Atheists...

I only side with the side which I percieve needs defending, and I do support your right to point out the bad in humanity, and conjecture solutions to such problems.

I prefer to maintain the most objective stance I can. The only way which I can acheive such a goal is to generally take no stance on anything subjective if I can avoid it, however; you have to take a basic stance one way or another, but after that you can take or leave most anything. I won't 'join the dark side', as you so sarcastically put it;), but I will support your right to express it when you come under attack from the opposing view point.

Atheism and theism both have their place, but when it comes down to it , its just nonsense in the form of metaphysical confusion. What I see is a monkey pointing at a cloud and saying that it is this, and another who doesn't see it saying that it is not. One makes conclusions based upon what he saw in the cloud and thinks that he is correct, and the other still doesn't agree with the other monkey. When it comes down to it they are arguing over a moment of confusion, when one thought that it could reach beyond the evident, beyond its own humble existence to somthing greater.

Ok seeing as my last (purposely wordless) post got no answers and I'm not sure anyone even clicked it, I'm reposting it and adding a few words.

I'm emprirical by nature
I refuse to follow mainstream religions as i'm a free thinker
i want to know the truth regardless of whether I like it or not.

I'm reading Dawkin's The God delusion pretty much as we speak - I agree with his writing to a large extent esp his critique of modern day and historic religious induced madness used for political aims

The extremes of born again evangelical christianity and the hijacking of Islam by muslim fundamentalists are obvious modern day examples of the dangers of fundamental religions.

Not only has mankind not got all the answers, we havn't even yet got all the questions.

Where I find Dawkins comes to a philosophical cul de sac is somewhere his imagination has been stunted due to his iconoclaustic stance.

I have an open mind re a Deity, I'm no fan of organised religion (even though it's not all bad - sure its been corrupted and still is but some good has come from it)

Last night I was star gazing - thats me at my most spiritual. I got back home and googled "galaxies" and this is the best link I came across

I defy anyone to look at these images and still claim to KNOW definitively that there's not a God like force in Nature.

SPACE.com -- New Pictures Reveal 100,000 Galaxies

Andykelly,:devilish:

Man at his sanest is a creature of wonder, the spectrum of the cosmos is such a sublime experience that one naturally wonders of what the source is, is the cosmos in fact that higher power often spoken of. It seems to me that sanity is only maintained if the defination of god/the source is limited to a naturalistic speculation, where we are left in wonder all the same, speculations as to superior beings as creators of all is just silly, there is not the remotest foundation for such a belief. It is true that people involved in religious traditions do, do some very humanitarian works, but so do people that do not belong to such traditions, they just do not attribute their compassion to an outer source. One thing in mentioning free thought, all of these traditions are a group thought, as you know, it is often wonderful to spend time with someone on the same wavelength, the sense of community, of belonging, helps these traditons maintain themselves, it is more than their beliefs that hold them together.:devilish:


"When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in a flag, and carrying a cross." StClair Lewis.

The god that holds up to speculation an reason is the one which is itself the entirety of the physical reality and nothing more. The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler has speculated that the very physical laws themselfs might be evolving. An adaptive, changing reality. It could be that there is some conciousness to reality, it is also possible that reality is simply a machine. It further could be that conciousness is mechanical and able to be synthesized via A.I. and conciousness is in te very fabric of physical reality, considering our conciousness and being most certainly is.

That we are concious seems the best evidence that the physical reality of which we are a part has a conciousness. If nothing else, that conciousness is part of physical reality is self evident, and thus that which we explain is being explained by a part of itself. This is why we cannot understand anything beyond relational reality,i.e. the relationship between physical things is all that we can knowand communicate. Even qualitative things are known and communicated relationally. I do not know if my colors are qualitatively the same as yours, but I know that relationally yellow denotes the same thing for both of us. It is an odd universe in which we live and we are an odd species to think we could know it without even knowing ourselfs.

Only if we demand that we be able to express everything about God.

"The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name."

Indeed! I was hoping someone would bring up the god of the unkown, the god of the inexpressible. I think that this is the original god concept, why so disparate regions have such similarity in their religious beliefs when one delves in deep enough.

This god is the god I think Wittgenstein had in mind when he spoke of the mystical and of god. We acknowledge this god at all times, and all confusion comes from attempts at expressing this god. Talk about bable! We all speak glossolalia hearing what we want and saying nothing when we speak of this god that we can sense but never communicate!

