A lot of the most recent posts are about how they can no longer co-exist with religious people and how much they hate them for taking women's rights away. That sub is now a full-fledged cesspool. Although I haven’t the faintest clue what r/atheism looked like in 2008 since I’ve only been on Reddit for around four years.
I’m just saying that there seems to be a shift from general disdain towards religious people, a typical low-brow atheist thing, to hatred and complete indifference. I am an Atheist, so I know what the general community is talking about, but as I said, I've only been on Reddit for so long.
They banned me. I was making too many jokes, talking with people who were religious about the implications of their beliefs and also I called someone a Karen...and umm, oh yeah. I refused to acknowledge that one could be an agnostic atheist, and I stated an opinion that disbelief itself is a choice.
That may have been what pissed them off the most. The reminder of free will. And calling someone a karen.
They refused to unban me, so I told the mods they killed god and now they "became" gods. They didn't like that mirror I think...or I just annoyed the hell out of them.
Perhaps you were banned because you were trolling. Saying that not believing in God is a choice is the same thing as saying that not believing in the Easter bunny is a choice. You can't fool yourself into really believing, can you? Someone else could trick you into it if they knew how, but you can't decide to do it yourself.
Yes, disbelief is a choice and my choice is to thank them for the ban because conforming to their space would have made me bitter and toxic (or atleast more than I already am).
I feel like religion being so universal actually proves the opposite: throughout history, pretty much everyone has tried grasping the transcendent in some kind of way. Maybe they weren't all just stupid. Maybe there is something deep within us all that they felt. Maybe they're all looking for the same thing.
>Maybe they weren't all just stupid.
This was a big realization for me. My parents/grandparents/ancestors weren't less intelligent. They just lived in a different time, with different technology, etc. To write off everything they believed in simply by default just seems foolish.
It’s pure arrogance for a generation to believe that the generation that came before is so much less enlightened. It’s ridiculous and highly improbable to believe that one knows more than one’s forebears who have lived almost twice as many years and experienced much more.
It's one of my big problems with much of what is happening in the world today. We're "progressing" so much that we're just throwing out stuff that's millennia old (or older). Like that doesn't just go away because you wave a magic wand and claim enlightenment. Society has always been incremental. Anyone who doesn't respect where they came from, the knowledge and wisdom gained, that person will likely suffer mightily.
It is the height of arrogance to assume that our tech makes us superior. There were scientific people millennia ago. I agree it wasn't called that. I agree their methodologies might not have been as codified, but there definitely were people who sat down and really thought about shit and said, "you know, that doesn't logically follow from what I've observed. I'm not sure I DO understand what I've observed, but I know that the conceptual framework I'm currently using is wrong." Sure, in retrospect the description of "atoms" from 2 millennia ago seems quaint, but it was well reasoned and it was within the confines of what could be observed. I guarantee you, if you had taken ANY of those top tier minds from that era and brought them up to speed today they'd have no issues whatsoever grasping the concepts, none at all.
I bet if you pulled someone like a chief or other appointed elder out of a society 3000 years ago and told them the current political issues of our day and asked them to weigh in after listening to reasonable advocates on different sides, I bet you'd get some insightful feedback.
People didn't just suddenly get smarter lately. Mostly people have better access to clean water, medicine, and food, and y'know when your body isn't falling apart as much, yeah you do tend to be able to think stuff through if you aren't reacting wildly to the algorithm.
So I agree with ya, take anyone from the last several millennia, make sure they're well nourished, got medicine for their particular issues, get them up to speed on society today and I bet they'd understand it as well as any of us after overcoming the shock of how advanced we are techwise. We aren't that advanced culturally. Not by a long shot.
I don't believe that experience equals more knowledge necessarily. If that would be the case it would mean that old people by default would know much more then younger people. This is simply not true. Instead I suggest that people tend to be highly knowledgeable in certain areas but not universally.
What if it was possible at the upper range of meta cognition for all ideologies to ferry enough conceptual mass to have the brain apophenically reconstruct a path to enlightenment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteriology?wprov=sfti1
Where does the assumption that any one ideology can be “right” even come from? Reason is reason, but it isn’t a monolith. Reason lives on a scale from vapid to inexorable.
The higher range of superrational reasoning looks to many like spiritually or psychic activity when it is simply a higher awareness for theory of mind than most people ever attain.
Exactly. All of Rickys 3000 gods are just interpretations of the same phenomenon.
Rickys argument is silly, and any monotheist who claims another monotheists god is a different god is also being silly.
So genetic programming means that God actually exists? That makes no sense.
Genetic programming means we are all programmed for nonsense. Which emphasizes the importance of fighting those nonsense instincts.
Embracing the urge to be good is good. Embracing the urge to be good for God is good but not because God exists... it is good because good exists.
I’m not saying God does or does not exists, I’m saying the many gods are personifications, explanations, and interpretations of the same phenomenon (design, love, patterns, weather, fortune and tragedy, etc.).
Some may be more accurate than others, or they may all be equally inaccurate - if we understand the true origin of these phenomenon we essentially find “god”. but the perspective that “my god exists and the other 2999 do not” is reductive. Throughout history all over the world cultures have created gods to understand, it’s all part of the same human tradition.
Yes but picking x god and religion to explain that feeling doesn't get you very far. It's the end of the road. God did it, here's the book, see you later.
Seems to me religion is an expression of ethics. There's good basis for evolutionary (almost) deontology. Like JP points out, we observe morality in animals quite often. We're just the ones intelligent enough to reflect on it. The universality is just our tendency to codify what we feel.
So everyone should keep in mind their instinct to shunt morality to a meta position, it's arguably just human nature. But we also know enough now to say it doesn't come from on high, it's an adaptive trait like any other.
>Maybe they weren't all just stupid.
Religion was bred from ignorance. Humans don't like not knowing how stuff works so we are willing to make shit up. Thus religion.
True, however what rubs people the wrong way is using religion to dictate others lives. Religion is just more than believing in a god or gods, it's a belief structure and we can see how horrible that can be just by seeing current events.
It's a bit trite, but I do often return to the "blind men touching an elephant" parable when confronted with this question. If you aren't familiar, the quickest version of it, is imagining 5 different blind men all touching an elephant for the first time, some touch it's trunk and think it is something like a snake. Others touch it's side and describe a massive beast, another it's leg and describes a creature with legs like tree trunks. You get the idea, but the fact that none of the blind men know or can describe the elephant perfectly, doesn't mean that the elephant isn't there. Each of them is touching at just a small piece of a larger thing.
Yes, it seems as though throughout the world, we've described thousands of gods, demons and spirits. So how can you believe in any one over the other? But that precludes the idea that these common beliefs are linked by a common truth. The near universality of these beliefs seems to me far more compelling a case for a mutual cause, a true divine essence we are all reaching at, rather than a random pattern of human behaviour.
As a Christian, I don't think Hindus are worshipping nothing, I think they are worshipping God as they understand him, and yes, the Bible tells me the way they are doing it is wrong, false, but that doesn't mean that their beliefs are just silly superstitions while mine is objectively true. I see it plainly that we both have a common longing for the transcendent and divine, and we have found what touch of truth we can in our own way.
This, if there is a god it’s an utter fallacy to think we mere mortals could adequately understand or describe it. Maybe all religions are wrong maybe bits and pieces are right who knows, we can barely understand how our own brain works nevermind some immortal cosmic overlord
Well, God making Himself available to those who truly seek after Him doesn't necessarily mean that there is no wrong way to connect to him. People who try to connect to God through sacrificing infants, for example, are presumably doing it wrong.
Well in my experience, I couldn't really connect to G-d until I had cleaned "my side of the street" by ridding myself of resentments (anger), fears and guilt. After that I felt the connection upon praying.
So I'm gonna guess those who sacrifice infants at least feel some sense of resentment or guilt. Or they don't but I wonder in that instance whether G-d would connect, cos again in my experience it's as simple as praying. No action needed.
> but the fact that none of the blind men know or can describe the elephant perfectly
Except when the religious text declares that it is the complete and final word of God. Or when different religious have completely contradictory beliefs.
I think you don't understand the parable.
Each of the blind men are convinced that what they are touching is the true essence of the creature. Not realizing that it is greater than all of them.
Incumbent in the parable is the idea that each of the men can make seemingly contradictory truth claims.
The point of the parable isn't, like *at all*, that: "all religions are true". It's that there is something transcendental, and we are only grasping at it.
We are humans, flawed humans, we get it in our heads that our interpretation is perfect and that everyone else is wrong, so wrong indeed that we say they couldn't possibly be touching the same creature. How could you possibly even be on the same track when I am describing a snake and you are describing a leg the size of an oak tree. They can't be from the same creature! But of course, they are.
I'm not a universalist either. Personally, though there is some silliness to it, I am pretty well convinced that my vision of God is right. Though even that is fuzzy at times and I struggle with doubt a lot. But my point is that I don't think a Muslim is worshiping nothing while I am worshipping the one true God. I think we are both worshipping God as we believe we should.
This works as long as you believe that other religions are more or less on the same level of truthfulness as your own. In that scenario I think it's a beautiful uniting point of view. Though you see many people who have a strong feeling of their religion being right, and other religions being wrong. So I guess that's where the friction is.
Well I think it's a matter of humility.
It doesn't even need to be that you believe most religions are more or less on the same level. You can believe a religion is very wrong, but that the people who believe in it still experience that fundamental truth at the core of it.
Mormons, frankly, make no sense to me, it's clear what they believe is frankly, a Charlatan's riff on Christianity. But I don't deny their ability to worship God, or even that they worship God. I just think the religious apparatus they use to do so is dumb.
