I wondered if there was some Walkyverse MMO I hadn’t heard of…
I’d play the heck out of it though.
Edwin I Callahan
Or maybe 3D figurines will be added to the store at some point? I might like a Dina or a Carla. A RPG game would be interesting, though I don’t know how much suspense you could generate trying to make the necessary roll to eliminate the clump of hair in the shower drain.
Been playing Among Us, can’t help but following up on the “God looking pretty sus” line…
“Yeah, God, what were you doing in Nav anyway?” “I had the take-the-wheel task.”
“Found the body in Storage, and God was standing right there.” “It was MY BODY!”
“I’m sus on Jerry. He wasn’t doing tasks.” The O2 alarm went off and I ran straight to Admin to fix it! If the atmosphere craps out WE ALL DIE! Did you expect me to do nothing?” “No! You should have kept on tasks – Specifically the worship-me task – and trusted in MY fixing it!”
“I’m not really sus on God, but he’s spent all game on cams watching everyone and not actually doing tasks, and he hasn’t even told us who did it when the murder happened right in front of his cameras. The task bar’s exactly one crew’s tasks short of full and God’s been doing zilch while we get murdered.”
Every game God joins gets glitched – He gets two roles, DadGod and SonGod. The best time was when DadGod was the imposter and killed SonGod, but then lost because SonGod glitched *again* and completed everyone’s tasks as a ghost.
#pedantry AND since in context it’s not a question about God’s existence but about how a certain chain of events would be proof of the relevance of a God, “We don’t know” is a valid answer for theists and atheists alike.
Agemegos
Which is the point here, right?
Reltzik
Yes. I’m engaging in the time-honored tradition of explaining the joke.
They aren’t discussing existence, but rather proposed mechanism of operation. “I don’t know,” how god allegedly works is synonomous with, “in mysterious ways.”
Part of the problem is that different people have different definitions for such terms as agnostic (it is impossible for anyone to know if God exists), atheist (knows God doesn’t exist), deist (believes God exists, but doesn’t believe in the church and its hierarchy). Then you also have the religious agnostic: “I don’t know if God exists. However, I believe that I should act in the way that God, if he exists, would want me to act.” Then you get the question of whether, if God exists, God cares if I believe in him or not. Also whether you should do evil if God asks you to. (My personal take on that one was that God asked me to do evil, I have considerable doubt about whether the message came from God.) Then you have the gnostics who believe that they know the truth, but nobody else does.
And nw we come to solipsism, which states that you can’t know anything other than your own mind. In this regard, Descartes said “I think, therefore I am”. What most people don’t realize is that it follows that it is impossible to know what you are, or whether what you see, hear, smell, etc. is real or an illusion.
… so much to unpack here, but I’ll limit myself to two points.
1) You’re talking about strong atheists specifically, and not atheists in general.
2) Faith (as a an epistemic method, rather than just hopeful optimism or honoring deals/relationships) is a lot more specific than being certain. It essentially boils down to basing one’s sense of certainty on believing really hard, rather than on anything more substantive. To the degree you’re basing something on sound reasoning or hard evidence, you’re not basing it on faith.
Agemegos
Hear! Hear!
clif
I have faith sound reasoning. Somewhat less in hard evidence, as the hard evidence doesn’t always mean what you think it does, but still faith in hard evidence.
I have a somewhat weaked, but still significant, faith in the positive value of talking to a higher power whether there is someone on the other end of the line or not.
I have a very low degree of faith in consensus reality. But in most cases, it’s still the way to bet.
Reltzik
Okay, didn’t word it specifically enough. The sort of faith that says “this approach has a tendency to work fairly reliably, so I’m going to trust it” is manifestly not the sort of faith used by most believers to believe in the existence of a god. I was trying to draw a category distinction, which if successful would have categorized the faith-in-reason-and-evidence approach as being fundamentally different from faith-in-god’s-existence.