Inexpressible, I think so. Unknown, I'm not so sure. I guess it depends on what we consider to be the necessary conditions for knowing something. If this includes the ability to express, then unknowable seems appropriate. I do think that we can experience the inexpressible.

Heh, at least I'd argue that we can experience the inexpressible. Bable, indeed.

Incommunicable, I suppose, indefinite when put to relational terms such as language or definite spacial form.

Hi all!

Are these things applicable to the imagination, does not something indeed have to have existence to be known, one can while in the same state of consciousness entertain that one is experiencing the existence of a creation of the imagination, through the imagination itself. Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge, and I believe this, left in ignorace, with nothing but the raw materials of the environment, the imagination would deliver up tangiable knowledge. The speculations of the imagination reguarding deities does not have the apparent raw matierals to come to tangiable understanding of the supernatural, anything it delivers up is still the property of the imagination, to be known, it must exist outside the imagination, as in a subjects relation to something tangible. Imagination without these basic materials is nothing, literially, nothing.





"When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in a flag, and carrying a cross." StClair Lewis.--------think Bush!

Here, here. :rockon:

This is terribly relevant to such discussions in my humble opinion.

Thus, to me, it remains of paramount import that I keep fixed on that which I - according to my own epistemological methods, and in my mortal and flawed state - can quantify. Otherwise, we flail about in our minds grasping anything that can be imagined, touting "it's possible! it's possible!".

Where I'm at and given what I believe, I feel I'm best grounded in the reality that we collectively share as members of the human animal species. Yes, let us imagine! Let us delight in all the wonderful possibilities our fancies can conjure!; but one should only stick one's head in the clouds as far as their feet remain on the ground.

<dismounts soapbox>

"The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie inconsequences of an action must therefore be irrelevant. At least thse consequences will not be events. For there must be something right in that formulation of the qustion. There must be some sort of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but this must lie in the action itself.
(And this is clear also that the reward must be something acceptable, and the punishment something unacceptable.)
Of the will as the subject of the ethical we cannot speak.
And the will as a phenomenon is only of interest to psychology.

If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.

As in death, too, the world does not change, but ceases.

Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.
The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive for ever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.
(It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved.)

How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.

The facts all belong only to the task and not to its performance.

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.
The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist.
If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably senseless, if it would doubt where a question cannot be asked.
For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be asnwered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)
There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.

The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other -- he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy -- but it would be the only strictly correct method.
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. "

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Monkey see monkey do!!!

If only it were so.

God never existed.

The normal argument for God's existence usually goes along the lines "everything has a cause so God had to have caused this universe." I, however, find that extremely naive. If everything has a cause, wouldn't whatever caused the universe have a cause, then that cause would have a cause, ad infinitum?

So either God was created by something else or the universe was created by a non-God entity. Science already supports the notion of a "multiverse" or string theory where there are many different dimensions that give "birth" to other dimensions, creating new universes. I personally find this much more likely as it is based in the physical world that we have proof of, not the spiritual world that there is no proof for.

krazy kaju:)

It is perhaps the comedy of comedies that there is on going dialogue between the atheist and the believer, one should know at least from experience that the believer did not get to be a believer through reason, there is I believe a desparate need in some individuals to believe, and no amount of proof will ever be adequate turn him away from his desire for certainty.

^ So sad but so true.

And we roll over the same old ground.

As Kant pointed out long ago, you cannot rational prove God, nor can you rationally disprove God. God is beyond logic.

No proof could turn a believer away from God because no proof can be given against God. Meanwhile, the desire for a logically provable God has long since passed mankind; we no longer see Aristotle as the highest point in philosophy.

All of life is not reduceable to logos. And I've yet to see one compelling argument against the value of mythos. The only objection to mythos I have seen are the logical objections - which miss the point entirely.

I seem to think that God is acausal, so in that the universe, time's "beginningness" was random. Why not?

But I still don't believe in God.

Thomas,

Same old ground, those whom believe are in violation of logic as much as those whom deny the existence of god, but, I am in violation as are you for not believing in every god that was ever conjured by the imagination. This is a silly debate, you do not believe in Zeus, you are an atheist Thomas, and who is on first.

Neither is in violation of logic. Both have a belief about something outside the bounds of logic.



I do not deny the existence of Zeus. Zeus, and the Greek myth, just are not relevant to me in the way other faith traditions are relevant to me.

I can read Homer and find value, even spiritual value. The Greek myth is not devoid of value, and still manages to speak to the human condition.



Depends on what you mean by 'atheist'.