god

Who created consciousness, according to atheists?

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.

What is believing in a higher power you don’t know?

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.”

https://www.laparoscopyhospital.com/news/news.php?id=28&p=35&search=

Sense of justice discovered in the brain

Click to access The%20evolution%20of%20a%20sense%20of%20justice.pdf

How can we determine the truth about the existence of God?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can we determine the truth about the existence of God? Should we rely on the beliefs of atheists or believers?”

This question is heartbreaking.

There is not a single thing in your life that you struggle with determining whether that thing exists other than your desire to believe what other humans have told you is true.

No other human has ever had to tell you the sun exists. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
No other human has ever had to tell you mountains exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
No other human has ever had to tell you oceans exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
No other human has ever had to tell you cold viruses exist. You can quickly determine that for yourself.
No other human has ever had to tell you snow exists. You can quickly determine that for yourself.

Nothing other than supernatural nonsense puts you into a quandary of wondering whether it exists or not.

You might wish to believe ghosts exist but will never see or experience tangible evidence to support any belief because no evidence exists. The same applies to goblins, leprechauns, fairies, angels, demons, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. All of these imaginary beings are products of fiction, in which you will never experience a real-life manifestation of any of them.

It’s not that no one has been looking — quite the contrary. Millions worldwide have been searching for evidence of these phenomena for centuries. There have been television programs for decades with teams of people equipped with the most modern technologies to help them find evidence.

Let’s contrast that against something that was theorized to exist in 1964. A particle officially referred to as the “Higgs Boson” was determined to exist by extrapolating from the evidence that showed a massive gap in our understanding that could only be explained by something the public became aware of as “The God Particle.”

It was named so, not because it bore any relationship to your magical sky daddy, but because it was difficult to find. A physicist by the name of Leon Lederman wrote a book in 1993 called “The Goddamn Particle,” which was an expression of frustration over how difficult it was to find.

Everything about physics on this scale showed that it had to exist, but it couldn’t be found.

It was finally discovered forty-eight years after theorizing that this particle must exist to explain how mass is transferred to other particles like electrons and quarks. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland gave us the first proof of its existence. We had no tangible evidence of its existence up until then. We did, however, have tangible evidence of its necessity to exist to explain other phenomena that could not otherwise be explained without it.

IOW, without the existence of the Higgs Boson, much of physics would have just broken down into a jumble that could not make sense, be adequately explained, or avoid being relegated to the same realms of the imagination that the supernatural exists.

Without tangible evidence of its existence, all scientific discovery was at risk of being viewed in the same terms as magic — inexplicable woo.

Physicists set out to find it according to the clues pointing to where it must exist, and that’s where it was found.

No such corollary exists with the god concept.

Nothing in the universe requires god as an answer to an unanswered question.

The only reason you and everyone else who struggles with the concept are hung up on it is that it appeals to your emotional need for the universe to make sense in a paternalistic way… in the very same way, life made sense to you as an infant in the cradle whose parents or guardians ensured you had food in your belly. Life made sense to you as an infant when your diapers were changed to keep you comfortable and warm each day.

Your yearning for God is the desire of an infant wistfully hoping the chaos of life makes sense on some level beyond your comprehension… and that may very well be the case, but it isn’t due to some magical parent who will care for you like an infant in a cradle.

Atheists have no beliefs about god, so turning to atheists to answer questions that are your responsibility to answer for yourself is a disservice to you.

Other believers will tell you what they are desperate to believe is true, while atheists will tell you they don’t believe that nonsense.

This atheist will tell you that if something like a god creature exists, it doesn’t exist in any form that any human has been capable of imagining. Our universe is too vast, alien, and too far beyond human comprehension for us to have the slightest hope of untangling its mysteries enough to know anything with any certainty.

This atheist will also say that every manifestation of god by humans is an extension of their egos and represents the epitome of delusional human arrogance.

This atheist will strongly recommend that you stop wasting your valuable intellect on pining for a cosmic super daddy of the imagination and focus it on trying to detangle the complexity of life on Earth. There is already plenty here for us to figure out on our own, wasting valuable time and effort in pining on something irrelevant to the physical reality we share.

