Asparagus_Prince
Bluelighter
Wrong again. You've interpreted presumptuously time and time again.
-
P&S Moderators: JackARoe | Cheshire_Kat
What made you find faith, or what turn against it?
- Thread starter paltatomate
- Start date
Mate don't pretend you weren't thinking I was a Christian. You and I both know you were.
It's the default presumption for atheists, when they get into a discussion with someone who insinuates they have a conception of God without actually defining their beliefs. You even alluded to that yourself in the first underlined point.
This is why atheism is so hollow. It is just the counter-reaction against Christianity, which whilst in itself is fully justified for reasons not worth expounding here, doesn't actually resolve any of the underlying philosophical issues. It just (rightly) counters the faults of Christianity as a religion, neutralizing the nonsense, but it has not neutralized the underlying impetus for why Christianity (or any other religion) came to be in the first place. That innate human desire to know the ineffable that is generated by something within us that already knows there is something to be known, or at least approached.
Asparagus_Prince
Bluelighter
Thanks for quoting me. But those underlined words and the fact that two questions from two different posts are jammed together gives off the wrong impression to anyone not following closely. And I'm sure by now no one is. But I start off by reassuring you that I'm NOT saying you're particularly religious (not underlined by you), and I suggested specific gods "for example". You didn't underline the "for example" part either. Later I also tried to reassure you that I'm not trying to trap you and that you can trust me. I meant that. If we ever talk again you'll need to realize that I mean what I say. I try to choose my words carefully. And maybe you're used to MB debates pivoting in unpleasant directions (I'm used to that too) but I'm not everybody else. You don't know me and we're only just beginning our journey to BFF-hood.
Also, in regards to jamming my 2 questions together as though they're the same quote... The part starting with "I'm curious" was in response to what you told me you're NOT... not affiliated with a major religion, denomination, etc. Who appears to be avoiding questions here? The one that has slapped the atheist label on himself despite not being a huge fan of the word? This is around the time I started to wonder if you're a projector. A person that projects his own views on others. I didn't presume it yet... wondering happens first.
Besides, what would be so bad about someone wondering if you're religious? I was just trying to form a better understanding of where you were coming from. Just say you're not, and move on. I don't know why you keep bringing it up like it's a great victory-lap moment for you.
But even if you're not Christian it doesn't change my view that you share a common tendency with them. And that is the subsequent asking of questions like "how do you explain the universe" or "what do you think happens when we die" questions. I think I'm up to having that question asked about 3,184 times now. But in all due fairness the religious typically accept my "I don't know" and don't assume that also means I refuse to think about it or that I am feigning apathy.
I still don't really understand what you're asking or what kind of "explanation" you're looking for. I mean, you start off by saying things like people "MUST have ontological faith" and that you "don't buy people haven't made up their minds". THAT needs underlined. Made up their minds, really? But somewhere along the way your question subtly erodes down to "leanings" or having a certain "feeling" on the matter. Or most recently, that you're not asking for a "full-fledged" explanation. I honestly don't know what you're after.
Again, this is not a trap but maybe you should go first. I promise I wouldn't criticize or even say a word about your response... I just want to see a template! Because I honestly and genuinely don't know what this explanation would look like. I don't even know how to make something up! If this was a Family Feud game show I'd guess the top 2 answers on the board are "a god created the universe" or "a bunch of atoms randomly began spinning around and woolah!". Are you saying I must lean one way or the other here? For me both explanations demand the same follow-up question: Where did the god/atoms come from? Which leads to the same conclusion of "I don't know".
I mean, did I answer your question just then? I'm a pretty creative guy but I don't really know what options C and D would be if I was writing this in multiple-choice form. If you can't imagine not "leaning" a certain way have you ever considered that might just be YOU, that others are different, and that you're projecting?
Maybe give me a chance next time. I try to choose my words carefully and, although I don't post a ton on here, I don't think of myself as having a reputation as someone that can't be trusted. Everyone presumes and there's nothing wrong with it fundamentally. I often presume about people that feel the need to announce they're putting someone on ignore. But it doesn't mean I'm right. I'll try to give them a shot and see what they're like first.