And I personally tend to put more faith in evidence than in sound reasoning. I’ve seen way too many people fall victim to bad reasoning while mistaking it for sound reasoning, and I’m not (quite) arrogant enough to believe that I’m immune to thinking something’s sound when it really isn’t. At least with an evidence-based approach I can fact-check. (Not attacking you there, just sharing my perspective.)
As for whether there’s positive value in talking to a higher power regardless of whether it’s real or imaginary, I’d say it depends on what you come away thinking that the higher power is saying. *side-eyes at least 95% of the Christian Right*
LiamKav
“Bad reasoning” is literally what Becky’s doing here to. “My life has worked out, which proves that there is a loving and proactive God” only works as an argument if your ignore all the people whose lives don’t end out working out for the best. It’s a very egocentric point of view and is usually resolved by thinking either:
1. They lives haven’t worked out yet, or
2. They need to love God in order for him to love them back and allow them not to starve or whatever.
Solenoid
Becky is the plane that returned to the airfield full of holes, turning around and saying the places with the holes need more armor, not the places that mysteriously had none.
Demoted Oblivious
On further thought I think the proper term for what Chaucer59 is describing is, “Anti-Theists.” Faith stands up without evidence, and against evidence to the contrary. So to have formal (rather than colloquial) faith in the lack of god or gods would be to believe they don’t exist even when it is proven that they do.
Even Strong Atheists don’t typically hold that they would refuse to believe in the face of irrefutable proof.
Thank you Reltzik for going after this. A lot of the faithful really don’t understand what atheism is about. To put it laymans terms I think Ricky Gervais sums it up well, an atheist doesn’t believe in 2600 gods including Yahweh the same way a given faithful doesn’t beleive in 2599 gods of other religions. Or as de Laplace put it, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”
Now that said, I would put my position as a reasonable but strong atheist. Which is to say, I beleive there is not a little black teapot orbitting out past Mars and too small for us to see with our telescopes and probes, and I beleive there is not any god. Should someone produce any concrete evidence contradicting those postions, then I would happily evaluate the evidence. And if it held up under skepticism, I would be open to conducting further research and considering the possibility that it is now real. (be it a god or a teapot) This is essentially the stance of Strong Atheists. see: Russell’s Teapot
Chris Phoenix
Actually, there might now be a teapot out near Mars. If Elon Musk knew about Russell’s Teapot and thought it would be funny to troll the world, he could have put a teapot in the trunk of that Roadster he launched. There’s at least some chance that he knew about it – if for no other reason than that I sent a tweet about Russell’s Teapot at him a few months before the launch.
Demoted Oblivious
For sure, and it would be awesome for some billionaire to troll earth that way, and really, should be (comparatively) cheap if they added it as a payload to a probe they lifted up anyways. But as yet, the odds of them managing something like that without leaks at this stage is pretty low.
Although I know if I was designing the PCB’s for any onboard electronics, I’d be sneaking in all kinds of subversive humour.
Needfuldoer
Thank you for bringing up Russel’s Teapot.
I consider myself an atheist-leaning agnostic. I haven’t seen definitive proof there isn’t anything out there, nor have I seen definitive evidence there is. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but at the same time I’ve never seen an event credited to divine intervention that couldn’t also be explained by science.
thejeff
The point of Russell’s Teapot and similar arguments is that we never bother with splitting any of these hairs with anything but religion. No one would ever describe themselves as the equivalent of “atheist-leaning agnostic” about anything else with no evidence for it.
Yes, it’s true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it’s also not evidence of presence and there are an infinite number of things for which we have no evidence that we don’t have definite proof against, that we don’t bother reserving judgement on.
drs
Hear, hear!
Also, absence of evidence is evidence of absence if you expect presence to lead to evidence. Like if there was a powerful being that wanted to help people, I would expect it to be more noticeable. If it cared about our belief, I would expect it to send more messages than a few guys in one tiny part of the world.
Absence of evidence is less useful with the Deist god, that started the universe and is just watching us like a reality TV show.
Agemegos
Absence of sufficient evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence, but it is necessary evidence of evidence.
