I don't really post here anymore but I figured the content could be something for yall to chew on. To start off with I am a Unitarian Universalist. I think I am the only UU on here . http://www.uua.org/ http://www.uua.org/aboutuu/uufaq.html To be brief in case you don't want to surf the site UU's don't have a doctrine of belief so on any particular sunday I may be sitting next to a UU christian, UU agnostic (lots of UU agnogs) UU hindu UU bali ect ect. UU is a vessel for each person to find their own spirtuality and as such a shift in beliefs is not seen as a loss in faith like other religions. UU's as a group spend a lot of time study religion and secular philophy and than as a group compare notes. While there are not many UU's on here there are many on the net cause it is a vessel for gaining knowledge on their existance within the universe. I spent some time discussion religion with others of various faiths while on the net and slowly over the course of the year I have made a strong shift. Towards atheism. Today consider myself to be an atheist / UU. I wrote a letter of resignation earlier yesterday and dated it today. This is the letter in its entirety minus names which I have removed. The letter was written to a specific audiance that is not here so it may not have continuity in the beginning or end. It has major areas of sub debate that haven't really popped up here and I thought yall could sub-divide parts you liked and turn them into debates. I wish you all well in your individual spirtual journeies..here is the letter: I came here a while ago and have since learned quite a bit. Before I arrived on here and I debated the issue of God for about a year while in college in the 90's and than for about a year right before coming to this forum. When I got here I had a list of why I believed there to be a higher power that created the universe and I break it down as follows: 1) Universal morality. I believed that that through a cosmic consciousness that man was inner-connected through God and that the result was a collective consciousness that was manifested by God. I believed that two common examples of this were 1) guilt as an intrensic feeling 2) a core set of beliefs that were universal like killing stealing and incest as wrong and/or taboo Since being here and from outside study, I have found that: 1)guilt is a comtemplation on many occassion (thus not 100 % inntate) 2) that my previous notion of core beliefs were relative by a wide variety of opinions Universal morality was scratched from my list. My second belief was that was that man was spirtual by nature and as such pointed to evidence of the existance of God. I believed that man's spirtuality was an indication of a divine presence. Since being here I have discovered that it is presumptuous to think that God exists but man is unable to discover God via the 5 senses which I will touch on later in this essay. I furthered realized that it is presumptuous to think that just because man searches for it that it exists. I scratched it off my list. I furthered believed that since man had an inclination towards the divine that that was a strong indicator of the existance of such. I learned of Vmat2 since and when I inquired about it on here [name deleted] stated that genes have a function not a purpose. I realized the truth in that statement and that the bigger question could really be what is the purpose of God's and man's relationship? The question of what was the purpose is addressed later in the essay. Lastly I believed in a soul. I have not debated the existance of a soul on here or elsewhere, that I am aware of but I have read 100's of pages on it on the internet and learned the following. 1) no evidence of a soul exists 2) It is not reasonable to think that every part of a human being has been found and identified except the soul. 3) the soul by the definintion of it falls outside the realm of all other cateogized parts of what makes man or beast 4) Many things I use to associate with the soul are in fact explainable with bio chemistry genetics and dna. I have since let go of my belief in a soul. Now my list was empty. Part II I have come to understand that the sum of my reality is that which I experience and that which is priori knowledge. Priori knowledge is that which is gained through deduction. In summary what I am saying is that experience + deductions=reality In regards to experience I understand it to be achieved through the 5 senses 1) sight 2) sound 3) taste 4) touch 5) smell I do not regard intuition as a 6th sense but a combination of skillful useage of the other 5 senses. Within the bounds of that definition of experience I have not experienced God. Specfically I have not, 1) seen him 2) heard him 3) tasted him 4) touched him 5) smell him The fact that I have not experience him alone persuades me that he is not a personal God. As a result and in addition I have not been able to locate God's home God's location at any time what even to look for in defining him. This has resulted in my inablity to define God. My conclusion. God is not personal or experienceable and I am not able to define him. The second part of my reality is priori