Personal Journey

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.

How do atheists think this brief existence is all there is?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do atheists think this brief existence is all there is? Don’t you have a yearning in your heart that there must be something over the rainbow?”

That’s not exactly how that works.

This brief existence is all there is for this thing we call “ego.”

This thing we call “ego” is far from being “all there is” and is, in effect, as relevant to the universe as a speck of dust on our planet. The problem here isn’t the insignificance of ego but the ego’s addiction to being (or being perceived as) relevant beyond its existence.

There is much, much more to existence beyond the human ego, but as soon as each life ends, so too does that frail construct that demands immortality for itself on the sole basis of simply recognizing its own existence.

What we should be doing with human egos is learning how to train them to focus on the lives they get so that the benefits of existence are maximized for themselves and through others because that’s the only way for the ego to validate itself within the context of its limited existence.

Pissing away one’s life by catering to delusions of egotistical immortality is the most toxic form of grooming for one’s ego that invariably metastasizes it into a cancerous tumour for human society.

Whatever may exist “over the rainbow” is not for the human ego to experience.

This existence is all there is for the human ego.

The sooner the human ego can embrace that, the sooner it can grow to appreciate a gift that can vanish at any moment for any reason. Appreciation for the finiteness of one’s existence is precisely the point of a limited existence. There is no other way to transcend this limitation.

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.

How can a believer provide evidence for God’s existence?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can a believer provide evidence for God’s existence to refute the claim of atheists?”

The real problem here isn’t that you don’t know how to provide evidence for God’s existence but that you see that no evidence exists but still insist your God does.

The lack of evidence should be the cornerstone of your disbelief in the existence of something.

It’s the same reasoning you would use to refuse to make a significant purchase like a vehicle without taking it for a test drive.

Your approach to your God belief is like reading an ad without pictures for a $100,000.00 sports car and sending money to an address in another country while expecting your sports car to appear at your doorstep the next day.

Do you usually make your major purchases without inspecting them first?

Would you recommend buying a house without doing a walkthrough?

Why, then, would you structure your entire life around something you can’t verify?

The best you have is someone else telling you it’s true.

You can invest in some incredibly valuable swampland from me if that’s how you make big decisions for yourself.

The harsh reality you’re struggling with is that atheists make no claims.

Atheists only refuse to buy swampland from an obvious charlatan whose only interest in you is how much money they can siphon from your pocketbook.

Can I say I’m an atheist when I’m agnostic?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can I say I’m an atheist, when I’m actually agnostic? If I say I’m agnostic I’m worried that people will either say that it’s not real, or try to convert me.”

You can say that your beliefs are your own. You have no obligation to share intimate details of your journey with anyone who isn’t a part of your life.

Anyone who presses you doesn’t respect your boundaries, and if that’s the case, tell them whatever they want to hear to get them off your case. They’re not interested in getting to know you as a person because they want to be closer to you but because they’re looking for some information about you that they can use for their benefit.

People in life will ask you questions about yourself only because they’re looking for weapons to use against you.

You cannot trust people who cannot respect your boundaries. Life does boil down to being as simple as that.

The next time you wonder if you’re “allowed to say something” or another about yourself, try to remember how an orange Nazi turd concocts bullshit about himself and others with every sentence spewing out of his lying piehole.

I am certainly not advocating for any “benefits” of becoming a pathological liar because that’s just disgusting. I am simply pointing out that you have no reason to tie yourself up in knots over how you describe yourself to someone else.

The harsh reality is that you could likely spend an entire month describing intimate details about your life and why you arrived at certain conclusions that prompted you to think one way over another. The chances are excellent that 99% of what you say will be lost on your audience. People remember only 20% of what they hear.

Most of what you say about yourself passes through another person’s perceptual filters, and you have no control over how they interpret what you say. The only thing you can do is make your best guess at understanding them well enough to use the right combination of words that will get them close enough to understand something resembling what you want them to know and then hope for the best.

Your thoughts and feelings are your own… and if you’re anything like what I’ve gone through, then one day, you’ll be agnostic within a specific context and then a militant atheist within another context the next day. The following day, you’ll be amenable to believers, and later on that afternoon, after encountering a zealous believer, you’re back to hating religion and thinking of yourself as an anti-theist while thinking atheism itself isn’t firm enough to get the stench of the zealous asshole off your body and cleared from your mind.

The entire point I’m getting at is that human beings are not robots. As much as too many people want to create labels and stuff people into neat little boxes, humans are not that defined in such discrete terms.

Humans are more like water or vapour, constantly shifting in the wind or changing direction and flow depending upon the shape of the land one moves over. Whatever defines you as you is summed up entirely as your collection of memories.

Meanwhile, your memories are not stored like magnetic particles on a hard drive. Your memories are stored in eleven-dimensional space as “signposts” — symbols that your mind unravels as you recall events from your life… and your recollection changes as your state of mind changes.

Humans are more fluid than literal fluids in nature.

The next time someone asks you what you are, tell them you’re human.

The next time someone asks you what you believe, tell them you believe dinner is being served at 6:00.

Unless you find yourself in a long and deeply meaningful conversation with someone who truly wants to know your person, you have no obligation to barf up serial numbers for their mental registration of who they want you to be.

Be you and let the “Nosy Parkers” in your life be confused. That’s a “them problem,” not a “you problem.”

Being worried about how other people will respond to you because you’re trying to be honest with them about trying to figure yourself out is an unfair and intrusive expectation from another person.

You may not feel annoyed enough by such prying yet. If you manage to get on to your senior years, you’ll find yourself pissed off at such a rude and entitled attitude precisely because you have gone through a lifetime of being worried about telling people what you fear might be the wrong thing.

Don’t apologize for being who you are. You will only end up hating yourself for doing that. If someone decides they have a right to push their beliefs onto you, tell them to fuck off. Seriously. If Helen Mirren can endorse this response out of regret for being more polite than she should have been, you should not ever feel guilty about drawing your boundaries with a nosy someone in the harshest of terms.

Now that I’ve gone on this rant, I bet you might remember a half-dozen words… assuming you read any of it with any consideration instead of skimming over it all.

Good luck in navigating through this monkey house we call life. You’ll do fine if you can learn to duck and weave around all the flying feces.

Cheerioz