Sadly, the real question is the one you’re avoiding.
The real question is the question you have flipped around because you’re too afraid to face it.
The real question is a reversal of the deflection you have concocted to protect the lie you live by.
The real question is: What makes the bible believable for you?
The talking snake or the talking donkey? How is love expressed through mass murder? How can one’s female children be chattel to be sold? Talking bushes? Magic?
What in any of that is believable or moral to you?
Do you sincerely believe that animals from around the world travelled thousands of kilometres to sit peacefully, predators and prey alike, in a small boat for months while the entire globe was flooded and most of life was wiped out?
Do you believe an entire species born of two people who bear male children can magically fill the Earth with enough children to fill the globe?
Can an entire sea be temporarily parted to make way for peasants to cross on foot? Perhaps you’re one of those who think the moon can be chopped in half and reconstituted? (No? Different book, eh?)
Can a person be swallowed by a massive fish and live inside its belly with all the abdominal acids for three days without any ill effects?
Can people indeed be brought back from the dead? Can water truly be converted into wine? Can rocks be transformed into bread? Did people live for almost one thousand years? Was an entire river converted into blood? Do cherubs and demons genuinely exist? Can people be transformed into pillars of salt?
What exactly do you find believable within the bible?
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “As there is no evidence that consciousness emerged from unconscious matter, then who created consciousness, according to atheists?”
The people you should be asking this question are not atheists but specialists who have expertise in this subject.
Atheists understand that one of the most glaring fundamental flaws in the believer mentality is that you expect knowledge to be a one-stop shopping process where you don’t consult authorities who specialize in a knowledge domain.
Believers like yourself behave as if your knowledge authorities are shopping centres of expertise.
This is why you look to your priest, minister, or religious leader to answer all the big questions in life, even though they have no clue what the correct answers are. Most of them pull nonsense out of thin air, and you lap it up like it were gospel. This is why so many of you struggle with a simple definition of disbelief for atheism.
That’s why you struggle with mastering simple tasks like knowing how to get real answers to your questions.
It is this kind of intellectual laziness that destroys your critical thinking skills.
For example, you pose questions like these as if they’re effective “gotcha questions” that can score you a win against your theological enemies.
You don’t care to understand the answer because you’re more interested in embarrassing atheists so that you walk around like a cock on a block and brag to your insular friends.
It’s pretty sad because the simplest way to address your nonsense question is to ask how you think any “who” is involved in the answer or even matters in considering an answer.
You presume a “who” is involved without any justification beyond the conditioning you have been subjected to daily since first learning how to say “momma.”
No one but you claims consciousness emerged from unconscious matter because you don’t bother to educate yourself on what humanity has learned about consciousness, what it is or how little we know about it. You don’t have the slightest clue how little you know about consciousness, but you behave as if your pat answer of a “who” is your secret weapon to put atheists in their subordinate place.
That’s just sad.
I doubt you even understand that what you have concocted is a straw argument. You create a fiction in your mind of what you think atheists believe about consciousness. You behave as if being an atheist magically imbues a person with knowledge in the scientific domains of biology, neurology, physics, and psychology — to name only a few that have explored the subject of consciousness.
You make this grotesque mistake in judgment because you have been taught to believe the magic words “God did it” answers every important question in life.
That’s just sad, annoying, and frustrating when believer after believer repeats the same nonsense daily by the dozen on every social media site.
Because of that, we know you don’t care about learning, much less understanding the numerous answers to your oversimplified question. You don’t realize that your simple question hides many questions you have no real answers to beyond “God did it.”
For example, you can’t identify or define what you mean by “unconscious matter,” but it’s clear from your wording that you’re thinking about something as simple as a rock. In your mind, the difference between a rock and a thinking being is magic. Forget about prions or viruses that behave like living creatures but aren’t.
You expect atheists to answer your question with humming and hawing that you can interpret as a win in the same way that MAGAts get off on “stickin’ it to the libs.”
If you cared about the concept you invoked, your question would be more specific and up-to-date with what science has discovered.
You would be asking not atheists but a mycologist about consciousness in mushrooms and fungus. You would be fascinated with how trees can talk to each other, and you would be respectful enough of the people you ask your questions, not assuming every atheist you encounter has knowledge and expertise in these fields.
The simple answer to your simplistic question is that there is no “who” beyond the wishful thinking of a childlike mind.
The existence of consciousness is accepted as a fact, but we don’t know what it is, how it exists, nor even the limits or range of forms in which it exists.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is it called when you believe in a higher power but don’t know what it is?”
