I'm an atheist. Not a militant one like Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss, but I agree with them on the point that an infinitely loving creator is nonsensical.
However, the more I go through life the less satisfying atheism seems. I had a brush with death several times last year. My uncle passed away, and my family had an open casket funeral. I had to touch his cold, dead hand at my family's request and pretend to say a prayer. That messed me up a lot more than I thought it would. Feeling his lifeless skin has since slowly sent me into an existential crisis. I really want to see my family and loved ones after I die. The idea of being greeted by cold darkness is beginning to drive me mad.
Around the same time, I had a serious illness that almost killed me, of which I am still suffering some after effects. I have developed another, separate, chronic condition that makes me feel suicidal at times. If there is no God, then all of this suffering is pointless, cruel, and meaningless. I am tired. I don't want to consider mortality anymore or I'll go insane.
Tell me, why do you believe in god? I don't want to believe because it is comfy. I want to believe out of a revelation that it is true. Can you give me any reason to believe?
People turn to atheism because they automatically assume a God has the moral obligation to give a shit about you or your limited concept of morality. They make it about a personal God who gets mad if you don't go to the Church or you jerk off to trannies and speaks to illiterate inbred goat herders in the desert
God has no reason to give a shit, even less so to give a shit about you. Drop the assumption that God owes you something and you will find the mark of a rational, sentient, omnipotent being in the Universe
William Bell
The fuck was that schlock.
Andrew Howard
>The idea of being greeted by cold darkness is beginning to drive me mad Were you "going mad" when you were only in the womb?
I'd imagine dying is something like coming into living; before we were born we didn't worry about jack shit.
Josiah Thompson
wtf i love clocks now
Cameron Gomez
I believe in a personal afterlife at the very least after visiting mediums.
James Nelson
Just look at these numbers.
Nolan Powell
Kek is your god now.
Jackson Gray
The construct of heaven was invented because people fear the unknown that comes after death. The concept of hell exist to control people's action in life. Accept the fact that we are just a sentient abstract signals trapped in a flesh vessel inside a skelleton wrapped in muscle in skin riding a giant lump of dirt through infinite void for all eternity.
Gabriel Gonzalez
You don't believe. Religion is all a way to control people. Propaganda 101: tell people to believe they're superior and they'll do anything that you want. Religion justifies war crimes and other horrible actions like paedophilia and genocide. Don't bother getting caught up in it.
Read pic before reading the below.
See, it's made you feel superior already. Now you'll strut along believing your superior, so you'll think doing whatever you do (hating niggers and jews) is justified because this random guy said so.
Dominic Murphy
>7s Praise him! Praise Kek!
Elijah Rogers
I BELIEVE
Brayden Wood
To expand, the heaven and hell concepts are only there to control people into doing what religious leaders want people to do. Kill someone? Go to hell after you die. Behave? Go to heaven after you die. It'll get people to behave so they don't fear punishment in the 'afterlife.'
Continue with atheism. Ignore religion altogether.
Josiah Long
I mean, I suppose the problem of evil can be overcome. But, there is just no evidence. The universe existing is evidence for something, but not necessarily a "God".
Jeremiah Edwards
I follow no religion but also reject the atheist tag as I think some, usually the loudest ones sound like bitchy 12 year olds getting edgy, they sound dumb, nothing I want to be associated with. On the flip side no one can convince me their religion is real, why is it always one or the other? I've always agreed that if there were a giant creator it would be too massive and alien to even notice humans.
>Consciousness Consciousness cannot be reduced to purely materialistic terms >archive.is/dpaeg The universe's basic block is information, not matter or energy >archive.is/UKxG4 Consciousness can be expressed as information patterns and quantified (work in progress). Every network is "unique" and contains a expresses a different instance of consciousness >archive.is/EymUY Reincarnation (probably) exists >archive.is/oFLX6 You retain awareness after brain death >archive.is/B0w9e
ppl are all one, We are god that has been divided into pieces so we can experience everything and not be bored of knowing everything
Joseph Jones
>but I agree with them on the point that an infinitely loving creator is nonsensical.
Did you ever read the old testament? God wasn't infinitely loving. Dudes regularly ruined people, be it mass numbers or on an individuals level, just to prove fucking points.