Pinning your hopes and dreams on the existence of a Father Cosmos is an abdication of your agency. It is a way of giving up on your gift of free will that you would expect someone to dictate your life to you instead of rising to the challenge of living your own life. It is a way of running away and hiding from the freedom you have been given, which has been hard-fought and won through bloody sacrifice after sacrifice throughout history for you to benefit from.

Pinning your hopes and dreams on the existence of a magical authority is giving up on yourself and retreating into a darkness of slavery and hopelessness in an existence of oppression made worse by the fact that you would only be serving the most depraved humans on the planet who don’t care in the least about a god beyond how they weaponize that concept against you and steal your life from you to benefit themselves.

This atheist strongly encourages you to live your life for yourself and not for some fantasy peddled to you by a parasite who wants you to believe nonsense because it benefits them at your expense.

Will people understand greed is a miserable state?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “When will people understand that their constant selfish reckless belligerent greed is what brought society to its current disgusting miserable state of existence?”

Let’s look at someone like Donald Trump. He has spent an entire lifetime spreading hatred while bullying people to feed shallow desires, and he entertains himself through acts of cruelty he enacts on fleeting whims. He’s been behaving in ways that epitomize constant selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed, ostensibly his entire life.

His response to being criminally convicted was not remorse but to have the conviction overturned.

This question naively presumes that a person who behaves in destructive ways throughout their life will magically experience an epiphany of conscience in which they will transform into the “decent human” imagined by this querent.

Never has any evil monster throughout history found any turning point in their life that magically transformed them into saintly beings. Most who claim to have “seen the light” assume such a position as a fraudulent means of continuing their prior agenda of self-benefit at the expense of others.

The short answer to your question is “never.”

People cannot change their essential nature. They may choose to improve, but that presupposes desire that has always existed and a lifetime of dedication toward that end.

People like Donald Trump see nothing wrong with their behaviour and so will never make an effort to improve.

Epiphanies such as this question presume to be possible constitute wishful thinking on a highly destructive level of delusion that prevents us from addressing the fundamental issues of broken psychology that we must dedicate ourselves as a society to addressing on the most basic levels.

We can never truly call ourselves civilized if our systems enable and empower the kind of evil embodied by people like Donald Trump — and make no mistake about it, we encourage his evil.

Our societies embrace and enable selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed.

Until we can address the fundamentally broken human psychology on a system-wide and social scale, we will continue to be plagued by these behaviours.

Ten percent of the world’s wealthiest are destroying our planet at a rate practically matching the total of the other 90% of the rest of humanity. Instead of doing something to restrain their destructive behaviours, we put them on pedestals and worship their harmful behaviours.

Changing humans in ways that address destructive behaviours embodying selfishness, recklessness, and belligerent greed means we must start at the top and change all of human society.

Why do people ignore the obvious proof of God?

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.

Which religious books are the most convincing?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Religious books are a lost cause. I’m an atheist, but I’m wondering which religion do you think is the most convincing? Don’t say none of them please.”

As others have pointed out, you’re not an atheist because you think like a believer does when they interpret their “spiritual journey” as a gym membership where their responsibility is limited to picking the right gym.

This is the sort of thinking that doesn’t care about physical health and fitness, nor about whatever benefits might be derived from an adequately customized routine fitting their personal needs in a way that optimally contributes to their development.

This is the sort of thinking that wants to take a pill to get the benefits of heavy lifting without having to do the work.

An atheist will have already sorted through this nonsense to arrive at a point where they understand that picking a religion doesn’t have anything to do with whatever one’s “spiritual journey” might be.

Picking a religion is like choosing between clown costumes to attend a formal affair.

If you were an atheist, you would be interested in the concepts defining the differences between belief systems rather than viewing them as package deals in which to immerse oneself.

If you were an atheist, you would want to know why it is that the “least spiritual” and most blatantly hypocritical and brutally violent religions are three of the most dominant religions on the planet and are entirely products of toxic patriarchy.

