere.
I just come to odds when someone that once believed in God is suddenly detriment to the theory that I can still have my faith in God.
I can't really parse out what this means, but nobody is saying you can't (as in "shouldn't be allowed to") "have faith in" an imaginary supernatural entity. But that fact is, to the extent that you put your energy into asking that entity for help as opposed to trying to get things done yourself, it will work to your detriment.
I rarely ever get into any religious conversation or debate, because I am anti organized religion, and to debate with one like myself, they would have to be fairly knowledgeable in histories of religion's frankly, not just a couple popular Quran/ Bible verses. However, at the same time, I am VERY supportive of one's choice to believe and pray especially, Why? because it give's folk's hope and having done time behind bar's, I have seen it change folk's that were rotten and miserable to more happy and productive in their societies, get off drug addiction's, etc. So this is difficult for me to also talk about. I also never seen any connection with God/ Spirituality and religion, and looked at the popular religious doctrine's as not being wrote by a man influenced through God, but through their own want's and sometime's to dominate and/ or enslave other's only. I also supported even the cross veteran's set up out in the Mojave Desert as a memorial (no one is out there, I hunted there as a kid), when atheist's hammered till the cow's came home to get it out of there because it was on gvmnt land, I also support any child that chooses to pray in their free time at school, or after school, however I am against any talk of religion in science or any other academic's. I will also admit that I have been also an active member of the Church of Satan for 3 decade's as well ... I also call myself personally a spiritualist (defining "spiritualism" as diferent than most). My involvement with the CoS is not to question any existence of a God figure but to suppress the atrocities of centuries of what's known as organized religion ... nor do I worship any christian devil, since I never been a christian, for me satanism for instance is mainly philosophical. No ... I see not a thing wrong with prayer or belief in God, but do believe in keeping all religion's out of gvmnt. Just wanted to post on this since I rarely do.
Thanx ....
BTW ... a good posting and explanation ...
@Infidel,
Since you seem to own truth in this area, I just want to take issue with one thing.
Prayer has never accomplished anything, anywhere.
Prayer has brought many people the illusion of shared experience with a higher power, and they need this illusion. Prayer has been very valuable to a great many. Additionally, to some cultures a deep hope is considered synonymous with prayer, which only makes sense if you embrace the concept of near omniscient gods. Even Oscar Wilde in a "Picture of Dorian Gray" combined the concepts of an earnest desire and a prayer. Dorian’s hope and wish to be eternally young was received by the Powers that be.
Prayers sometimes do come true. I believe prayer has no paranormal causal relationship with the realization of a prayer. I think you believe that also. There are plenty of people who believe otherwise. For those people, the prayer may have some effect. It is said that with faith you can move mountains. Only faith that the mountain can be moved inspires one to try to move them. The mountains where I live just sit there. I know I cannot move them, not a single millimeter. The Egyptians could move pyramids, but only because they tried. I cannot even pull my fridge out to clean underneath it.
Prayers, and the faith that they may be answered, do have a purpose in life, just not in my life.
P.S.
I am sympathetic to your skepticism and faith about prayers. This is one of my favorite quotes:
Then at last, Noah sailed; and none too soon, for the Ark was only just sinking out of sight on the horizon when the monsters arrived, and added their lamentations to those of the multitude of weeping fathers and mothers and frightened little children who were clinging to the wave-washed rocks in the pouring rain and lifting imploring prayers to an All-Just and All-Forgiving and All-Pitying Being who had never answered a prayer since those crags were builded, grain by grain, out of the sands, and would still not have answered one when the ages should have crumbled them to sand again.
The only argument I could imagine here would be "what is God?"
There, you're argument becomes completely subjective. ;)
JMJ
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