It is a paternalistic instinct we are born with and inculcated during childhood socialization, and is called “wishful thinking” for adults.
There are many “higher powers,” at least when contrasted against whatever “powers” a human being has.
None of those higher powers are a replacement for one’s parents, no matter how much one wishes theirs were not so toxic. The sad reality is that such wishful thinking is a byproduct of centuries of generational trauma.
If you’ve ever noticed how well-adjusted people are from loving families, you’d have realized how much natural self-confidence tempered by humility they exude. All that is required to develop that maturity is a parent who understands love and expresses it honestly, even when it’s most arduous and demands the most brutal honesty with oneself by admitting one’s shortcomings to one’s children.
This attitude and desire are biologically driven instincts with the essential elements guiding them. These are built into the brain’s hardwiring in the prefrontal cortex, from which a sense of justice and balance within the universe is derived.
“What is particularly interesting about these findings is that they suggest that the sense of justice is not something learned through experience or socialization but rather something built into the brain. This is consistent with the idea that certain moral principles are universal across different cultures and societies, such as the idea that it is wrong to harm others or that honesty is a virtue. These moral principles may be rooted in how the brain processes information about social interactions and relationships.”
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do pro-choice people say life does not begin at conception when it does? Why not use one of the million stronger arguments other than basing their stance on a lie?”
Life begins at conception is the lie of anti-abortion hypocrites.
No matter how you slice and dice and dance around the hair-splitting, moving goalpost surreality inhabited by anti-abortion hypocrites, there is no rational justification for any of their idiotically myopic and arrogantly self-serving propositions.
“Life”, in the context of a child, is either a human life replete with every human characteristic or a lump of flesh no different than a tumor. You don’t get to have it both ways.
The human child-making process is precisely that: it is more often terminated spontaneously without will than with intent. Intent changes nothing about the fact that a significant proportion, if not technically the majority of all such processes do not complete. We see it everywhere in nature. It is reality in an unvarnished light.
Imbuing cells in development with absent characteristics is an intellectual and moral betrayal of oneself and humanity. Wishful thinking is not reality. A fetus is not a child; while every child born is entitled to being loved and supported by parents who want them. To do less by forcing a development process is a hypocritical abuse of a life which leads to a multiplicity of victims…
…and for what? So that you can pretend you’ve charged like a hero into saving an innocent? The harsh reality is that you haven’t saved anyone but you have condemned innocent victims to hardship and society to increased social problems like crime and poverty.
If you stop and think about the issue of innocent children needing someone to defend their lives, you would lead a charge to save real children who are dying every few seconds due to preventable causes. Anti-abortion hypocrites never seem to care, however, about children after they are born.
Where do you get off pretending like you know better than the pregnant mother if that child will have a fair chance at a fulfilling life or a life of so much misery they commit suicide or go on a shooting spree or choose a life of crime as a way to get back at a world which didn’t want them nor cared about whether they lived or died?
How dare you lie about life beginning at conception?
Life is a continuum with no finite starting and stopping points beyond the individual’s experience. Each one of us is born and each of us dies. Those are the only boundaries we will ever experience.
If conception is life, then so are sperm and ovum. Not only is the anti-abortion hypocrisy self-serving and myopic bollocks, it’s an arrogant betrayal of one’s fellow humans and humanity as a whole.
There is absolutely nothing redeeming in the anti-abortion position. Anti-abortion hypocrites are inhuman monsters.:
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do scientists believe that the universe and the Big Bang can come from absolutely nothing but find it so hard to believe in the Holy Spirit?”
Creatio ex nihilo
This is a Latin phrase which means “creation from nothing.”
It is a phrase used in all three Abrahamic religions. The idea of something from nothing comes from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions, not from science.
Scientists don’t claim something came from nothing. Your religion makes that claim.
Instead of learning about your religion, you invent nonsense derived from your religion and concoct fiction about a discipline you choose to remain ignorant of while using your fiction as justification for smearing what you have made no effort to learn anything about.
Don’t you think that’s a bit convoluted?
It’s referred to as a straw argument.
Your straw is a religious phrase you attribute to science, and then you use that false attribution as justification for fraudulent criticism. You imply hypocrisy in science while embodying hypocrisy in your question.
If this were a behaviour that rarely occurred, it would be easy to overlook. Instead, the hypocrisy you have demonstrated occurs so often that it’s almost a surprise when a question by a believer to atheists isn’t hypocritical.
Where does one find a “Holy Spirit” buried under so much hypocrisy from religious folks?