knowledge. I have always been a believer (until now) of St Thomas Aquina's 1st mover principle. It is called the first mover arguement. The eventual problem I discovered with this arguement is: 1) If God made the universe than who made God ( Bernard Russell, "Why I am not a Christian) 2) If God is not personal why would he be motivated to make the universe. He didn't need the universe to exist in if he was existant before it. I also rested much strength on the anthropic prinple which states loosely that any valid theory of the universe must be consistant with our existance as carbon based beings. It further stipulates that any small changes in our enviorment would result in non-life on earth including but not limited to 1 ) tilt of the earth 2) spin of the earth 3) distance from the sun 4) chemical make-up of the earth. I went to postitive atheism for a counter point http://www.positiveatheism.org/faq/anthropic.htm and found the following coutner points from Victor Gijsbers. 1) to qoute him "the concept of fine tuning begs the question" in that "fine-tuning" pre-supposes that the physical constraints can be fined tuned. 2) Is based on misconception of probablity. While the probablity of life on earth is small the probablity of life in a univese with billion of planets is anything but small. 3) carbonization. VJ states that TAP assumes that only a small number of universes would bring about life. there is a lot more if you go to the link. Jef Raskin futher punches a hole in TAP by stating that 1) a change in the physics would change the result 2) that the cause and effect relationship of TAP was backwards in its presentation. He didn't state it but I am thinking it would follow that if TAP's cause and effect was correct (as it is stated by proponets of the theory) than evolution as a theory would still be invalid as no natural selection would be neccessary if the course was preplanned. Jef Raskin took the liberty of creating an experienment to support his ideas and explains them better than I probably have here. http://humane.sourceforge.net/publi..._principle.html In the summation of the arguements I have learned that TAP has failed to show that life on earth is anything other than probability or for our sake dumb luck. Because: 1) All that I attributed to the existance of God had been debunked here 2) I am unable as show how to achieve a personal relationship with God 3) I am unable to show or find a purpose of man's relationship with God I am renouncing my belief in God. On my first few days where I remember asking (name deleted) on the boards why he was an atheist and he stated paraphrased " that athesim comes from within and religion from the outside". I didnt' understand what he was talking about than but it makes prefect sense today. I came here looking for God and instead discovered alot of myself, my existance, my spirituality and a larger piece of humanity and many great friends. I am hereby submitting my formal resignation to my belief in God this day of January 10, 2005. Sincerely, Robtex
Robtex You may not believe in God anymore, but God still believes in you. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You came HERE looking for God? Hmmm...that's interesting. As far as I'm aware He's not a registered member that is currently posting. No wonder you didn't find Him. So, is it because you did not happen to run into God on the forum the reason that you are unable to show how to achieve a personal relationship with Him? Um...you don't need a forum for that...it's a spirit to spirit telepathic communication...one that you experience in you...around you...in your real life. You interact with Him personally, not via your computer. The law states "seek and you will find...knock and the door will be opened"...therefore, if you did not find, then you did not seek...if the door wasn't opened, then you did not knock. God is an actual spiritual being that you can interact with...and He's not posting here, so why don't you try opening up your heart to Him and talking to Him? Invite Him into your life...tell Him that you want to know Him...that's all it takes. Love, Lori
Well, my question is really...did you go to Him? I mean directly...personally to Him? I'm asking because it doesn't really sound as if you meant to know Him, but to intellectualize Him...to deduct Him. And so it's really no surprise that you failed...no offense but knowing Him myself...it's impossible as a human to deduct God...after all...He's God. Don't give up...He's right there. And He loves you, Lori
Lori lets get a communitive defintion of personal relationship if we can. for me, 1 ) I don't believe in telepathy. Unless you do and can document I am suggesting that is not a valid experssion of communication.. 2) I define personal in that which I can directly experience. I can directly experience that which I can experience through the 5 given senses 1) touch 2) taste 3) smell 4) hearing 5) sight That which is outside the realm is to me inpersonal. I have never 1) touched God 2) tasted God 3) smelled God 4) heard God 4) seen God by my defintion God is inpersonal. Thanks for sighing it love..you are very sweet and caring on these forums.