Whereas absence of necessary evidence is sufficient evidence of absence.
However, the god hypotheses that still survive are by craft or selection the ones that make no predictions, and therefore require no necessary evidence. Nevertheless, it seems absurd to choose one and believe it without evidence.
thejeff
Which is again, the point of Russell’s teapot. Unfalsifiable and unverifiable (at least at the time.) It is not only absurd to believe in it, but also absurd to withhold judgement and claim to be agnostic about it.
For many atheists, God falls into the same category. Bending over backwards to avoid making even claims of unbelief without proof is something none of us do in any part of our lives except talking about the existence of God. It is absurd to hold this one idea to a standard we do not hold anything else.
C.T. Phipps
I think believers understand atheism about as often as atheists understand the faithful. If you haven’t been both, you’re missing some context.
Demoted Oblivious
Actually, since actual atheism culturally incurrs a significant amount of debate (due to the prevalence of religion) I’m not sure that your claim is defensible.
Annecdotally (so uselessly from an evidentiary standpoint) my experience with atheists is that far more atheists have attended church, read the bible and other religious texts, than faithfull have studied atheism. I’m also subject to a bias because I do read more relgion v. atheism texts and discussions, and also that I naturally hang out with like minded folks, and so do not meet a higher sample of faithful to provide a better experiental dataset.
Finally, one thing I do consider and worry over is that I was raised areligously by two very different atheists. One was a communist and had essentially just drank different koolaide, but the other made it clear that our explorations in life were encouraged and supported. I also had access to a Bachelor of Religious studies, and was able to discuss and ask about many different relgions and facets thereof.
drs
A large number of atheists were believers. Or at least were raised in the community, but many believed, too. So they can understand how the faithful thing because they remember thinking that way. Very few Christians were atheist, if only because of the base rates.
Similarly, I used to be libertarian, so feel I can still reasonably emulate them. Emulating conservatives, not so much.
thejeff
Though it’s not uncommon for atheists raised in a particular faith, particularly a toxic one, to not have a good grasp on how broad religious experiences actually are.
An atheist who was raised fundamentalist treating Catholics or mainline Protestants as if they’re Biblical literalists, for example.
This isn’t limited to atheists of course. Many religious people have very distorted views of everyone outside their own tradition – see Joyce for examples.
For me, it’s less “I am 100% certain God, as Christians describe him, does not exist,” and more “I’m too lazy to bother praying or offering worship to anything.”
I wouldn’t define it as faith. I’m an atheist because of, well, lack of faith and feeling. Even when I was a child, and was getting dragged to the evangelical church my mom was super in to, I just…didn’t feel anything. All the supposed love and confidence that all the other kids and the preacher and whoever talked about, it was like they were seeing a color I can’t see. I’ve never felt any kind of divine presence in my life, or around me, I’ve never seen any evidence that wasn’t able to be explained by logic, and honestly, I just don’t care, in a very benign way. Religion doesn’t bother me, but it also has no effect either. ‘Faith’ implies feeling to me, and I don’t feel any way about deities or atheism.
Objectively speaking I would not be cool with God’s methods. Just saying, a handful of people got kidnapped, and a guy died, so Becky can go to school. Not cool God. Not cool.
Also if we’re speaking just in totals and not malicious motives and stuff, 3 guys died. More than a few people are probably traumatized. Like if I were god I would’ve just made Becky’s dad not a complete tool. Like he could still be an ignorant and intolerant jackass, but just not such a big one that he aides a kidnapper/murderer.
You’re not taking this god’s goals and objectives into account. Suppose the goal is to entertain and maybe educate and teach third party observers so they would be better people. Might that justify that god’s actions?
Now of course, allowing Mike to die would be unforgivable.
I could hypothesize a God that isn’t an asshole, even given the state of our reality. Maybe God created the universe as an experiment to see how quantum mechanics and relativity would work when combined during the Big Bang and is keeping the universe around to study black holes. This God would be only dimly (if at all) aware of and mostly apathetic towards the self-replicating chemistry stuff happening on the surface of a few space-blobs that have yet to combine their masses into singularities worth studying. When we start manufacturing black holes as power reactors, THAT’S when God will finally start noticing us and be confused as all fuck.
