Do You Believe in God?

That argument isn't that rare. I've heard that brought up before.

 

The seatbelt issue was merely one example and by focusing so hard on the example because you felt it was ridiculous, you in many ways missed the entire point.

As the poster above mentioned, the concept of predestination is hardly a foreign idea to theology and like I said, is not something I just made up on the fly. I know it's Wikipedia but here's an article on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination

I don't agree with the idea that some are automatically chosen for a better fate while others aren't but more to the point, the idea is that our lives are planned before we're even born and thus some would chose to die in a certain way without even consciously knowing it before hand (while they're living anyways), possibly to teach us a lesson as I suggested earlier.

Here's something else:

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/research01.html

Spoiler

It is not unusual for near-death experiencers returning from clinical death to report having received information concerning their pre-existence before they were conceived in the world. Some experiencers report of learning how they chose various aspects of their lives to be predestined before they were born. Some of the choices people have reported having chosen before birth include the selection of their birth parents, choosing their mission in life, and even choosing how they will die. This knowledge received by near-death experiencers of the past and future shows how some things in life are predestined while other things are not. It shows how free will and predestination both exist and work hand in hand. It means we choose our destiny in life before our birth into the world to live it. Because reincarnation is a concept found in many cultures and religions, the metaphor of life as a river which we chose before we were our birth, shows up in many of these cultures and religions. There are many aspects to a river which make it an excellent analogy to help us understand where we came from, where we're going, who we are, why we're here, and what life is all about.

I know how dismissive some are to NDE's but the point I'm making again is that there are viewpoints where people feel predestination is real.

 

dwight 2 houston speaks volumes.

 

I do know

 

Yes! Houston Rockets, champs by 2015!!!

 

A friend posted this on FB today:

 

I have to laugh at the idea that atheists are somehow more materialistic and that atheism will somehow bring ruin to the world faster than Christians. Atheism is fact based, not faith based first of all. The thing about atheists is they don't really tend to give a damn about spreading their belief system. You dont see atheists in airports or knocking on doors or having atheist study or atheist camp for their kids or young life for atheists or passign out atheist pamphlets. Christians are encouraged to spread their faith, whether you like it or not they're more than happy to read the bible to you or invite you to church. They actively try to convert or indoctrinate people to their faith in even the most subtle of ways. As for materialism, atheist don't have tithes, collection plates, or massive organizations that own millions of dollars in land. Christianity in the US has a massive machinery behind it. Militant atheism, if there is such a thing is about removing religion from government. They don't give a damn what you believe as long as you're not pushing it on them. Militant religion is way more fanatical. They're about injecting their faith not only into government but into every aspect of public life.

 

"I'll believe in God if the Rockets can get James Harden away from the Thunder and then get Dwight Howard" - 2011

 

You're telling me people may have ambiguous opinions about a subject like God? NO FREAKING WAY.

Not to mention, I don't see the contradiction. I don't really care if God ( or really, the gods) exist or not. I pray to them time to time, but that doesn't mean a lot - Japan's pretty much an atheist country, yet everyone goes to pray at the shrines. And even if God did exist, I'm a nationalist before I adhere to any religion.

I am extremely sorry that took 3 sentences to describe, and thus is not good enough for the "yes or no" dichotomy you want. I hope you can understand.

Oh. So militant atheism is good, up until the point where it does something bad like Robespierre or the Soviet Union (and conflating Stalin with atheism is just as bad as conflating Jihadists with Islam), then it becomes militant religiousness. That's an incredible cop-out.

Not to mention your sentence is my entire point. It's not good enough, from my experiences, for atheists to attack religion. They also need to attack belief. And while I'm ambiguous about my views on religion, I am NOT ambiguous on the importance of belief and ideals to uphold a society. Searching for the truth, searching for the facts, is very nice and important, but there is a point where it becomes pointless navel-gazing, which is pretty much modern postmodernism in my belief. People need something to believe in, to keep the fabric of society and to bind the community together. And while I don't like Christianity being that thing which people believe in, I want to replace it. I don't want to destroy it, because that will create nihilism ( and contary to how the media depicts it, nihilism is NOT "wanton debauchery do whatever you like", so don't counter me by pointing out that atheists are not like that)

 

Playboy Interview by Kurt Vonnegut

PLAYBOY: Beyond the fact that it's become a profitable way to make a living, why do you write?

VONNEGUT: My motives are political. I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society. I differ with dictators as to how writers should serve. Mainly, I think they should be - and bio-logically have to be - agents of change. For the better, we hope.

PLAYBOY: Biologically?

