Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Touched By Atheism
As an atheist, of course I have trouble explaining to devout godders what atheism is all about. Almost always, they have some whole different idea of what it is.
The greatest challenge, though, is explaining why atheism is a GOOD thing. They can’t get it. Can’t imagine it.
And yet ...
The very best and most hopeful fact I could think of to relate to other humans is that there are no gods or devils, no heavens or hells, no supernatural or mystical manifestations AT ALL.
It’s all chemistry and physics. All matter and energy, math and science, life and death and evolution. All REAL stuff.
Do you know what that means? NOTHING IS HIDDEN. Nothing is secret. There are no tricks built into the universe, no lies, no tests of loyalty, no conspiracy to keep us small and humble and ignorant. Nothing is willfully denied us. It’s all right out where we can see it. And if we’re smart enough, to figure it out.
Sooner or later, everything is within the reach of our understanding. The whole universe is an open book, and if we can only learn its language, a book waiting to be read.
There is no afterlife. But there is also no artificial governor on the possibilities contained in the one life we get. In the time we each have, we’re allowed to do incredible things.
Consider the accomplishments of individuals such as Jonas Salk or Wolfgang Mozart, Michelangelo or Mohandas Gandhi, Harriet Tubman or Marie Curie, Sir Edmund Hillary or Frank Lloyd Wright. THESE are the kinds of things human beings can do. Completely without watchful gods or holy book commandments, we humans — you and I — are capable of immense creative accomplishments, awe-inspiring adventures, brilliant endeavors of invention and discovery, heroic acts of compassion and love.
In a world totally devoid of mystical superbeings, humans can act only as humans. We have no assets beyond the real-world capacities and powers of human beings.
And yet ... we can do things even we ourselves consider miracles. In fact, humans are the ONLY source for the amazing things humans do. All too often, though, we — perhaps because we’re afraid of admitting what we really can do — mistakenly attribute them to gods.
As an atheist, I can unreservedly admire the artworks and inventions and discoveries of the men and women of my society and my history, and be awed by THEM — the magnificent fellow-beings I get to share the world with. They whose accomplishments I get to witness and benefit from.
That there are no gods or devils, no magic, that the entire universe is an open book which can never begrudge us learning its poorly-hidden secrets, that heroic acts and creative wonders come from PEOPLE, these are lush, rich, warm, epically reassuring FACTS that go beyond the feeble fantasies any mere religion can ever offer.
...
...
And it seems to me that if more people knew this, if more of us gave up wasting time pleading to mystical superbeings for strength or courage or magical gifts from above, if we knew that the important stuff comes from US, or not at all, if we knew that the answers are inside, and not out, and that only hard work and caring ever accomplished anything, or ever will, then and only then would we each get up off our asses, catch the fire of inspiration that smoulders inside us, and do those great, wonderful, heroic things we've always dreamed about.
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Some flaws in your reasoning.
First off, I'm not a "goddite". I do have some spiritual beliefs, but I favour science and logic for reasonable explantion, and have just spent an hour arguing with a friend who unfortunately got bitten by the Fundie Christian bug.
The reality of atheism can't be a good thing because of the fact that after so many years, you stop existing. How can this be better than a model with an afterlife, especially considerring there are hundreds of religions that don't "Judge" people the same way Christianity does.
This is an example of the "Black and White fallacy".
Why believe one or the other? Why not believe a bit of both, and leave out the bits that don't make sense to you? Why not believe in a world with an afterlife, that can still be scientifically explained and accessible?
Why do we need a God for an afterlife? You can be an atheist and believe in an afterlife, you know.
Why don't we all go there, and sort it out ourselves, like we do here? Why does there need to be a "god" in the traditional sense, what if there were beings like "Gods" that exist in our collective conciousness, influencing us?
There are so many possibilities for what someone can believe.
I don't think hell is possible, regardless. Sooner or later, we'd get desensitized to torture. There's only so long pain will affect us before our bodies suddenly quit and die, if even of natural causes. I imagine that if there was an afterlife, we'd have a similiar backdoor. Without a physical body, the ultimate exploit of pain, to slow us down, it would be very hard to torture a soul indefinitely. Sleep is a wonderful escape from almost everything - and dreams. My guess it would be something like that - it's very hard to truly hurt a dreamer.
And what's wrong with "tricks"? I call them mysteries.
The idea that you simply cease to exist is horrible - not to mention on some levels, impossible and illogical, but I'll get onto that later.
I mean, you get so many years, and that's it. What about kids that get it at a young age? Imagine how horrible that must be. Imagine NEVER existing again. Do you have ANY idea what that entails? No, you can't even imagine it. Not just because you can't comprehend it, but because it's a state your conciousness simply can't be in. I can't imagine what it's like, but I can imagine the general idea of it.
