Atheism

I guess this brings us back to the beginning - where two views remain widely separated.

I'm comforted by this woman's outlook and see her as giving her kids a taste at true freedom - to make their own choices based on their own judgement rather than on the judgement and punishment of some eye in the sky, to make amends with an apology or act of kindness rather than eighteen hail mary's... And I see them fortunate enough to see the return on their 'investments' in this lifetime rather than worrying about what punishment or reward awaits them in the next.

Again, there are two sides, but I am firmly planted on this one.

All that stuff about god not being logical etc. seems to me to be blaming God or whatever you want to call it for all the things that happen in the world that are not to that person's liking. This thing happened or that thing happened so God is bad.

It might be true that we control children so they don't come to harm, but with adults its different. We give or at least should give a partner free will to make their own choices and learn their own lessons, as we too must be allowed to ourselves. Maybe if there is a God, that is why he/she/it allows things such as poverty and murder to happen. In any case, it does seem to be the best way for us to learn. Any sort of restriction would limit our learning as we would not see the consequences of our actions if we were protected. So I guess being "safe" comes actually comes with a price in terms of the things that we do not experience.

I believe very much that life is a spiritual journey, but I'm just a whole lot less dogmatic about the details than some others are. I am trying to follow a saying I saw recently, which said "Live each day like its your last and learn like you're going to live forever". It might be a tricky combination to pull off, but I really like the mindset.

[QUOTE] [b]Donna13 wrote:[/b]

this lady doesn't sound very intelligent to me.[/QUOTE]
She is incredibly intelligent. She has chosen to establish true trust between herself and her child, as she knows that one day he won't respect her judgement if and when he discovers she openly lied to him about something. Telling lies is the opposite of what builds trust.

[QUOTE]I can talk to my own older family members and hear enough anecdotal information that proves to me (beyond my own experience) that we are being assisted, warned of shocking events in advance, and that prayer works.[/QUOTE]
"Anecdotal information" is an oxymoron. This entire statement is unsubstantiated conjecture that has no basis in reality.

[QUOTE]And these phenomena (whether you apply religious ideas to it or not) have been the subject of the work of real scientists at the top universities.[/QUOTE]
Maybe so, but not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper has been published on the subject because this style of thought is the exact opposite of the scientific method.

[QUOTE]This lady just sounds like a person who is trying to be logical, but overlooking what she cannot accept.[/QUOTE]
Right - and you are somehow painting her with a negative brush because she is choosing not to blindly and uncritically accept things that are 99.99999% likely not true. Congratulations - you've just summed up religious intolerance into a single sentence. :-)

[QUOTE]She may be just as controlling as a super religious mother or father. The other side of the coin.[/QUOTE]
This is far more complex and layered than two simple binary options. Instead of a coin, let's liken these various styles of thought to an ocean - agnostics swim in the ocean, atheists sit on the beach suntanning, and religious people have taken a cup of the water and walked away with it, content to never see an ocean again, and believe that swimming is hazardous to your health.

Freedom to think freely is not control. Her method is the absence of control. She is giving her kid the freedom to think for themselves, providing all options that *tangibly* exist. Eliminating the intangible is not a restriction. She is teaching her child how to think independently within the physical world. And to use the above analogy - she will let them go swimming when they are old enough.

But to some pious folk, this is akin to "control." The irony is staggering. A parable for you:

A group of kids are running around in an empty field, and they are being "controlled" by an authority figure saying "do whatever they want, and under no circumstances should you do otherwise!" Meanwhile there is another group of kids playing in an enclosed 8 x 8 area across the street, and they are told they have the freedom to explore in there as they please, while being told on a daily basis that the kids across the street are being controlled and are unsafe without the fence.

Moral of the story: Tell them anything enough times and they'll believe it. A five year old believes *anything* you tell them.

Years ago a friend of mine dated someone who essentially said the same thing. My friend once told her she could do whatever she liked, and she said "stop controlling me."