VONNEGUT: Writers are specialized cells in the social organism. They are evolutionary cells. Mankind is trying to become something else; it's experimenting with new ideas all the time. And writers are a means of introducing new ideas into the society, and also a means of responding symbolically to life. I don't think we're in control of what we do.

PLAYBOY: What is in control?

VONNEGUT: Mankind's wish to improve itself.

PLAYBOY: In a Darwinian sense?

VONNEGUT: I'm not very grateful for Darwin, although I suspect he was right. His ideas make people crueler. Darwinism says to them that people who get sick deserve to be sick, that people who are in trouble must deserve to be in trouble. When anybody dies, cruel Darwinists imagine we're obviously improving ourselves in some way. And any man who's on top is there because he's a superior animal. That's the social Darwinism of the last century, and it continues to boom. But forget Darwin. Writers are specialized cells doing whatever we do, and we're expressions of the entire society-just as the sensory cells on the surface of your body are in the service of your body as a whole. And when a society is in great danger, we're likely to sound the alarms. I have the canary-bird-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. You know, coal miners used to take birds down into the mines with them to detect gas before men got sick. The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam. They chirped and keeled over. But it made no difference whatsoever. Nobody important cared. But I continue to think that artists - all artists - should be treasured as alarm systems.

PLAYBOY: And social planners?

VONNEGUT: I have many ideas as to how Americans could be happier and better cared for than they are.

PLAYBOY: In some of your books - especially The Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse-Five - there's a serious notion that all moments in time exist simultaneously, which implies that the future can't be changed by an act of will in the present. How does a desire to improve things fit with that?
VONNEGUT: You understand, of course, that everything I say is horse****.

PLAYBOY: Of course.

VONNEGUT: Well, we do live our lives simultaneously. That's a fact. You are here as a child and as an old man. I recently visited a woman who has Hodgkin's disease. She has somewhere between a few months and a couple of years to live, and she told me that she was living her life simultaneously now, living all the moments of it.

PLAYBOY: It still seems paradoxical.

VONNEGUT: That's because what I've just said to you is horse****. But it's a useful, comforting sort of horse****, you see? That's what I object to about preachers. They don't say anything to make anybody any happier, when there are all these neat lies you can tell. And everything is a lie, because our brains are two-bit computers, and we can't get very high-grade truths out of them. But as far as improving the human condition goes, our minds are certainly up to that. That's what they were designed to do. And we do have the freedom to make up comforting lies. But we don't do enough of it.

PLAYBOY: Do you think organized religion can make anybody happier?

VONNEGUT: Oh, of course. Lots of comforting lies are told in church - not enough, but some. I wish preachers would lie more convincingly about how honest and brotherly we should be. I've never heard a sermon on the subject of gentleness or restraint; I've never heard a minister say it was wrong to kill. No preacher ever speaks out against cheating in business. There are fifty-two Sundays in a year, and somehow none of these subjects comes up.

PLAYBOY: Is there any religion you consider superior to any other?

VONNEGUT: Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous gives you an extended family that's very close to a blood brotherhood, because everybody has endured the same catastrophe. And one of the enchanting aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous is that many people join who aren't drunks, who pretend to be drunks because the social and spiritual benefits are so large. But they talk about real troubles, which aren't spoken about in church, as a rule. The halfway houses for people out of prisons, or for people recovering from drug habits, have the same problems: people hanging around who just want the companionship, the brotherhood or the sisterhood, who want the extended family.


PLAYBOY: Aren't links by name, though, what you call a false carass in Cat's Cradle - a group that finds its identity in an irrelevant or artificial shared experience?

VONNEGUT: I don't know, but if it works, it doesn't matter. It's like the drug thing among young people. The fact that they use drugs gives them a community. If you become a user of any drug, you can pick up a set of friends you'll see day after day, because of the urgency of getting drugs all the time. And you'll get a community where you might not ordinarily have one. Built around the mar1juana thing was a community, and the same is true about the long-hair thing: You're able to greet and trust strangers because they look like you, because they use mar1juana, and so forth. These are all magical amulets by which they recognize one another - and so you've got a community. The drug thing is interesting, too, because it shows that, damn it, people are wonderfully resourceful.

PLAYBOY: How so?