Lori lets get a communitive defintion of personal relationship if we can. for me, 1 ) I don't believe in telepathy. Unless you do and can document I am suggesting that is not a valid experssion of communication.. 2) I define personal in that which I can directly experience. I can directly experience that which I can experience through the 5 given senses 1) touch 2) taste 3) smell 4) hearing 5) sight That which is outside the realm is to me inpersonal. I have never 1) touched God 2) tasted God 3) smelled God 4) heard God 4) seen God by my defintion God is inpersonal. Thanks for sighing it love..you are very sweet and caring on these forums.
Well, Robtex...don't you see that you are limiting Him by and defining Him with human characteristics? You would have had to have lived 2000 years ago and come across Jesus. Why are you doing that? It doesn't make sense, because you do not know that five senses are all that we have to use. I know better, because I have experienced Him. I have heard Him not with my ears, and felt His presence not with my skin. But, I have seen Him work in my life, and in me, and these works are tangible and observable to myself and everyone around me. Rob, I've had Him do some freaky shit with me dude...I'm not kidding. Good stuff...really good stuff...but stuff that can not be defined and/or explained without a spirit and a spiritual realm. I'm telling you...you're missing something. You're missing something huge. Don't place limits on Him...in doing so you are limiting yourself and what you can experience. Are you doing that so as to avoid the relationship? Otherwise why would you? I'm telling you the truth. It is not impersonal because you do have a spirit...you are a spirit inside a body. I do love you and in that, I wish that you would come to know the love that I know and have felt...have experienced...you can, and it's personal. Love, Lori
Lori by spirt I am assuming you mean a soul. The human soul came out of pagan traditions and was adopted by Christianty. As time progress the science of biology and human anatomy have since defined all that has become to be known as man. The soul is not a listed part of the human being. Specfically, 1) the soul has never been proven to exist 2) the soul by its defintion falls outside the category of what biologically makes up man or beast 3) Because human biology dna and genetics research have come as far as they have it is, in my estimation, unreasonable to think that they would have not at least postulated a theory or discovered evidence of a soul it if existed. You will in short find no secular science evidence or proof of a soul because there is none. The soul as a phycial entity does not exist. As far as limiting him to human characteristics while I have never been a Christian, I would like to point out that your religion does just that by saying Jesus came to earth and died for man's sins. I think it is inconsistant to say that Jesus had human characteristic 2000 years ago but God does not now. As I have always rejected the notion of Jesus I made a more liberal statement that was told fold. One I said that what is personal is that which I can experience with the 5 senses. I have not experienced God via the 5 senses therefore God is not personal. Within the scopes of that proof I would further stated that that the creation of the universe by man would be a personal endeavor. All personal endeavors require motivation. I cannot see why motivation for a personal universe could come from an inpersonal God. But the bigger arugement (and its a big one took me close to a year to read about it) is on the theory of intellingent design and a philophy called teleology. Teleoloy is a theory that the universe was design for a specific purpose and more specfically the anthropic prinple is an attempt (see orginal essay) to merge modern science with the theory of intellingent design. The smart money is not on intellingent design but on random --design...random design would imply no creater. In regards to the 5 senses....they are 100 % accepted in the science community to be our only ways to observer our world. There is no mysterious missing sense. Humans make the perfect test subjects because scienctist are around them daily and in the matter of how humans percieve their world there is without a doubt only 5. Having said that I would ask you to read about the discovery of vmat2. google it. The dr Hamer found a gene whose function (not purpose function) is hardwired into our dna code. Here is a couple of links for you. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=16378 http://washingtontimes.com/world/20041114-111404-8087r.htm You will see that your inablity to expeirence God via the 5 senes is not because you can't name the mysterious 6th sense that science has failed to uncover but that because God is not evidencable.