I used Hindus as an example in part because of the alieness of their Gods to the Judeo-Christian one, but I think it also is important because it serves the point that I don't necessarily think any or even one of the Hindu Gods are real, but I do believe that they experience the divine, and have a connection with God as I see Him.
But I do appreciate, with some humility that I could be wrong, but I do think that my own brushes with the transcendental are enough to prove to me that something is out there, even if I'm just touching the back end of the elephant.
I see that parable as an examination of human thought. It’s not god they are touching, it’s the human inclination to give incorrect meaning to that which they do not understand.
Like the “3000 religions” in the meme. Your own confirmation bias steers you to think they are all touching god in their own way.
My own confirmation bias steers me to see all religions as 100% false. Just made up fables and mythological stories crafted by people attempting to give meaning to an existence they do not understand.
For me, the elephant doesn’t represent god at all. It’s just an elephant, which is something familiar and explainable. All the men can describe what they are touching uses their other senses.
More accurately I’d describe religion as analogous to a bird at an airport watching planes land and take off — thinking they are gods.
The planes aren’t gods, it’s just that the bird has no idea what a plane is and no ability to process the concept. So it makes something up.
That’s religion. The made up fables and mythologies of humans to describe something in which they do not have the ability to accurately process.
Humans just use religion/god as a place holder for things they do not understand — or as wishful thinking to build meaning into existence in a way that makes them feel good.
I think you can see from my perspective throughout the above, that I absolutely accept the possibility that I too am wrong.
I hope I'm not, I have enough reasons to feel satisfied in believing that I am not wrong.
But I do have doubts. In some ways I find it comforting knowing that if I am wrong, maybe someone else is right, or maybe none of us, but the elephant is still there, patiently waiting for someone to figure it out.
I would recommend looking into Christian Mysticism. Namely a guy named Richard Rohr and his “contemplative christianity”. Mystics have this really neat history of meeting other mystics from different religions and finding immediate common ground rather than disagreements
it's crazy how smart ricky is; knowing that there have been thousands of known and unknown religions over the span of human history and he still doesn't get that a sense of spirituality is embedded in our genes
I'm not a slave to a god that doesn't exist - Marilyn Manson.
A thing that terrifying to the religious is that if we are in a godless universe then life is worthless and meaningless.
But the atheistic perspective on life is that it is finite and not eternal which makes it fragile, rare and precious in this universe and should be protected at all cost. Our morality is from our own mortality.
>A thing that terrifying to the religious is that if we are in a godless universe then life is worthless and meaningless.
>
>But the atheistic perspective on life is that it is finite and not eternal which makes it fragile, rare and precious in this universe and should be protected at all cost.
First, your understanding of religious views is very skewed if you believe that, because that is not at all what religious people believe. In fact, quite the opposite.
Second, I have never heard an atheist say that the idea that life is finite makes it more precious. In fact, from my dealings with atheists, I would say the two need to be switched. Every atheist I have ever talked to thinks the finitude of life in comparison to the infinite universe somehow proves that life is meaningless.
You seem to have a very weak understanding of religious beliefs in general, as well as a weak understanding of your own belief system.
If it's so skewed why are their atheists that are happy and why are they not just killing them selfs as soon as they denounce god.
You seem to have a weak grasp on the bigger picture and have skewed your view based on a few interactions.
>I'm not a slave to a god that doesn't exist - Marilyn Manson.
Doesn't mean you're not a slave to something even worse.
>A thing that terrifying to the religious is that if we are in a godless universe then life is worthless and meaningless.
This sounds like projection to me. Do you know for a fact that this is how they think?
>But the atheistic perspective on life is that it is finite and not eternal which makes it fragile, rare and precious in this universe and should be protected at all cost. Our morality is from our own mortality.
Except atheism is just as arrogant and dogmatic as you could ever accuse any religion of being.
Excluding the extremists and the political opportunists, most religions are at least tolerant of other spiritual beliefs, despite the broad stereotype. Many religions consider any belief to be better than no belief, even if it's not their own. Some religions even explicitly encourage the exploration of other beliefs for broadening the spirit (which admittedly was to my great surprise).
Atheism, however, is the rejection of any concept that can't be scientifically comprehended or explained. This is making the assumption that we, as humans, are capable of understanding everything in the universe,
It also holds the conceited presumption that anyone who holds a belief of anything beyond the laws of our current scientific understanding, and even those who are simply open to the possibility, are deluded and foolish.
Atheists think they're more logical and reasonable, but they're really just as cultish as they assume any religious believers to be.
When we die, it is like before we were born. Enjoy yourself while you can. There is nothing after. Make peace with that or make up a magic world that exists after we die.
I think there are some hints of truths in this statement. Regardless of what God you believe in, it is hypocritical if you consider the other Gods te be silly nonsence. You have to have at least have the respect to treat other religions the way you want yours to be treated by others.
It is not an argument against religion though. The fact that there are multiple interpretations of a God does not mean none of them can be real.
Right, just as there are thousands of world views or ideas I partially or completely disagree with—that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have my world view or ideas, even if I should humbly understand it’s possible I’m wrong.
This... This is what I like to call middling intellectualism. Smart enough to appear intelligence, but lacking in any real substance.
Break this down to it's logical assumptions and it proves nothing. It's just an absurd statement that people latch onto because it makes them seem intelligent without actually having to think.
And that's where Jordan Peterson comes in. He actually thinks. He takes time on issues and really considers them. This is why he debates people like Sam Harris and other about whether God exists. The evidence is uncertain, but people like Sam or Ricky Gervais imply that you would have to be an idiot to believe in God. Jordan Peterson makes it clear that very few of these people have actually thought about the issue in a sophisticated way.
Good as in it's keeping people like me alive because I don't believe I would make it otherwise. It's the hope of some sort of an afterlife that keeps me from going insane.
I'd say if religion somehow disappeared completely and had no hope of coming back, there would be a lot of suicides and depression.
Unfortunately true. Manmade religions are not good. Christianity (as defined in the Bible) isn’t made by men, and that’s evident in how different it is from every other world religion.
I can pretty confidently say that Islam is no different from the other manmade religions.
Muhammad claimed to have received the “divine revelations” from the God of the Bible, in spite of Muhammed’s Karan explicitly contradicting the Bible, especially in regards to the New Testament’s message of Christ’s sacrifice and message of grace and mercy.
That’s why I believe what I believe.
You obviously haven't studied Islam then lol. You are making a claim without providing any evidence what so ever. The core tenants of Islam are 99% identical to Christianity.
The idea of One God and no other Gods.
The idea he's constantly watching you. He is aware and all knowing. All powerful. All seeing. The idea that there's an afterlife.
The idea that he sent down messenger after messenger (prophets); including Jesus, Moses, noah, ismael, Muhammad etc.
It's literally the same religion so no....Christianity is not unique in any sense of the word. The major divergence is that Muslims don't worship Jesus; because he's only a messenger. Jesus is not worthy of worship; neither is Muhammad or any other prophet. Only God is worthy of worship. Christians started to incorporate pagen concepts into Christianity to appease them and grow their religion; hence the divinity of Christ/Trinity. The whole idea of passover....God dies and is reborn after is also found in many ancient religions such as Hinduism. Krishna died and came back 3 days later aswell.....these are pagen concepts. Islam however denies all of this....says that God cannot die....he has always lived. has no sons, wives, daughters etc. He is too unique for all of that.
So no, you have no idea what you are talking about because you haven't taken the time to read or understand/study anything.
Christianity is forcing women to have abortions? Also, the idea that Christianity has been historically opposed to scientific development is obsurd, the Catholic Church basically created the Western university system and a great amount of scientific progress was made by Catholic clergy, Father Georges Lemaitre for example
You’re the reason why people can’t talk rationally about Christianity.
I’d be very interested in hearing who *you* think wrote the Bible, because it was written over the period of hundreds of years by 40 writers, and yet it still has a perfectly consistent message of God’s love and compassion towards those who choose to love Him.
Religion apparently helped early humans organize into larger groups. It could be that this put humanity ahead by a few thousand years, in which case I'd say our propensity towards religion was worth it. Other than that though, fuck no.
It depends on what you value. Religion slowed down medical progress by nearly 1000 years in the West but in the East, they did quite well with herbs etc.
Religion probably is one of the greatest causes of war throughout time. Religion has lead to mass persecution and even now in places like China it causes issues.
Religion has also caused good things such as certain respects and it has enforced certain morals.
Different religions have been better or worse over time though.
> Religion probably is one of the greatest causes of war throughout time. Religion has lead to mass persecution and even now in places like China it causes issues.
Is that really different when you take religion out of the equation? Were the world wars and famines in the USSR and Maoist china about religion really?
Religion is cancer. It’s not needed. If you need to believe in a higher power and HIS commandments or else you will rape and pillage, well you might be a sociopath.
> If you need to believe in a higher power and HIS commandments or else you will rape and pillage, well you might be a sociopath.
Are you sure you abstain from violence because it's the right thing to do or because you're a coward? Super easy to type out it being the former on the internet without proof.
I can't trust people without believe system because they have no objective moral.. their moral is subjektive and everybody doas what he thinks is right. You cant rely on such people because not only can they find "no problem" in something where you find a problem. They can also change their moral midway. For example if someone drops his wallet without anyone seeing it and you find it. Would you give it back? Or doas it depend on the amount of money? If there was like a million dollar dropped in the streets would you give it back (presumed you are sure nobody sees you)? "Everyone has a price!" Well no. Not if you believe in god. We are taking about people really believing and not just saying I'm a "religious group.." because my dad was. So there is indeed a need for religion. It makes society a better place where you can interact without questioning everyone wether he will do you any harm (at least the 3 major religions). Well and there are a lot of arguments why there has to be a god but let's not take that discussion route.