Some people are so under control that they are frightened by freedom, as it translates to them as a form of control. If you don't give them answers to unanswerable questions from day one, they won't be scared by the lack of answers or control by external forces in their lives. But when an adult has externalized control for all their lives, only then is such freedom scary. They find safety in rules and restrictions.

"Freedom is slavery," said George Orwell. He was right.

See attachment.

If one is content to believe in the existence of a higher power with these facts in mind, there just are no words to express how limited their worldview is.

For millennia, organized religion has been little more than a business plan to control the thinking of the masses so the rich and powerful can get more rich and remain powerful.

Today many of us still worship god, but this past century has seen a changing of the guard - with god being replaced by capitalism, and with very few people even realizing it. Profits and CEO salaries have astronomically risen in the past few decades while the average wage has not changed at all. Those who benefit most from this setup vilify anyone who speaks against it - and the very people these activists are speaking on behalf of are instructed by the media to write them off as lunatics.

It is a formula destined for success for the 1% to run off with all the money - particularly in the US, where 99% of the population is brainwashed with the need to purchase the new iPhone. And half of them have to choose between health care and lunch.

"Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV. And you think you're so clever and classless and free"

^ John Lennon, from Working Class Hero.

We are too busy worshiping money to realize that the overwhelming majority of the poverty and hardship spoken of in the attachment are there because of our choices as encouraged by a few corporations. Information is abound to attest to this.

So what does this have to do with religion?

Religion keeps cognitive thinking abilities at a very low level. Powerful people have known this for as long as the possibility of control has existed. The last thing the movers and shakers want is for people is to wake up and organize themselves to create a better system for those who have lost the most because of western corporate greed.

So they offer you 23 types of bagels and hope you'll be happy with your "choice."

And it's working.

Real Wizard, you might want to read a little bit about these subjects from better sources than something that a musician said or from a biased anti-religion website. Look up placebo effect, for starters. You could start with a medical journal, or read about the experiments at Princeton (human thoughts having a significant effect on matter). It is interesting stuff.

I have no problems trusting information from my own family members or from my own thoughts. Ha.

That woman sounded good until she started hammering on religion. She is just as intolerant as the religious fanatics that rail against atheists. It makes me embarrassed to consider myself an atheist.

Whatever happened to actually to listening and not being closeminded? Instead there is polarization where atheists are pure evil, and 2/3 of the world's population is mentally challenged because they believe in a higher power.

This Atheism topic started out with good level headed discussion, but devolved and exploded into a cesspool of hate shortly after 2013 began.

I don't see any hatred in this thread; just the sharing of ideas.

Also, I'd just like to add that I was not trying to discuss religion at all. I don't see any point in that because I am not for or against religion. Other people here can work on that argument. And I guess I've said enough already - so though I will be interested to read the arguments when GF returns, I doubt I'll have much more to add ... Except this ... Ha. It seems to me that making broad generalizations is not so necessary. Everyone is an individual. Lumping people into good vs bad, smart vs dumb, confused or clearheaded, and then assigning value or non value to each group; that is the kind of talk I am just not interested in following closely.

[QUOTE] [b]The Real Wizard wrote:[/b] This is far more complex and layered than two simple binary options. Instead of a coin, let's liken these various styles of thought to an ocean - agnostics swim in the ocean, atheists sit on the beach suntanning, and religious people have taken a cup of the water and walked away with it, content to never see an ocean again, and believe that swimming is hazardous to your health.
[/QUOTE]
===

I'm traveling so I can't reply as thoroughly as I would like, but I saw this and had to say I think it is brilliant.

Follow this guy on twitter, whether you are a believer or not.. https://twitter.com/GSpellchecker

Question - 'If god didn't exist there would be no such thing as atheism'

Answer - 'Unicorns exist because you don't believe in them'



Brilliant.