My memories of church doctrine don’t seem to include hypocrisy as an attribute of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps I missed that while my eyes rolled back up into their sockets as my head began thumping from all the mind-numbing nonsense I was being exposed to.
It could be my knees getting sore from the padded board while I wondered when I could sit back in my seat.
At any rate, I always found myself more interested in learning about scientific concepts because they made sense. I felt like my imagination was lit up when learning something tangible, while my mind felt dulled into a stupor every time I felt forced to endure the mind-numbing religious patter.
I never understood why people would prefer being lulled into a stupor to stimulating their imagination. I used to chalk that up as a subjective preference indicating benign differences between people.
I have come to realize, however, that the incuriosity of people who prefer to wallow in fiction rather than choose to stimulate their imaginations with knowledge indicates a tremendous gulf which creates problems in society.
Dialogues online with religious people rather than in person seem to provide greater freedom in exploring those differences in thinking, so perhaps you can address in more personal terms why it is that you don’t know your doctrine and believe the doctrine you don’t know but have heard it somewhere is a product of science.
Aren’t you in the least embarrassed to realize you have admitted to being ignorant of both science and the religion you seem to want to be associated with?
How does one go through life pretending they are devoted to this thing called religion but remain so ignorant of it at the same time?
I’m sure your first instinct is to dismiss these words as “fake news,” so I’ve included an AI summary to help you cope with how you have just humiliated yourself in a way not unlike peeing in your pants in public.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Dear Atheists, do you think its better to have faith, or no faith?”
Believers should learn to understand how various forms of faith exist that don’t require you to check your brain out of service to maintain them.
For example, one can have faith in all the other drivers on the road to mostly observe the rules of the road.
One can also have faith in the referee for your game who is sincerely interested in being objective.
One can also have faith that the person they hire for a job sincerely wants to succeed and contribute to your success.
None of these forms of faith are guarantees against misjudgment but are optimistic expectations that will generally pan out positively. The odds of a negative outcome are far fewer than a positive outcome.
These are forms of faith based on an awareness of the world and an objective understanding of how people generally behave.
We know there are outliers and sometimes disappointments, but for the most part, one’s faith in these conditions is met with positive results.
This is a justifiable form of faith.
What is not a justifiable form of faith that essentially amounts to wallowing in self-serving delusion is believing in the existence of a human-like entity endowed with magical powers seen nowhere else in the universe… particularly when assuming such an omnipotent being of galactic proportions will intervene in the life of something less than a speck of bacteria to it… and most especially in matters of convenience like one’s favourite team winning a ballgame or a parking spot opening up in a timely manner.
Otherwise, it is much better to have enough faith in oneself to ignore the naysayers in one’s life than not because one will never have any hope of realizing one’s goals or dreams without it.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you believe in karma? Is karma real and happen to everyone whether they believe or don’t believe?”
Cause and effect is physics, and so is Chaos theory, which is encapsulated within a concept called the “Butterfly Effect.”
In essence, it’s impossible to confidently predict the consequences of human behaviours because human societies are chaotic systems in which the most minor actions can lead to highly dramatic outcomes.
Whispering the correct sequence of words in the right tone into the correct ear can initiate a domino effect that can destroy an entire civilization (to translate the Butterfly Effect into a highly dramatic potentiality within the space of human dynamics).
That is valid science supported by observation and math.
Karma is “woo” — wishful thinking connecting a cause to an unconnected but desired outcome. It is supported only by the desire of the individual who hopes for a specific result. Reality doesn’t work that way, but coincidence can cause people to believe it does.
Having said that, if enough people desire an outcome, such as stopping a malignant force like Trump’s rabid destruction of the nation, then people will take action to affect an outcome through intent. This isn’t “Karma,” which suggests some invisible hand of the “human interaction space” (like the magical “invisible hand” of the free market) but cause and effect.
What will result from the escalation of conflict through the initiation of several protests as pushback to what the Trump administration is attempting through their implementation of Project 2025 is unknown. The only predictable aspect of where we are now is the guarantee that conflict will continue to escalate until it reaches a crescendo that can result in a complete breakdown of civilization through unmitigated chaos. How far all of this goes is anyone’s guess. We won’t know until the dust settles. We can only hope for a specific outcome based on the degree of public engagement and the escalation of protests against the takeover of the nation by a fascist entity.
That’s not karma because we can lose, while karma implies a guaranteed win. This is cause and effect in action, and the outcome is unpredictable.