VONNEGUT: Well, thousands of people in our society found out they were too stupid or too unattractive or too ignorant to rise. They realized they couldn't get a nice car or a nice house or a good job. Not everybody can do that, you know. You must be very pleasant. You must be good-looking. You must be well connected. And they realized that if you lose, if you don't rise in our society, you're going to live in the midst of great ugliness, that the police are going to try to drive you back there every time you try to leave. And so people trapped like that have really considered all the possibilities. Should I paint my room? If I get a lot of rat poison, will the rats go away? Well, no. The rats will still be there, and even if you paint it, the room will still be ugly. You still won't have enough money to go to a movie theater; you still won't be able to make friends you like or can trust.
So what can you do? You can change your mind. You can change your insides. The drug thing was a perfectly marvelous, resourceful, brave experiment. No government would have dared perform this experiment. It's the sort of thing a Nazi doctor might have tried in a concentration camp. Loading everybody in block C up with amphetamines. In block D, giving them all heroin. Keeping everyone in block E high on mar1juana - and just seeing what happened to them. But this experiment was and continues to be performed by volunteers, and so we know an awful lot now about how we can be changed internally. It may be that the population will become so dense that everybody's going to live in ugliness, and that the intelligent human solution - the only possible solution - will be to change our insides.


PLAYBOY: How does it feel to have been doing for years what must have seemed to you like good work and only now getting really noticed?

VONNEGUT: I don't feel cheated. I always had readers, even when not much money was coming in. I was in paperbacks, you see, and from the first, I was getting friendly notes from strangers who had found me in PXs and drugstores and bus stations. Mother Night and Canary in a Cathouse and The Sirens of Titan were all paperback originals, and Cat's Cradle was written with that market in mind. Holt decided to bring out a hard-cover edition of Cat's Cradle after the paperback rights had been sold. The thing was, I could get $3,000 immediately for a paperback original, and I always needed money right away, and no hardcover publisher would let me have it.
But I was also noticing the big money and the heavy praise some of my contemporaries were getting for their books, and I would think, "Well, ****, I'm going to have to study writing harder, because I think what I'm doing is pretty good, too." I wasn't even getting reviewed.Esquire published a list of the American literary world back then and it guaranteed that every living author of the slightest merit was on there somewhere. I wasn't on there. Rust Hills put the thing together, and I got to know him later and I told him that the list had literally made mi sick, that it had made me feel subhuman. He said it wasn't supposed to be take seriously. "It was a joke," he said. And then he and his wife got out a huge anthology of high-quality American writing since World War Two and I wasn't there, either.

PLAYBOY: Do you think organized religion can make anybody happier?

VONNEGUT: Oh, of course. Lots of comforting lies are told in church - not enough, but some. I wish preachers would lie more convincingly about how honest and brotherly we should be. I've never heard a sermon on the subject of gentleness or restraint; I've never heard a minister say it was wrong to kill. No preacher ever speaks out against cheating in business. There are fifty-two Sundays in a year, and somehow none of these subjects comes up

PLAYBOY: Is there any religion you consider superior to any other?

VONNEGUT: Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous gives you an extended family that's very close to a blood brotherhood, because everybody has endured the same catastrophe. And one of the enchanting aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous is that many people join who aren't drunks, who pretend to be drunks because the social and spiritual benefits are so large. But they talk about real troubles, which aren't spoken about in church, as a rule. The halfway houses for people out of prisons, or for people recovering from drug habits, have the same problems: people hanging around who just want the companionship, the brotherhood or the sisterhood, who want the extended family.
Playboy: You don't have a community?

Vonnegut, Jr.: Oh, there are a lot of people who'll talk to me on the telephone. And I always receive nice welcomes at Holiday Inns, Quality Motor Courts, Ramada Inns.

Playboy: But you have no relatives?

Vonnegut, Jr.: Shoals of them, but scattered to hell and gone, and thinking all kinds of crazy different ways.

Playboy: You want to be with people who live nearby and think exactly as you do?

Vonnegut, Jr.: No. That isn't primitive enough. I want to be with people who don't think at all, so I won't have to think, either. I'm very tired of thinking. It doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe, in my opinion. I'd like to live with alligators, think like an alligator.

Playboy: Could this feeling come from the fatigue of having just finished a book?

Vonnegut, Jr.: No.

Playboy: Even though you'd rather be an alligator, could we talk about people some more?

Vonnegut, Jr.: People are too good for this world.

 

I'm guessing Vonnegut didn't go to a lot of church services if he never heard a minister preach on kindness/gentleness.

Thanks for posting that, Dubious. Interesting reading for sure.

As for the thread...I've stopped in to read it from time to time...but I'm not likely to change anyone's mind and I'm not remotely interested in proving up God to you like a mathematical formula. I do wish people could find a way to express opinions without being so rude to one another, though. I'm guilty of that, too.

 

It was in a John Cusak tweet today. Vonnegut is my biggest philosophical influence, ha!~

I cannot possibly believe in God, but I envy people that find comfort in it.

