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Trake said:
Some people just find it hard to believe that there is a person who controls their life.

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Where do you get the absurd notion that there is a person controlling your life. God is the energy of nature - neither sentient or aware of anything, as far as we can tell.

Imagine a circle and a sphere. The sphere says to the circle "hey, can you spin like this?" and the sphere spins on its x axis. The circle says "yes, I can" and spins on its x axis. The sphere says "Well, what about spinning like this?" and it proceeds to spin on its y axis. The circle confirms that it can also spin on its y axis by demonstration. "Hmmm," says the sphere, "can you spin like this?" and spins on its z axis. The circle sees the sphere spinning but can't comprehend the movement whatsoever because, while a sphere is three dimensional, the cirle only has two dimensions and it will never be able to understand anything greater than itself.

We are three dimensional objects and there is a force spinning before us but we can't comprehend it as it is a dimension or more above us - a dimension outwith time, hence the eternity of God.

Remember, He gave man free will in the book of Genesis, so you can't say that you are being "controlled" either.

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Dazzle said:

Remember, He gave man free will in the book of Genesis, so you can't say that you are being "controlled" either.

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Are you crazy?!?!?!? If I don't believe in god, I don't believe in a book written by power hungry MEN (Human Beings, not god) who just wanted to assert this man, jesus to a position of power, and then ride on his coatails!

To me, the bible is a work of utter and completely useless lies and trash... And guess what, a lot of people believe that. A lot of people like to believe what they believe, and never change, and they call it being steadfast, me, I call it ignorance. If you can solidly prove your god exsists, then, and only then will I believe in him.

I'll save you the time... After all, at least I will accept another belief besides my own...

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If you can solidly prove your god exsists, then, and only then will I believe in him.

I'll save you the time... After all, at least I will accept another belief besides my own...

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That's because to believe in God(s) you need faith not proof.

I personally do not believe in any God. I'm an agnostic, but interested in the concepts of Humanism and Deism.

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Trake said:
Are you crazy?!?!?!? If I don't believe in god, I don't believe in a book written by power hungry MEN (Human Beings, not god) who just wanted to assert this man, jesus to a position of power, and then ride on his coatails!

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To me, the bible is a work of utter and completely useless lies and trash...

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And guess what, a lot of people believe that. A lot of people like to believe what they believe, and never change, and they call it being steadfast, me, I call it ignorance. If you can solidly prove your god exists, then, and only then will I believe in him.

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First of all, does everyone have their own god? What's with the your every time? And anyway, I call your comments here ignorance and I challenge you inversely to prove that God does not exist.

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poia said:
Clearly, this subject bugs you somewhat; usually atheists just ignore religion.

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Most atheists, I think, would love to be able to ignore religion, but find it increasingly difficult to do so in environments where religious people try to impose their beliefs on others, whether on an individual level or a state-sanctioned level in the form of laws and customs. As the saying goes, "we have freedom of religion, but not freedom from religion."

This, I think, is what leads to the creation of anti-religious sentiment among some atheists. It's not so much the "smug sense of superiority" often attributed to atheists by religious people that motivates them, but rather a reaction to people and attitudes that make living a secular life more difficult. Atheists favour the separation of church and state for precisely this reason--they don't feel that religion has a place in the making of laws that apply to non-believers. By all means, let your deity dictate your behaviour, they'd say, but if I choose not to believe in that deity, why should I still be held to those dictates? Laws are supposed to be secular things, since they apply to everybody, regardless of an individual's beliefs.

In some areas, it's illegal for stores to open for business on Sunday. Other areas prohibit the sale of alcohol for religious reasons--e.g. so-called "dry counties." Other areas have laws banning the possession of "sex toys," or so-called "deviant sexual practices" like sodomy or sado-masochism, even between consenting adults. If I'm not a religious person (or if my religion doesn't happen to share these particular prohibitions), why should I be bound by such by-laws? These are examples of religion-inspired rules being imposed on believers and non-believers alike.

Perhaps most offensive to atheists, though, is the pervasive attitude among religious people that "only religious people have moral values." The notion that without religion there can be no morality is patently false, and implies that atheists are somehow amoral or evil. Atheists donate to (and work for) charities, volunteer their time to help others, and give back to their communities in secular ways (without even the thought of a heaven or promised land as a reward), but I think they clearly resent the fact that revealing their lack of belief in a deity causes religious people to think less of them. Ironically, atheists feel persecuted for their lack of religion.

If there were complete and proper separation of church and state, I think most of the tension between believers and atheists would go away. Atheists would be happy to leave believers alone, and even respect them for their convictions--if they could be assured of the same treatment in return. It's harder for an atheist when your country's leader claims to have conversations with God, bases many of his policy decisions on his religious beliefs, and wants to enshrine those beliefs in the laws of the land. As religious dictates are imposed on non-believers through the legal system, atheists get (understandably) crotchety.

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Trake said:
I think I'll write the next bible then, I'll e-mail what I have to you in a few years... Better yet, why don't I just use the context of Harry Potter to describe god?

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If you can find spiritual insights in any work of fact or fiction, by all means commit them to writing. That kind of insight can be very powerful as a means of explaining spiritual concepts to others, and it's been done since mankind first learned to communicate.

What else, after all, is animist religion but a means of recognizing the trademarks of an unknowable force in the evidence of nature? Prior to the advent of scientific study and an understanding of physical laws, the world was a mysterious and wondrous place. One had only to look at the intricacy of vein patterns on a leaf, or witness the raw power and beauty of a waterfall to appreciate that there were things greater than oneself at work in the world. Animists used the context of nature to draw their spiritual insights, and later personified these spirits as gods to make their insights more explicable to others.