Many other religions demonstrate far more respect for life like Buddhism does and without dogmas rooted in barbaric violence.

If you were an atheist, you would not care about “which religion” but about which religious practices and ideals are beneficial and which are toxic to your growth. The notion of joining a team to achieve “spiritual growth” would send chills down the spine of an atheist who is otherwise clear on how utterly destructive such tribalistic thinking is to one’s mental health and personal growth.

The fact that so many believers feel compelled to address their issues through fraudulent representations of themselves is just proof that believers don’t sincerely believe their delusions. They struggle with their doubts, so they feel compelled to overcompensate through fraudulent behaviours. Sadly, they don’t know how to escape their mental prison and see no alternative but to indulge in sinful betrayals of the tenets in their scriptures.

What are the 3 things that atheists would like from Christians?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “I won’t give up my faith, but what are the 3 things that atheists would like from Christians (or any religion really), in order to live in the best society possible?”

No one is asking you to give up your faith, and if someone does, then you have every right and justification to tell them where to stuff their opinion. You have every right to whatever belief you choose to hold. Sovereignty over one’s mind is an inalienable right (regardless of whether some might disagree — I’ll fight this one to the death — which is my belief, and if I choose a belief and hold onto it strongly enough to go to war to defend it, then I have to respect another’s right to do the same).

Having said all that,

I don’t impose my beliefs onto others (what I spoke of above was defending my belief — a big difference), and I do not want others to impose their beliefs onto me. I am severely offended by attitudes that do not respect my choice, yet I expect respect for theirs.

#1. STOP proselytizing. I don’t care if it’s a mandated directive. Do NOT impose your beliefs onto others if they do not want to endure your rendition of them. Please respect that you have the right to your beliefs ONLY because you acknowledge another’s right to their beliefs.

What this means in “real world terms” — NO MORE anti-abortion nonsense. NO MORE sexist, misogynistic imposition of your religious beliefs onto a society of individuals who do not share your beliefs. STOP PROSELYTIZING. PERIOD. Nothing of your belief system belongs in a shared society’s laws… nowhere in educational policy… nowhere in anything beyond its context.

By all means, use your existing houses of worship and your homes to worship, practice, or do whatever you like concerning your beliefs. DO NOT attempt to push your interpretation of your own beliefs onto a public sphere. Your beliefs are yours, not everyone else’s. Learn to respect that and put it into widespread practice. Speak out against toxic hypocrites like Jim Bakker, who pushes an ignorantly incendiary and self-serving agenda by riling up his “flock” into supporting violence to further his cause. That is entirely disgusting behaviour. Your beliefs do not belong anywhere outside the context they serve you.

#2. Get out of politics and learn to respect what is sacred about the separation between church and state. While you’re doing that, start paying taxes and take every dollar back from the rich evil monsters who are preying on the weak to con them into supporting their personally lavish lifestyles. (I don’t remember who it was now, and I’m not going to research it, but an example I remember from recent news was one hypocrite crying about needing a personal jet because public air transportation is full of sinners. — — I’m happy to report that person did not say that directly to my face because I’m not sure I would have contained my disgust with that particular attitude. Still, I can tell you, every one of those entitled monsters who prey upon the weak have nothing but enmity from me, and I’m pretty sure many others as well. Do SOMETHING about them because they certainly do NOT represent any spirituality or belief. They are the same cut of sociopathic monsters as those who lead terrorist groups from other belief systems.)

#3. Get out of science and learn to respect your boundaries and the role of religion in society. Your beliefs are not science or scientific in any nature or stretch of the imagination. Your beliefs do NOT trump scientific discovery within the realm of science. Evolution, for example, as your beliefs don’t bind a topic. Evolution occurs whether you want to believe it or not. Still, you need to understand how the moment you think your subjective belief somehow forms an equivalent counter-argument to hundreds of years of an evolving discipline, you betray your faith by stepping into territory which doesn’t belong to your faith and is not beholden to any subjective conclusions you may arrive at.

Facts are Facts. Period.