Josiah Sullivan
Gold cannot decay, therefore it cannot evolve. Only a God can create it. Now the only thing to figure out is who the God is. A brief comparison of the Holy books of the world should make that pretty easy. Be sure to use the King James Version in your analysis.
Lincoln Bailey
The first mover argument as sketched out by Aquinas is pretty compelling. It says nothing specific about the nature of God though, except that he is the causa sui originator of all causality.
Anselm's ontological argument is a bit more controversial, and doesn't really seem well-suited for convincing people. Still, it has managed to convince some - Kurt Gödel, one of the greatest logicians of all time (with Aristotle and Frege), found it convincing and constructed a formal proof of it. This lead some philosophers to outright deny the modal logic he used for it, rather than accept his conclusion. That is kind of interesting.
If you're actually interested, I'd recommend the following works:
Proslogion - Anselm Summa Theologica - Aquinas Ethics - Spinoza
Thomas Jones
>The idea of being greeted by cold darkness is beginning to drive me mad. It's not cold darkness. It's nothing. If you died and were somehow revived in a million years, then it would seem like absolutely no time has passed, because being dead means there is nothing. There's no darkness or coldness. It's the same as what people say they experience during surgery when they're under anaesthesia. They feel that they wake up a second after they pass out, even if 6 hours have passed.
Caleb Richardson
You're on the right path m8, have faith
Camden Jenkins
It's incredibly unlikely to the point of being nigh impossible that we evolved by chance. The actual probability of you existing in this universe by chance occurance is somewhere in the range of one in a centillion. For you to come to being in the span of a mere 14 billion years is so phenomenally unlikely that there MUST have been some intelligent influence.
For comparison the chances of you winning the lottery every single week for 10 years straight are a few million fold more probable than the chance of you sitting where you are right now if the universe is purely deterministic
Mason Mitchell
If cold darkness was the truth, why would it upset you so much? You're not the only one, so why does it upset so many people so much? If it were so simple as that people just evolved from lower organisms with no meaning, and humans were just another species with no destiny, why would the truth that we evolved in be so distressing?
Sheldon Vanauken wrote of a letter he received from C.S. Lewis in his book A Severe Mercy:
“C.S. Lewis in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed by it--how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.”
Cameron Foster
That was well deep m8, stinks of nu-age desu
Jayden Foster
How 2 b atheist in easy steps. 1. Claim you haven't seen evidence, you are a special snowflake chosen for a mission, so you need ever increasingly harder to disprove signs each 5 minutes. 2. The guy who saw evidence has a mental illness. 3. There are no videos except for a whole internet, but these don't count because they are domestic recordings with bad quality, just as if your regular Joe had caught it on cam by sheer luck instead of the hq superproduction with fun montages, filters and fx you can actually trust.
Nicholas Foster
The nature of consciousness is the biggest evidence. Find a way to reduce it to material terms and you have disproved God, read what posted about matter and energy being composed by information to the most basic level (the same stuff our consciousness is made of) This guy gets it. I was the one who originally posted the links (it's all peer reviewed research), but he fucked up and mixed it up with Reverend's Billy Bob sermons. Shame really, but you get the idea
Ethan Gutierrez
Deuteronomy 20:10-16 – "When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes."
Justin Rodriguez
>infinitely loving creator Has many more qualities than that although God created the universe as an expression of love. He created beings to express love as well, towards Him (By faith) and others, however you can't love without volition and purpose.
Faith is a more powerful expression of "love" due to the qualities that faith goes into. Faith in parents, friends, spouses, children, etc...Goes both ways and leads to acts of kindness or animosity depending on the level of faith we have/actions of those we have faith in.
Jaxson Cook
How can something come from nothing? Energy just began to exist. Matter eminated from that energy. You are conscious. You can think. You exist and are intelligent. These are not merely evolutional traits. Im not saying I know what god exists, just saying that something does exist.
Easton Turner
I've been reading Warhammer 40,000 novels non stop for the past 2 years.
Im totally brainwashed by it. I believe in Chaos (the Immaterium, Sea of Souls, whatever you wanna name it). Warp exists, too, with all its insane fuckery. Lets just hope the God Emperor is real, or else we're all FUCKED.
You can always rest assured that since there is something, there can be something AGAIN.