The most believable non-asshole God, roundaboutly paraphrasing Douglas Adams:
The idea of an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omnipowerful, etc. Capital G God is ridiculous in the sense of, here is a being with an upper limit (even if that limit is theoretically infinite), which can or has only created inferior products. A bit depressing, isn’t it?
Contrast that, the theory of evolution states that we came from the tiniest specks of life, building off of the simplest compounds to create more complex forms until we eventually reached where we are now, and we’re continuing to grow and improve. So “God” as defined as the thing that created the universe without having to be created, sure, that absolutely exists/existed. Is it the same as the Christian (or any other) God? Jury’s out on that.
I once had a debate with a Christian who responded to my comment on how Satan only had the power God allowed him to have: Yes, the Created cannot surpass the Creator. “Oh, so that’s why cars can only go as fast as the fastest human can run, and planes can’t fly.”
Didn’t get an answer to that.
thejeff
“Thing that created the universe without having to be created” doesn’t necessarily exist in any meaningful sense and certainly not in the sense religious people mean it.
Early universe cosmology is weird.
deathjavu
“What came before the big bang?” doesn’t have an answer because there was no flow of time that would allow for the word “before”. It’s not actually a question, it’s more like a divide by zero error in that you’re asking it wrong.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
Like asking what is north of the North Pole.
Demoted Oblivious
That does raise philosophical questions that may or may not be raised by actual origin mechanics. But to the example I point out, yeah nothing is north or North, but there’s still stuff past it, above and below it. This requires a frame of reference outside the topology of the globe to perceive but doesn’t mean those places don’t exist.
But that’s just relevant to the globe. I don’t know what (if any) equivalent questions exist about the origin of the universe, but despite the question being perhaps mathematically flawed, it’s good to be driven by curiosity and willing to ask. When people are told not to ask questions, we lose explorers and discovers to grey beaurocratic tedium.
231 thoughts on “Crimson”
Ana Chronistic
that’s how His ways are MYSTERIOUS
God looking pretty sus
none of that better happen again, tho, lest Sarah gonna get Old Testament on them
Ana Chronistic
(Joyce fwiw) https://www.heroforge.com/load_config%3D11104558/
Ana Chronistic
(hey also Becky… sorta) Becky https://www.heroforge.com/load_config%3D11103679/
Deanatay
Issat supposed to be a little Dina-saur egg?
TheKelliestKelly
Initially read those links as “Hero of Age” and was curious what Wilis was up to
sammyred8
I wondered if there was some Walkyverse MMO I hadn’t heard of…
I’d play the heck out of it though.
Edwin I Callahan
Or maybe 3D figurines will be added to the store at some point? I might like a Dina or a Carla. A RPG game would be interesting, though I don’t know how much suspense you could generate trying to make the necessary roll to eliminate the clump of hair in the shower drain.
Reltzik
Been playing Among Us, can’t help but following up on the “God looking pretty sus” line…
“Yeah, God, what were you doing in Nav anyway?” “I had the take-the-wheel task.”
“Found the body in Storage, and God was standing right there.” “It was MY BODY!”
“I’m sus on Jerry. He wasn’t doing tasks.” The O2 alarm went off and I ran straight to Admin to fix it! If the atmosphere craps out WE ALL DIE! Did you expect me to do nothing?” “No! You should have kept on tasks – Specifically the worship-me task – and trusted in MY fixing it!”
“I’m not really sus on God, but he’s spent all game on cams watching everyone and not actually doing tasks, and he hasn’t even told us who did it when the murder happened right in front of his cameras. The task bar’s exactly one crew’s tasks short of full and God’s been doing zilch while we get murdered.”
goggleman64
Every game God joins gets glitched – He gets two roles, DadGod and SonGod. The best time was when DadGod was the imposter and killed SonGod, but then lost because SonGod glitched *again* and completed everyone’s tasks as a ghost.
