This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “I’m beginning to lose faith. Does God really exist, and if yes does he even listen to our prayers?”
I would say that based on your question history and the way you have been provocative toward atheists for quite some time now, that you have been “losing your faith” for a lot longer than you realize.
The surprisingly positive change I’m registering in your question today is that you finally realize it.
“Losing your faith,” however, is merely a struggle with disappointment in your faith. You’re not losing it since you’re unhappy with the lack of fulfillment you have expected from it. That’s a big part of the reason you have been so provocative with atheists.
You have been taking your frustrations out on people who appear unburdened while you have struggled to carry an impossible weight to bear.
You’re still not quite at the stage where you see contradictions as reasons to question your commitments to your beliefs.
You still value your beliefs more than they are healthy for you, which is causing you confusion. The only way through the cognitive dissonance you are struggling with is to examine your beliefs with a microscope and a willingness to discard overgrown beliefs like the overgrown weeds they have become.
This is a painstakingly long and meticulous process that could last you the rest of your life, but the more progress you make on pruning your beliefs, the more clarity you will find in your thinking.
Congratulations on taking your first steps on the road to your recovery.
It can be painful to make such a breakthrough, but you should be proud of your accomplishment because it will give you strength and hope for a more straightforward path ahead.
Good luck… and do notice how this time, I’m not providing a link to your profile for others to block you because honesty should be recognized and acknowledged as a valuable commodity that should be cherished.
Wherever your path takes you, I wish you the best of luck and will explain why I may sound so pleased in my response; it’s that I anticipate a dramatically reduced degree of misanthropic cynicism from you in future and that’s a much better experience to look forward to as opposed to the toxic cynicism experienced from you to date.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can an atheist be so sure that there is no God/creator if there is creation? Doesn’t creation mean something has been created?”
The concept of “creation” was invented by humans who first conceived it when they discovered smaller versions of themselves popping out of their bodies. While living with something growing inside for most of a year, they realized something new grew within them.
Then humans discovered tools. At first, those tools were found objects like bones to be used as weapons or extensions of one’s reach.
Eventually, humans learned they could improve on found objects by fastening rocks to the end of a bone to function more effectively as a weapon.
Throughout all of this, humans developed language, and within that process, they began to create sounds to describe what they witnessed.
As it happened, the notion of something arising out of nothing was expressed as a sound indicating what was understood of that process.
Humans knew nothing of natural processes and how they might have differed from the human process of shaping objects into tools or giving birth to new generations of humans.
Humans then knew nothing of virtual particles and quantum foam, so it was easy to assume some form of magical hand was involved in constructing little humans inside big humans in a way that was not unlike how they shaped better tools with rocks and bones.
The reality, however, that we can see around us and everywhere is that natural processes can lead to massive changes and the creation of the new without any guiding intelligence.
It is generally understood that mountains and lakes were “created” by natural processes and are not the product of intelligence deliberately moving continents to reshape the surface of the Earth.
The universe is far beyond being much more vast than anything we can imagine on Earth. That means it’s as impossible for a singular intelligence to deliberately shape matter into an unimaginable variety of specific forms as it is for an active intelligence to create Mount Everest or the Nile River.
Creation means something from constituent materials assembled into a structure. “Creation” does not imply any guiding intelligence while the vastness of the universe eviscerates any egotistical notion of such an intelligence remotely resembling what we understand of human intelligence.
It’s a delusional form of arrogance held by believers that blinds them to the nature of reality and it is a sickness of perception that threatens our future as a species on the planet.
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.
Atheists have no expectations of an imaginary figure.
Atheists do have expectations from unhinged believers who hypocritically betray their faith and their God’s commandments to treat others like they are all God’s children,
to stop passing hateful judgments and bearing false witness against atheists,
and to render unto Caesar by staying in their lane and out of politics.
Atheists also have hopes believers that they may, one day, realize how their condemnations of atheists only condemn them to an eternal pitchfork enema while being spit-roasted in a lake of fire.
We hope for this because it may finally result in them abandoning their addictions to hatred, violence and overt destruction of all that does not comply with their fascist expectations.
We hope for this because we realize that doing so could finally reduce the number of victims of violence and war to almost nothing.
The mid-East alone would experience a real Renaissance of the kind of love and peace that religions pretend to value. The rest of the world could finally prosper by dropping believers’ widespread misanthropic attitude toward each other and everyone in general so that we could also experience a return to sane values in communities where people work together in peaceful harmony.
It’s a dream, but it’s worth having because without it, one can only descend into the madness spread by unhinged believers, and that is the worst hell of all.
After all, what do you gain by assaulting atheists with childishly delusional questions like this?
Your question is just the result of your addiction to hatred porn. It does nothing productive for you or helps you in any way.
Do you think the people in your life appreciate your efforts to demonize atheists?
Really?
Are you sure they’re not embarrassed by behaviour like this?
Maybe it would help if you understood how this hateful behaviour of yours is what drives people away from religion to make it a rapidly shrinking phenomenon in society.
Here, have a look at the effect you are having on your religion with your perpetual hatred spew:
Try to think of what Jesus would do before overtly betraying everything you pretend to believe in because you’re only helping atheism to grow…
And we atheists don’t mind that at all… the sooner you drive everyone away and your mythologies into obscurity, the happier we atheists are.