I don't get most atheists. They say they're perfectly comfortable with the idea of non-existence. This seems so deliciously human to me.
You shouldn't be comfortable. You should be fucking scared for your life! You'll never get to do anything again after a specific point! Never think, never feel. Do you know what that would entail? No, you don't. Neither do I, and I don't believe that under any model that it is possible, but I can recognise that the postulate is a frightening one, until you examine it fully. It seems to me you haven't examined it at all.
I don't think people believe in the afterlife solely out of fear. I think they do to an extent because ceasing to exist does not make sense to them.
When you think your conciousness "fades" while sleeping, it's not really. It's very possible your perception of time is being loosened.
Personally, I believe there may be an afterlife because I'm a subscriber to the novel Quantum Mechanics theory of conciousness being a basic building block of the universe - meaning it can't just "disappear". Honestly, how does it make sense for it to be a higher product of brain structure? How can that "generate" an observer, a viewpoint into the universe? Sounds like alchemy to me. But maybe it's a suitably complex system that can somehow ANCHOR it by being compatible with it.
That's my reasoning anyway. Of course, I won't claim to know, unlike some atheists, what happens after I die - I honestly don't know. The best and most logical theory is that free of physical constraints, our conciousness melds together to create some kind of world out of the experiences we gathered on this one; a mirror. But perhaps I've been reading too much of "The Sandman".
Anyway, I don't think most people can handle atheism, the ideas that it puts forward.
I think we just have to look at the idea that maybe people DO need spiritual beliefs of some kind, even if they're only passive. I honestly think most atheists only survive by ignoring the cruel truth of their beliefs.
So?
Why is it so bad to stop existing after a set time? What bothers you about that? There's no evidence of an afterlife. So?
Not having an existance after this one is a little disturbing, granted. But realizing that this is all there is IS important. This is all you've got. An atheist, knowing that is going to try to make the best of this life. We can't procrastinate on things we think are important. If we do, they will NEVER get done.
There's no evidence of an
There's no evidence of an afterlife, but there is a lot of quantum theory suggesting that conciousness is a basic building block of the universe - meaning, in my personal follow-on from that, that it can't truly be created nor destroyed.
Read E. R. Close's "Can Matter be defined in Terms of Consciousness?" - it's a great paper.
I don't see why most people wouldn't "Make the best of life". We're all scared of death. If anything, others may want to make the best of life who are not comfortable with the nonsensical notion of nonexistence.
This isn't a place where the normal scientific idea of "If there's no proof of it, then we must presume it isn't there". The truth is we don't even know what conciousness really is so we can't even begin to apply any form of reasoning to it until we do.
Yes, I'm aware of all the latest theories trying to model functions of consciousness as higher brain functions - but that doesn't make sense. How can we "be" a brain? Our little window into the universe somehow "being" the product. As a device that is "aware" of it's own existence, that can be explained. But not how there's someone looking in, actually experiencing the brain experiencing itself. It's hard to describe the problem with this ideaology - but once you realise it, it's a major flaw. Again, I recommend E.R. Close's paper.
I doubt you understand my idea of an observer - you'll claim to, but I doubt you do. Likewise, I might not understand yours, as there is no frame of reference.
Yes, debunked
"ISn't that remarkable? Someone who already has a pre-existing position is capable of "debunking" something they have already personally disavowed.
I just love it when goddists try to do science. It's so cute. Like watching a kid in one of those car-seats with the little plastic steering wheel pretending to drive."
That's just nonsense. Are you trying to make some sense?
If I believed, I would
I really liked what you had to say about people thinking that deep down everyone believes in god...I've noticed this myself, and have struggled with convincing people that I'm a good person without all of the religious baggage. If I could believe in God, I would, but I have a lifetime of experiences and feelings that just don't allow the sort of blind faith that religions require. I often wonder how christian scientists are able to reconcile what they know vs. what they believe.
"debunked?"
ISn't that remarkable? Someone who already has a pre-existing position is capable of "debunking" something they have already personally disavowed.
I just love it when goddists try to do science. It's so cute. Like watching a kid in one of those car-seats with the little plastic steering wheel pretending to drive.
It is quite difficult to
It is quite difficult to convince people who think non-believers will burn in hell of atheism's merits. I have much better luck pointing out absurdities and evils of the Bible and Christianity in general. Which is extremely easy.