Mr D
Oh god, they look like shaven dwarves.
Like you grabbed Gimli, shaved his beard, “there, this is Becky”
Ana Chronistic
Yeah, that’s my complaint, but they’re mini figures, so they gotta be thicc to survive printing ?
Yet_One_More_Idiot
“We demand rigidly-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!” 😀
Doctor_Who
See Joyce, atheism isn’t so different from faith!
Only problem is, now you have no one to complain to.
Freezer
#UmmActually “I don’t know” isn’t atheism, it’s agnosticism.
Mra
Give it time.
Reltzik
#UmmActually In this case, agnostic-atheism.
#pedantry AND since in context it’s not a question about God’s existence but about how a certain chain of events would be proof of the relevance of a God, “We don’t know” is a valid answer for theists and atheists alike.
Agemegos
Which is the point here, right?
Reltzik
Yes. I’m engaging in the time-honored tradition of explaining the joke.
Demoted Oblivious
They aren’t discussing existence, but rather proposed mechanism of operation. “I don’t know,” how god allegedly works is synonomous with, “in mysterious ways.”
Agemegos
Faith: “We don’t know how God works (but we’re sure about what He wants us to tell you to do).”
Agnosticism: “Actually, we don’t know that God works.”
Atheism: “Who is this ‘God’ person, anyway?”
Sombrero
A-religiousness: “What the hell are you talking about?”
Ana Chronistic
Buddhism: Shit happens.
Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.
Zen: What is the sound of shit happening?
(Actual Zen Buddhism: Shit is the reward for shit happening.)
Atheism: I don’t believe this shit.
Agnosticism: What is this shit?
Chris
Actual Buddhism: Shit happens because of the shit you did a long time ago.
Demoted Oblivious
Also, formally agnosticism is, “I can not know.” It is actually a stronger stance than it is typically credited for.
Naldru
Part of the problem is that different people have different definitions for such terms as agnostic (it is impossible for anyone to know if God exists), atheist (knows God doesn’t exist), deist (believes God exists, but doesn’t believe in the church and its hierarchy). Then you also have the religious agnostic: “I don’t know if God exists. However, I believe that I should act in the way that God, if he exists, would want me to act.” Then you get the question of whether, if God exists, God cares if I believe in him or not. Also whether you should do evil if God asks you to. (My personal take on that one was that God asked me to do evil, I have considerable doubt about whether the message came from God.) Then you have the gnostics who believe that they know the truth, but nobody else does.
And nw we come to solipsism, which states that you can’t know anything other than your own mind. In this regard, Descartes said “I think, therefore I am”. What most people don’t realize is that it follows that it is impossible to know what you are, or whether what you see, hear, smell, etc. is real or an illusion.
Then it starts getting confusing.
Chaucer59
Atheists have faith. Sure, it’s backed by sound reasoning, but you don’t say, “There is no God,” if you’re not certain.
Reltzik
… so much to unpack here, but I’ll limit myself to two points.
1) You’re talking about strong atheists specifically, and not atheists in general.
2) Faith (as a an epistemic method, rather than just hopeful optimism or honoring deals/relationships) is a lot more specific than being certain. It essentially boils down to basing one’s sense of certainty on believing really hard, rather than on anything more substantive. To the degree you’re basing something on sound reasoning or hard evidence, you’re not basing it on faith.
Agemegos
Hear! Hear!
clif
I have faith sound reasoning. Somewhat less in hard evidence, as the hard evidence doesn’t always mean what you think it does, but still faith in hard evidence.
I have a somewhat weaked, but still significant, faith in the positive value of talking to a higher power whether there is someone on the other end of the line or not.
I have a very low degree of faith in consensus reality. But in most cases, it’s still the way to bet.