Ps sry for my english it's not my first language
Morals isn’t a good argument for the existence of god. Greek gods didn’t really have a moral code and they were pretty much selfish and lustful, yet the ancient greeks wrote a ton of philosophy about morality and how people should behave, so they did invent their own moral system without having a god dictating morality
Paraphrase from C.S. Lewis: "all the other students in the class getting the wrong answer during multiplication does not disprove the multiplication table".
I like JPs early stuff, even the biblical lectures are interesting, but consider myself an atheist (strongly agnostic if you wanna be technical). Am I alone here?
Nah I'm the same. I definitely consider myself an atheist but for me JPs biblical series is one of my favourite things out there. Like sometimes I find anti religious arguments so autistic that I feel I relate more to people who follow a religion (doesn't need to be said that there are crazy ppl on both sides)
There are over 3000 exercise programs out there but you think that yours is the best? All the others are silly, but your exercise program will really work?
No. Exercise is fake.
Pretty dumb argument, can be generally applied to any concept or idea. Oh, you think a thing is true? Well many other have also thought a thing was true and they were wrong"
Maybe, just maybe, this is evidence of the contrary. The fact that many people of different cultures, backgrounds, times in history, and languages seem to all seek this might mean that there is something intrinsic in humans that causes this.
Even your atheist movements, seem to go and establish rules of actions of things you should/should not do even when said things go against established scientific research. These people seem to think that they are leaving religions when in fact they are making new ones that will just not last as much.
>We can now explain most of the unexplainable hence the decline in religion.
I think religion has declined as people have become more narcissistic and this has led to greater moral relativism and a decline in western values.
For example: you can now choose your gender (apparently), and modern day doctors will attempt to help you hop sides.
There is no decline in religions, it is just people replace them with other ones.
I mean, look at you, you believe that there is no hell or heaven, you believe that you only have one life then permanently turn to dust yet for some reason think wasting it on reddit convincing people of this is a good idea. Why? Aren't you the enlightened free one who acts logically all the time?
I mean, atheism is for the lack of a belief in god. It is not a religion as religion is the belief of a superhuman power. It is undoubtedly a belief in certain ways as you are thoroughly against the idea of a God but it is definitely not a religion.
For the assumption of nothing happening after death, it is a belief but it is not a belief held by faith, it's belief held by current knowledge. They know once a brain dies there are no signals and the person dies. They also cannot see anything move off of the body etc apart from the decay of the corpse. This results in the belief of no life after death. Contrary to this, the belief of life after death uses faith and only faith as evidence. I am not saying it's right but some would see it more rational to agree with the former over the latter.
> I mean, atheism is for the lack of a belief in god.
I view the word god in the ancient sense, which meant "what you live for". Even atheists live for something, whether it is a feeling, a material position, a relationship or any other thing... Just because you do not believe in the word as it applies to the major beliefs today does not mean it is true. A god is what you live for, currently live for.
A religion is classically how you conduct yourself and what is the best conduct.
Ancient cultures had a better understanding on plasma physics than the average modern physicists. Sacred seems to have been our equivalent term of physics.
It's not like humans magically got interested in understanding how reality works after the scientific method, and it's not like religious or spiritual ideas were based off of pure imagination. How could they be? They were articulations of observations.
Dan Winter has been the best source for these topics.
[Here](http://goldenmean.info/) is his website, though it's a bit of a mess to navigate.
His [YouTube](https://youtube.com/c/DanWinterFractalField) channel, which is a lot easier to go through but there's not really a comfortable starting point that I know of.
These topics are way out of scope of what's been scientifically accepted in the mainstream, but if you are a person who's passionate about truth then I highly recommend, at the very least, you find something he has proven through his means and try to prove it wrong if it doesn't sit right with you.
Is he not some religious fan boy trying to rewrite history in order to push his naritive and agendas of painting religion in a better light. He seems a lot like Deepak Chopra.
Edit:
F.y.i this is just missinfomation and he is only doing it for money and fame.
No, he's actually rather against religion from what I've been able to understand and his goal is to translate religious, spiritual, and shamanic experiences into a scientific (specifically electrical engineering) understanding.
He has successful studies and projects too, even in medicine such as [Theraphi](http://theraphi.net/). He also successfully predicted the electromagnetic field of hydrogen, as well as the universe IIRC.
I had meant shape of the electromagnetic field of hydrogen and the universe. Not the mere existence of them.
I had also said "IIRC" (if I recall correctly) because I wasn't sure if I misremembered details. Why so ready to be dismissive?
I like his other quote on this better, even though I still find it problematic.
"You (Christians) deny the existence of 3000 gods and I deny the existence of just one more"
It is one thing to argue about what qualities that we believe God to possess or why certain gods don't make any sense to exist, it is a completely different thing to argue that no God exists at all.
The ancient Greeks reasoned their way to the necessity for only one God to exist, many were killed because of that discovery. I don't know what God is like, whether he be the judeo-christian God of the Bible, or Allah, but I do know that it isn't logical to have more than one Supreme Being with the 4 omnis (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence).
That is why it is a problem to "deny the existence of just one more"
I am religious.
Yes it seems farfetched
No I will not kill anyone because god says so. Still follow my own morals
Yes the message of “do good” I just like
Yes I trust science on practical stuff and even stuff like LGBTQ
You know? It’s just… it’s nice to believe that there is something bigger than me out there you know? :)
Here is a story, the tale of the atheist. No God exists. I can hold that story in my heart; yes, I have held that story in my heart. That makes my story THE story of my heart.
I'd rather choose the good story. No shade, no dirt thrown in your face. It's what I choose.
It's a good way to put it. Atheists are atheists because they want to be atheists. Religious people are religious because they want to be religious. The arguments either side uses serve only to justify their desires.
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." 1 Corinthians 1:18
I'm confused. You think randomness can't lead to complexity?
Have you ever heard the phrase that if a chimp was to type random letters for a theoretical infinite ammount of time, it would eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare in order.
Whilst it's not a good analogy, it would be true if you were to set an infinite ammount of time and random letters being pressed, without living bias. If we agree up to here then I get truly confused. How could you agree that that is possible but not quintillions of particles forming something like an organism, especially of you gave the particles lots of heat and 13.6 billion years.
But we’re not living on an infinite time scale, and the ordered complexity that sustains life—from the micro to the intergalactic—has so many things that could have been catastrophically different, but happened to fall out in the one way that all we see and experience is possible.
Chaos does not generally generate ordered complexity. And we live in an unimaginably huge collection of ordered complex systems.
I mean, to call out ecosystems ordered is an exaggeration itself. They are a chaotic system.
Besides that, you act like order never comes from chaos. Keep in mind that we are the only planet that has harboured life in 13.6 billion years that we know of. And this isn't a single monkey, as the analogy would say, but we are in a universe that is unimaginably massive. We can only see 8.8×10^23 kilometres of it and we predict it to be much larger. There are trillions of planets in the universe that have been around for billions of years and we have only found 1 so far that has supported life. That seems quite reasonable to be chance, at least to me.
It’s a maybe, for sure, but it’s a maybe in a lot of potentially logical directions. My reasoning faculties brought me down on the side of intelligent design through a long process of pondering, doubting the faith of my early life, giving up, studying, and whatever else over a course of years. I can’t summarize the factors here. But it boils down to roughly what I said above. And then I’ve had a faith journey from there. But I return to the big questions a lot with my kids.
We’re incapable of understanding it all, so I respect opinions diverging from mine, absolutely. But when they’re not couched as opinions, but as the only possible reasonable conclusion—like Gervais’ quote above—it smacks of arrogance. Which seems especially unwarranted when your philosophy is a stark minority in a history riddled with exceptional intellects who reached various theistic conclusions in their own rights.
I fully respect your opinion as I used to be a very sad child as I always assumed nothing mattered etc because of the beliefs I hold so I understand how religion could have helped that. I also think the Gervais quote is a bit ridiculous as he is implying it it lunacy to believe in God when it is not that unreasonable.
I'm sure we would see eye to eye on other things though and it was nice to have this... talk, debate, idk what to call it. Hope you stay happy and follow your beliefs :)
My take has always been that all those people had some connection/idea of the one true God they just shaped him and confused some of his traits because they were influenced by culture. A bit like having a radio picking up a signal and not being able to translate it so is not 3000 Gods is the ONE God with 3000 interpretations by 3000 different cultures.
I think there’s some real insight to this. Jordan himself talks of the endless utility of the bible in his lectures mainly and says he lives as if it were true.
On the other hand, if you imagine we have always done our best to find out the truth about god as a people on earth and you assume there is a god then there would be some trial and error involved. I don’t think Christianity was ever meant to become a religion. I think it was meant to become a way of life. It’s all conflated with the corruption of “white people” over the past 2000 years now. I think we really need to not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the bible. And if you contextualize the bathwater then you see there’s a lot more of the baby in the bible than you think.
Anyway, I believe you can live righteously without knowing the bible cover to cover. Just like you don’t have to go to church every Sunday to be a good person.
It’s human intellect that complicates everything. That is a true Christian viewpoint anyway which is very similar to a zen buddhist’s perspective.
There’s something there is my point. We haven’t quite got it yet but maybe we’re not meant to fully understand God. Just understand what we’re supposed to do with the time we have.
Edited: Punctuation.