what i do is look at the belief--in this case in "God" and at the believer, and then --in this case--at the believers denail OF the belief they used to have the central thing then to focus on is the BELIEF. what IS the belief, and what IS being rejected You sem to sy that you believed in a God, and soul, and then found out science cannot find the soul, and can explain everything just fine without a 'God' or 'soul' and all the religious paraphanalia But i question the very belief you DID have, and thus am bemused that you reject it whilst also throw out the spiritual baby with the bathwater For is we change 'God' to GODDESS it is a completely different flava. The whole concept of God has grown up via patriarcahl thinking, and not many athiests i read seem to want to explore this, and what it might mean about their athiestic position--which is the rejection of 'GOD' GODDESs wasn't/isn't some idea of a transcendent god-on-high, but is HERE in the very core of Earth and body The patriarchs DID reject that, and the athiests reject what they accepted but dont speak about Goddess, and what THAt may mean strange
Duendy that is a strawman arguement. which of the 5 senses have you used to verify God? WHat emperical evidence do you have that man has a soul? What is your case for intelligent design? as far as "the baby with the bathwater qoute" it is presumptous to say because man is spirtual there is a God. Man is spirtual because he his genetic makeup --dna --is such not because there is a God.
I would have thought it was fairly obvious that humankind is on this planet because all of those factors are right for it on this planet - a not unreasonable concatenation of circumstances which surely is not that uncommon in the Universe. The real discussion over the Anthropic Principle is more concerned with the laws of physics - the universal constants such as G and h and how if they were just slightly different then the Universe simply would not exist as we see it - it would rapidly condense or fly apart into insignificant dust and energy. You've not really made enough distinction between what you called "TAP" which I assumed stood for "The Anthropic Principle", but in fact stands for "Theistic Anthropic Principle". Scientists talk about the Strong Anthropic Principle and the Weak Anthropic Principle, and I don't believe that Theistic Anthropic Principle is really part of that discussion, it's just a way for theists to use an area of science which is close to philosophy. Either way, those arguments on the Positive Atheism site are not really valid and are not part of the real discussion amongst cosmologists about SAP and WAP. I was interested in that Jeff Riskin link, robtex, but it doesn't work. (It may have happened when you edited your post, since links automatically have the ... put in them). I was a little disappointed on reading your first post that it was not sciforums that helped you in your discussion - you seem coy as to where it was, unless I've missed it. I personally question your rejection of God based on his not having shown up on your senses. That would be valid if he'd never shown up on anybody's senses, but as Lori will tell (indeed already has told) you, something she (and others) call God or Jesus has indeed shown up on their senses. Of course, they're the same senses that are affected by the mind (as in when the love of your life enters the room and your pulse and temperature go up and you can practically feel your heart within your chest). The senses can be fooled, after all. In other words, you could experience God and he still might not exist, and the converse is also true. By the way, although I sound less and less like it with my every post here, I am an atheist and will remain so. However, despite not believing in God myself, I do know that everything Lori says is right: if you put yourself in the right frame of mind and go find God, you will find him - and feel him, in the way I've described. Those of us with an utterly rational look on life really are missing something - an entire world of experience which a) contributes significantly to peoples' happiness and b) has been shown to be a generally healthier lifestyle. We atheists don't live as long, I'm afraid.
Adstar: Good bye robtex. May you be forgiven. ************* M*W: Forgiven for WHAT? Finding out YOUR god doesn't exist? What a joke! Robtex has found the truth while you're still drowning in lies. It's not Robtex who needs forgiveness, it is you.
