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Author Topic: Atheism/Religion Discussion  (Read 183180 times)

Descan

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1770 on: December 22, 2012, 11:23:06 pm »

Um, if it turned out that a god exists... I probably still wouldn't worship him.

Guys a dick.

I mean, there'd be no point. Guy would know I wouldn't mean it, and there'd be no way for me to mean it... It'd be insulting to both of us.

I'd acknowledge his existence, though. If he existed, there's no point in saying he doesn't. That's putting my head in the sand.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2012, 11:25:20 pm by Descan »
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Slayerhero90

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1771 on: December 22, 2012, 11:23:35 pm »

Kill god and eat him.
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Wolfy

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1772 on: December 22, 2012, 11:32:49 pm »

Something I always wonder about is if there is a purpose to a hypothetical God's existence. If God is truly omniscient and knows all possible outcomes. Why bother doing anything about it? Why guide humans when you gain nothing out of it, even a new experience?
Maybe its not for him, your assuming god needs new experiences, or needs anything, maybe since he knows everything he lets us live and learn.
Why not be in it for us? he has nothing new to gain but we do.
and if he has inherit omniscient (it is a real definition, both of them are called omniscient, neither obs is more "true" then he could choose not to know things

Is he? i don't have clue, but if he exists then IT DONT matter, I don't need to know that to know he deserve worship
if he dont exist? or well, at least i followed what I belive is right
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Starver

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1773 on: December 22, 2012, 11:41:02 pm »

As a random response to a general recent feeling, I'll just reiterate something I may have voiced before in this thread...

The God Of Logic who set our universe up with so many hints that it was non-divinely run probably wouldn't be too happy with any of the people who decided that there was a God, of any kind, with a hand in it.  Including me, for leaping to the conclusion that there was God Of Logic without actually having any reasoning behind it.

And if we're supposed to be in a total-immersion game, then the programmer would probably prefer that the Fourth Wall remains unbroken, ne?  PMing the designer to request a new feature implemented or complaining that something is (or should be) nerfed might not be what He wants...
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Slayerhero90

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1774 on: December 22, 2012, 11:42:23 pm »

I personally would enjoy personifying the fourth wall and presenting my foot to its crotch.
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Wolfy

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1775 on: December 22, 2012, 11:46:42 pm »

Quote
so many hints that it was non-divinely run
where are the hints for it?
because we can expelling them? tell me would a "smart" race not make rules and make it where they dont have to "run the universe but let it run it self base on laws and rules?

or do you think this for another reason?

the bible says proof for God is in creation, I believe that to include the laws, you dont have to, thats fine, just know the bible dose meeting God "leaving" hints, and even says most would deny it
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MaximumZero

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1776 on: December 22, 2012, 11:52:45 pm »

Hypothetical 1: If we found that there were a god, any god, my first course of action would be to lambast him/her/it/them about fucking up the world so badly. Seriously, some of the things humans do to one another, animals, and even plants are genuinely horrifying. Omnipotence would allow any creator god to simply not give us the option to do seriously fucked up things. inb4 free will: We would still be allowed to make our own choices, but some of the more horrifying ones should probably be greyed out. My second course of action, of course, would be to punch the face off of said god and usurp their throne and omnipotence, as I could do a much better job of running this ramshackle popsicle joint. The sheer fact that I can imagine a world that is better than the one we have now on a grand scale is proof enough of that.

Hypothetical 2: If we were, in fact, created as a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong (or right, but that seems doubtful, given our history,) and we met said aliens, I would immediately lambast them about fucking us up so badly. Seriously, the human body is full of ridiculous issues. Inadequate fur, claws and teeth. Pathetic eyes that can be molded improperly, causing vision issues in a large quantity of us. Birth defects capable of rendering a human incapable of self-care, requiring a huge quantity of resources just to keep from dying in an impromptu manner. Weak muscles and bones, compared to predators. A woefully inadequate dietary system, full of waste and infection, and ungainly amounts of parasites. My second course of action would be to consider joining the aliens' society. If they saw me fit to join them, I would weigh the benefits of doing so, and potentially find a way to raise myself to their level, and possibly beyond. If they found me unfit, I would go on a society wide facepunching spree, and then claim rulership over them.