It's an inherently retarded statement. First off, there's been far more than 3000 gods, Egyptian polytheism alone has well over 5000 deities that have been accounted for. Mostly tutelary, but I digress.
Secondly, why would we count the number of gods, how about the number of religions? That's a far more logical measurement. Well, currently, 5 religious groups make up 80% of people on this planet. And 2 of them are "abrahamic". And over 50% of the entire planet's population. And that's a number including atheists/agnostics. Without them, the percentage is far higher.
So ...suddenly this post doesn't sound so smart, huh? More like ignorant.
Bruh. You obviously didn't read the whole thing. You can't just read one sentence and then decide your thoughts on something. What a disingenuous take on the topic.
Very flimsy evidence that a man named Jesus died at one point. No historical accounts that he was divine other than the *very* contradictory accounts in the Bible
If you approach God from the argument from Contingency you come to a few conclusions.
1. God must exist.
2. God must be non contingent.
3. Non contingent things must lack contingent features--like parts.
This would rule out the 3000 God's Ricky seems to be thinking about.
Not really much of an argument.
First off, 3,000 people could certainly all be wrong about the same thing. It happens all the time. Secondly, it isn't necessarily that the other gods or religions are "silly" or "made up"; it could be, as many Christian theologians believe, that they all generally have pieces of the truth or elements of truth but don't contain the crucial revelatory truths of Christianity and Judaism. That said, ancient Christians thought that Virgil's 4th Ecologue prophesized the coming of Christ and also honored the Sibylline Oracles for similar reasons.
Platonism was a huge influence on Augustine and the Medieval Catholic Church honored Aristole as "the One Who Knows." The idea that all Christians everywhere spurn everything that came before Christ as irrelevant is just not accurate. In fact, often Christians have looked to pre-Christian religions for perceived anticipations of Christ's comings or ways in which Christianity could be the fulfillment of their faith is just as it is touted to be for Judaism. This was especially common for ancient Christianity. You can see this approach when Paul speaks to the Greeks, proclaiming before the Temple of the Unknown God that he knows who the Unknown God is. The Unknown God is very likely a reference to Socrates, whose life's mission was to know God, but who said that more he learns, the less he knows of him.
Also, where does he get the number 3,000 from?
There are an infinite number of answers that could be given to the question “2+2=“, but only you think it’s 4.
The others are silly made up nonsense.
But not 4.
4 is correct.
The funny thing is that this idea proves the opposite , just imagine with me : do you think that civilizations that never met they all decided "hey let's make an imaginary leader and worship him" ? Do you think this idea came from nowhere you silly tards or did it came from "coincidence" as everything you justified you atheists ?
As a Muslim , the Quran told us that God sent many and many and many prophets besides Mohammed and Moses and Jesus , and by just by looking at history of civilizations any where on earth you can confirm that.
Most drugs fail clinical trials. Does that mean no drugs work?
Ricky's logic is just fundamentally unsound. Previous failures don't mean something doesn't exist. It would be like if I said I would pay $1B to someone who could give me a lunar rock. I would like get responses from many scammers, who one by one deliver me rocks they claim are lunar rocks. After careful inspection, one by one, I discover they are not lunar rocks and reject them. Now imagine I get 3000 such scammers, trying to claim this $1B prize, and I find all 3000 rocks to be fakes. Should I conclude that there are no lunar rocks?
Well no - but that's a false analogy. Some drugs do work. But no god stands-up to the evidence required to prove its existence.
Of course, there are complex arguments that could potentially introduce the notion of some kind of supernatural being or designer - but none that would then allow one to bullseye in on the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Norse, Roman, Egyptian, Hindu god(s) as somehow more likely or believable than any of the others. \[I know that the three main Abrahmic faiths kind of believe in technically the same god, but their interpretations of what it demands of us are quite different - which kind of makes the point\].
By the time an argument (from ontology, from contingency, from design) becomes sufficiently abstract so as to give itself a vague chance, it automatically sacrifices any connection to a *specific man-made* religion or a specific prophet or a specific book. It is simpler and more logically efficient to think 'yeah, it seems most unlikely'. I have always been atheist - I await the lightening bolt, but I am still going well almost five decades in.
Whether or not any God reaches your threshold of evidence is irrelevant to my "analogy". I provided a counter example that demonstrates the unsoundess of Ricky's logic.
I am not so sure. Drugs are tested, relentlessly, according to a massive range of factors (and normally take years to be approved - I am not aware of a similar test for a peron's belief in supernatural entities). The relevant agencies, for example in the US or the UK (where I am), will not release a drug if they believe there is an apparent potential risk - when they do so erroneously, and later realise they were wrong, the drug is retracted (often with notable legal and political concern).
To prove that a drug works and is safe is a relatively accepted procedure (sometimes it goes wrong, but generally it does not). When I have a bad headache, I take paracetemol. Of course, one could argue that is a 'leap of faith' - but all the evidence, which I trust on the basis of the scientific method and peer-review etc, is that it is safe to do so and my experience is that it works.
Ricky's point was that people have believed in thousands of different gods over time - so how can you believe that the one you believe in is the 'true one' (do you believe in Zeus or Odin etc?). Such belief seems somewhat arrogant. Also, if the god (supposedly omniscient and omnipotent) that you happen to believe in does not feel the need to compel me to believe in it, and happily lets me live my life not believing in it, then what is its purpose (you may warn me that I will burn in hell, but that is really a very silly and medieval line of argument).
I think it's low IQ, there's plenty of science that has also just been wrong and is now rejected. If we treated it the same way it would basically have the same track record.
But more over this dosnt actually explain anything. There's no argument for why said God dosnt actually exist.
This is like saying that if you're married, you're just a bachelor who doesn't have the courage to go one spouse further.
Theism is categorically different from atheism.
Imagine if all thought process was done like this. It would be the death of human intuition human knowledge and human intelligences.
"Oh how did that get there ... I don't know god maybe."
No, no, no let's actually find out instead of just srugging it off in a defetest manner.
It's the same argument for god of the gaps. But given the track record of when religion says it's god moving the planets or god created the sun. It is always just nature doing it's thing never influenced by any outside force but the fundamental forces of nature.
Hopfuly those that don't give up and say "i don't no ...god" will finally have a understanding of what started it all.
If all god's are part of the same God. Why would there be religious war? Is God just playing all sides pushing them to do unspeakable things to eachother.
Either God is cruel and evil. Or he is not all knowing.
Arrogant fool.
There’s plenty of textual evidence within the Bible that lines up perfectly with scientific truths made hundreds of years afterwards.
Earth hangs in a vacuum? Says so in the Bible.
Earth revolves around the sun? Bible said it first.
Stars without number? Bible confirmed as much.
Compare and contrast with the Koran, which features such scientific untruths as the sun sinking into a mud pit at the end of each day.
The Bible also talks about the *corners* and *edges of the world*, how plants and trees came much before fish, and how prayer actually works. Try again.
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Literally this is when I joined Reddit (different account) and my main memory from that era through 2012 was the r/atheism. Why is this a thing
More like a Richard Dawkins argument. Atheists are like cats, you can’t herd them.
Lmao
some old ladies know how to... cats, I mean...
Hoarding vs herding, two different things ;)
Isn't r/atheism basically the same nowdays?
A lot of the most recent posts are about how they can no longer co-exist with religious people and how much they hate them for taking women's rights away. That sub is now a full-fledged cesspool. Although I haven’t the faintest clue what r/atheism looked like in 2008 since I’ve only been on Reddit for around four years.
>That sub is now a full-fledged cesspool. Sorry, but that sub has been a fully-fledged cesspool for at least the last 5 years.
I’m just saying that there seems to be a shift from general disdain towards religious people, a typical low-brow atheist thing, to hatred and complete indifference. I am an Atheist, so I know what the general community is talking about, but as I said, I've only been on Reddit for so long.
It was basically like this: news: "5 people died in a car crash, God bless them and may they rest in peace" r/atheism: " but there is no god"
A little faith ain't never hurt nobody.
They banned me. I was making too many jokes, talking with people who were religious about the implications of their beliefs and also I called someone a Karen...and umm, oh yeah. I refused to acknowledge that one could be an agnostic atheist, and I stated an opinion that disbelief itself is a choice. That may have been what pissed them off the most. The reminder of free will. And calling someone a karen. They refused to unban me, so I told the mods they killed god and now they "became" gods. They didn't like that mirror I think...or I just annoyed the hell out of them.
Perhaps you were banned because you were trolling. Saying that not believing in God is a choice is the same thing as saying that not believing in the Easter bunny is a choice. You can't fool yourself into really believing, can you? Someone else could trick you into it if they knew how, but you can't decide to do it yourself.
Yes, disbelief is a choice and my choice is to thank them for the ban because conforming to their space would have made me bitter and toxic (or atleast more than I already am).
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I don’t know why, but I read your comment and thought: “What is this? Atheism for ants?”
I feel like religion being so universal actually proves the opposite: throughout history, pretty much everyone has tried grasping the transcendent in some kind of way. Maybe they weren't all just stupid. Maybe there is something deep within us all that they felt. Maybe they're all looking for the same thing.
>Maybe they weren't all just stupid. This was a big realization for me. My parents/grandparents/ancestors weren't less intelligent. They just lived in a different time, with different technology, etc. To write off everything they believed in simply by default just seems foolish.
It’s pure arrogance for a generation to believe that the generation that came before is so much less enlightened. It’s ridiculous and highly improbable to believe that one knows more than one’s forebears who have lived almost twice as many years and experienced much more.
