Atheism

Thanks for the vote of confidence!

I remember as a little tyke a school mate telling me he communicated with God. I believed him until one day he made a predicition but nothing happened. I mentioned that the predicition didn't happen and he got mad. He swung at me but he was a weakling so I merely stopped him and walked away. I never trusted anyone who claimed that they talked to God. Anyway I dreamt that Nixon had blood coming out of his mouth and the next day the Watergate scandal broke. Later it turned out 18 minutes 0f the tape had been erased.

Christians! Yogis! Can't we all just get along?

Apparently not.

A Southern Baptist leader told Christians the spirituality behind yoga practice doesn't fit with the Gospel message of salvation through Christ.

Christians who practice yoga "must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga," Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler wrote in an essay entitled The Subtle Body: Should Christians Practice Yoga?.

This story hit the religion blogs (like USA Today's Faith and Reason and the Washington Post's On Faith) three weeks ago, but today, AP picked up the story and Yahoo posted it on their homepage. That's when Mohler's statement went mainstream.

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This story reminds me of the time I sat in a doctor's waiting room, reading a novel that was set in Tibet, I think. A very serious young man came in and sat down nearby. After getting a look at my book's front page for a few minutes, he told the receptionist, "I would never let eastern thoughts into my life. They run counter to what Christ wants us to think." He went on a bit. The woman made a noncommittal reply and I turned the page and kept on reading. Wish we had been alone and I had had the need to fart right then.

what?

I'd like to know Mr Mohler's reasons for his assertion.

Ayesha is set in the Tibet region more or less. That's very droll ed.

Glee

Just a little thank you to everyone that shared their own stories about being and becoming atheist. I'm saddened to learn that is challenging thing to be in the States, or at least part of the states.

I was wasn't raised religiously at all. I've never asked my parents why. I had friends that went to Sunday School but had no idea what it was.

At what you'd call elementary school we had an hour or so of religious education called 'scripture' every Thursday morning. When they asked what denomination we were, to divvy us up, I picked Presbyterian because I thought it sounded funny. Learnt lots of Jesus on the road stories but somehow missed the point of them other than as stories.

Two early childhood 'philosophical' epiphanies were:

At age four seeing a war movie on day time TV at my grandparents place (we didn't have a TV) and a seeing a pilot in a plane going down, struggling with his ejector seat and failing to get it to work. It was less than graphic (1960s, on daytime TV) but I ran screaming from the room because I knew exactly what death meant. The end. And clearly I'd developed empathy.

Age 8, I'd gotten really into science, particuarly astronomy, even won a model hovercraft from Continental chicken soup for knowledge of the planets, when I'm wondering through school, just after hours, pondering the physical limits of the universe. So I'm thinking 'right at the edge there's a brick wall - but what's over the brick wall? Another brick wall? And then....' and my brain did flip flops trying to comprehend infinity - bit of do it yourself Total Perspective Vortex

I hadn't all dismissed the idea of a christian god, or any other gods, really. It was nice to think there was a heaven, where my cat went and ate all the mice she wanted, and then they went to heaven too. In my mid teens I committed myself to reading the bible. That was an eye opener. I'd read too much science fiction to see that far from being the 'word of god' (Hey, God, take writing lessons) it was clearly part family history, part garbled myth/memory, fused from many sources, deliberately avoiding clarity when it was most needed.

I'd always been a voracious reader (I could read before I went to school thanks to my mother) and loved non-fiction. None of those books were anti-religious; religion just wasn't a factor in explaining things.

In my late teens my best friend became 'born again', I could see the social attractions of being with nice people who did fun stuff together on 'retreats' but it meant believing a big lie that I couldn't bring myself to believing.

Fortunately, religion isn't a big delineating factor on social acceptability/mobility in Australia - I never felt under any pressure for being an unbeliever, in fact I used to feel sorry for kids who lost their Sunday mornings, and the poor Jehova's witness kids that didn't get christmas or birthday presents.

Until my mid 20s I was probably agnostic. Until I came to believe the universe without God was a frickin' amazing place. The only thing a God brought to the picture was cruelty. If an intelligent hand was guiding this it needed it's knuckles rapped. But if this is arbitrary cause and effect than it makes sense and can parsed emotionally - and gave you a real reason to be thankful you were alive, because nature and humanity provide plenty of opportunity not to be.

In my early 30s I got over my fear of death, philosophically - I still get an adrenalin rush when a ute is 360ing toward me on the highway.

I'm a lot more tolerant of believers than I used to be, but can't help the feeling they've taken the easy way out by just accepting someone else's version of the way things are, and not really contemplating why and how you should live. Accept your insignificance on the macro level and work on your performance at the micro level.

I like some of Dawkins' points. I agree that it makes no sense to accept religious arguments without question, when we do that with no other sphere of human knowledge. I also like his quote from some historical figure who's name escapes me 'Why should I fear death? I was dead since the dawn of time until just recently, and wasn't affected the least by it.'

Good read, hingehead.

Yes that is what I was thinking as well.

High praise from you my friend.

Thanks RL.

Interesting link to OKCupid's statistics blog about reading /writing skills and how they correlate with the self identified religions of the site's members:

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I greatly enjoyed reading your account, Hinge. I think part of the reason that i was able to defy the authority of the church was because religion was just not a part of my home life. I was sent for Catholic instruction because that's how people did those things in those days--my grandparents thought it was their duty to see that i was instructed in the religion of my parents, but that's as far as it went. My grandfather was not religious--his father had been a Protestant, and had married a Catholic woman, agreeing to raise their children as Catholic. Then he quarreled with the parish priest, whom his wife despised, so i guess you could say my grandfather was a lapsed Catholic.

