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Atheism

charliebrown said:
Stephen Hawking claimed people are just computers that simply just turn off when we die.

Thirty miles from me is Nashville which just went through a school shooting and It goes back to the age old question why bad things happen to good people and young children ?
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As far as I'm concerned, God has got nowt to do with it...we do it to ourselves. (opinions may vary)
 
Vardoger said:
I'm not a member of any atheist organisations at the moment, but I don't see a problem with organized atheists working to protect their rights. An organisation is usually better to do lobbying than single persons.
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Who do you imagine is trying assail atheists’ “rights”, whatever they may be?

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
Who do you imagine is trying assail atheists’ “rights”, whatever they may be?

maximus otter
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Not so much here in Western countries, but primarily in countries where the religion's name begins with an 'I' and ends with an 'M', atheists are regularly persecuted and murdered.
 
maximus otter said:
Who do you imagine is trying assail atheists’ “rights”, whatever they may be?

maximus otter
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Well .. the Church of England did have a thing for torturing atheists to death and setting fire to them - which you could see as assailing their rights.
A while back and past persecution on religious grounds during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I is no guarantee of future religious persecution, but having a degree of wariness might not be utterly without justification.
 
pelgrane said:
Well .. the Church of England did have a thing for torturing atheists to death and setting fire to them - which you could see as assailing their rights.
A while back and past persecution on religious grounds during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I is no guarantee of future religious persecution, but having a degree of wariness might not be utterly without justification.
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maximus otter
 
That was a slightly tongue in cheek response as to why, as Vardoger said, there is nothing inherently strange in atheists forming organisations to protect their rights.
 
Fluttermoth said:
It's also a problem in parts of America as well; atheists regularly lose their jobs, are disowned by their families, and it's almost impossible for an atheist to be voted into any public position in many states :(
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that is just awful :(

From my perspective that is very unchristian of them. I'm assuming that it's mainly Christians who do this in this case?
 
Thankfully Christianity has moved on from the ghastly times of Bloody Mary, the Inquisition and such like (other ideologies maybe not as much), but the point remains that atheists apparently believe that the universe and everything we perceive around us arose out of nothing unnatural and that human beings amount to merely evolved flesh and blood automata.
I must admit that I find it hard to reconcile the "but where did everything originally come from" question with the fundamentally nihilist stance of the atheist without considering that it all started with something beyond our human comprehension.
 
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I have to confess that all my life I have had mixed emotions about the presence of a God.

I also confess that I have never meet an atheist.

I do know my wife lost 2 good friends from covid and they seemed to be very religious.

I do know covid killed about 7 million people world wide and their religious beliefs did not seem to help them.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
the point remains that atheists apparently believe that the universe and everything we perceive around us arose out of nothing unnatural and that human beings amount to merely evolved flesh and blood automata.
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I've taken a quick straw poll (sample size one) and this suggests that the actual difference (for at least those like the sample individual) is that they just don't care any further about the question than you've summarised above.

I am vaguely aware that some people get very attached to football teams. If I looked more closely I would probably see stuff about it in all sorts of places. However my attention is so focussed elsewhere that I don't even have a view of "not being interested in football". I've come out the otherside and am mostly oblivious to the questions that may surround it and what it means to those who do have an interest.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Thankfully Christianity has moved on from the ghastly times of Bloody Mary, the Inquisition and such like (other ideologies maybe not as much), but the point remains that atheists apparently believe that the universe and everything we perceive around us arose out of nothing unnatural and that human beings amount to merely evolved flesh and blood automata.
I must admit that I find it hard to reconcile the "but where did everything originally come from" question with the fundamentally nihilist stance of the atheist without considering that it all started with something beyond our human comprehension.
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The mystery still remains, and always shall.
However, religion adds an extra layer of complexity. Atheists think that the Universe spontaneously came into being. Religion has the view that God or gods created the Universe, without explaining how those deities came into existence.
Thus, essentially the same question is left unanswered.
 