Silas I did have discussion elsewhere..lots on yahoo about God the universe ect and I cut and pasted it. Sorry about the Jef Raskin link. Jef Raskin if you check enwikipedia .com is quite a character . He is the guy credited with creating macintosh for apple computer. He has quite a number of interesting things to say about religon none of which are negative and all which are insightful. His main website is here: http://humane.sourceforge.net/home/index.html and his thoughts on the antrophic prinple are here http://humane.sourceforge.net/published/anthropic_principle.html If the websites fail to load a second time you can goggle Jef Raskin and his own website will come up first. That is the one it is on. In regards to theory of life it really isn't that complexed. Scientists have a strong theroy that the life orginated from RNA. If this is so it comes down to two theories 1) RNA was self created and life came from non-life 2) RNA was created by God. This is assuming one accepts the current standard for sciences explaination of life. I realized that since there is no way I can ever --with my limited knowledge--"prove" rna came from either but that I accept science as a standard for our collective reality and they seem pretty confident on the RNA issue, that the bigger question is really intelligent design. Or more specfically was the earth created with a masterplan in mind. Couple quick facts on ID theory loosly. 1) Religion, particullary Christanity has held that at first that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun revolved aroudn it they than reverted their opinion when science assessed it as incorrect. 2) the earth is not near the center of the universe. 3) The universe is huge but so far only life on one itty bitty planet. If God created the universe what the heck are all the other planets for? In regards to the antrhopic prinple I can't remember where I saw it print but a few others pointed out to me too that the anthropic prinple is not compatable with evolution. Evolution states that the mution of cells creates new species and stronger of those will survive longer periods on a random basis. The anthorpic prinple ---actually specfically TAP by its defintion would void the theory of evolution as no random mutations or speciecs would be neccessary. I didn't get at first while some followers of Islam and Christanity hang on to creationlism (since it has been so strongly refuted by science) so strongly. until this was pointed out. TAP and evolution cannot co-exist with any level of comfort. The second link (not the Raskin one) really goes into detail on this. I read a little about the two scientists who discovered DNA James Watson and Francis Cricket. If you are unaware Cricket passed away in July of last year and humanity lost a great great man. Both were strong atheists and Cricket believed that life came from a theory known as Panspermia in the secular community. Two things I learned from this. Incidently, I gotta confess, looking at the two men who scientifically found the meaning of life and whom were both atheists and say, "look guys you are wrong about that whole God thing" is kinda hard to do.....I mean they essentially discovered life...but, all things being equal 1) is it more realistic to think life came from nonlife on its own 2) that life came from a supreme creater I am saying this due to mans inablity to communicate with God (ie God is not personal) do to the strong counter arguements to St Thomas Aquinas first princple and do to the info I have read on various ID theories ( I have not seen sap and wap yet..yikes lot of APS to look at).....that the smart money is on life coming from non life. Here this is a great neutral link that I use all the time....I hope it helps you reach clarity as much as it has me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page I have had trouble with cutting and pasting en wikipedia before and I had to google it to get on. Great great site. Two last things on the anthropic prinple. Jef Raskin is not much of a bible basher...the stronger arguements are on the other link from my original post. Two with regards to sap and wap while I have not read them yet I want to point out a trend that is consistant with the birth of the anthropic prinple and with tap. It is like a game of chess. Science, and btw I am sure if you need me to I can find a link supporting this but the gross majority of scientists are by and large atheists..the men and woman who define us who we are and how we came to be majorly reject the notion of God....but its like chess ....science makes a discovery and religion back peddles giving birth to a new theory. Than science makes another discovery..religion makes a new theory and back peddles..maybe one day abiogensis will be discovered and it will be checkmate. It is a silly game really though......one side searches for the truth and many from the other consistanly impedes it. Many atheist, were either ex-deist or strongly deistically inclined. I say this to you Silas because I am getting that vibe from your post. One major flaw rests within Deism and I want to point that out to you. For God to go through all the trouble of creating a universe and than ignorning life within it is unreasonable. Motive demands somthing stronger than apathy and Deism somehow has married the two in its propogation of the orgins of the universe. In regards to Lori experience God, I want to point out Lori is very nice and even though alot of the atheists really attempt to push buttons on her she keeps her cool. But I asked her and am asking again which of the 5 senses she has experienced God with and didnt' get an answer. As a matter of fact nobody has ever been recorded to have experienced God with one of the 5 senses...that which is evident to man is experienced through those senses and that which is unevident is inpersonal. Not a deep concept at all. Adstar, in regards to your post.....when one dismisses the notion of God many, self included they are likely to embrace the notion of humanity. I have been reading more and learning more about secular humanism and instead of wasting my time praying to a God who just drowned 100k plus people on the other side of the world I have decided to invest my time in humanity. I hope you make that discovery one day too ..and that is it really not a good bye or a write off from you. When one turns from God one the most natural things to turn to is humanity. MW thanks for your support. Nice to have a friend in my corner. Didn't expect all this emotion over this....I just figured people would pick off the points 1) ST TOM'S 1ST 2) intelligent design 3) does the soul exist ect ect and debate over it....yikes there is some emotion on here...