My grandmother was raised Methodist by her mother, but was not a church-going sort. I learned many popular Protestant hymns from her, which she sang was she worked around the house. She was principally responsible for sending me off to be tortured by the nuns (not how she saw it, of course), and reacted to my rebellion with consternation--why was i making waves, why didn't i just cooperate. That was how i was able to cut a deal about confirmation and get out of the whole church gig.

I didn't live in an atheist household, but i did live in one in which religion played no part.

Surely it is just as amazing either way. I don't see how a universe without God is more amazing that one with God. And the cruelty is in Nature in both cases as well. What brought the cruelty into the world if God is not a factor? Could the concept of cruelty exist without the concept of God? How does your concept of cruelty arise in a Godless universe? Evolutionary processes depend on weakness being eradicated by a process we can only call cruel because we have the concept of cruelty.

The western atheist lives in a world that has the Christian God from which the concepts he is using to discredit that God are derived. Why would natural cruelty ever be mitigated without the Christian God? Atheist regimes are notorious for their cruelty to dissidents and anyone else they don't like. They would laugh at the fuss made over waterboarding. It would be considered kid-glove treatment.

The Christian God of the New Testament has only existed for a mere 2000 years, and for most of that time only in isolated places, and expecting the idea, the fundamental idea of our culture, to overcome the cruel forces of Nature in such a short space of time is not a reason to abandon the idea. And personally abandoning the idea is a completely different thing from promoting the widespread abandonment of it. To promote that abandonment without offering a vision of a world that has totally abandoned the Christian God, the only possible objective of such promotion, is irresponsible, revolutionary and an invitation to step into an unknown place and the unknown place can only have the cruel forces of blind nature to guide it.



That argument was used by David Hume. Samuel Johnson thought it "mad". When you die you give up everything you have. Before you were born you had nothing to give up. The two situations are not comparable. Let your life be seriously threatened and watch evolution's forces at work on your physiology. Your notion is the affectation of someone sitting in comfort and safety and might well put the fear of death into a cupboard for a time but does it eradicate it? Dawkins is not well read enough to be going around the world promoting stepping into an unknown place. I imagine that he reads stuff which helps him justify three marriages and pile up money providing justifications to others who reject Christian teaching for personal gratification.



The atheist Hobbes said that life was "nasty, short and brutish". And it is for the savage. The life you are speaking of is a derivative of Christianity whether you like it or not. If you are thankful for your life it is Christianity you owe a debt to and certainly not nature and humanity.

I cannot see why believing in something which is speculative and incapable of disproof but which helps people to live happier and better lives should be disparaged and treated with contempt.

We all know that professional wrestling is a lie but millions enjoy it and I don't think they would if it wasn't a lie. And women's beauty treatments are one giant set of falsies.

I hope nobody is persuaded by your self absorbed remarks and when you are older and presumably wiser I think you will have the same hope.

How you set your admittedly admirable precocious ideas watching a TV programme against a whole culture, and the greatest culture there has ever been, is a complete mystery to me and it makes your remark about realising your "insignificance" look ridiculous.

Very nice. Check my new sigline...

I wouldn't live with that **** soz if I was you. I proved it drivel in my last post. hinge was wiping out the fundamental idea of your culture on the basis of seeing a TV programme as an infant. If that isn't grandiose narcissism I don't know what is. Had there been a power cut or he had gone to the playground instead of to his grandparent's house that fateful day he wouldn't have seen the programme and world history would proceed undisturbed. His significance is extraordinary.

Your presence on A2K, and hinge's, is posited on a sense of your significance. Some people commit suicide or become depressed and even catatonic from dwelling upon their insignificance.

It's an example of hypocritical self-abnegation and false modesty belied every time you apply make up or see if your frock displays you to best advantage. The micro-level is a rat hole.

But that's the beauty of that line, and why I chose it as a sigline.

Sure, we're significant on a micro level (which is not a rat-hole, just everyday life with its wonders and frustrations). But on a macro level? Universe-level? Not hardly.

So you find that disturbing?

It doesn't disturb me. I'm advising not taking it seriously. Anybody--but especially a lady. The line has no beauty. It's a well worn cliche to begin with. A stoic saying from wayback.



Every Grain of Sand. Bob Dylan. A song he is reputed to have cracked his vocal chords on in a gig in Italy.

My Dad is dying. He has been fighting cancer for about 6 years.

I visited him shortly after his initial diagnosis. At a point in our visit we had occasion to dine at Cracker Barrel, where there were old black and white pictures, blown up tintypes, used as decor'. He was quiet for a minute as he looked at a rather large picture of a straight faced women with her hair in a tight bun and an equally straight faced robust man in a suit that was hung over the fireplace.

"They had no idea," he said. "They thought they were significant, and yet, their children or grandchildren have allowed their picture to end up here."

I suggested it may have been a copy, that the original may remain with the family, and that perhaps they had been significant enough that their children or grandchildren had wanted to share them even if in such a small way.

We finished eating. He paused to buy me some horehound candy on the way out, which he had remembered to be a favorite of mine as a child.

Sorry to hear about your dad, SQuinney....