Arguing creationism as some form of valid response to evolution is a disgustingly stupid form of willful ignorance. It has polluted this world far too much already, and the disgusting attitudes of believers concerning this issue are just too much to deal with now. We have more significant problems as a species, and being bogged down by idiots who think their personal, insular, and subjectively defined perspectives on life should be given enough credibility to be treated seriously in a public dialogue only makes things worse for everyone.

Keep your faith, but know this; it is subjective and not remotely determinate about our physical universe. Learn to understand how faith does not trump facts because it should work the other way around. Physical reality should determine our beliefs because we are bound to this existence. Anything beyond it is speculation. If you want to call it a belief, go ahead, but it means nothing to the facts we all must live by together.

Why AI Writing Can Never Truly Replace Human Writing

This post is different from my typical fare. It is an answer to a question posed on Quora, but it’s also a response to a post I’ve read about AI replacing human writers. My arguments have consistently been that as long as an AI is incapable of feeling emotions like love, sorrow, hatred, anger, and the entire range of emotions bred into us throughout centuries, it will never be capable of stimulating emotion within people. AI will never, on its own, connect with humans emotionally. Humans may imbue their AI experiences with emotions, but those are projections. Those emotions are mirror reflections of oneself and one’s biases. They can certainly help develop mindfulness techniques, but that becomes a self-referential silo.

Socialization is how we grow past our self-imposed boundaries, and we need input from other humans to understand ourselves truly. The purpose of this post is to prove this contention. How I will be doing that may seem somewhat circuitous, but please be patient enough to get to the punchline because I think it’s amusing, and I hope you will be too. Thanks for reading my gurgitations.

Here is the question posed on Quora that I answered:
As far outside of religious context as possible, can any atheist explain their personal decision to not believe?
https://www.quora.com/As-far-outside-of-religious-context-as-possible-can-any-atheist-explain-their-personal-decision-to-not-believe/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1
As far outside of religious context as possible, can any atheist explain their personal decision to not believe?

You ask this question as a believer because you must choose to maintain your belief consciously.

Every day is a day of ritual affirmation of your belief. At least once per week, you socialize with people to reinforce your choice to believe.

Your crises of faith are caused by the fact that you sometimes struggle to maintain your beliefs. You have doubts about your beliefs, but you do what you can to put them aside, and that may include a prayer or a castigation against Satan invading your thoughts with temptations to stray.

You may even turn to your book to find inspiration to hang onto your belief. You see words that confirm how hanging onto your belief is sometimes a struggle and that you must stand firm and never lose that belief.

You fear losing your belief because you feel like you’re letting down a paternalistic entity that will be disappointed and angry with you for not maintaining.

You struggle with the fear of an eternal punishment for betraying your commitment to your belief, and yet, after all of that, you still wonder why you endured all that turmoil.

You may tell yourself that it’s a test of your character and that if you pass it, you will be graced with an eternal reward instead of an eternal punishment.

You still wonder how people can live without that struggle, so your curiosity prompts you to ask how people would choose against what does not feel like a choice.

In your mind, you may think you have a choice, but you have a choice because a choice between Heaven and Hell isn’t much of a choice. It’s a no-brainer. After all, who would be stupid enough to choose eternal torture?

This prompts your curiosity because many people seem unconcerned about what you believe will happen to them.

Your mind struggles with the notion that people would choose eternal torture on a lake of fire as if it’s never going to happen to them.

It makes no sense whatsoever to you that people would choose to reject Paradise in favour of Hell.

The problem, however, isn’t that people choose not to believe because you can’t actually “choose” to believe. You know this yourself because you don’t “choose to believe.” You choose to maintain your beliefs.

What you do not understand about atheists and atheism is that people do not choose to become atheists.

People awaken to a new reality about themselves that they no longer believe the illusion and realize after the fact that they have become atheists.

Here’s the punchline:

An AI may be trained well enough to identify what I identified in the question posed. I don’t believe an AI could trigger the querent on such a visceral level by being so on point that they become defensive and dismissive of the information they encounter. This is a technique I refer to as “forced introspection.” This person will continue to deny, as we already know from our experiences with the MAGA mentality. However, they won’t forget how they were triggered to discover that their dismissal of what they read will vanish from their consciousness without an impact.