This is the only thought that is keeping me a normie.
Brayden Collins
Look into occult shit.
I don't mean the satanic occult, I mean the Jesus kind. Theosophy can help. Eventually you'll run across shit that will be proof to you, but understand that spirituality is not some guy in the clouds on a surfboard, it's very philosophical and abstract beyond human comprehension.
Also this
Jeremiah Fisher
I've read Summa Theologica. Aquinas is one of my favorite philosophers too. The first mover argument makes a lot of sense. The idea that something can come from nothing is illogical. That part of existence may never be explained by science.
As for the ontological argument, I studied it in college, but I was never able to fully grasp it.
Joshua Harris
Congratulations. You have the dumbest post in this thread, and that's a feat.
David Morales
>brainwashed by it
Kek'd
The lore of the universe is great and mirrors what we see in reality quire well in some aspects. Just started ready the HH and I've really been enjoying it, any suggestions?
Jaxon Young
Read it all.
Star with all the Horus Heresy books. After that, i recommend:
Both are about Inquisitors, really, really good books.
Ryder Mitchell
Do you understand that? It was too fast and *needed* time to be thought about and considered. I guess Russians are crazy clever after all, and in a way that I like. I fucking detest American academic notions of intelligence. They chant "Freedom" like a mantra but they all live in a box, confined by the limits of their perception and hence their limited understanding. It's so fucking Anglo Saxon, binary and indicative of there superiority complex.
If you really want to believe in God, it's not such a leap if you keep an open mind and understand that everything within a Religion is symbolic of Virtues. Even God is a symbol but the confusion sown by parties interested in confusing you so as to control you is all around you. It caters to your ego and your ego's need for validation. So to find a concept of God that you can understand, appreciate and accept is possible, finding a Religion you can do that with is another matter and tied to much more pragmatic things like your culture, nation, ethnicity and personal values.
Lincoln King
Let me add, your perceptions of reality are through one lens. Everything you read will be through one person/group's lens, but it is only a physical manifestation of very abstract concepts. All spirituality is right, but imperfect because it's seen through physical human psyche.
Try to look at various different lenses/sources/arguments to see an intangible reality. Just don't lose yourself.
Connor Williams
you can call me Nu-male Transgender Lesbian Black Jesus
Anthony Hughes
>eisenhorn
Noice m8, just ordered it and hoping it will arrive by Christmas for some down time. I've even, sadly, started considering taking up the tabletop game, it's fuck off expensive but seems like a healthy hobby to have on the side.
Ok so E=mC^2, meaning all matter is energy. So everything's just energy.
And then I began to ask two questions:
>why is there anything instead of nothing >what is the source of consciousness?
For the first one, I came to the (somewhat paradoxical?) answer: nothing can't be the only thing that exists. Basically for there to be nothing, something has to exist. Otherwise what is nothing? As for consciousness, I view it as our window into this experience. The energy of the universe is playing hide and seek with itself, and through consciousness, it is able to have a wide range of experiences.
So I think of all this energy as god. At some time, for some reason, the big ball of energy we call the universe became the planets and the stars and you and me. And I'm just calling that big ball of energy god.
Nathaniel Jenkins
>The nature of consciousness is the biggest evidence. Find a way to reduce it to material terms and you have disproved God If it was anything else than chemical processes in the brain and interactions between neurons we wouldnt be able to cancel someones consciousness (putting them to sleep) by using drugs like barbiturates. If consciousness was something strictly metaphysical and godgiven it makes zero sense for us to be able to subvert gods will for us to have a consciousness through the use of a simple chemical interaction.
Bentley Sanchez
I can't convince you because I'm on the same page. I get frustrated about how redpilled Sup Forums users in general seem to be about most issues, but completely bluepilled about this.
If it was truly European culture, like paganism, then I would perhaps get involved and blindly believe in it, in the name of cultural pride & heritage. But it isn't even that. In the beginning christian missionaries in europe lived in little hillside & coast shacks because they got hunted the fuck out whenever they tried to push their message in populated areas of europe.
Centuries later they were violently slaughtering anyone who professed to believe anything other than christianity, forcing their word on our ancestors who rejected it.
No one thinks there was some agenda to this dogma that spread so strongly from the middle east into europe?
