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[Siquo]

Hmmm, that's all true.

No, I think that the only motivation left for me to believe in a God and a Purpose and the only way that's left that influences my day-to-day behaviour is to prevent myself from comitting suicide, then.

[dreiche2]

Not sure what you mean?

Also, let me reiterate, personally I'm not opposed to people having personal beliefs, be they spiritual of philosophical or religious. I'm just trying to defend and stress the importance of rationality when it comes to anything but personal beliefs.

[Siquo]

Well, the notion that everything is pointless, makes living kind of pointless. Then why live at all? Especially at that time in my life, I wasn't enjoying my life either.
Then I got a visit from what Christians call the "holy spirit", but has many names in many religions, which is (as best as I can describe) a sudden rush of clarity and a feeling of awe and one-ness with nature, humanity and the universe. Which was awesome. Like a billion hot-dogs. Yes, I was sober at the time .

[Starver]

(Still way behind the vanguard of this thread, but thought the following worth replying to...)

Well, if you have a creature that created the whole fricking universe, I can assume that he's both omniscient and omnipotent, easily. And even if it's not infinite power, it pretty much can be assumed to be infinite (omni) by mortal standards.

You know Conway's Game Of Life?  Imagine that God was someone who took that program and splattered some random filled squares and then clicked 'run'.

Should that ever create self-aware beings (by the standards of those particular constructs within the GOL-grid) that were capable of hypothesising about their world and The Creator, they'd indeed have a being who had created their 'whole frickin universe' (and one provably without free-will, might I add, whatever the denizens thereof may think) but need have had no omniscience about him and (depending on whether he even has access to edit the 'running' grid) may not even have any 'potence', never mind the 'omni-' version.

But, yes, he could remove/duplicate/overwrite whole constructs.  And stop/start and even save and re-run from past points.  Is that infinite power?  Well, it's more power than those living on the grid.  All, the same, this poor sod who set this thing running might well be unable to truly comprehend what it is that He has started, doesn't even know that this set of dots (or that grouping of loosely interacting structures) are conscious... and couldn't even guess that this particular 'squadron of gliders' of represents information equivalent to a neural pulses corresponding to the religious/irreligious thought, and thus has no means to work out that when that meta-pattern begins loosing its individual identity that it has expectations of attaining an afterlife of some kind (e.g. cutting and pasting into a 'holding' grid, whose square-spatter environment corresponds to an eternally rewarding/punishing existence)...

The Grid-Beings are as nothing to the Creator.  And the nature of the Creator (as a carbon-based life-form operating a silicon-based computer within a 3-dimensional world, at least by our estimations) is far beyond the understanding of the 2-D beings whose ultimate constituent parts are pure data that maybe they can self-examine themselves and their environment and identify qualities of it as being based upon a grid system (there'd be bi-axial bias towards movement and orientation which might be understandable by those 'living' in that environment, if it's not so engrained in their worldview that they take it for granted without even imagining any alternatives) although my best guess is that their 'Planck Limit' kicks in well above the size of actual 'glider' objects, which would be best analogised in our terms as sub-quantum particles that, but only en-mass, would form the equivalents to photons, higgs bosons, etc, etc, insofar as the workings of the universe go and also form the 'force' connections between the massive structures which would be still atom-like to the dwellers thereupon...

Which is a bit of a reach, as far as theoretical theology goes, and not intended to represent Truth.  Just a POV and completely unprovable postulate, even were I so inclined to want to present it as such.

I hope that made sense, though, because I tend to waffle a bit when it comes to such thought experiments, and may not have covered all the bases.

[RedKing]

Also, let me reiterate, personally I'm not opposed to people having personal beliefs, be they spiritual of philosophical or religious. I'm just trying to defend and stress the importance of rationality when it comes to anything but personal beliefs.

Problem with that being, for a person with deeply held religious beliefs, the line between personal and public/external/secular beliefs is pretty hard to define.


EDIT: I started to get into a long-winded discussion of the watchmaker God idea, but thought better of it. It's been hashed over by better minds than mine, and essentially goes back to the same argument:

"Evolution proves there is no God!"
"But God created DNA, transfer RNA, etc.!"
"Prove it!"
"Prove He didn't!"
etc. ad nauseum. 

[Starver]

Oh darnit.  Ninjaed (more or less).  Well, I should have known.

Well, you could say that instead of the user creating the world, the game designer created the world generator. And as he created the game, he would have infinite control over it if he wanted.

But that's not the creator. The argument was that the creator has to be all-powerful, and in this example the creator is the gamer who clicked the New Game button, not the programmer. [...]

(Still reading...  Don't know how many pages I am behind the latest, but I'll try to get there and thus more current.)

[dreiche2]

Well, the notion that everything is pointless, makes living kind of pointless. Then why live at all? Especially at that time in my life, I wasn't enjoying my life either.
Then I got a visit from what Christians call the "holy spirit", but has many names in many religions, which is (as best as I can describe) a sudden rush of clarity and a feeling of awe and one-ness with nature, humanity and the universe. Which was awesome. Like a billion hot-dogs. Yes, I was sober at the time .

Well, my motivation isn't to take your feeling of purpose away from you. I would feel bad if I would succeed in that. That's why I made that comment about personal beliefs repeatedly.

As for personal beliefs, I never said everything is pointless. The question of purpose is, in my opinion, a valid one, and is neither answered nor necessarily invalidated by science. Science just doesn't deal with these type of questions.