What really gets me isn't so much the people who don't see atheism's virtues but the ones who think that deep down, everyone REALLY believes in God - and we self-described atheists are just mad at him for some arbitrary, selfish reason. After I ask why they believe in God - and debunk any flawed reasoning - they always "just know." And not just the average Joe Christian thinks like this. I've had talks with a professor at a Christian university in my hometown, and he tells me the same thing. He is very intelligent and has spoken to many atheists, including his unlikely pen pal Greg Graffin of Bad Religion.
I could never understand why the professors there, who can be quite skeptical and have no problem pointing out logical fallacies in the world of academia, don't apply those same methods to their thoughts on religion. It is as if there is some sort of self-imposed mental block in their minds, sifting and filtering out any doubts or critical thought pertaining to their fundie religious beliefs.
While we are on the subject,
While we are on the subject, are you aware that the article you uncritically pimped several months ago linking religiosity and societal ills has been debunked?
http://huperborea.blogspot.com/2006/06/religiosity-leads-to-societal-ill...
My analogy
My analogy comes from years of playing with Lego, coupled with the occasional remarks from acquaintances that atheism removes wonder from the universe.
Take two scenarios. In one, I build a house out of Lego. It's a pretty cool looking house and all, but you know that I built it, and that it's something easily within my grasp.
In the other, a bucket of Lego falls over on a hill (maybe the wind knocked it over, maybe it was just precariously balanced in the first place...), and by the time it reaches the bottom (maybe years later), the pieces are in the shape of a house. Some were lost along the way, some ended up in unusual but useful places, but the end result is still a house just as good as the one built by hand.
You still have a house, but honestly, which of those two scenarios is more wondrous? The quick and easy 'I built it', or the long and arduous 'How did _that_ happen?', which leaves you with plenty of questions?
Your analogy
The problem is that your example is flawed on it's face. No matter how long you give it, your bucket of legos falling down a hill are never going to form a house. End of dilemma.
A Real Analogy
Geez, I guess theocratic wingnuts don't know a joke when then see one...go figure.
Since RickU seems to think the Lego analogy is seriously what Evolution is saying, let me help out. Evolution is not a crapshoot. It has never said, as people like Fred Hoyle erroneously assert, that a tornado goes through a junkyard and a 747 emerges on the other end. Evolution is the result of "accumulated probabilities." Richard Dawkins explains this really well, but my best summary is that the building blocks that make up life do not just behave like dice. Many highly complex chemicals form naturally that react with one another as complex systems (not dice). Molecular structures can really be thought of as very small machines. They are anything but chaotic. Further, when conditions are stable, such as in tidal pools of the Earth's early oceans, or near some ocean floor vents, the highly complex structures which form can receive energy inputs and react in such a way that as the energy is exhausted, the overall order of the system increases. People who try to misquote information theory to claim order never comes out of disorder are (1) mistaken (in the case of coincidences, or if you prefer to use the religious term, "miracles") and (2) we are not dealing with chaos. Think about the fact that when a chemical bond forms, energy is lost and the overall order of the system increases, such as H and O becomming H2O. Anyway, to make a very long story short (by a couple of billion years), you eventually get certain chemical systems that react with the environment in manners such as feedback loops, or re-enforcing cycles, and you get something that now has at least a rudimentary response or reflex like reaction to it environment. Now building off this ordered structure, little changes occur. Many of the changes respond poorly to the environment and do not last, but occassionally a change occurs with fits well with all the other complex chemical systems around it. This change gets kept and a bigger and more complex system develops. Even after a relatively short period of time, you get some incredibily complex systems, which a creationist will look at and say would be impossible to build by "random chance." But, as we know, they didn't get that way by throwing dice. And, finally, we have seen laboratory experiments where just these kind of complex systems have been formed out of inorganic substances and actually give rise to an even more revolutionary types of system, template-like structures that can make crude copies of themselves by interacting with other complementary substances in the environment. Like I say, substances like crude RNA macromolecules have already been observed forming in the laboratory and from this it is possible to show that all the building block of life could be evolved. So it is just a matter of time before creationists will have to abandon their "evolution is just a crapshoot" argument. Then they will have to resort to arguments used by hacks like the fake "Dr." Kent Hovind who says that even if scientists show an experiment that produces life, it only proves that intelligence is required to produce life. Presumably he is acknowledging scientists as "intelligent," although he frequently resorts to saying they are liars, atheists, and fools who are all inferior to him--a two-bit con-man who gave himself a Ph.D from a "university" that once operated out of his house, and is now called "Patriot Bible Univesity" (I just love that name).
Signed,
Blasphemies-R-Us
The super evil science dude who dares to believe that thinking is NOT a crime and does NOT want to be God's Bitch
Clarification
My wife warned me that comment would be misinterpreted...To be clear, I have no doubts whatsoever in the science of evolution. That comment was specific to example given above it.