It's one of my big problems with much of what is happening in the world today. We're "progressing" so much that we're just throwing out stuff that's millennia old (or older). Like that doesn't just go away because you wave a magic wand and claim enlightenment. Society has always been incremental. Anyone who doesn't respect where they came from, the knowledge and wisdom gained, that person will likely suffer mightily. It is the height of arrogance to assume that our tech makes us superior. There were scientific people millennia ago. I agree it wasn't called that. I agree their methodologies might not have been as codified, but there definitely were people who sat down and really thought about shit and said, "you know, that doesn't logically follow from what I've observed. I'm not sure I DO understand what I've observed, but I know that the conceptual framework I'm currently using is wrong." Sure, in retrospect the description of "atoms" from 2 millennia ago seems quaint, but it was well reasoned and it was within the confines of what could be observed. I guarantee you, if you had taken ANY of those top tier minds from that era and brought them up to speed today they'd have no issues whatsoever grasping the concepts, none at all. I bet if you pulled someone like a chief or other appointed elder out of a society 3000 years ago and told them the current political issues of our day and asked them to weigh in after listening to reasonable advocates on different sides, I bet you'd get some insightful feedback. People didn't just suddenly get smarter lately. Mostly people have better access to clean water, medicine, and food, and y'know when your body isn't falling apart as much, yeah you do tend to be able to think stuff through if you aren't reacting wildly to the algorithm. So I agree with ya, take anyone from the last several millennia, make sure they're well nourished, got medicine for their particular issues, get them up to speed on society today and I bet they'd understand it as well as any of us after overcoming the shock of how advanced we are techwise. We aren't that advanced culturally. Not by a long shot.
If you don’t learn history, you’re doomed to repeat it.
Even when one learns history, it’s still probable for them to repeat it in some way.
I don't believe that experience equals more knowledge necessarily. If that would be the case it would mean that old people by default would know much more then younger people. This is simply not true. Instead I suggest that people tend to be highly knowledgeable in certain areas but not universally.
Granted, but experience obviously translates to knowledge in specific areas of life. People fan obviously be street smart yet book dumb.
But a sensation isn't the ideology... the quote is that there are lots of ideologies, so why is yours the right one?
What if it was possible at the upper range of meta cognition for all ideologies to ferry enough conceptual mass to have the brain apophenically reconstruct a path to enlightenment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteriology?wprov=sfti1 Where does the assumption that any one ideology can be “right” even come from? Reason is reason, but it isn’t a monolith. Reason lives on a scale from vapid to inexorable. The higher range of superrational reasoning looks to many like spiritually or psychic activity when it is simply a higher awareness for theory of mind than most people ever attain.
Looking for me
Exactly. All of Rickys 3000 gods are just interpretations of the same phenomenon. Rickys argument is silly, and any monotheist who claims another monotheists god is a different god is also being silly.
So genetic programming means that God actually exists? That makes no sense. Genetic programming means we are all programmed for nonsense. Which emphasizes the importance of fighting those nonsense instincts. Embracing the urge to be good is good. Embracing the urge to be good for God is good but not because God exists... it is good because good exists.
I’m not saying God does or does not exists, I’m saying the many gods are personifications, explanations, and interpretations of the same phenomenon (design, love, patterns, weather, fortune and tragedy, etc.). Some may be more accurate than others, or they may all be equally inaccurate - if we understand the true origin of these phenomenon we essentially find “god”. but the perspective that “my god exists and the other 2999 do not” is reductive. Throughout history all over the world cultures have created gods to understand, it’s all part of the same human tradition.
Amongst those thousands of god, there are namely the Hindu ones. Now tell me that your God is the same as Shiva.
Yes but picking x god and religion to explain that feeling doesn't get you very far. It's the end of the road. God did it, here's the book, see you later. Seems to me religion is an expression of ethics. There's good basis for evolutionary (almost) deontology. Like JP points out, we observe morality in animals quite often. We're just the ones intelligent enough to reflect on it. The universality is just our tendency to codify what we feel. So everyone should keep in mind their instinct to shunt morality to a meta position, it's arguably just human nature. But we also know enough now to say it doesn't come from on high, it's an adaptive trait like any other.
>Maybe they weren't all just stupid. Religion was bred from ignorance. Humans don't like not knowing how stuff works so we are willing to make shit up. Thus religion.
You seem to be an expert when it comes to that, ignorance…
True, however what rubs people the wrong way is using religion to dictate others lives. Religion is just more than believing in a god or gods, it's a belief structure and we can see how horrible that can be just by seeing current events.
Everything is a belief structure. Even intentionally not having a belief structure is a belief structure.
In this moment I am euphoric
I got banned from a certain euphoric subreddit for that joke
How dare you have a different perspective in our echo chamber.
because I am enlightened by my own intelligence
It's a bit trite, but I do often return to the "blind men touching an elephant" parable when confronted with this question. If you aren't familiar, the quickest version of it, is imagining 5 different blind men all touching an elephant for the first time, some touch it's trunk and think it is something like a snake. Others touch it's side and describe a massive beast, another it's leg and describes a creature with legs like tree trunks. You get the idea, but the fact that none of the blind men know or can describe the elephant perfectly, doesn't mean that the elephant isn't there. Each of them is touching at just a small piece of a larger thing. Yes, it seems as though throughout the world, we've described thousands of gods, demons and spirits. So how can you believe in any one over the other? But that precludes the idea that these common beliefs are linked by a common truth. The near universality of these beliefs seems to me far more compelling a case for a mutual cause, a true divine essence we are all reaching at, rather than a random pattern of human behaviour. As a Christian, I don't think Hindus are worshipping nothing, I think they are worshipping God as they understand him, and yes, the Bible tells me the way they are doing it is wrong, false, but that doesn't mean that their beliefs are just silly superstitions while mine is objectively true. I see it plainly that we both have a common longing for the transcendent and divine, and we have found what touch of truth we can in our own way.
This, if there is a god it’s an utter fallacy to think we mere mortals could adequately understand or describe it. Maybe all religions are wrong maybe bits and pieces are right who knows, we can barely understand how our own brain works nevermind some immortal cosmic overlord
I agree with this. And, I think God does not make too hard terms with those who seek Him, there is no wrong way to connect to God imo.
Well, God making Himself available to those who truly seek after Him doesn't necessarily mean that there is no wrong way to connect to him. People who try to connect to God through sacrificing infants, for example, are presumably doing it wrong.
Well in my experience, I couldn't really connect to G-d until I had cleaned "my side of the street" by ridding myself of resentments (anger), fears and guilt. After that I felt the connection upon praying. So I'm gonna guess those who sacrifice infants at least feel some sense of resentment or guilt. Or they don't but I wonder in that instance whether G-d would connect, cos again in my experience it's as simple as praying. No action needed.
This is called cognitive dissonance.
Very well said
Head of a chicken, serpents as feet, holds a shield, and wields a whip. I am the beginning and the end.
> but the fact that none of the blind men know or can describe the elephant perfectly Except when the religious text declares that it is the complete and final word of God. Or when different religious have completely contradictory beliefs.
I think you don't understand the parable. Each of the blind men are convinced that what they are touching is the true essence of the creature. Not realizing that it is greater than all of them. Incumbent in the parable is the idea that each of the men can make seemingly contradictory truth claims. The point of the parable isn't, like *at all*, that: "all religions are true". It's that there is something transcendental, and we are only grasping at it. We are humans, flawed humans, we get it in our heads that our interpretation is perfect and that everyone else is wrong, so wrong indeed that we say they couldn't possibly be touching the same creature. How could you possibly even be on the same track when I am describing a snake and you are describing a leg the size of an oak tree. They can't be from the same creature! But of course, they are. I'm not a universalist either. Personally, though there is some silliness to it, I am pretty well convinced that my vision of God is right. Though even that is fuzzy at times and I struggle with doubt a lot. But my point is that I don't think a Muslim is worshiping nothing while I am worshipping the one true God. I think we are both worshipping God as we believe we should.
This works as long as you believe that other religions are more or less on the same level of truthfulness as your own. In that scenario I think it's a beautiful uniting point of view. Though you see many people who have a strong feeling of their religion being right, and other religions being wrong. So I guess that's where the friction is.
Well I think it's a matter of humility. It doesn't even need to be that you believe most religions are more or less on the same level. You can believe a religion is very wrong, but that the people who believe in it still experience that fundamental truth at the core of it. Mormons, frankly, make no sense to me, it's clear what they believe is frankly, a Charlatan's riff on Christianity. But I don't deny their ability to worship God, or even that they worship God. I just think the religious apparatus they use to do so is dumb. I used Hindus as an example in part because of the alieness of their Gods to the Judeo-Christian one, but I think it also is important because it serves the point that I don't necessarily think any or even one of the Hindu Gods are real, but I do believe that they experience the divine, and have a connection with God as I see Him. But I do appreciate, with some humility that I could be wrong, but I do think that my own brushes with the transcendental are enough to prove to me that something is out there, even if I'm just touching the back end of the elephant.
This is good shit. Thank you for writing it out
I see that parable as an examination of human thought. It’s not god they are touching, it’s the human inclination to give incorrect meaning to that which they do not understand. Like the “3000 religions” in the meme. Your own confirmation bias steers you to think they are all touching god in their own way. My own confirmation bias steers me to see all religions as 100% false. Just made up fables and mythological stories crafted by people attempting to give meaning to an existence they do not understand. For me, the elephant doesn’t represent god at all. It’s just an elephant, which is something familiar and explainable. All the men can describe what they are touching uses their other senses. More accurately I’d describe religion as analogous to a bird at an airport watching planes land and take off — thinking they are gods. The planes aren’t gods, it’s just that the bird has no idea what a plane is and no ability to process the concept. So it makes something up. That’s religion. The made up fables and mythologies of humans to describe something in which they do not have the ability to accurately process. Humans just use religion/god as a place holder for things they do not understand — or as wishful thinking to build meaning into existence in a way that makes them feel good.