There are many philosophical means of going about this question that do not necessarily rely on religion, although many answers will in some way or another rely on a non-justifiable belief (non-justifiable, but at least not in stark contradiction to actual evidence, as many religious justifications are). And again, that is perfectly fine in my eyes.

Personally, I'm trying to find a philosophy and purpose that relies on as few assumptions as necessary, and that kind of works out for me. But it's a little bit radical in parts.

"Evolution proves there is no God!"

I for my part surely would never say that.

[RedKing]

That's why you're a reasonable atheist (or maybe more agnostic), and why Richard Dawkins is a stuck-up git. 

[chaoticag]

Actually, he never said that, or anything next to that in any of his books.He once got arch-bishops to sign a letter to an MP saying that evolution is as close to a fact as it will ever be. Every bishop practically signed it.

[Siquo]

I know, dreiche, you've been more respectful than me at times



Since that time I did come upon another viewpoint, that could've done the same thing:
Life is empty and meaningless, (Yeah I already knew that thanks for reminding me)
But the fact that life is empty and meaningless is empty and meaningless. (...oooh.)

Reading it like that would make you go "well duh" but it was quite profound within the context of when I heard this. Everything in life that has any meaning, is the meaning you gave it. That means that you can change the meaning of everything at will.
That's harder than it sounds though. If someone hits me in the face, my initial reaction could be "you asshole" or "yeah, I had that coming". I could change the meaning of that event though, and fully believe in that new meaning. But that's the hard part, to be able to override your "fixed" beliefs (which aren't fixed at all).


So dreiche, what's your radical purpose?

[Andir]

Well, the notion that everything is pointless, makes living kind of pointless. Then why live at all? Especially at that time in my life, I wasn't enjoying my life either.
Then I got a visit from what Christians call the "holy spirit", but has many names in many religions, which is (as best as I can describe) a sudden rush of clarity and a feeling of awe and one-ness with nature, humanity and the universe. Which was awesome. Like a billion hot-dogs. Yes, I was sober at the time .

That's your take on it... personally, I wouldn't commit suicide unless it logically made sense.  (ie:  There are hundreds or thousands of people on a submarine with a live bomb counting down and someone had to stay behind to make sure it sunk to the bottom... That's suicide for that person, but it's a logical decision that got them there.  [even though that's highly move script material :p])

Why live life when it has it's downs?  Because right around the corner there's an up?  It's called optimism.  Throwing it all away because you might have had a bad day is just stupidity and has nothing to do with religion.

Your "holy spirit" is my own logically thought out sense of awe at the immensity of the universe and of how lucky we are to be able to live and remember what happened yesterday... but I don't attribute that to a god.  In my mind it doesn't take a god to get us here, so believing in it is futile in my eyes.  If there was some undeniable proof of a god in any form then I'd have to rethink my position but I'm not changing my life or believing that such a thing exists until such point.

If I were to say something that generalizes your reality like you are trying to do to us I'd have to say:  If there were a god that had control and dictatorship over my life and afterlife, I'd be so depressed and afraid that I would say the wrong thing and piss off such a god.  To me it would feel like living as a slave and that life would be living torture, so I may as well end it so I can skip the living part.

Now do you understand why what you say is condescending?

[dreiche2]

Siquo:

He, I'd love to get into that, but I really need to restrain myself now... I really need to get some work done. Another time!

It's not really a radical purpose or so radical anyway. It's just that I reject a lot of the things many people take intuitively for granted (such as, having a 'self') on philosophical and scientific grounds, but at the same I don't fall into a cynical 'everything is pointless' mode either. And some of the resulting stances are maybe somewhat weird. For example, if I take my ideas seriously, then that means that treating myself better than others is irrational. Not just unethical, but irrational as in, it doesn't make sense, not any more than treating people with red shirts better than people with green shirts would.

Similarly, rejecting the notion of a continuous self, the notion of death or personal experience become utterly irrelevant (if I were to take these thoughts completely seriously).

Many atheists would say that in principle, they are not afraid of death (because, once they are dead they don't care, right?). But many would also say that making certain experiences before they die is one goal of theirs. In my worldview, there is no non-superficial difference in between the future you or the future me making an experience. So I can value the experience per se if I chose so, but working towards me having that experience instead of someone else having that experience is utterly arbitrary....

urgh I need to stop! Sorry if that sounded confusing...

[Grakelin]

Actually, he never said that, or anything next to that in any of his books.He once got arch-bishops to sign a letter to an MP saying that evolution is as close to a fact as it will ever be. Every bishop practically signed it.

The Catholic Church's official stance defies stereotype on many things, you would be surprised.

I don't know how safe it is to actually list any of them, though, because somebody will just swoop in and deny it without doing any research. With this prediction provided here for future reference, however...

- The Catholic Church stands by the idea that if you never got the chance to hear about God, you don't go to Hell.
- The Catholic Church has acknowledged the existence of evolution at various times in the past.
- The Catholic Church does not believe that homosexuals are evil, only the practice of homosexuality. They do not stand by the idea that AIDs was a punishment by God to kill homosexuals.

It would be very ignorant for those of us who do not follow this faith to blindly attack them. They have many conservative views, but not nearly as many reactionary ones as we all like to pretend.

[Micro102]

- The Catholic Church stands by the idea that if you never got the chance to hear about God, you don't go to Hell.

Then why do they continue to teach people about it? 

[Flaede]

- The Catholic Church stands by the idea that if you never got the chance to hear about God, you don't go to Hell.

Then why do they continue to teach people about it? 

Because (last I heard) the catch is you don't get to go to heaven, either.