Colton Turner
>baa you're dumb educate yourself!
Creation still violates less scientific laws than the big bang theory and evolution.
Jace Collins
Dead Men Walking
Liam Richardson
The digits have spoken
Ryder Adams
>t are a few million fold more probable than the chance of you sitting where you are right now if the universe is purely deterministic Does this theory even account for infinite multiverses though?
Matthew Sanders
I think our perceptions of reality are so deeply rooted to one, singular experience that we actually have no idea how the universe really works. I remember riding in a plane for the first time, and watching the cars and houses slowly shrink to toys really blew my mind. Our perceptions are sort of like that for everything else. Like if we could attain a higher level of perception and switch between it and our current ones, we may find a lot of physical rules are not actually the way they seem.
Bentley Nguyen
>added to list
Truly the best art / aesthetic.
>grimdark
Noice
Mason Lee
I was in the same boat as you, OP. Crazy as it sounds, I found more comfort in hermeticism than any religion (though Buddhism and Taosim are cool).
I recommend mindandmagick's YouTube channel highly.
Jack Lopez
Whoa.... 80$ on Amazon for Dead Men Walking.
Gotta check if its in some other omnibus, 80$ is.... a lot.
Once hooked on WH40K, you will never go back. Your wallet will suffer, but its worth it.
Connor Harris
>It's incredibly unlikely to the point of being nigh impossible that we evolved by chance. First off, I just want to say that its obvious you're just pulling shit out of your ass here.
Secondly, had this "one in a centillion" chance occurence not happened, you would not be able to sit here and shitpost on a mongolian carpetweaving board either. The only reason you are able to, is because it happened. Meaning, you have no experience of what may have been or what could have happened, so you are left to merely speculate.
Levi Powell
The brain is the hardware the software of the mind runs on. You can take a hammer to the hardware and stop the program from running but it doesn't mean you've changed the programming of the software at all
Brayden Hughes
Maybe its just because I have smoked way to much put but I seriously and earnestly believe reality is all an illusion in one way or anther.
Everything exists way too perfectly. How can all the ingredients to become the world we are today have actually existed in any other setting besides a controlled one?
I know theres going to forever be debate on it and no conclusive answers, but to me I just feel like everything I know and see was planned with some sort of craft.
Logan Wilson
>Secondly, had this "one in a centillion" chance occurence not happened, you would not be able to sit here and shitpost on a mongolian carpetweaving board either Uh, yeah, that's my point. It's literally impossible that it happened by sheer chance, ergo...
Camden Wright
If you manage to understand this paper and its implications, the ontological argument will spring to life.
The teleological argument is definitely the most satisfying argument for god. But there is no doubt to be had, the ontological argument is the best possible argument for god.
Its saying that if god can exist, then he does. Simply because god is perfect and it is more perfect to exist than not to exist. This might seem like a cop out, but the more you go into it is the more you realize that it is true. The entire argument is premised on a distinction between being and existence, and essentially the subjective - objective differences in reality (say that kant proposed regarding epistemology).
The only argument that "defeats" this argument is that hard materialism accounts fully for the origin and nature of experience and consciousness. This argument is already disproven by physics (though it doesnt mean god exists, but that some metaphysics indicative of something like god exists).
The question of "if god can exist" is already answered. So must the question "does he exist".
It feels like a cop out but it really genuinely is not and the paper i linked removes all modal logic from the argument in so making it a real argument.
The coolest thing about the paper i linked, is that it shows one very important part of the ontological argument. That god MUST NECESSARILY have abilities that represent maximums (such as omnipotence) and so the actual existence of god depends entirely on whether we can understand him to BE perfect and complete or not.
That is, there are no imperfect or incomplete "gods" these gods cannot exist. So in a sense, if an atheist is seeing god as incomplete, then he is not wrong.
The thing is, theists see god as complete full, infinite and loving in part to many to real experience. (i have heard the voice of god, and it is far warmer and more loving than you can ever imagine)
Luis Morris
I just find it insane that this universe, with all it's beauty and all it's wonder, was created by nothing for no purpose.
Let alone this world and humanity. I can't find any way to rationalize that it all came about by chance.