Silas, yikes I missed a couple of your points. That is what you get for making so many of them darnit. In regards to very thing Lori is feeling as being true..I am not denying it. What I am saying is the instigator is in her dna makeup gene code as discovered this year. Not God. Heck I not expecting to feel unspirtual anymore either...I just am going to give credit where credit is due...my genes not God. While the senses can be fooled if God was to be personal it would be aproductive of him to fool the senses. As that which is all powerful and creater of the universe I reject the notion that he created that which he cannot communicate with on that creations own level. As far as a healthier lifestyle for believers I want to point out that the belief itself which is generally credited with makes that lifestyle possibly healthier as opposed to what is believed in. That in itself promotes natural selection as it is a dna strand that results in a longer living species. My first stumbling block and one of my largest (after Id) was my inablity to define God (as UU who has no doctrine). When every I tried to articuate in print what God was there was a gaping hole staring me in the face. Do yourself a favor. Pretend there is a God and describe him via your 5 senese or whatever qualifications you want. Than go backwards and unqualify him. It is suprising easy to do over and over again. If you read the orgininal essay I had a list of why I believed and when I looked into it and put it on the table for dissucssion it did't hold anymore. That is reality. My reality. Find yours. There are atheists (ha ha I am the newest addition) in UU..maybe that is a place for you to search. I want to leave you with a now famous qoute that really puts it into prespective for me by Stephen Roberts, I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. - -- Stephen Roberts, quoted from Rob Fenton, in a letter to Cliff Walker (September 29, 2000)
Robtex, First off, I think it's a presumptuous to think you *should* be able to define God (and not let Him define *you*), but I understand your reasoning, so I will address your definition of personal. You state: Your emphasis on "direct" already causes some questions. There are people on these forums that I have a very personal relationship with, whether I had touched, tasted, smelled, heard, or seen them. I "met" these people by proxy, but even through a medium like text, it cannot only be called "indirect". I met them very directly and personally -- utilizing my senses, but without really being able to rely on them. Your definition manages to exclude the possibility of it ever being or becoming "personal". Furthermore, personality and receptivity does not begin and end at the "skin" (tactile, or so-called "direct" experience). There is something to know long before the senses have been engaged, a personality, which exists long before people have perceived you physically, and long after they had. My understanding of the "soul" is God's knowledge of you. It can't be found, measured or detected without referring to God, and therefore it cannot be lost until God loses us. The Biblical soul is the "life-breath" of God, which He breathed into Adam to make him a "living being". It never belonged to us, but our existence -- our totality of being -- is as close we can come to experience it "directly". Life itself is our interface with God, and while we yearn to engage all our senses to experience Him, we know we can't experience anything more than life. It isn't the "direct", tactile, sensory experience that lets us know Him, let alone define Him, it is only how we are defined, an indication that we are not limitless. God once limited himself to a human body, and now people don't trust the senses of those who perceived Him... and so can't trust the relationship they developed with Him. Some people rejected his Spirit, declaring their laws or "nature" sufficient, and others rejected His body, declaring their own spirit sufficient. Yet without acknowledging both, we can never reconcile ourselves with God (cf. Ephesians 2:12-22). We will see him as only a Spirit too far, or a body too near (human). Spirituality is how we reach out, as a baby reaches for a parent, that still unknown 'familiarity'. The baby accepts on faith that whoever reaches back is their parent, it has no choice, yet nobody would call it blind faith -- it has that ability to recognize and recognition is fostered by the parent's attention. It comes with the relationship, and its lack is a lack of relationship. We have that same 'familiarity' with love, justice, order, peace, harmony, truth, morality. But all of them only exist within relationships. The lack of them is a lack of relationship. They are not God, but they allow us to recognize Him, and respond to Him as children, not exiles or enemies. Yes, morality might be totally definable and self-contained, without bringing God into the equation, because it's the language of relationships. We will see it among each other just as we would see it in relationship with God. The two instances aren't mutually exclusive, and one is not "evidence" for the other, but that it exists is still significant -- especially since morality is regarded as authoritive, compelling, lest it be a worthless fantasy, to be discarded along with concepts like peace and harmony. Love cannot be enforced, yet we stake all our hopes on the imperative of it; we have faith in it, as at the same time we don't have faith in chaos. Within a relationship it is the