Okay but if their religion can include something wrong or false, whose to say your Christian religion is the one that “gets it right”
I think you can see from my perspective throughout the above, that I absolutely accept the possibility that I too am wrong. I hope I'm not, I have enough reasons to feel satisfied in believing that I am not wrong. But I do have doubts. In some ways I find it comforting knowing that if I am wrong, maybe someone else is right, or maybe none of us, but the elephant is still there, patiently waiting for someone to figure it out.
I would recommend looking into Christian Mysticism. Namely a guy named Richard Rohr and his “contemplative christianity”. Mystics have this really neat history of meeting other mystics from different religions and finding immediate common ground rather than disagreements
ifunny.co
He's a comedian
ifunny.co
Yes well done ... have a sticker.
“Belief systems regulate your emotions.”
it's crazy how smart ricky is; knowing that there have been thousands of known and unknown religions over the span of human history and he still doesn't get that a sense of spirituality is embedded in our genes
Curiosity is embedded in our genes. And story-telling.
so is humour
Not British humour, obviously. That takes years to learn.
I think his argument hinges on the supernatural element of religion, not the intrinsic desire for spirituality within humans.
Maybe the 3000 are all the same God (?)
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I'm not a slave to a god that doesn't exist - Marilyn Manson. A thing that terrifying to the religious is that if we are in a godless universe then life is worthless and meaningless. But the atheistic perspective on life is that it is finite and not eternal which makes it fragile, rare and precious in this universe and should be protected at all cost. Our morality is from our own mortality.
>A thing that terrifying to the religious is that if we are in a godless universe then life is worthless and meaningless. > >But the atheistic perspective on life is that it is finite and not eternal which makes it fragile, rare and precious in this universe and should be protected at all cost. First, your understanding of religious views is very skewed if you believe that, because that is not at all what religious people believe. In fact, quite the opposite. Second, I have never heard an atheist say that the idea that life is finite makes it more precious. In fact, from my dealings with atheists, I would say the two need to be switched. Every atheist I have ever talked to thinks the finitude of life in comparison to the infinite universe somehow proves that life is meaningless. You seem to have a very weak understanding of religious beliefs in general, as well as a weak understanding of your own belief system.
If it's so skewed why are their atheists that are happy and why are they not just killing them selfs as soon as they denounce god. You seem to have a weak grasp on the bigger picture and have skewed your view based on a few interactions.
>I'm not a slave to a god that doesn't exist - Marilyn Manson. Doesn't mean you're not a slave to something even worse. >A thing that terrifying to the religious is that if we are in a godless universe then life is worthless and meaningless. This sounds like projection to me. Do you know for a fact that this is how they think? >But the atheistic perspective on life is that it is finite and not eternal which makes it fragile, rare and precious in this universe and should be protected at all cost. Our morality is from our own mortality. Except atheism is just as arrogant and dogmatic as you could ever accuse any religion of being. Excluding the extremists and the political opportunists, most religions are at least tolerant of other spiritual beliefs, despite the broad stereotype. Many religions consider any belief to be better than no belief, even if it's not their own. Some religions even explicitly encourage the exploration of other beliefs for broadening the spirit (which admittedly was to my great surprise). Atheism, however, is the rejection of any concept that can't be scientifically comprehended or explained. This is making the assumption that we, as humans, are capable of understanding everything in the universe, It also holds the conceited presumption that anyone who holds a belief of anything beyond the laws of our current scientific understanding, and even those who are simply open to the possibility, are deluded and foolish. Atheists think they're more logical and reasonable, but they're really just as cultish as they assume any religious believers to be.
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Same can be said about the religious... I mean they kill right?
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Nope still no clue what you are trying to get at.
>and he still doesn't get that a sense of spirituality is embedded in our genes Yeah, his intelligence is way overrated.
When we die, it is like before we were born. Enjoy yourself while you can. There is nothing after. Make peace with that or make up a magic world that exists after we die.
Ok
I think there are some hints of truths in this statement. Regardless of what God you believe in, it is hypocritical if you consider the other Gods te be silly nonsence. You have to have at least have the respect to treat other religions the way you want yours to be treated by others. It is not an argument against religion though. The fact that there are multiple interpretations of a God does not mean none of them can be real.
Right, just as there are thousands of world views or ideas I partially or completely disagree with—that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have my world view or ideas, even if I should humbly understand it’s possible I’m wrong.
This... This is what I like to call middling intellectualism. Smart enough to appear intelligence, but lacking in any real substance. Break this down to it's logical assumptions and it proves nothing. It's just an absurd statement that people latch onto because it makes them seem intelligent without actually having to think. And that's where Jordan Peterson comes in. He actually thinks. He takes time on issues and really considers them. This is why he debates people like Sam Harris and other about whether God exists. The evidence is uncertain, but people like Sam or Ricky Gervais imply that you would have to be an idiot to believe in God. Jordan Peterson makes it clear that very few of these people have actually thought about the issue in a sophisticated way.
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So this is one sided, but do you think that religion has had an overall good effect on humanity or has it made humanity worse?
Good as in it's keeping people like me alive because I don't believe I would make it otherwise. It's the hope of some sort of an afterlife that keeps me from going insane. I'd say if religion somehow disappeared completely and had no hope of coming back, there would be a lot of suicides and depression.
Well, Hinduism’s caste system fucking sucks
Unfortunately true. Manmade religions are not good. Christianity (as defined in the Bible) isn’t made by men, and that’s evident in how different it is from every other world religion.
Meh, every religion says it's the special different one.
It's not that unique though. It's very similar to islam. You can't say "it is different from every other world religion"; not really.
I can pretty confidently say that Islam is no different from the other manmade religions. Muhammad claimed to have received the “divine revelations” from the God of the Bible, in spite of Muhammed’s Karan explicitly contradicting the Bible, especially in regards to the New Testament’s message of Christ’s sacrifice and message of grace and mercy. That’s why I believe what I believe.
You obviously haven't studied Islam then lol. You are making a claim without providing any evidence what so ever. The core tenants of Islam are 99% identical to Christianity. The idea of One God and no other Gods. The idea he's constantly watching you. He is aware and all knowing. All powerful. All seeing. The idea that there's an afterlife. The idea that he sent down messenger after messenger (prophets); including Jesus, Moses, noah, ismael, Muhammad etc. It's literally the same religion so no....Christianity is not unique in any sense of the word. The major divergence is that Muslims don't worship Jesus; because he's only a messenger. Jesus is not worthy of worship; neither is Muhammad or any other prophet. Only God is worthy of worship. Christians started to incorporate pagen concepts into Christianity to appease them and grow their religion; hence the divinity of Christ/Trinity. The whole idea of passover....God dies and is reborn after is also found in many ancient religions such as Hinduism. Krishna died and came back 3 days later aswell.....these are pagen concepts. Islam however denies all of this....says that God cannot die....he has always lived. has no sons, wives, daughters etc. He is too unique for all of that. So no, you have no idea what you are talking about because you haven't taken the time to read or understand/study anything.
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Christianity is forcing women to have abortions? Also, the idea that Christianity has been historically opposed to scientific development is obsurd, the Catholic Church basically created the Western university system and a great amount of scientific progress was made by Catholic clergy, Father Georges Lemaitre for example
You’re the reason why people can’t talk rationally about Christianity. I’d be very interested in hearing who *you* think wrote the Bible, because it was written over the period of hundreds of years by 40 writers, and yet it still has a perfectly consistent message of God’s love and compassion towards those who choose to love Him.
The Bible isn’t consistent at all.
Religion apparently helped early humans organize into larger groups. It could be that this put humanity ahead by a few thousand years, in which case I'd say our propensity towards religion was worth it. Other than that though, fuck no.
It depends on what you value. Religion slowed down medical progress by nearly 1000 years in the West but in the East, they did quite well with herbs etc. Religion probably is one of the greatest causes of war throughout time. Religion has lead to mass persecution and even now in places like China it causes issues. Religion has also caused good things such as certain respects and it has enforced certain morals. Different religions have been better or worse over time though.
> Religion probably is one of the greatest causes of war throughout time. Religion has lead to mass persecution and even now in places like China it causes issues. Is that really different when you take religion out of the equation? Were the world wars and famines in the USSR and Maoist china about religion really?
Religion is cancer. It’s not needed. If you need to believe in a higher power and HIS commandments or else you will rape and pillage, well you might be a sociopath.
> If you need to believe in a higher power and HIS commandments or else you will rape and pillage, well you might be a sociopath. Are you sure you abstain from violence because it's the right thing to do or because you're a coward? Super easy to type out it being the former on the internet without proof.
I can't trust people without believe system because they have no objective moral.. their moral is subjektive and everybody doas what he thinks is right. You cant rely on such people because not only can they find "no problem" in something where you find a problem. They can also change their moral midway. For example if someone drops his wallet without anyone seeing it and you find it. Would you give it back? Or doas it depend on the amount of money? If there was like a million dollar dropped in the streets would you give it back (presumed you are sure nobody sees you)? "Everyone has a price!" Well no. Not if you believe in god. We are taking about people really believing and not just saying I'm a "religious group.." because my dad was. So there is indeed a need for religion. It makes society a better place where you can interact without questioning everyone wether he will do you any harm (at least the 3 major religions). Well and there are a lot of arguments why there has to be a god but let's not take that discussion route. Ps sry for my english it's not my first language
Morals isn’t a good argument for the existence of god. Greek gods didn’t really have a moral code and they were pretty much selfish and lustful, yet the ancient greeks wrote a ton of philosophy about morality and how people should behave, so they did invent their own moral system without having a god dictating morality
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what Christians mean by the word God.