Last edited:
No it's not. It was the same post: #166 - Your Post. I concatenated two parts of it (see the double dots?). You're trying to split hairs, and more to the point don't be accusing me of misleading people when your own accusation isn't even correct. That's dishonest.
The universe, but more importantly your own subjective experience, is the product of some ontological process. Whether that be the big bang, a Christian creation story, or many of the other ones humans have contemplated. You can't have an effect without a cause.
I don't believe in the big bang, or any creation story. I don't believe that space (dimensionality) can be defined, or time, and consequently there is no motion (despite us witnessing apparent motion). Somehow this paradox is also inextricably intertwined with the non-dimensional point of awareness that we seem to be; somehow the Universe is infinitely large, 'I' is infinitely small, but they overlap at the same point.
I can't really relate it through words. The only literal concept - as opposed to a poetic medium - that comes close, is the idea of a singularity. That existence is a singularity, somehow non-destructively reflecting or refracting against itself.
I couldn't care less about being asked for my religious beliefs, in fact I enjoy the discussion and chance to. The point was you were insinuating I might be Christian, which as I said already is the default presumption of atheists when they get into a tangle with someone arguing against their position. It's the fact you reached for that, as atheists are apt to do, which betrays what atheism really is and the thinking processes involved.
You're misrepresenting what I said now. I didn't say I expect people to have made up their minds, to have fully fledged explanations that cover every angle. That's not it. It was that regardless of the uncertainty in ones mind regarding an ontological explanation, there has to be one, of at least a feeling or intuition that one type of concept is more viable than another, that there can not be a total absence of one.. because to absolutely deny any ontological explanation is to deny your own existence.
The universe, but more importantly your own subjective experience, is the product of some ontological process. Whether that be the big bang, a Christian creation story, or many of the other ones humans have contemplated. You can't have an effect without a cause.
My own conception is incredibly difficult to articulate. It also contradicts in a way some of what I have already said, which was said for the purposes of discussion, and owing to the fact we exist in a material paradigm which carries with it certain collectively presumed concepts i.e. space and time.
I don't believe in the big bang, or any creation story. I don't believe that space (dimensionality) can be defined, or time, and consequently there is no motion (despite us witnessing apparent motion). Somehow this paradox is also inextricably intertwined with the non-dimensional point of awareness that we seem to be; somehow the Universe is infinitely large, 'I' is infinitely small, but they overlap at the same point.
I can't really relate it through words. The only literal concept - as opposed to a poetic medium - that comes close, is the idea of a singularity. That existence is a singularity, somehow non-destructively reflecting or refracting against itself.
Asparagus_Prince
Bluelighter
Yeah, that's right. But one was at the very beginning and the other at the end of a long post, and both addressing different things. Wow, you really got me there.
Post 158...
"I don't buy the idea that a person hasn't made up their mind"
Psycho_Logic
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2023
- Messages
- 305
Inherent uncertainty, ever changing conditions of life und ultimately letting go of an illusion that existence is graspable with heavily biologically conditioned "body-mind apparatus" through which we sense and try to make sense of an process immeasurably vaster and more complex than we can even start to imagine. Having faith, as opposed to fervently believing, is a process of acknowledging our limits and clearly seeing that we simply can not know. And then letting go of trying to figure it all out. Living in that "mode" and still not falling prey to nihilism was my way to relax, breathe out and trust that the process of "the great who knows?" is enough. I was faced by 3 choices: fervently believing in a set of concepts (atheism being one of them), becoming nihilistic or to just live and observe. Last on that list is from where my faith arrises. It was sped up by living in a broken family with no trust or certainty, in a country where very rigid system of communism was being literary blown up via bloody war for promises of personal freedom and meritocracy that did not materialise and coming to an understanding in a very early age that every society is playing the same game with the difference being in gradients and expression of identical power dynamics. Reading and psychedelic experiences were the last deal breakers after which i couldn't unsee what I have seen and realised.
paltatomate
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2022
- Messages
- 11,074
That's a good option for sure.