Frideswide said:
I am vaguely aware that some people get very attached to football teams. If I looked more closely I would probably see stuff about it in all sorts of places. However my attention is so focussed elsewhere that I don't even have a view of "not being interested in football". I've come out the otherside and am mostly oblivious to the questions that may surround it and what it means to those who do have an interest.
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I am a football atheist too! :D
 
charliebrown said:
I also confess that I have never meet an atheist.
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How do you know? Does everyone in your neck of the woods wear a stylish lapel pin to make some info clear? AB negative, It's Complicated, Jain.

charliebrown said:
I do know covid killed about 7 million people world wide and their religious beliefs did not seem to help them.
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How do you know? I think you are assuming that they all prayed not to die. Perhaps the less obtrusive and noticeable the faith the more likely they are to pray for something else?
 
Frideswide said:
I've taken a quick straw poll (sample size one) and this suggests that the actual difference (for at least those like the sample individual) is that they just don't care any further about the question than you've summarised above.

I am vaguely aware that some people get very attached to football teams. If I looked more closely I would probably see stuff about it in all sorts of places. However my attention is so focussed elsewhere that I don't even have a view of "not being interested in football". I've come out the otherside and am mostly oblivious to the questions that may surround it and what it means to those who do have an interest.
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Well exactly.
Personal belief is always a result of a straw poll of one!
 
Frideswide said:
Touche! What I meant was that there's no point in asking me for first hand experience of atheism so I nipped into Mr Frideswide's study and asked him!
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Oh wow! I had a long theological discussion with my lady about her (French Catholic) beliefs after dinner yesterday. She is genuinely credulous of the Marian apparitions, whereas I remain hugely sceptical, but we both agree that the universe and everything couldn't merely have arisen out of nothing. So neither of us are atheists, but I could not be described as a follower of organised religion either.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
...but we both agree that the universe and everything couldn't merely have arisen out of nothing. So neither of us are atheists...
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Those things don't follow. I think you're assuming that atheists think the universe sprang from nothing. Atheism says nothing about the origins of the universe, or our ability to ever know. Perhaps that's science you're thinking about, which really doesn't say much more about it really. Also, you seem to be equating 'the universe couldn't have sprung from nothing' with 'a god exists', as though it's one or the other. I don't know why.
 
PeteByrdie said:
Those things don't follow. I think you're assuming that atheists think the universe sprang from nothing. Atheism says nothing about the origins of the universe, or our ability to ever know. Perhaps that's science you're thinking about, which really doesn't say much more about it really. Also, you seem to be equating 'the universe couldn't have sprung from nothing' with 'a god exists', as though it's one or the other. I don't know why.
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Where did all the stuff come from then?
 
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blessmycottonsocks said:
Where where did all the stuff come from then?
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I don't know, why are you asking me. I'm long in the tooth but I wasn't watching the universe come into being. Our universe might be a product of a larger, multidimensional parent universe with physical laws we don't understand and can't investigate, at least at the moment. And, yes, that invokes infinite regression, but so does a theory that a deity created everything.

eburacum said:
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It's gods all the way down.
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The point is, religion doesn't answer the question, nor does atheism, which just posits there is no convincing evidence for a god or gods, and science gets nearer the beginnings of the universe with observation (which disagrees with the sources from which our notions of a god originate), but still doesn't answer the question. 'We don't know' doesn't equal 'this conception of a deity is true'.
 
Mythopoeika said:
The mystery still remains, and always shall.
However, religion adds an extra layer of complexity. Atheists think that the Universe spontaneously came into being. Religion has the view that God or gods created the Universe, without explaining how those deities came into existence.
Thus, essentially the same question is left unanswered.
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I was a Hare Krsna for 12 years living in a temple. The Vedic knowledge on which the Hare Krsna religion is based on goes into immense detail about the process of creation and who God is. Christianity doesn't because that type of knowledge is not it's purpose.
 