People will call Tesla’s worldwide sales tanking karma because it feels good to say that. The reality, however, is that it’s the effect of a Nazi salute on the marketplace by a public that hasn’t forgotten the horrors of the Nazi scourge that extinguished millions of lives.
In short, I prefer to know the variables that can affect an outcome than hope some magical cosmic intelligence is balancing some invisible scale according to how I would wish the universe to operate.
Effects flowing from causes are reality, while karma is just wishful thinking.
“Atheists are a group which share characteristics or interests or views in common beyond disbelief in a God creature.”
“Atheists have no morals.”
“Atheists reject or hate God or worship Satan or any fictitious creature imagined by theists.”
“Atheists believe in science.” (No one, atheist or otherwise, who understands or has a basic understanding of science “believes in” science. Science is not a matter of faith, so please stop superimposing your insular paradigm onto others.)
“Creationism is an alternative to evolution.” (Also, don’t ever call people, atheists or otherwise, “evolutionists” because that’s just plain ignorance at an incredibly ignorant level of insular stupidity.)
Other statements like “God bless you” are contingent upon an individual atheist’s perspective on the matter. (I’m okay with people expressing positive sentiments in terms they are comfortable with and interpreting them as such.)
Atheists do not, as a whole, hate theists; they want them to stay in their lane and stop pretending like their beliefs trump facts because they don’t. Freedom of religion is the freedom to believe as you wish, not the right to impose your beliefs onto others. I don’t care if you think your interpretation of your scriptures causes you to believe homosexuality is wrong; you’re not God, and you have no right to pass judgment on people for how they were born… oh, and stay out of politics or start paying taxes like everyone else does.
By the way, Jesus wasn’t white, and his views were liberal. He did not support wealth but service to his fellow humans. He was not a narcissist who cared more for himself than the poor. His life was dedicated to peace, not war, nor to becoming wealthy or superior to others. He washed the feet of lepers to show you what that means, so betraying your saviour with your idiotic divisiveness and hatred will only send you to the hell you fear (if your beliefs pan out to be confirmed).
Even worse than simply betraying your beliefs, you make life hell for others — yes, I know, not all religious types are hypocrites. Still, all religious types must call out hate-mongering hypocrites like Steven Anderson, Kenneth Copeland, Jim Bakker, and the Westboro Baptist Church, who all prey upon your fellow believers by feeding on their insecurities. Make an effort to show the world you do believe what you claim to believe by raising a humungous stink over the very many atrocities committed by supposed religious leaders. There is no bloody way any religion can have any claim on morality when the predation of minors is institutionally protected. You must clean out the corruption in your own house first before you can hypocritically claim to care about so-called “unborn babies.” All this hypocritical crap makes people justifiably hate you and everything you claim to believe in — even the innocent ones among you; and worse for you, it makes people run away from your toxicity while eviscerating your credibility in everything you claim to believe.
That should cover most of the broad strokes I can identify from the top of my head (yes, it’s true, my references were Christian because that’s what I am most familiar with, but that doesn’t mean every other form of theist fantasy gets a pass because these sentiments apply to you, too.) We are living in a world characterized by disinformation and hatemongers to disenfranchise innocent people who cannot defend themselves. At the same time, hate crimes escalate as a monstrous hypocrite profits from selling autographed bibles.
(I wrote this five years ago and have been discussing these issues throughout my entire life, and instead of seeing any improvements with your lack of integrity issues, we’re seeing an increase in the kind of hypocrisy that would send chills down the spines of your venerated saviours. It’s horrifying just how little effort religious followers put into holding their leaders accountable for the hate they spread, and you dare to pretend you have a moral high ground. It is this kind of hypocrisy that’s driving people away from you.
If you want to be legitimately viewed as a moral people, then concentrate on feeding children in your schools instead of putting up fraudulent props like your Ten Dogmatic and repetitive Commandments. Kids need nutrition to focus on school and succeed at getting an education, not orders barked at them with threats of eternal punishment. This isn’t supposed to be the dark ages any longer. Those were over 500 years ago.)
All I can say as a summary is, Thank God I live in Canada because Americans are in for one helluva wake-up call over these next four years. What truly sucks, though, is how much of a negative impact you’re going to have on the entire rest of the world as you grapple with your lack of basic human decency.
Self-sacrifice isn’t a “gift,” it’s a responsibility and a call to action.
Self-sacrifice can occur as a parent sets aside their desires to make way for their children to achieve successes outside their reach. For example, a parent who works multiple jobs to help their child get an education that will give them a better life than they could attain has generally been regarded as a “typical” or “common form of self-sacrifice” and often considered noble.