relationship that determines the laws, and what makes you guilty, who can punish and who can forgive. Outside the relationship, whether one feels guilt or not is irrelevant -- but we don't add good to bad and divide by two to determine what is absolutely moral, which is what you do if you try to incorporate "all opinions" over all relationships to attempt to determine whether there is an undeniable difference. No, guilt is the awareness of your own part in destroying something real, not something hypothetical; and morality is all about whether love is only a hypothetical reality between people, or an actual one. We also know that we are not just a bag of bones, because when we get to know other people, we get to know them as persons -- personalities. That's what allows us to have personal relationships with other people, and this is ultimately what we want to "get to know" in a person: their hearts, who they "really" are. We don't feel what we see on someone's death bed is what they really were, as if their life a lie, a temporary inconsistency that has now been exposed -- yet this is what an a priori conclusion on a universal scale would be: that we are temporary inconsistencies, life futilely striving towards life in a universe that promises only entropy and death, and that's what makes us feel "morally" wronged by natural disasters. Our spiritual inclinations are offended by such natural inclinations, and millions live on the brink of coming apart at the seams. And things fall apart.... And yes, atheism cannot *but* come from inside, because it asserts the absence of a relationship with God, the sovereign loneliness and ultimate death of the soul, in your own mind, and in God's eyes. But religion comes from inside as well, from the will to have and restore a relationship we are guilty of letting die, and of a love rejected.
fyi Francis Crick was a great man. I believe he may have played cricket.... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Thank you for the corrected link. I do understand a lot of what Jef Raskin is saying, but I don't agree with his conclusions and I see fallacies in a lot of his arguments. A lot of what he says are quibbles about language. Brandon Carter said, ""Our location in the Universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers." and Raskin goes on about the word "privileged" as if the very use of the word implied the existance of a Creator, which is not in my opinion what Carter meant at all. Then he says, Carter's "anthropic principle" is merely an anthropic instance. To see this, rewrite Carter's statement to read more neutrally, "Our existence as observers is compatible with the conditions that obtain at our location in the universe." The phrase "as observers" can now be seen as irrelevant; in fact, we could say of a rock on Mars: Its existence as a rock is compatible with the conditions that obtain at its site on Mars.And here he reveals himself to have missed the entire point. The whole Anthropic Principle discussion arises out of one thing and one thing only: the quantum mechanical necessity for an observer. He dismisses Anthropic Principles because they are teleological (run from effects to causes), and yet has not grasped the essentially teleological aspect of physics as we are now discovering. Nope, as I'd hoped I'd made clear. I am a total atheist. But I am always on my guard against insufficiently thought out arguments in favour of atheism or against the existence of God. I don't believe you have really thought through every aspect of your belief in the rational, seeing as you have boiled it down to the five senses, which even science would regard as totally insufficient. This has provided a doorway for the theists Lori and Jenyar to get their feet in. Lori did in fact give you an answer to your question about how she had experienced God: "I know better, because I have experienced Him. I have heard Him not with my ears, and felt His presence not with my skin." But if she had heard Him with her ears and had felt him with her skin, what difference would that make? What we hear and feel is only a subjective experience created by and for our brains. wikipedia is a great reference, it is true. If I am not demonstrating clarity in my writing, that is not something I can fix by reading an encyclopaedia. I am not in particular need of clarity in my thoughts ... or more clarity than I already have, thank you. Thank you, and in return I will ask you to do yourself a favour, and that is not to make assumptions about the people you meet, either online or in real life. I have found my reality, and my clarity, thank you very much. You appear to have recently lost your faith in God. Well, I lost mine over twenty years ago. I personally did not find it nearly as complicated as you have to dismiss the concept of God, but I've had hard and painful battles with the concept of eternal nothingness after Death. And now I've come to sciforums where I've frequently had to work much harder to justify my belief in science than I had to hitherto, and the lesson that has taught me is a little, (just a little) humility, and the acceptance that my faith in science and the rational is not really different, deep down, than the theists' faith in God, Jesus, the Bible, Mohammed, the Q'Ran or the Book of Mormon. Even Richard Dawkins recently admitted that his defence of Darwinian evolution comes down to an article of faith - something he believes and yet can't prove. (Recent survey in the UK of scientists on exactly that question)