This dynamic can only occur between humans, so I feel comfortable putting all my economic eggs in the creative content basket. I’ve wasted a lifetime attempting to fit into a broken system and have become worse for wear. I may not ever see the same income potential I was well underway in achieving before a nuclear bomb on my life ended that aspiration. At least I can spend whatever time I have left expressing myself and permitting myself to be the “real me” through doing what I love doing.

Temet Nosce

How do you know if you’re an evil person or not?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-know-if-youre-an-evil-person-or-not/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

That’s simple: Do you find the act of hurting another pleasurable?

Even if that other person has caused you harm and you lash out in self-defence while feeling sorrow toward them and the events that lead to a destructive outcome, you are demonstrating the capacity of awareness that characterizes what allows humans to think of ourselves as “civilized.”

When Hillary Clinton laughed at the death of Muammar Gaddafi, that was when she lost it for me. It doesn’t matter how evil a monster he was; there should never be any pleasure in taking a life because that’s a betrayal of one’s essential humanity on every level. One can feel relief and express that. One can find satisfaction in ridding the world of evil, even through extreme measures, but the moment one finds pleasure in that act, one embodies the evil one self-righteously destroys. Evil always wins in that outcome.

Another example of knowing when one is evil is when they are in a position to save a life and choose not to. The most iconic moment embodying this behaviour was in Breaking Bad when Walter White watched Jesse Pinkman’s girlfriend, Jane, die of an overdose. He could have saved her, but his priority was controlling Jesse.

This was a harrowing moment for me when, up until this point, I found reasons to justify Walter’s behaviour but could no longer do so after this.

This particular scenario has exploded with meaning to me as I find it occurring in real life by people I should have been able to trust. Instead, they’re responding to my struggle for survival, which they are responsible for creating in ways that echo attitudes and behaviours.

Meanwhile, I currently need more options for addressing my struggle through civilized means. I have been exhausting every supposed route to reparations, but none are forthcoming as door after door slams in my face. I empathize with Luigi Mangioni in ways I would not have expected otherwise.

This is not something to be proud of or to find pleasure in. This is a moment demanding sorrow that we must come to this extreme before those responsible for evil stop and consider the gravity of their actions.

Do atheists believe in having faith, hope, and wisdom?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://divineatheists.quora.com/Do-atheists-believe-in-having-faith-hope-and-wisdom-14“

Neither of those concepts is exclusive to believers. That you ask this question means you’ve been subjected to disparagements about atheists by other believers who spread hatred instead of the peace and love your faith alleges to represent.

This particular atheist now cringes every time I see the words “believe in” because I know it’s coming from a believer who doesn’t understand belief. They overuse that expression as a shortcut for every bit of conceptual data their brains can accommodate.

It’s like watching someone put ketchup on everything they eat, from eggs to steak to cakes and doughnuts. It just gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I am learning to hate the expression “believe in” more and more every day because the people who are supposed to understand the implications of belief the most are the least capable of comprehending the implications of a belief.

Many believers confuse belief with entrenched insularity; nothing could be more toxic to the concept.

Many believers behave as if zealotry and belief are synonymous, but they’re not. They’re just excuses to refuse to learn, grow, and change. Invoking beliefs for believers is often the equivalent of a child whining about cleaning their room or taking their medicine. Letting go of toxic beliefs is just too much “woke” for far too many.

I have faith in myself and my ability to find a way to make it through this exceptionally challenging period in my life, but I have to accept that I may fail. I rely on hope to carry me through while smoothing out the rough edges and allowing me to maintain the necessary motivation to overcome adversity. I don’t see wisdom as a statically defined state of being but as an ideal, like a utopia, which serves more as a compass setting than a destination. There is no point in which a maxim of wisdom is attainable. Wisdom is often contextual and a subjective perception one has of another. To think of oneself as wise is just another means by which one admits membership into the Dunning-Kruger club.

I hope I have enough wisdom to survive my travails, but I have faith that I may succeed even if I don’t.