Reltzik
Okay, didn’t word it specifically enough. The sort of faith that says “this approach has a tendency to work fairly reliably, so I’m going to trust it” is manifestly not the sort of faith used by most believers to believe in the existence of a god. I was trying to draw a category distinction, which if successful would have categorized the faith-in-reason-and-evidence approach as being fundamentally different from faith-in-god’s-existence.
And I personally tend to put more faith in evidence than in sound reasoning. I’ve seen way too many people fall victim to bad reasoning while mistaking it for sound reasoning, and I’m not (quite) arrogant enough to believe that I’m immune to thinking something’s sound when it really isn’t. At least with an evidence-based approach I can fact-check. (Not attacking you there, just sharing my perspective.)
As for whether there’s positive value in talking to a higher power regardless of whether it’s real or imaginary, I’d say it depends on what you come away thinking that the higher power is saying. *side-eyes at least 95% of the Christian Right*
LiamKav
“Bad reasoning” is literally what Becky’s doing here to. “My life has worked out, which proves that there is a loving and proactive God” only works as an argument if your ignore all the people whose lives don’t end out working out for the best. It’s a very egocentric point of view and is usually resolved by thinking either:
1. They lives haven’t worked out yet, or
2. They need to love God in order for him to love them back and allow them not to starve or whatever.
Solenoid
Becky is the plane that returned to the airfield full of holes, turning around and saying the places with the holes need more armor, not the places that mysteriously had none.
Demoted Oblivious
On further thought I think the proper term for what Chaucer59 is describing is, “Anti-Theists.” Faith stands up without evidence, and against evidence to the contrary. So to have formal (rather than colloquial) faith in the lack of god or gods would be to believe they don’t exist even when it is proven that they do.
Even Strong Atheists don’t typically hold that they would refuse to believe in the face of irrefutable proof.
Chris Phoenix
Today’s Jesus and Mo seems very, very relevant to this.
Demoted Oblivious
Thank you Reltzik for going after this. A lot of the faithful really don’t understand what atheism is about. To put it laymans terms I think Ricky Gervais sums it up well, an atheist doesn’t believe in 2600 gods including Yahweh the same way a given faithful doesn’t beleive in 2599 gods of other religions. Or as de Laplace put it, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”
Now that said, I would put my position as a reasonable but strong atheist. Which is to say, I beleive there is not a little black teapot orbitting out past Mars and too small for us to see with our telescopes and probes, and I beleive there is not any god. Should someone produce any concrete evidence contradicting those postions, then I would happily evaluate the evidence. And if it held up under skepticism, I would be open to conducting further research and considering the possibility that it is now real. (be it a god or a teapot) This is essentially the stance of Strong Atheists. see: Russell’s Teapot
Chris Phoenix
Actually, there might now be a teapot out near Mars. If Elon Musk knew about Russell’s Teapot and thought it would be funny to troll the world, he could have put a teapot in the trunk of that Roadster he launched. There’s at least some chance that he knew about it – if for no other reason than that I sent a tweet about Russell’s Teapot at him a few months before the launch.
Demoted Oblivious
For sure, and it would be awesome for some billionaire to troll earth that way, and really, should be (comparatively) cheap if they added it as a payload to a probe they lifted up anyways. But as yet, the odds of them managing something like that without leaks at this stage is pretty low.
Although I know if I was designing the PCB’s for any onboard electronics, I’d be sneaking in all kinds of subversive humour.
Needfuldoer
Thank you for bringing up Russel’s Teapot.
I consider myself an atheist-leaning agnostic. I haven’t seen definitive proof there isn’t anything out there, nor have I seen definitive evidence there is. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but at the same time I’ve never seen an event credited to divine intervention that couldn’t also be explained by science.
thejeff
The point of Russell’s Teapot and similar arguments is that we never bother with splitting any of these hairs with anything but religion. No one would ever describe themselves as the equivalent of “atheist-leaning agnostic” about anything else with no evidence for it.
Yes, it’s true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it’s also not evidence of presence and there are an infinite number of things for which we have no evidence that we don’t have definite proof against, that we don’t bother reserving judgement on.
drs
Hear, hear!