Has served me well in life.
Asparagus_Prince
Bluelighter
Interesting post. Your signature is something I relate to a lot. Although, I must admit I was hoping this part "Don't even think about nothing that's not right in front of you" was not intended to be some double-negative play on words.
I never really answered lecroute's original question although I alluded to it when I referenced my religion-induced trauma way earlier in this thread. It's a long story that would require way too many details but I will go ahead and provide one anecdote of what my childhood was like...
But up into my early/mid teens I would have this regular nighttime occurrence of thinking God was giving me specific commands to test my faith. Like, for example, on one occasion I imagined God telling me to go outside in the snow, at 3am on a school night, barefoot, and to stand there for 5 minutes. And that if I didn’t do it he might strike me dead. I told myself “That’s just YOU, that’s just YOU, Asparagus Prince. God isn’t saying that. It’s YOU”. But then I thought: “But what if it IS God? He's all-powerful so why would he allow that thought to enter my brain? AH!!!!". So eventually I blasted out of bed and went outside to stand in the snow.
And that is one of many, many similar stories. My school grades plummeted, I was usually tired, and I'd frantically dread sundown. To this day my parents will tell you the crazy “sleep-walking” stories, as they call it, from my childhood. Stories that ended with: “Asparagus Prince, WHAT are you doing?!?!? Get back to bed!”
But many years later I began doubting God on an intellectual level. It was almost exactly the same feeling as when I began to doubt Santa Claus. And then in my early 20s I moved to Australia for several years. I was already basically an atheist, but that was the knockout blow to religion. I give Australia a lot of credit for giving me a break from the Bible Belt. And having friendships with atheists that demonstrated they were living happy lives.
Ironically becoming an atheist gave me what religion used to promise. Things like contentment and peace. I had a family gathering this past Monday and I overheard my Christian mother say something that she's said a million times before: "I struggle SO much with why God would ask Abraham to kill his own child! I sometimes lose sleep thinking of that!" And other family members piped in and talked about areas where they're struggling with their faith, or their stressful uncertainty regarding why God hasn't answered a certain prayer... things like that. And I thought: You guys are doing WAY too much heavy-lifting! It's unnecessary. Atheism, for me, has required no faith or energy and has simply made life easier. I think it's the person I was supposed to be had I not been conditioned at a young age. I don't miss those days of anxiety and struggling with faith night-in and night-out. I'm a ridiculously wild thinker and my head is in the clouds too much already. So focusing on the knowable and what's in front of me has been a life-changer.
I hate the idea of telling a religious person that their faith is "wrong" or that they're lying to themselves, because I'm sure there are some that benefit from their faith. But I do see a lot of people that remind me so much of my former self. And it seems their faith is unnecessarily tearing them apart. Or that they're in denial mode but don't want to admit it because God might be listening. And I feel like telling them: I've got some ideas that I think might work for you if you're willing to listen. And I'm always happy if any curious reader PMs me.
Last edited:
Zopiclone bandit
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2018
- Messages
- 12,155
I have never seen you post on this part of BL & didn't agree with you 100%
Do you not see how this can be applied to those in the atheist position as well, that atheism itself may only be a temporary stepping stone? On an intellectual level atheism, when taking under its wing the tenets of 19/20th century science, is just as full of holes as the Christian theology that it sought to break free from. Science can not reconcile the mystery of the subjective experience through its understanding of neurology, and it goes to great lengths to disparage (just as the Christian religion did) any personal accounts of those who have had subjective experiences that run counter to its dogma i.e. out of body experiences, or mystical experiences.
The argument generally proposed (re: God) always takes the intellectual, materialist route. "Prove God as object", so that it may be measured according to our standards. But it makes no allowances for the possibility of proving God as subject; by its own dogma it deliberately excludes this possibility, which ironically is just an inherited hangover from the Christian theology it tried to escape from - the Priest/Pope is the middleman.
Foreigner
Bluelighter
You've never seen me post in P&S? Really?