Brandon Watson
user I always like to imagine a desert scene. You know, sand, rocks, the whole nine yards. It's empty, desolate, insanely hot during the day, insanely cold during the night... maybe there is some sand drifting with the wind, skirting by your face...
But what is this? You notice a small lizard skirt through the sand, a thing in motion. A creature. It's not a rock, or a grain of sand, but a living, breathing THING.
So WHY does this THING exist? It is not needed in this valley of lifeless rock and sand. This land could exist for eons without needing a living thing to take up refuge within itself. The living thing is unnecessary, seemingly pointless... Or was it? Sure, perhaps it was just an incredible accident... a miracle, if you will. So now the question is: was this, the creation of a living thing, just a random miracle, or was there some sort of other involvement? Was there something else overseeing the process?
I guess I'm just saying that it is the UNNECESAry quality of life itself that leads me to reaffirm my beleif in a higher power.
Humans sometimes can't even walk out of a door right, yet we are so adamant in our knowledge we think we can easily solve the world's biggest questions? So I'd say its foolish to believe in there being absolutely a god or absolutely no god, yet at the same time I myself is so compelled by the excessiveness of life that I am inclined to believe in some sort of God.
Oliver Parker
>I believe things with almost zero probability happened It's almost like you believe in miracles sven cuckoldsson
Jaxon Garcia
>It's literally impossible that it happened by sheer chance Uh, no? The fact that it has disproves that. Every step of the way up until our existence can be rationally explained using science. From the nanoseconds after the big bang, to the stars exploding, debris coalescing into planets and finally the emergence of multicellular life. We do not need a deity to explain how our emergence happened.
Doesn't disprove what i said. Why would a combination of chemical processes give birth to conscious beings and not just "zombies" on autopilot? Maybe these processes just make consciousness "visible" to our world, like some kind of anthenna
And the idea of zombies on autopilot in itself is possible. Harris mentioned an experiment in which brain damage to an individual resulted in this individual being blinded by his right eye (the eye and the optic nerves were fine tho). He was then received some kind of test where two halves of an incomplete sentences were placed in front of his eyes. He was able to complete the sentences despite bing blind from one eye. Consciousness seems to be an "extra piece"
Joseph Wood
I'm beginning to think that reincarnation is the most likely of all the afterlife scenarios. Like your consciousness gets recycled, but it isn't actually "you" the next time around. You could be an alien 100 million light years away next time, or a bug. Blows my goddamn mind thinking about it.
Kayden Ross
>material brain constructs consciousness >The video game character constructs the player
Sure buddy
Jackson Myers
>Załóżmy, że skonstruowaliśmy komputer, który zachowuje się, jakby rozumiał język chiński. Innymi słowy, komputer bierze chińskie znaki jako podstawę wejściową i śledzi zbiór reguł nimi rządzący (jak wszystkie komputery), koreluje je z innymi chińskimi znakami, które prezentuje jako informację wyjściową.
>Załóżmy, że ten komputer wykonuje to zadanie w sposób tak przekonujący, że łatwo przechodzi test Turinga, tzn. przekonuje Chińczyka, że jest Chińczykiem. Na wszystkie pytania, które człowiek zadaje, udziela właściwych odpowiedzi w sposób tak naturalny, że Chińczyk jest przekonany, iż rozmawia z innym Chińczykiem. Zwolennicy mocnej sztucznej inteligencji wyciągają stąd wniosek, że komputer rozumie chiński tak, jak człowiek.
>Teraz Searle proponuje, żeby założyć, iż to on sam siedzi wewnątrz komputera. Innymi słowy, on sam znajduje się w małym pokoju, w którym dostaje chińskie znaki, konstruuje książkę reguł, a następnie zwraca inne chińskie znaki, ułożone zgodnie z tymi regułami. Searle zauważa, że oczywiście nie rozumie ani słowa po chińsku, mimo iż wykonuje powierzone mu zadanie. Następnie argumentuje, że jego brak rozumienia dowodzi, że i komputery nie rozumieją chińskiego, znajdując się w takiej samej sytuacji jak on: są bezumysłowymi manipulatorami symboli i nie rozumieją, co „mówią”, tak, jak i on nie rozumie treści chińskich znaków, którymi operował.
How can I know in my heart, that English is not just another "room"? What happens if I refuse to manipulate the symbols for the program?