Also, absence of evidence is evidence of absence if you expect presence to lead to evidence. Like if there was a powerful being that wanted to help people, I would expect it to be more noticeable. If it cared about our belief, I would expect it to send more messages than a few guys in one tiny part of the world.
Absence of evidence is less useful with the Deist god, that started the universe and is just watching us like a reality TV show.
Agemegos
Absence of sufficient evidence is not sufficient evidence of absence, but it is necessary evidence of evidence.
Whereas absence of necessary evidence is sufficient evidence of absence.
However, the god hypotheses that still survive are by craft or selection the ones that make no predictions, and therefore require no necessary evidence. Nevertheless, it seems absurd to choose one and believe it without evidence.
thejeff
Which is again, the point of Russell’s teapot. Unfalsifiable and unverifiable (at least at the time.) It is not only absurd to believe in it, but also absurd to withhold judgement and claim to be agnostic about it.
For many atheists, God falls into the same category. Bending over backwards to avoid making even claims of unbelief without proof is something none of us do in any part of our lives except talking about the existence of God. It is absurd to hold this one idea to a standard we do not hold anything else.
C.T. Phipps
I think believers understand atheism about as often as atheists understand the faithful. If you haven’t been both, you’re missing some context.
Demoted Oblivious
Actually, since actual atheism culturally incurrs a significant amount of debate (due to the prevalence of religion) I’m not sure that your claim is defensible.
Annecdotally (so uselessly from an evidentiary standpoint) my experience with atheists is that far more atheists have attended church, read the bible and other religious texts, than faithfull have studied atheism. I’m also subject to a bias because I do read more relgion v. atheism texts and discussions, and also that I naturally hang out with like minded folks, and so do not meet a higher sample of faithful to provide a better experiental dataset.
Finally, one thing I do consider and worry over is that I was raised areligously by two very different atheists. One was a communist and had essentially just drank different koolaide, but the other made it clear that our explorations in life were encouraged and supported. I also had access to a Bachelor of Religious studies, and was able to discuss and ask about many different relgions and facets thereof.
drs
A large number of atheists were believers. Or at least were raised in the community, but many believed, too. So they can understand how the faithful thing because they remember thinking that way. Very few Christians were atheist, if only because of the base rates.
Similarly, I used to be libertarian, so feel I can still reasonably emulate them. Emulating conservatives, not so much.
thejeff
Though it’s not uncommon for atheists raised in a particular faith, particularly a toxic one, to not have a good grasp on how broad religious experiences actually are.
An atheist who was raised fundamentalist treating Catholics or mainline Protestants as if they’re Biblical literalists, for example.
This isn’t limited to atheists of course. Many religious people have very distorted views of everyone outside their own tradition – see Joyce for examples.
Vulcanodon
Faith is a specific type of confidence that is based on belief rather than evidence.
Grant
For me, it’s less “I am 100% certain God, as Christians describe him, does not exist,” and more “I’m too lazy to bother praying or offering worship to anything.”
aelfwine
That’s not how the word ‘faith’ is normally used.
If I say that I’m sure there are no packs of lions in Antarctica, you wouldn’t call my certainty on that fact, “faith”.
March
I wouldn’t define it as faith. I’m an atheist because of, well, lack of faith and feeling. Even when I was a child, and was getting dragged to the evangelical church my mom was super in to, I just…didn’t feel anything. All the supposed love and confidence that all the other kids and the preacher and whoever talked about, it was like they were seeing a color I can’t see. I’ve never felt any kind of divine presence in my life, or around me, I’ve never seen any evidence that wasn’t able to be explained by logic, and honestly, I just don’t care, in a very benign way. Religion doesn’t bother me, but it also has no effect either. ‘Faith’ implies feeling to me, and I don’t feel any way about deities or atheism.
Reltzik
There are BILLIONS of people to complain to, and as a bonus we can actually have face-to-face conversations with them.
Keulen
We can just complain to other people instead of a god.