Psycho_Logic
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2023
- Messages
- 305
*that he didn't agree with you 100%.
I believe that's the meaning.
But @Zopiclone bandit you can correct me if I have misunderstood you.
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
When I was about 3 years into my higher education in the physical sciences it was a wrap as soon as I understood the chemistry of how life evolved from matter.
That shattered all faith in religion.
Faith in a god was shattered just by looking through all the suffering and pain in the world through the lens of evolutionary theory, survival of the fittest. It all made perfect sense at that point why the world was so tragic.
That shattered all faith in religion.
Faith in a god was shattered just by looking through all the suffering and pain in the world through the lens of evolutionary theory, survival of the fittest. It all made perfect sense at that point why the world was so tragic.
For me, it was the other way around. The more I learned, the more it became apparent that evolutionary theory as it stands is not sufficient to explain life, not in the slightest. It can't even explain how the very mechanism we're using to describe it came in to being - language is one of the greatest mysteries in science - nor can it explain where the motivation for 'survival of the fittest' even emerges from (let alone how chemistry generated self-motivation to become biology).
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
Have you studied evolutionary science academically? With a base in basic physical sciences? And molecular evolutionary bio in particular…. Not the fossil record and more macroscopic things like fossils. If you don’t understand the chemistry of it all which is the foundation studying the limited fossil record is pointless.
I will say there is plenty of documented evidence of species evolving in modern times into different species. So evolution has been observed to Happen in modern times already. But I dogress
I’m not talking about evolution though really
.
I’m talking about chemical reactions that form amino and nucleic acids from simple molecules existing everywhere in space, their polymerization, and replication due to their dimerization. (Reproduced in labs at this point).
Super easy to see how those reactions happen (down to the actual reaction mechanisms). From there life and viruses are a joke
Species might evolve, but that does not equate into evolution itself (as currently defined) being even half the picture. There's so many examples, one I already listed, which completely confound the notion of 'survival of the fittest' and accidental random mutation.
It's the equivalent of creating oil and thinking from that you can build and start a car. It's nonsense.
I think you vastly underestimate the bridge between chemistry and organic biology. Abiogenesis is not proven. Just because you can manufacture some amino acids and precursors to organic life in laboratory settings, that says absolutely nothing about how these can self-motivate towards more complex forms. Even the most basic microbe lifeform we know of is still massively more complex than just being a jumble of organic precursors correctly arranged or folded together.
It's the equivalent of creating oil and thinking from that you can build and start a car. It's nonsense.
Asparagus_Prince
Bluelighter
It's funny because recently my daughter and I were having a similar conversation (I think) and it occurred to me that I hadn't really thought of it this way. And it's funny to read a post like yours so soon after this conversation. Spooky! I'm beginning to have faith in coincidences.
But anyway we were talking about those who suggest there cannot be morality without a God. And we were considering/thinking of morality as one of those many variables that have helped humans with our survival. Someone earlier in this thread imagined not having morality and just bashing people and stealing whenever he/she felt like it. Well, perhaps we never would have ever developed and survived if we were constantly engaging in conflicts and bad ideas like that. Or, I should probably say far more than we already do.
Asparagus_Prince
Bluelighter
I suppose, but I was just telling my story.
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
that’s exactly all that life is. Simple as.
There has yet to be a single instance of a protein folding or a replication process of nucleoc acids that breaks basic chemical law. No magic going in. It’s all predictable chemistry although it has to be looked at in hindsight sometime, but nothing magical that breaks chemical expectations is happening in a living system.
Last edited:
LucidSDreamr
Bluelighter
morality is simply a product of natural selection in social species.
Individuals that were team players and didn’t hurt their peers were accepted into the pack and their survival was thus favored.
Those that stole and betrayed the other in the pack were killed or kicked out to die alone and did not pass on their lineage.
Now there is a balance where being greedy (ie stealing) also favors survival in social species. But it’s a balance. Be dominant but not so much that you are kicked out of the circle of social cooperation on your pack. This is the best balance to survive and that is what evolution selected for.
So morality (aka. Being nice) only exists because it favored survival.