Interesting answer! Its clever because the question is rubbish to start with. And the response highlights the flawed thinking within it.

Yet for all intents and purposes, unicorns and god do exist in someone's reality if they believe in them. Kids and Santa are another good example of this. Then one day the child is sad to find out that Santa doesn't deliver the presents at all. And as adults, we continue to suffer this sort of emotional pain when our view of the world is found to be wanting.

[QUOTE] [b]Heavenite wrote:[/b]

Interesting answer! Its clever because the question is rubbish to start with. And the response highlights the flawed thinking within it.

Yet for all intents and purposes, unicorns and god do exist in someone's reality if they believe in them. Kids and Santa are another good example of this. Then one day the child is sad to find out that Santa doesn't deliver the presents at all. And as adults, we continue to suffer this sort of emotional pain when our view of the world is found to be wanting.[/QUOTE]

I think the "Yes, Virginia" letter explains this problem really well. The problem is one of definition, not of being vs. not being. This is equally applicable to Santa Claus, God, unicorns, etc.

"Yet for all intents and purposes, unicorns and god do exist in someone's reality"

So if God exists only in the mind of man does that mean he is real?

In which case I have a seat reserved for the tooth fairy, santa and Thor.

I saw Spiderman and Wolverine, they are in films FFS!!!!

[QUOTE] [b]mooghead wrote:[/b]

"Yet for all intents and purposes, unicorns and god do exist in someone's reality"

So if God exists only in the mind of man does that mean he is real?

In which case I have a seat reserved for the tooth fairy, santa and Thor.

I saw Spiderman and Wolverine, they are in films FFS!!!![/QUOTE]

When a million people believe in God, does it mean a bearded guy suddenly pops into existence on a cloud? No, it certainly doesn't. Does it mean god exists in the same way morality or arachnophobia exists? I would argue it does. They are mental concepts, that exist solely because people believe in them. They don't exist outside our minds, and they are not tangible. Still, I do think they exert influence on the actual world - if everyone suddenly stopped believing in morality, or everyone stopped being afraid of spiders, that would definitely change our lives, be it in major or minor ways.

That is the power of belief, which is an entirely different thing to religion all together, something religious fundamentalists and hardcore atheists both have a hard time understanding. Belief is a very powerful psychological capability, but when millions of people believe that every word of the bible is literally true, that doesn't mean it suddenly becomes so.

So why can belief make a thing like morality (or 'god') real, but can it not cause the bible to suddenly become absolutely true? It's the difference between the abstract and the concrete - abstract concepts exist in the mind (and according to Platonic philosophy also in a metaphysical world that is entirely separate from the universe), but concrete things are inherently bound to the physical world in some way.

[QUOTE] [b]The Real Wizard wrote:[/b]

[QUOTE] [b]Donna13 wrote:[/b]
She may be just as controlling as a super religious mother or father. The other side of the coin. [/QUOTE]

Years ago a friend of mine dated someone who essentially said the same thing. My friend once told her she could do whatever she liked, and she said "stop controlling me."

Some people are so under control that they are frightened by freedom, as it translates to them as a form of control. If you don't give them answers to unanswerable questions from day one, they won't be scared by the lack of answers or control by external forces in their lives. But when an adult has externalized control for all their lives, only then is such freedom scary. They find safety in rules and restrictions.

"Freedom is slavery," said George Orwell. He was right. [/QUOTE]


The woman in the article I posted is giving her children the chance to experience everything around them without the reliance on some unseen being. As they grow up, as they experience life and as they come to understand themselves and the world around them, they might see how right she was. Or they might see the work of a higher power for themselves. That’s the wisdom of this woman. That’s the gift she’s giving her kids. We’re always afraid when we take our first steps into ‘freedom’ but when we’ve been trained to trust ourselves, to understand that much of what happens does so because of our own actions and the actions of others, then we are better equipped, IMO, to deal with what’s ahead of us.