Agemegos
Real people to complain to cost $170 for each one-hour session.
Imaginary people listen for free.
Demoted Oblivious
Jesus! What is your internet bill like?
Agemegos
No-one on the InterNet listens.
Agemegos
Though, mind you, I have been consulting my therapist by way of Skype since March.
clif
Type harder. Use Caps.
Demoted Oblivious
Sorry I didn’t quite catch that.
clif
;-P
HMRC4EVR
this reminded me of the Epic Rap Battle between Sister Teresa and Sigmund Freud.
He Who Abides
I love that battle.
Dara
allll we have to do now
is take this lies
and make them true some how
Sirksome
Objectively speaking I would not be cool with God’s methods. Just saying, a handful of people got kidnapped, and a guy died, so Becky can go to school. Not cool God. Not cool.
Sirksome
Also if we’re speaking just in totals and not malicious motives and stuff, 3 guys died. More than a few people are probably traumatized. Like if I were god I would’ve just made Becky’s dad not a complete tool. Like he could still be an ignorant and intolerant jackass, but just not such a big one that he aides a kidnapper/murderer.
clif
You’re not taking this god’s goals and objectives into account. Suppose the goal is to entertain and maybe educate and teach third party observers so they would be better people. Might that justify that god’s actions?
Now of course, allowing Mike to die would be unforgivable.
deathjavu
Yeah this was the strongest argument I felt in terms of being atheist. Clearly any gods that do exist are assholes and unworthy of worship.
Agemegos
Have you noticed that Life is cruel and senseless?
Reltzik
I could hypothesize a God that isn’t an asshole, even given the state of our reality. Maybe God created the universe as an experiment to see how quantum mechanics and relativity would work when combined during the Big Bang and is keeping the universe around to study black holes. This God would be only dimly (if at all) aware of and mostly apathetic towards the self-replicating chemistry stuff happening on the surface of a few space-blobs that have yet to combine their masses into singularities worth studying. When we start manufacturing black holes as power reactors, THAT’S when God will finally start noticing us and be confused as all fuck.
Ana Chronistic
The most believable non-asshole God, roundaboutly paraphrasing Douglas Adams:
The idea of an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omnipowerful, etc. Capital G God is ridiculous in the sense of, here is a being with an upper limit (even if that limit is theoretically infinite), which can or has only created inferior products. A bit depressing, isn’t it?
Contrast that, the theory of evolution states that we came from the tiniest specks of life, building off of the simplest compounds to create more complex forms until we eventually reached where we are now, and we’re continuing to grow and improve. So “God” as defined as the thing that created the universe without having to be created, sure, that absolutely exists/existed. Is it the same as the Christian (or any other) God? Jury’s out on that.
I once had a debate with a Christian who responded to my comment on how Satan only had the power God allowed him to have: Yes, the Created cannot surpass the Creator. “Oh, so that’s why cars can only go as fast as the fastest human can run, and planes can’t fly.”
Didn’t get an answer to that.
thejeff
“Thing that created the universe without having to be created” doesn’t necessarily exist in any meaningful sense and certainly not in the sense religious people mean it.
Early universe cosmology is weird.
deathjavu
“What came before the big bang?” doesn’t have an answer because there was no flow of time that would allow for the word “before”. It’s not actually a question, it’s more like a divide by zero error in that you’re asking it wrong.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
Like asking what is north of the North Pole.
Demoted Oblivious
That does raise philosophical questions that may or may not be raised by actual origin mechanics. But to the example I point out, yeah nothing is north or North, but there’s still stuff past it, above and below it. This requires a frame of reference outside the topology of the globe to perceive but doesn’t mean those places don’t exist.
But that’s just relevant to the globe. I don’t know what (if any) equivalent questions exist about the origin of the universe, but despite the question being perhaps mathematically flawed, it’s good to be driven by curiosity and willing to ask. When people are told not to ask questions, we lose explorers and discovers to grey beaurocratic tedium.
thejeff
“Mu.”