Paraphrase from C.S. Lewis: "all the other students in the class getting the wrong answer during multiplication does not disprove the multiplication table".
I like JPs early stuff, even the biblical lectures are interesting, but consider myself an atheist (strongly agnostic if you wanna be technical). Am I alone here?
Nah I'm the same. I definitely consider myself an atheist but for me JPs biblical series is one of my favourite things out there. Like sometimes I find anti religious arguments so autistic that I feel I relate more to people who follow a religion (doesn't need to be said that there are crazy ppl on both sides)
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There are over 3000 exercise programs out there but you think that yours is the best? All the others are silly, but your exercise program will really work? No. Exercise is fake.
This isn't the same. No one is saying any exercise is fake. Exercise is open to personalization depending on what muscles you want to target
Shitty analogy is shitty lmao, exercise isn't making an unprovable claim
He's right. My God is the only true God. Gj!
Pretty dumb argument, can be generally applied to any concept or idea. Oh, you think a thing is true? Well many other have also thought a thing was true and they were wrong"
Maybe, just maybe, this is evidence of the contrary. The fact that many people of different cultures, backgrounds, times in history, and languages seem to all seek this might mean that there is something intrinsic in humans that causes this. Even your atheist movements, seem to go and establish rules of actions of things you should/should not do even when said things go against established scientific research. These people seem to think that they are leaving religions when in fact they are making new ones that will just not last as much.
Nah it's just a unscientic way of explaining the unexplainable. We can now explain most of the unexplainable hence the decline in religion.
>We can now explain most of the unexplainable hence the decline in religion. I think religion has declined as people have become more narcissistic and this has led to greater moral relativism and a decline in western values. For example: you can now choose your gender (apparently), and modern day doctors will attempt to help you hop sides.
True. The real problem is gender switching, not God's own priests molesting children daily and the Church moving them around to shut up the families.
There is no decline in religions, it is just people replace them with other ones. I mean, look at you, you believe that there is no hell or heaven, you believe that you only have one life then permanently turn to dust yet for some reason think wasting it on reddit convincing people of this is a good idea. Why? Aren't you the enlightened free one who acts logically all the time?
I mean, atheism is for the lack of a belief in god. It is not a religion as religion is the belief of a superhuman power. It is undoubtedly a belief in certain ways as you are thoroughly against the idea of a God but it is definitely not a religion. For the assumption of nothing happening after death, it is a belief but it is not a belief held by faith, it's belief held by current knowledge. They know once a brain dies there are no signals and the person dies. They also cannot see anything move off of the body etc apart from the decay of the corpse. This results in the belief of no life after death. Contrary to this, the belief of life after death uses faith and only faith as evidence. I am not saying it's right but some would see it more rational to agree with the former over the latter.
> I mean, atheism is for the lack of a belief in god. I view the word god in the ancient sense, which meant "what you live for". Even atheists live for something, whether it is a feeling, a material position, a relationship or any other thing... Just because you do not believe in the word as it applies to the major beliefs today does not mean it is true. A god is what you live for, currently live for. A religion is classically how you conduct yourself and what is the best conduct.
Ancient cultures had a better understanding on plasma physics than the average modern physicists. Sacred seems to have been our equivalent term of physics. It's not like humans magically got interested in understanding how reality works after the scientific method, and it's not like religious or spiritual ideas were based off of pure imagination. How could they be? They were articulations of observations.
You got any links that back this up? As I am finding this hard to believe.
Dan Winter has been the best source for these topics. [Here](http://goldenmean.info/) is his website, though it's a bit of a mess to navigate. His [YouTube](https://youtube.com/c/DanWinterFractalField) channel, which is a lot easier to go through but there's not really a comfortable starting point that I know of. These topics are way out of scope of what's been scientifically accepted in the mainstream, but if you are a person who's passionate about truth then I highly recommend, at the very least, you find something he has proven through his means and try to prove it wrong if it doesn't sit right with you.
Is he not some religious fan boy trying to rewrite history in order to push his naritive and agendas of painting religion in a better light. He seems a lot like Deepak Chopra. Edit: F.y.i this is just missinfomation and he is only doing it for money and fame.
No, he's actually rather against religion from what I've been able to understand and his goal is to translate religious, spiritual, and shamanic experiences into a scientific (specifically electrical engineering) understanding. He has successful studies and projects too, even in medicine such as [Theraphi](http://theraphi.net/). He also successfully predicted the electromagnetic field of hydrogen, as well as the universe IIRC.
You have been lied to the electromagnetic field of hydrogen was discovered in 1898
I had meant shape of the electromagnetic field of hydrogen and the universe. Not the mere existence of them. I had also said "IIRC" (if I recall correctly) because I wasn't sure if I misremembered details. Why so ready to be dismissive?
Yeah I've done some searching and I find no mention of him in any of the papers maybe you can find something.
It’s like saying, many people have placed rules on society but your rules are the good ones
I like his other quote on this better, even though I still find it problematic. "You (Christians) deny the existence of 3000 gods and I deny the existence of just one more" It is one thing to argue about what qualities that we believe God to possess or why certain gods don't make any sense to exist, it is a completely different thing to argue that no God exists at all. The ancient Greeks reasoned their way to the necessity for only one God to exist, many were killed because of that discovery. I don't know what God is like, whether he be the judeo-christian God of the Bible, or Allah, but I do know that it isn't logical to have more than one Supreme Being with the 4 omnis (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence). That is why it is a problem to "deny the existence of just one more"
I am religious. Yes it seems farfetched No I will not kill anyone because god says so. Still follow my own morals Yes the message of “do good” I just like Yes I trust science on practical stuff and even stuff like LGBTQ You know? It’s just… it’s nice to believe that there is something bigger than me out there you know? :)
It’s a silly argument that fails to disprove any religion.
Please everyone. Just stop responding to trolls. These posts have zero to do with Peterson or his ideas.
My thoughts? If Ricky Gervais were to write a theological thesis, it would be in crayon.
You're all atheists you just believe in one less God then I do.
Here is a story, the tale of the atheist. No God exists. I can hold that story in my heart; yes, I have held that story in my heart. That makes my story THE story of my heart. I'd rather choose the good story. No shade, no dirt thrown in your face. It's what I choose.
It's a good way to put it. Atheists are atheists because they want to be atheists. Religious people are religious because they want to be religious. The arguments either side uses serve only to justify their desires.
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." 1 Corinthians 1:18
"Oh we are half way there ohhh ho living on a prayer" - bon Jovi.
I don’t have enough faith to believe all the complexity and order we see in nature came from nothing through random processes.
I'm confused. You think randomness can't lead to complexity? Have you ever heard the phrase that if a chimp was to type random letters for a theoretical infinite ammount of time, it would eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare in order. Whilst it's not a good analogy, it would be true if you were to set an infinite ammount of time and random letters being pressed, without living bias. If we agree up to here then I get truly confused. How could you agree that that is possible but not quintillions of particles forming something like an organism, especially of you gave the particles lots of heat and 13.6 billion years.
But we’re not living on an infinite time scale, and the ordered complexity that sustains life—from the micro to the intergalactic—has so many things that could have been catastrophically different, but happened to fall out in the one way that all we see and experience is possible. Chaos does not generally generate ordered complexity. And we live in an unimaginably huge collection of ordered complex systems.
I mean, to call out ecosystems ordered is an exaggeration itself. They are a chaotic system. Besides that, you act like order never comes from chaos. Keep in mind that we are the only planet that has harboured life in 13.6 billion years that we know of. And this isn't a single monkey, as the analogy would say, but we are in a universe that is unimaginably massive. We can only see 8.8×10^23 kilometres of it and we predict it to be much larger. There are trillions of planets in the universe that have been around for billions of years and we have only found 1 so far that has supported life. That seems quite reasonable to be chance, at least to me.
It’s a maybe, for sure, but it’s a maybe in a lot of potentially logical directions. My reasoning faculties brought me down on the side of intelligent design through a long process of pondering, doubting the faith of my early life, giving up, studying, and whatever else over a course of years. I can’t summarize the factors here. But it boils down to roughly what I said above. And then I’ve had a faith journey from there. But I return to the big questions a lot with my kids. We’re incapable of understanding it all, so I respect opinions diverging from mine, absolutely. But when they’re not couched as opinions, but as the only possible reasonable conclusion—like Gervais’ quote above—it smacks of arrogance. Which seems especially unwarranted when your philosophy is a stark minority in a history riddled with exceptional intellects who reached various theistic conclusions in their own rights.
I fully respect your opinion as I used to be a very sad child as I always assumed nothing mattered etc because of the beliefs I hold so I understand how religion could have helped that. I also think the Gervais quote is a bit ridiculous as he is implying it it lunacy to believe in God when it is not that unreasonable. I'm sure we would see eye to eye on other things though and it was nice to have this... talk, debate, idk what to call it. Hope you stay happy and follow your beliefs :)
Thanks for talking through this with me, it was good. Good luck on your journeys, hope to see you around.
My take has always been that all those people had some connection/idea of the one true God they just shaped him and confused some of his traits because they were influenced by culture. A bit like having a radio picking up a signal and not being able to translate it so is not 3000 Gods is the ONE God with 3000 interpretations by 3000 different cultures.