 

No. I'm sorry, but this just isn't accurate. All of the human 'isms' are words that describe a minimum set of beliefs their subscribers must hold. If you don't hold those minimum beliefs, the term doesn't apply to you. Stalinism is a political belief - if you don't believe the arrangement of the state should be based on one-party rule, state ownership of the means of production, and industrialization, then you are not a Stalinist and you're just abusing language if that's what you call yourself.

To be an atheist, there is exactly one belief you have to hold: There's no evidence that gods exist. Once you hold that belief, there's no other action atheism implies, and to become a more extreme atheist is only to become more sure that there's no reason to believe in gods. Some atheists are Stalinists. Some are humanists. But their actions are driven by the other beliefs they hold. Atheism itself is almost entirely inert.

Whatever else you might say about Stalinism, you must admit that it's a very high-maintenence belief. There's a long list of things its subscribers must do in order to create a reality that matches their vision. Atheism is not like this. I don't know what 'militant atheism' means, but criticism that uses this term usually takes the form of "Why do you keep refusing to treat our unsubstantiated faith claims with the same seriousness that you treat well-evidenced propositions? Why won't you make an exception for our god?

I have no problem with belief, which simply means to hold some condition as 'true' in your mind. What I have a problem with is faith, which is belief unsupported by evidence. "Voltage/resistance = amperage" and "If you fail to pray to the correct god in the correct way you will be tortured in hell for all eternity after death" are two statements that people sincerely believe, but only one of those statements has evidence to support it.

 

I've mentioned leaps of faith in this thread before, but I want to point out that atheists who make these statements are typically leaning on Occam's razor to support many of their facts. Occam's razor is a heuristic, and as with all heuristics, tends to bring a sense of overconfidence in the path of least resistence.

The fact is we don't have all the answers, and when any of us are met with one of those questions, we accept what we find to be most comforting. I try to be as objective as I can, but the "truths" of this world that I blindly accept are rooted in a case of puer aeternus.

 

That's not true for atheism/atheist. What Cometswin described is the principle of being skeptical, not atheism. Atheism, is the position that rejects religious claims because of insufficient evidence, thats all there is. Atheism doesn't have any claims to make, nor does it have any holy book as such. It's not a belief system nor it is based on faith. It's simply the default position when in doubt.

We don't have all the answers, in fact, we probably don't have most of the answers, therefore I'm gonna hold my judgement for the time being. That's the right attitude towards anything happening around us.

And it's certainly not Rocket science.

 

That's probably true but I think it's probably more reasonable to use Occam's razor in explaining the unknown than using stories passed on over time. One is a probability while the other is a myth. They both might eventually be wrong but the myth is always wrong.

 

Are you going to tell me that your atheism and SP's atheism are the same?

Except you do need faith. Everyone does. You can't live your life demanding evidence for everything. What is trust, after all, if not the belief in someone to do something even if you don't have total proof that they will? And what is a society if there is no trust? Even someone like bobmarley isn't so foolish to believe that there won't be a knock on his door at midnight.

Scientific proofs are not the same as moral, ethical, and historical proofs, and religion exclusively concerns itself with the latter - even when they do interfere with science, it is obviously on said moral and ethical grounds. This is all the more compounded by the fact that science is obviously a very, very bad method on which to build a society, so then the question becomes how do we build it? It's not built on evidence in the way that science is.

The idea of evidence is built on the fact that we should find truth, and that is all well and good in science - but there is no such thing as an objective truth in morals and ethics. It is this continual search, however, which has led to endless navel-gazing and solipism, to the intellectual jargon wasteland which is postmodernism, as we destroy old beliefs and old ways in the name of the truth, only to knock down the next truth in a 50 years as the newest academic trend appears.

 

Concerning atheism and mass murder, Christian apologist Gregory Koukl wrote that "the assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them." Koukl details the number of people killed in various events involving theism and compares them to the much higher tens of millions of people killed under atheistic communist regimes, in which militant atheism served as the official doctrine of the state. It has been estimated that in less than the past 100 years, governments under the banner of communism have caused the death of somewhere between 40,472,000 to 259,432,000 human lives. Dr. R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is the scholar who first coined the term democide (death by government). Dr. R. J. Rummel's mid estimate regarding the loss of life due to communism is that communism caused the death of approximately 110,286,000 people between 1917 and 1987. Richard Dawkins has attempted to engage in historical revisionism concerning atheist atrocities and Dawkins was shown to be in gross error (see also: Atheism and communism and Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union).

Koukl summarized by stating:

“ It is true that it's possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the detail it produces evil because the individual people are actually living in a rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it can produce it, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We're talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. ”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was asked to account for the great tragedies that occurred under the brutal communist regime he and fellow citizens suffered under.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered the following explanation:

“ Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'
Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'