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LymeswoldSnork said:
I must say all these theories about what exactly happened so many nanoseconds after the Big Bang seem just as fanciful and meaningless as theology.
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I can attempt to differentiate between the two. One is an extrapolation of observation, regardless of whether it's intuitive to someone, and doesn't assert anything it can't support with at least some evidence. The other is mythology intuitive to people thousands of years ago who were incapable of making those observations. One is a hypothesis derived from what can be known now, the other is a story about something far beyond what could have been known by people in the distant past.
 
Thanks to observation, we have then opportunity to explore ever closer to the moment of the Big Bang. At the moment the absolute horizon of observation is the Cosmic Microwave Background, which takes us back to the time when the universe was a dense, hot, opaque mass of plasma 379,000 years after the Bang itself. Since this surface is opaque one might think that this is as far back as one might see; but by detecting and measuring other forms of radiation, such as neutrinos, gravitational waves and even more exotic indicators, we should be able to see even deeper into the past.

Theology on the other hand makes no testable predictions, so is a completely different magisterium.

I love dreaming up theological constructs with various degrees of plausibility. My flippant statement 'it's gods all the way down' is one of these; if we imagine a god that created the universe, then we can also imagine a god that created that god, and one that created that god, and so on. This is a form of infinitism; there does not have to be a start to the chain of creators, any more than there needs to be an edge of the universe.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitism

But this is just an idle speculation; I've got lots more, even weirder conjectures. The universe is almost certainly far weirder than we can imagine. Such speculations are only useful as thought experiments and ways to imagine the unimaginable, so I'd never use these constructs as a basis for statements about morality. But some people seem to need guidance and reassurance, so good luck to those who can provide such things.
 
eburacum said:
Thanks to observation, we have then opportunity to explore ever closer to the moment of the Big Bang.
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Just as a slight aside, many assume that the "Big Bang" hypothesis was invented to give non-theists an alternative secular expression to replace creation, which obviously implies a creator.
The irony though is that the "Father of the Big Bang" was the Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre:

https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/georges-lemaitre-big-bang#:~:text=This startling idea first appeared,scientific orthodoxy in the 1930s.
 
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eburacum said:
Theology on the other hand makes no testable predictions, so is a completely different magisterium.

I love dreaming up theological constructs with various degrees of plausibility. My flippant statement 'it's gods all the way down' is one of these; if we imagine a god that created the universe, then we can also imagine a god that created that god, and one that created that god, and so on. This is a form of infinitism; there does not have to be a start to the chain of creators, any more than there needs to be an edge of the universe.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitism
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Christianity does not explain who God is, what His names are, or any real details other than a very broad outline and it also does not explain the process of creation as both of those are not the purpose of Christianity.

Science always seeks to put itself on the top rung. It's almost as if God only exists if science can prove He does which would then put science back above God.

The journey of religion is one of going inwards to learn about our true nature or self realisation and through that to re establish our lost relationship with God. We are imperfect, prone to illusion, limited and prone to making mistakes and unless we are reconnected in some way to the source that is perfect, then we can never start to understand God. The mind on it's own can never understand there is a God. It needs a via medium to do that. It can't be studied by science either as it's outside and beyond the realm of the material sciences. It's also personal to each person and expresses itself differently because we are all individual. By nature, God consciousness is not scientific.

What we imagine in terms of who created God, that is illusion. Imagine a place where everything exists eternally. God is the original who has always been and will always be and we are His created parts and parcels. We understand life in this world through the action of time. Spiritually, there is no time, and our nature is just that, timeless, but it's covered at present with the dense heavy illusion of time which is a force more powerful than every scientist that has ever existed, exists now, and will ever exist.

To me atheism is just a lack of knowledge off God and doesn't seem to be able to be a thing without there being a God to be atheistic about. In fact if there was no God there would be no atheism because we'd all be of the same mindset. It's like 'dark' has no meaning without 'light', etc.
 
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