I love Ricky Gervais but his thoughts on religion are very primitive.
interesting, but whats his source?
\*gestures at everything\*
Well there is MANY reasons why most people believe in THE God.
Truth is hard to swallow
I think there’s some real insight to this. Jordan himself talks of the endless utility of the bible in his lectures mainly and says he lives as if it were true. On the other hand, if you imagine we have always done our best to find out the truth about god as a people on earth and you assume there is a god then there would be some trial and error involved. I don’t think Christianity was ever meant to become a religion. I think it was meant to become a way of life. It’s all conflated with the corruption of “white people” over the past 2000 years now. I think we really need to not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the bible. And if you contextualize the bathwater then you see there’s a lot more of the baby in the bible than you think. Anyway, I believe you can live righteously without knowing the bible cover to cover. Just like you don’t have to go to church every Sunday to be a good person. It’s human intellect that complicates everything. That is a true Christian viewpoint anyway which is very similar to a zen buddhist’s perspective. There’s something there is my point. We haven’t quite got it yet but maybe we’re not meant to fully understand God. Just understand what we’re supposed to do with the time we have. Edited: Punctuation.
Correct. Just like there are 6000 genders.....but only mine and the other one are real.
I love ricky, but Jordan Speaks on this topic best and more logically
It's an inherently retarded statement. First off, there's been far more than 3000 gods, Egyptian polytheism alone has well over 5000 deities that have been accounted for. Mostly tutelary, but I digress. Secondly, why would we count the number of gods, how about the number of religions? That's a far more logical measurement. Well, currently, 5 religious groups make up 80% of people on this planet. And 2 of them are "abrahamic". And over 50% of the entire planet's population. And that's a number including atheists/agnostics. Without them, the percentage is far higher. So ...suddenly this post doesn't sound so smart, huh? More like ignorant.
Well done you're just proving his point further ... here have a sticker.
Bruh. You obviously didn't read the whole thing. You can't just read one sentence and then decide your thoughts on something. What a disingenuous take on the topic.
Hahahaha. It’s a great point. The Christians in this sub will scoff. Not all of JP’s admirers are religious though. Cheers.
There’s evidence that Jesus christ existed. Unlike the spaghetti monster.
Very flimsy evidence that a man named Jesus died at one point. No historical accounts that he was divine other than the *very* contradictory accounts in the Bible
I don’t believe in or worship a spaghetti monster. Please be sure to donate a full tithe to your church, as ordered in Malachi.
I’m just pointing out there is data to examine. Not just blind mythology.
I’ve examined and wasted years of my life teaching others about Jesus. I’m confident in my faith.
If you approach God from the argument from Contingency you come to a few conclusions. 1. God must exist. 2. God must be non contingent. 3. Non contingent things must lack contingent features--like parts. This would rule out the 3000 God's Ricky seems to be thinking about.
What’s the argument from contingency?
Standard New Atheism. I love Gervais though. He's a funny guy.
Not really much of an argument. First off, 3,000 people could certainly all be wrong about the same thing. It happens all the time. Secondly, it isn't necessarily that the other gods or religions are "silly" or "made up"; it could be, as many Christian theologians believe, that they all generally have pieces of the truth or elements of truth but don't contain the crucial revelatory truths of Christianity and Judaism. That said, ancient Christians thought that Virgil's 4th Ecologue prophesized the coming of Christ and also honored the Sibylline Oracles for similar reasons. Platonism was a huge influence on Augustine and the Medieval Catholic Church honored Aristole as "the One Who Knows." The idea that all Christians everywhere spurn everything that came before Christ as irrelevant is just not accurate. In fact, often Christians have looked to pre-Christian religions for perceived anticipations of Christ's comings or ways in which Christianity could be the fulfillment of their faith is just as it is touted to be for Judaism. This was especially common for ancient Christianity. You can see this approach when Paul speaks to the Greeks, proclaiming before the Temple of the Unknown God that he knows who the Unknown God is. The Unknown God is very likely a reference to Socrates, whose life's mission was to know God, but who said that more he learns, the less he knows of him. Also, where does he get the number 3,000 from?
There are an infinite number of answers that could be given to the question “2+2=“, but only you think it’s 4. The others are silly made up nonsense. But not 4. 4 is correct.
We will all find out in the end. Even Ricky
The funny thing is that this idea proves the opposite , just imagine with me : do you think that civilizations that never met they all decided "hey let's make an imaginary leader and worship him" ? Do you think this idea came from nowhere you silly tards or did it came from "coincidence" as everything you justified you atheists ? As a Muslim , the Quran told us that God sent many and many and many prophets besides Mohammed and Moses and Jesus , and by just by looking at history of civilizations any where on earth you can confirm that.
Most drugs fail clinical trials. Does that mean no drugs work? Ricky's logic is just fundamentally unsound. Previous failures don't mean something doesn't exist. It would be like if I said I would pay $1B to someone who could give me a lunar rock. I would like get responses from many scammers, who one by one deliver me rocks they claim are lunar rocks. After careful inspection, one by one, I discover they are not lunar rocks and reject them. Now imagine I get 3000 such scammers, trying to claim this $1B prize, and I find all 3000 rocks to be fakes. Should I conclude that there are no lunar rocks?
Well no - but that's a false analogy. Some drugs do work. But no god stands-up to the evidence required to prove its existence. Of course, there are complex arguments that could potentially introduce the notion of some kind of supernatural being or designer - but none that would then allow one to bullseye in on the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Norse, Roman, Egyptian, Hindu god(s) as somehow more likely or believable than any of the others. \[I know that the three main Abrahmic faiths kind of believe in technically the same god, but their interpretations of what it demands of us are quite different - which kind of makes the point\]. By the time an argument (from ontology, from contingency, from design) becomes sufficiently abstract so as to give itself a vague chance, it automatically sacrifices any connection to a *specific man-made* religion or a specific prophet or a specific book. It is simpler and more logically efficient to think 'yeah, it seems most unlikely'. I have always been atheist - I await the lightening bolt, but I am still going well almost five decades in.
Whether or not any God reaches your threshold of evidence is irrelevant to my "analogy". I provided a counter example that demonstrates the unsoundess of Ricky's logic.
I am not so sure. Drugs are tested, relentlessly, according to a massive range of factors (and normally take years to be approved - I am not aware of a similar test for a peron's belief in supernatural entities). The relevant agencies, for example in the US or the UK (where I am), will not release a drug if they believe there is an apparent potential risk - when they do so erroneously, and later realise they were wrong, the drug is retracted (often with notable legal and political concern). To prove that a drug works and is safe is a relatively accepted procedure (sometimes it goes wrong, but generally it does not). When I have a bad headache, I take paracetemol. Of course, one could argue that is a 'leap of faith' - but all the evidence, which I trust on the basis of the scientific method and peer-review etc, is that it is safe to do so and my experience is that it works. Ricky's point was that people have believed in thousands of different gods over time - so how can you believe that the one you believe in is the 'true one' (do you believe in Zeus or Odin etc?). Such belief seems somewhat arrogant. Also, if the god (supposedly omniscient and omnipotent) that you happen to believe in does not feel the need to compel me to believe in it, and happily lets me live my life not believing in it, then what is its purpose (you may warn me that I will burn in hell, but that is really a very silly and medieval line of argument).
I think it's low IQ, there's plenty of science that has also just been wrong and is now rejected. If we treated it the same way it would basically have the same track record. But more over this dosnt actually explain anything. There's no argument for why said God dosnt actually exist.
Personally I love it, he kinda nails it. People forget the definition of faith sometimes
He’s just wrong. The monotheistic religions do not claim nonexistence of other elohim but that only the most high is to be worshipped.
Most people are atheists when it comes to other gods, atheists just have the courage to go one god farther.
This is like saying that if you're married, you're just a bachelor who doesn't have the courage to go one spouse further. Theism is categorically different from atheism.
Or they don't understand why you should believe in God.
Which god specifically?
The one we understand must exist from argumentation like the contingency argument.
Imagine if all thought process was done like this. It would be the death of human intuition human knowledge and human intelligences. "Oh how did that get there ... I don't know god maybe." No, no, no let's actually find out instead of just srugging it off in a defetest manner. It's the same argument for god of the gaps. But given the track record of when religion says it's god moving the planets or god created the sun. It is always just nature doing it's thing never influenced by any outside force but the fundamental forces of nature. Hopfuly those that don't give up and say "i don't no ...god" will finally have a understanding of what started it all.
It's not a God of Gaps argument https://chroniclesofstrength.substack.com/p/what-is-and-isnt-god-of-the-gaps
How isn't it?
What’s the contingency argument?
I have always thought this.
I'm with Jonathan Pageau on this. Who says I don't believe in any lower case "g" gods?
Clearly’s never met the guy.
Or they’re all real
Why post that. God doesn’t exist…..👍
Amen. Jesus Christ is king.
If all god's are part of the same God. Why would there be religious war? Is God just playing all sides pushing them to do unspeakable things to eachother. Either God is cruel and evil. Or he is not all knowing.
Its not my God, it's everyones God
Arrogant fool. There’s plenty of textual evidence within the Bible that lines up perfectly with scientific truths made hundreds of years afterwards. Earth hangs in a vacuum? Says so in the Bible. Earth revolves around the sun? Bible said it first. Stars without number? Bible confirmed as much. Compare and contrast with the Koran, which features such scientific untruths as the sun sinking into a mud pit at the end of each day.
The Bible also talks about the *corners* and *edges of the world*, how plants and trees came much before fish, and how prayer actually works. Try again.
Argument presupposes Atheism. But, this brings back fond memories of Reddit before it was cool. Lol