Either way, someone needs a facepunch.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1777 on: December 23, 2012, 01:09:38 am »

No matter what happens, I will support eating the aliens to gain their power.
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Thecard

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1778 on: December 23, 2012, 01:12:15 am »

No matter what happens, I will support eating the aliens to gain their power.
I'm going to have to agree with you there, unless they come to bring us copious amounts of Italian food (without the intention to eat us).
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I think the slaughter part is what made them angry.
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Starver

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1779 on: December 23, 2012, 01:18:58 am »

Quote
so many hints that it was non-divinely run
where are the hints for it?
because we can expelling them? tell me would a "smart" race not make rules and make it where they dont have to "run the universe but let it run it self base on laws and rules?

or do you think this for another reason?

the bible says proof for God is in creation, I believe that to include the laws, you dont have to, thats fine, just know the bible dose meeting God "leaving" hints, and even says most would deny it

Ah, the hard (to understand?) questions, eh?  (Yes, I know it's your spill-chucker making the malapropisms/etc, that's why I'm fighting to understand, and actually replying.)

The 'hints' (perhaps not the right way of putting it) are that everything we see is explainable by non-divine intervention.  Or maybe that should be "divine non-intervention".  YKWIM.  Including that if I hold a Bible in my hand (which I can't, at the moment, but I've got one at home somewhere... NT, at least) I can analyse it and find that it's pretty much the same kind of construct as my Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, or my copy of the I Robot compilation, or my Science Of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, or my set of Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy books from Kim Stanley Robinson, or the 19th Century chemistry textbook I have[1], or Orwell's Animal Farm, or Flatland (a modern reprint, I'm afraid) by Edwin Abbot Abbot, or the Perl Cookbook, or (if I still had it) Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  In all these cases, I can find a mundane reason for their having been printed, possibly track down some of their editors/authors/contributors (or at least make a decent effort to identify them, and some may no longer be living).

And those authors and contributors could, I'm sure, tell me how they came up with what they wrote.  Some of those people would say "It's just stories", some "It's allegory", others "It's a manual for life", yet others just "It's a manual".  Some may be a mix, and doubtless other descriptive words would come into it.  But at some point the words for each of these materialised out of the ether (possibly from the mouths of others, but ultimately the materialisations of the oral words came from nowhere), with no more and no less reason for any of these books to have been divinely inspired than any of the others.

Similarly, when I cast my eyes upon a landscape, a spot of starlight, the form of a horse/beetle/human or a rainbow I can dig deeply and find that some fairly standard things that caused these to things to be as they were, and no reason to believe there's been any intervention (unless you believe in a continually intervening deity who does things like keeping the planets following Kepler's 'laws' for no reason).

I'm pretty much forced to conclude that we have a non-interventionist deity, if any.  We're on auto-pilot.  Wound up and let to run.  The tapestry of lfe is governed only by the interaction of its threads, with no weaver planning its layout.  This is my conclusion and YMMV.  (In fact, for you, I know it does.)

So my "hints" are the total and utter lack of any hints to the contrary.  Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.  But it's certainly a rather conspicuous absence of evidence.

Quote
because we can expelling them?
Because we can explain them, is that?  Hope so.  Basically: Yes.
Quote
tell me would a "smart" race not make rules and make it where they dont have to "run the universe but let it run it self base on laws and rules?
Certainly.  ToadyOne does not come round to each of our homes/places-of-work and use a debug feature to make the world we are generating (by his grace) pop up the next ambush, siege, forgotten beast, caravan, migrant wave, birth or other world happening...

Hence why I allow that a God Of Logic (or any other, whether they took that title as their own or not) might have created a Fire-And-Forget universe.  The point of Creation is always an interesting philosophical point (at some point you have to address what caused the Cause, whether that be the Big Bang or "And Then There Was Light", which might actually be considered very similar by many people), but I'm speaking about everything since then.  Including the creation of life itself (quite a lot further down the road, comparatively).  So whether deity or Sufficiently Advanced Hyper-aliens, you seem to have the gist of my idea there, yes, if I understand you correctly.  I assume you don't object to this, either.