Thank you for doing our work for us.
Forget everything I said and keep up the excellent work… wallow in your hatred porn because that’s just you drinking poison while hoping your enemy will die from it.
The implication of this question, mainly since an anonymous profile posed it, is that atheists do so out of malice.
That’s not the case at all.
Although some atheists may indulge in malicious dialectics to stir up anxiety within believers, that’s not typical of most atheists. Barry Hampe pointed out that it’s often a response to provocation from believers, while several other respondents indicated matter-factly that it’s a truth as they see it.
It goes deeper than simply asserting what appears evident to non-believers. Often, believers need to question their presumptions, and that’s precisely what the querent does by posing this question.
Telling a believer that God is not real forces them to either wallow in defensive denial (which disarms their provocation) or shakes their psyche enough to prompt them to question why someone would say something like that. This question represents the latter, which indicates, by my bias, the first inklings of doubt in one’s position. After all, we live in a world where every major religion claims to represent the “one true truth.” No rational person can accept how all are correct in their presumption — especially not after centuries of warring against each other for ideological dominion.
Often, the goal is not malice but an attempt to assist believers in expanding their perceptions beyond the box they’ve been conditioned to secure themselves within. In this regard, saying God isn’t real is a bit of a counter-provocation from a motivation opposite that of a believer who seeks homogenized thinking to validate their own.
I’ve begun asserting that if a God does exist, then it’s nothing like any human mind has ever imagined or could comprehend. Every religion has completely misunderstood and mis-imagined whatever might constitute Godhood. This is based on the reasoning that human minds are incapable of understanding something which would, by necessity, be so far beyond complex that we can’t grasp it on any level more significant than an eyelash mite can grok the body it lives on.
We may consider ourselves an intelligent species, but our metrics are self-serving. The universe is vast and complex beyond our comprehension. We may have unlocked many secrets, even enough to grasp the fundamental nature of its structure within the context of our perceptions. Still, we have no clue what may exist outside our perceptual fields — directly or in conjunction with technologies extending our perceptual capacity.
I’ve been thinking this particular approach might achieve some success with believers because the scriptures themselves already familiarize them with the notion of God being beyond human comprehension.
By reinforcing this particular piece of authoritative insight within the prevailing concepts of godhood, we can expand believer perceptions beyond the limits they have consistently shrunk over the centuries.
Our scientific investigations have forced them to retreat, shut down, and shut out threatening information. They’ve dug into the notion that science has been deliberately eradicating the foundations of their existence. They have reacted to this by negating everything which contradicts their biases. Everything scientific is perceived as an enemy. This phenomenon characterized much of the operative psychology within this last election.
As someone who perceives religion as a cancerous threat to our existence as a species (primarily due to the tribalist component of religious bias), I think the solution lies not in the rejection of a believer’s need to believe but in an expansion of their perceptions. By reminding believers that they don’t have definitive answers, explanations, or anything beyond their wistful imaginations to define a god that exists purely within their imaginations, they can begin looking outward instead of shutting down.
Learning to accept the necessary limitations of humanity validates a natural ignorance of godhood because it is ignorance shared by all humans. In this way, the atheist threat to their beliefs is mitigated.
Personal insecurities are also mitigated within an expansive tribe comprising all of humanity.
Our struggle with believers is born of piecemeal geographies and tribal borders hinging on being authoritatively definitive about each tribe’s perspective on the nature and shape of god. The common ground, however, lies in accepting how none of them can be accurate because humans cannot apprehend godhood — by the very definitions of “God” as established by their scriptural authorities.
By encouraging their minds to accommodate and embrace possibilities rather than allow them to be set like hardened plaster into myopically formed sculptures, the often violent competition between tribes can be mitigated. They’re all too focused on establishing a supremacy of authority within a definitive shape, boundary, and finite nature to an insular concept of godhood.
Opening their minds to accept how all are wrong instead of fighting over who is right in a “Might makes right” fashion may encourage them onto a path to the peace and love they often declare characterizes their belief systems.
In short, for believers, atheists may say, “God isn’t real,” but you can interpret that to mean, “Your vision of a god isn’t real.” You have nothing beyond your imagination and the force of your personality to support your contention that God is real. It’s a lie, and you know it.
Most atheists are open to evidence, but we’re also astute enough to understand how our primitive ancestors had no clue what lay beyond their limited geographical explorations and, much less, beyond our planet.
Even believers today no longer believe God hurls lightning bolts from the sky by hand or hides the sun from humanity when disappointed with us. We know no God sends hurricanes to our homes to punish us for mixing fabrics or eating shellfish. Most believers know this as well — and it’s usually the religious leaders who manipulate the gullible with lies for personal enrichment. Perhaps believers should choose new spiritual leaders who won’t lie to them and will open their doors to shelter them during a storm.
Perhaps it’s time to start looking outward to possibilities instead of lying to oneself and others about the products of one’s imagination and searching earnestly for a real god.
If all religions can admit to each other that they don’t know anything substantive with any certainty, then perhaps they can build bridges between each other instead of lobbing bombs. If that’s possible between belief systems, then it’s also possible for atheists and agnostics to join them in an honest endeavour toward solving life’s mysteries.
thotbag 