Other forms of self-sacrifice, such as jumping on a live grenade (for an extreme and improbable example to make a point) to protect a crowd, are a requirement created by circumstances that would be unnecessary if extreme conditions were not present. This form of self-sacrifice is an artificially created necessity that could have been avoided if the motivations behind the person throwing the grenade were mitigated proactively.
This form of self-sacrifice is an instinctive form of preservation that extends beyond the limits of one’s life. It is an expression of commitment to the social contract historically responsible for elevating humanity beyond the baser instincts that drag us backwards into primitive states of existence. Over and above the preservation of one’s self, selfless preservation is performed from the exact sentiment of a parent sacrificing themselves for their child. It is an act of love in the extreme. It is an embodiment of the best of what humanity can be.
Like the child whose life is enriched by their parent’s self-sacrifice, the beneficiaries of such an act of selflessness have not received a gift to luxuriate in but an obligation to follow suit and make life better for those who come after.
This is how social evolution must progress in the face of apathy and against those who place themselves and their desires above the needs of others.
Without the capacity for self-sacrifice, the future of humanity is decay and self-destruction.
Self-sacrifice within this context is a warning that without the courage demonstrated by the few willing to alert an apathetic world of the need to take action, the conditions causing the suffering that demanded the sacrifice of one’s self will worsen and create more victims.
Self-sacrifice within this context is the canary in the coal mine warning the rest of humanity that death is on its way and alerting the people that they are facing a choice to serve a higher purpose than their fleeting whims or be sacrificed by parasitic forces as fodder for the conditions demanding their blood.
Self-sacrifice is a warning to the apathetic that if they do not rise against the threats facing them, their turn will come, and it will be far worse for them than the person sending their message of warning through their self-sacrifice.
Self-sacrifice can be defined with a simple quote: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.”
Here is an example of a story about a Pastor who sacrificed himself to try and stop Hitler while saving numerous lives. I’m posting it here because the space I otherwise posted seems unwilling to approve it in another answer because it’s appropriate to this question and because we are at a point where we are repeating history.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer February 1906–9 April 1945), was a German Lutheran pastor, neo-orthodox theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world have become widely influential; his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship is described as a modern classic.[1] Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Adolf Hitler’s euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of Jews.[2] He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison for 1½ years. Later, he was transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Bonhoeffer was accused of being associated with the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler and was tried along with other accused plotters, including former members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office). He was hanged on 9 April 1945 during the collapse of the Nazi regime.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How come people ignore the mathematical proof of God, even when it is so obvious? How did humanity convince itself that the One cannot be proved mathematically?”
A general rule of thumb is when something seems “so obvious” to you, but the rest of the world fails to see what you see, it is incumbent upon you to do what you can to make what is evident to you obvious to others.
You may understand something so thoroughly that it’s evident to you, but you should have no difficulty explaining your observations in ways that will help others see them as you do.
There is one caveat, however, that sometimes things appear apparent only within the context of a misinformed and misperceived delusion.
For example, it may seem obvious that the world is flat because you see a horizon, but your conclusion would be flawed because you haven’t availed yourself of all the evidence that disproves a conclusion you formed in ignorance.
I say this to you because the entire world, believers and non-believers alike, have searched for evidence for thousands of years, yet no one has found any. To make such a claim as to consider obvious the proof that only you see is also to claim you’re more intelligent than most of humanity throughout the centuries. That’s a tall order of intelligence. Your claim of the proof you see as obvious also means you’re claiming to be more intelligent than Plato, Aristotle, Da Vinci, Kant, Socrates, Locke, Aquinas, Nietzsche, Descartes, Newton, Einstein, Galilei, Sartre, Copernicus, Lao Tzu, and thousands of other massive intellects throughout history.
You’re either a supremely knowledgeable human capable of solving numerous issues for humanity, or you’re just being arrogantly delusional.
Consider that whenever you stake a claim on understanding something that no one else does.
If you were that intelligent, you wouldn’t waste your energy making fantastical claims on social media. You would have already been recognized as a keen intellect through whatever writings you composed that show your intellect.
If you were that intelligent, you would already have the answer to your question.
The general rule of thumb for people online encountering such fantastical claims as what you pretend to have great insight into is that you’re a crackpot and will be considered a crackpot until you can prove otherwise.
Considering all of this, it might help you (and possibly others) avoid the public embarrassment one would experience when they soil themselves.
Your claim of the “mathematical proof being so obvious” is roughly the equivalent of peeing your pants in public and claiming it’s liquid gold.
thotbag 