Quote
the bible says proof for God is in creation, I believe that to include the laws, you dont have to, thats fine, just know the bible dose meeting God "leaving" hints, and even says most would deny it
"The Bible says..."  Indeed.  But forgive me if I consider (say) the character of Joshua to have the same credence as the character called A. Square[2].  They both have some very interesting points to make about worldviews.  I can apply the views of both of these characters to my life, and both have experiences that I never will (as would Biggles or Rincewind or Alice Liddell or Wendy Darling or Tom Sawyer or Dan Dare or John Rourke or Doctor John H. Watson M.D,), whether or not I believe that these experiences are possible.

So if you are saying that the Bible is the missing 'hint', then you're not adding anything.  I could point you at the Quran[3] which gives hints that you don't accept, or at the Torah, or the Book of Mormon or... well, at some point you're going to say that these works (despite each and every one of them being advertised as being "The word of God") is either no longer relevant (perhaps superseded) or is not and has never been "True".  And you have to appreciate that there are people out here in the real world who would put the Bible into that category.  (Or any given version[4] of the Bible, what with different modern texts having taken different translational routes, but that's just more grist to the mill and doesn't matter much when you're gluten intolerant already.)



Aliens?  I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.  It's the only way to be sure.


[1] Which doesn't even contain a Periodic Table in it (just a list of "known elements"), because Mendeleev's table hadn't been popularised enough yet.

[2] The "A" is for Albert, according to Ian Stewart in "Flatterland", and or his own fictional descendent of Mr Square, Victoria Line.

[3] Or however we spell that, these days.  It always used to be either "Koran" or "Q'ran", I think, when I was a lot younger and learning about these things.  With the apostrophe in the latter optional, but probably as a sop to not having a 'bare' letter Q.

[4] At least the Torah and Quran are at least normally read in their original (or at least longest-term and culturally universal) languages, without translation errors.  And I know that the Torah at least (possibly also the Quran) has a "When you copy this text, you must copy this exactly!" instruction contained within its meme, which I find a fascinating 'reinforcement' clause.
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Micro102

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1780 on: December 23, 2012, 01:20:01 am »

Something I always wonder about is if there is a purpose to a hypothetical God's existence. If God is truly omniscient and knows all possible outcomes. Why bother doing anything about it? Why guide humans when you gain nothing out of it, even a new experience?
Maybe its not for him, your assuming god needs new experiences, or needs anything, maybe since he knows everything he lets us live and learn.
Why not be in it for us? he has nothing new to gain but we do.
and if he has inherit omniscient (it is a real definition, both of them are called omniscient, neither obs is more "true" then he could choose not to know things

Is he? i don't have clue, but if he exists then IT DONT matter, I don't need to know that to know he deserve worship
if he dont exist? or well, at least i followed what I belive is right

Yes I do assume God needs things. Liking the smell of burning blood, having a heaven in which everyone praises his name for all eternity without rest, getting angry, jealous, ect. They show a need for something one way or another. So it's either he does have needs, or all holy books ever are wrong.
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Thecard

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1781 on: December 23, 2012, 01:23:09 am »

Err... Not a Muslim, but I think it can be spelled any of those ways, since it's translated from calligraphy.

Though, I prefer to spell it "Qur'an."
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I think the slaughter part is what made them angry.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1782 on: December 23, 2012, 01:27:20 am »

There are a couple dozen "accurate" romanizations of any Arabic word. No one ever managed to standardize it.
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Starver

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1783 on: December 23, 2012, 01:34:33 am »

There are a couple dozen "accurate" romanizations of any Arabic word. No one ever managed to standardize it.
<insert name of preferred deity here>damnit!  If they can standardise tlhIngan Hol, why can't they do it with a local language!
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MaximumZero

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Re: Atheism/Religion Discussion
« Reply #1784 on: December 23, 2012, 01:35:28 am »

-snip-
A lot of these points about a "God of Logic" are well and good, but they're missing something: Occam's Razor, of course. You could say that there is some sort of non-interventionist god somewhere outside our reality, and that said god is just chillin', watching the universe go by in all its splendor...but there's literally no reason to believe that. Anything outside our universe is unable to affect us, to our knowledge. Therefore, it may as well not exist within our frame of reference. At that point, there is nothing anchoring said god to our reality, and no evidence to suggest that said god is even there. This is the point where we say, "That thing doesn't exist." Even if it does exist, the fact that it exists is of no consequence to us, as there is no interaction between the two parties, and it may as well be null and void anyway.

NINJASSSSSS...
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