Henry Hughes
I just find it insane that the mountain, with all it's beauty and all it's wonder, was created by nothing for no purpose.
Let alone the river, and the trees. I can't find any way to rationalize that it all came about by chance.
There must be a god that's building and moving those mountain, digging that riverbed while planting those trees.
This is what people thousand years ago think. I'm glad to see humanity never improved themselves after this many years.
Carter Perez
A miracle is something that happens without any rational or scientific explanation. It just happens, seemingly because of divine intervention. We do not need a deity to explain how we came to be, it is all one scientific process, from the start to the end.
Sebastian Brooks
But where did it all come from to begin with?
Jason Rivera
Woah
Leo Roberts
>not recommending gaunt's ghosts
Jack Flores
Have thousand worth of w40k models not worth the lore and story is fucking god tier tho All hail the God Emperor of mankind
Juan Martin
But we can change the "programming of the software" ? Using drugs, again. Anti-depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens and so forth. We can change how we percieve the world, and what we see, using chemical interactions. The definition of a depression for example is a chemical imbalance in the brain. Thats one of the first things shrinks tell you. "you're not depressed because you're an inherently shitty being, you're depressed because of a chemical imbalance." Thats the definition of a clinical depression. It can be measured and explained using chemicals.
Camden Gomez
No, I agree that many celebrity atheists are douchebags. They treat science as a type of religion itself that cannot be talked down upon. I've been wrong so many times about things I was once 100% convinced of, though. Maybe atheism is just trendy and I fell for it? I don't know.
Isaac Moore
There's no way this is how you actually think about probability. You would call out some one who gets a full house every draw 100 rounds in a row.
Nolan Rodriguez
That's only because i didnt read them yet, but i heard they're awesome books.
Right now im finishing Ciaphas Cain 8th novel. Absolutely hilarious and great war stories.
Nope, nothing once you've gone the atheist route you'll always know that what ever religion your following doesn't work. Being an atheist is probably the least favourable position on what life is about. It's only cynical, knowing that every thing will end isn't very fun.
Ethan Barnes
>Uh, no? The fact that it has disproves that No, it proves that there must have been outside influence. Unless you literally believe in miracles.
Think about it. In a deterministic universe everything that has happened and will happened can be traced back to the root cause of the big bang right? If I break pool balls some of them will fall in holes because of the way I struck the cue ball, which influenced the way the cue ball struck the rest of them. If you think about the likelyhood of the cure ball 'striking' the universe in such a way that all 4x10^79 atoms in the universe went into their 'holes' and created just the right set of circumstances for you to be born 14 billion years after the big bang occurred, it's just not possible for it to have happened by random chance. You could go through literally an infinite number of possible universes formed by differing boundary conditions before you even got to one that had at one point the CHANCE of you existing in it's 14 billion year history let alone one where you actually DO exist.
I mean, you're here and it's human nature to shrug your shoulders and accept reality as it is and I guess you just think "Wow it's really, really, REALLY unlikely (understatement of all time) but I'm here so I guess I just got lucky" to avoid thinking about the fact that no, luck doesn't really come into it when the math says it shouldn't even be possible if you hit that cue ball a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times.
Noah Myers
Insufficient evidence to fully answer this question. But consider the god of the gaps. Just a few hundred years ago, everyone KNEW that "god" created the planet Earth. Everyone KNEW that "god" created humans in his image. Now we know that our planet, and indeed our whole solarsystem, was formed by coalescing debris from a supernova. Now we know, that we evolved from lesser forms of life. Gods role in our emergence has been pushed back further and further the more we can explain it using science, just filling up the gaps of what we dont know yet. We can accurately explain exactly what happened nanoseconds, picoseconds, after the big bang. We just have that barrier left, and once we pierce it, the role of god will be pushed back even further.
Jayden Campbell
>In the beginning christian missionaries in europe lived in little hillside & coast shacks because they got hunted the fuck out
That actually happened the moment the missionaries reached central and western Europe. The societies based there were heavily revolved around polytheistic paganism, hence the idea of believing in just one God was considered preposterous by them. However, in Eastern Europe, when Saint Andrew the Apostle (brother of Saint Peter the Great) reached the outskirts of Dacia, he encountered a monotheistic society completely based on the belief in one god - Zalmolxis. What happened next? The Dacians quickly embraced Christianity due to the similarities with their own religion - Zalmolxism.