Nor would you be the first to craft a religious text out of whole cloth, either. The Mormons base their beliefs on a "second testament of Jesus Christ," supposedly dictated to Robert Smith by God. Why not write a third such testament that finally gets it right? The point is that spiritual writings are invariably the interpretations of human beings trying to understand the world as they see it at the time. If their insights are particularly deep or powerful, if they manage to capture the essence of something new and important about life, their writings will inspire others. There's nothing wrong with that, and the best works of fiction do it quite frequently.

As a scientist, a mathematician, I can appreciate that we don't have all the answers--that's what keeps science going, after all. Science is about an endless set of questions, the search for important insights about the universe, and our theories about life, the universe, and everything are constantly evolving. I have some antique science texts on my bookshelf from the early 1900's that paint a picture of the world as science knew it at that time, and it's downright comical in places. No doubt in a hundred years people will look back on the science texts of today with a similar sense of humour. We still know so little about our universe, our world, our existence, that it seems premature to altogether dismiss the possibility of a higher power at work somewhere. In a way, science may be just another approach to discovering God, as we've come full-circle as animists with better tools.

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What in the present context would constitue genuine proof? Can such "proof" be found for any issue of consequence in the New Testament? Obviously nothing can definately be "proved". We cannot "prove" that Jesus even lived; in fact numerous writers, past and present have argued persuasively that he didn't. The question of "proof" is ultimately beside the point. The most one can honestly do is deal with evidence. - which is not the same as "proof". Evidence in the context of the Bible studies, cannot "prove" anything, but it can suggest greater or lesser possibilities, greater or lesser plausibilities. One must survey the available evidence and draw conclusions from it: for instance, that one sequence of events is more likely to have happened than another. If one employs this criterion, the matter becomes largely one of common sense.

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Trake said:
That is an excellent point, and the fundamental reason that I, or anybody else is Agnostic.

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True enough, no one can "know" whether God exists. What it comes down to, then, is how you choose to deal with that situation. Do you choose to believe that God exists, even in the absence of proof? Do you choose to believe that God does not exist, even in the absence of disproof? Or do you throw up your hands and admit that since there's no way of knowing either way, either of those positions could be justified?

And there's the rub, really. Most atheists refuse to recognize that they hold a "belief" as well. It's a "belief," because their argument that God does not exist is unprovable, so they're taking a stand on faith themselves, ironically. The atheist argument is predicated on constructing a plausible alternative scenario that can explain life, the universe, and everything without a need to attribute anything to a Creator. Science is their most frequent tool in this quest, but it falls short, currently, of being able to provide a complete set of non-theoretical answers. Atheists have faith, however, that science has the potential to do so, and will eventually succeed. In essence, then, in the absence of a solid disproof of God's existence, atheists are forced to take up a position of faith in His non-existence. They become just as guilty of belief-without-proof as they accuse religious people of being, it's just that their "belief" is in the equally-unproven opposite.

A true scientist, I think, would have to be a pure agnostic about the matter. And an agnostic, let's remember, must respect both the believers and the atheists, because one of them is right, and the agnostic will never know which!

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Dazzle said:
Imagine a circle and a sphere. ...

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That's a good analogy. Here's another one to consider:

Imagine for a moment that the universe as we know it is just a very elaborate simulation being run in a powerful computer somewhere, much like the premise behind The Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor. Each one of us is just an autonomous bit of self-modifying code, an artificial intelligence construct running within the framework of a larger program that defines our environment.

Our artificial universe is nevertheless governed by physical laws--scientists in our virtual world can observe and measure physical properties like gravity, pressure, temperature, magnetism, and so on, because the Programmer had to have specified some constants and variables to define our universe in the first place. Chances are, our universe was modeled after the Programmer's universe, and we were modeled in Her image.

In some cases, that scientific process may even expose some of the "code" itself. DNA, for example, is very much like assembly language to a computer programmer, and the Human Genome Project is very similar to a programmer's effort to reverse-engineer a program from its machine-language instructions. Perhaps pseudo-sciences like astrology are just efforts to reverse-engineer the algorithms the Programmer used to generate character traits.

It's impossible, of course, for anyone living in this virtual universe to perceive anything outside of it--the Programmer exists, but our consciousness has no means of escaping the context of our program. The Programmer can look in on us, however, and can make changes to our environment whenever She feels like it--She's both omniscient and omnipotent as far as our virtual universe is concerned. She may even run multiple universes, each with its own set of characters. Perhaps it's even possible to transfer a character from one such universe to another.

If you've played any of the current crop of massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games (e.g. Everquest, Asheron's Call, World of Warcraft, etc.), this scenario might resonate somewhat chillingly. We create virtual universes all the time, stock them with characters and use them to play out our fantasies and our nightmares. Give the technology twenty, fifty, or a hundred years, and both the level of sensory detail and the quality of the artificial intelligence may well be quite realistic. We would be gods to the characters in those universes, and they would have no means of conceiving of us, trapped as they are in their controlled environment.

Such characters would doubtless sit around in online fora like this one, debating the existence of the Programmer, and whether code spontaneously evolved from the binary digital equivalents of Adam (1) and Eve (0)

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rnlaing said:
"Science is too young to understand religion" . I hate science to begin with, so why in the hell would i back it?

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I recommend H.P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled- a two book set (one covering Science; the other Theosophy). This should help give a clearer idea of the subjects here. I wouldn't say that science doesn't understand religion but they are two beliefs that belong together - religion attempts to explain what science can't and science attempts to explain what religion can't.

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