If you read about the heavy cult formed around Zalmolxis, you might learn that Herodot talked about him and even named him as the "former slave and apprentice of Pitagora" and that he traveled to Egypt in search of knowledge, prior to his arrival in the Carpathian area.
tl;dr Religion as a construct is a tool used by centuries to mass-manipulate people into submission. God, however, as an entity of energy and information, is a different kind of talk.
Jonathan Nguyen
Swede, the theory of evolution is based on observation but it does not and cannot consider all the data. There are things about man that we are still learning and even regarding concepts complex like free will and the desire for truth that are universals in all cultures, there are things within the evolutionary process that the expedient and "mostly right" theory of evolution misses out on. None of which refute the theory, but that hint at a much larger reality.
I know the aussie was just talking about the chances of it all happening. But even if he were pushing the creationist argument (which is wrong). Evolution is not a done deal, yes, what we observe is real, and our best explanation is Darwin's. However, this explanation is just one interpretation and relies on a dataset that is strictly limited (say to fossil records, plant and animal morphology and behavior). And while rich WAY beyond a shit criticism, is not immune. It cannot actually include things like "intelligence" or "consciousness" due to their not leaving behind any "physical indicators" (say outside of tools that emerge long after the faculties develop) for us to observe. We are left to rationalize "after the fact" which always leads to a "it was meant to be this way all along" type of deterministic position due to the hindsight bias (hence the distinction between macro and micro evolution and the general emphasis on experimentation in modern science). Human judgement errors are just that large of a threat to good science.
So evolution explains some things better than others. Its not perfect, but for most physical applications its the best and only real explanation.
It cannot for example explain my very real spiritual experiences, that to this day fill me with joy and a sensitivity and understanding of spiritual text that bears no "marker" on my physical body
Nathan Johnson
This. Also the Enforcer series
Joshua Martin
Sort of. Whenever I'm high part of my brain is experiencing the trip and the other part is still 100% grounded in reality by acknowledging that I'm tripping. I don't think I've ever lost the ability to reason while I've been high. It's just a little harder. So there is some duality there.
Ryan King
if the material brain did not construct consciousness then why cant consciousnesses be found elsewhere, in other places than the material brain?
Ethan Sullivan
Depression is a myth and doesn't exist and is an excuse used by weak willed people to mull over things that functioning people just get over and go on with their lives, but thats a conversation for another time
Oliver Perez
>Odin >uses the AoM picture of Thor This will always bother me.
Jose Perry
not an argument please come back later when you are able to construct a rational argument for your position. fact remains we do not need a deity to explain our emergence. please disprove this.
Bentley Mitchell
in infinite space there's likely to be multiple godlike entities with knowledge, power, and understanding far beyond our own, immortality etc. it's also possible for us to ascend to godhood
Christian Edwards
I'm a kekist btw
Lucas Hughes
that is wrong and science disagrees with you. we can see the difference in MRI scans between non-depressed brains and depressed brains. We can SEE the chemical imbalance. And I understand that for a non-mentally ill person its hard to see how it feels like to be mentally ill, but that doesnt change the fact that mental illnesses exist.
Jace Gray
If we could go on without destroying us with nuclear bombs, at one point in future, maybe 100, 200 or 500 years, we are able to create simulations in which the AI believes to be alive. And maybe they create another simulation. Maybe we are just simulated as well? Ask yourself if it would make any difference.
Wyatt Brooks
Gods most likely exist and they don't give a fuck about our daily struggles. The one God that I firmly believe doesn't exist is Jesus.
Christian Ross
Wtf you pathetic creature.. you have been dead already for billions of years since the start of the universe until somehow you decided to be born just a few years ago.
Again you were already dead for almost an eternity.. being dead is nothingness and thats very comfy.. like a good relaxing sleep without any dreams.
Bentley Sanchez
People back then believed that god hand dug them or did so with magic.
People nowadays call this magic "physics, biology and chemistry". They both propose god is behind it, just much more intelligent mechanisms.
Physics cannot explain "energy" or "laws" so it adopts the materialist position as a default simply because its not necessary to understand why to make clean and clear predictions from the fact.
