What Makes People NOT believe In God? (Atheists Come!)

Joe R, interesting thoughts. However, religion is a comfort to many people who lead hard, brutal lives in abject poverty. They look forward to another life, a dream world of warmth and security. They will not be so thrilled to find out that they will live not 70 but 150 years in pain and deprivation. Eternal life? I don't think so. Not in your or your grandchildren's lifetimes.

Karen Armstrong wrote this in Shambhala Sun about religion and the rise of fundamentalism.

The article...

0 Replies

Belief in spiritual things is also a comfort to other than just those in desperate life situations. There are plenty of people who believe, and they come in all stripes.

0 Replies

I did not intend to imply otherwise, Snood. I was saying to JoeR that, even if a person lived a very long life, he might still seek religion or spiritual succor. The one does not preclude the other.

As Karen Armstrong points out in her Shambhala commentary, human beings seem to crave spirituality and trancendance, an attempt to understand what might lie beyond this realm.

0 Replies

This is what you said...

Kara:

Quote:

religion is a comfort to many people who lead hard, brutal lives in abject poverty. They look forward to another life, a dream world of warmth and security. They will not be so thrilled to find out that they will live not 70 but 150 years in pain and deprivation. Eternal life? I don't think so. Not in your or your grandchildren's lifetimes.

...and when I replied in direct response to the pointless sarcasm evident in the above, you come back with this...

Quote:

I was saying to JoeR that, even if a person lived a very long life, he might still seek religion or spiritual succor.

OBVIOUSLY an entirely different tone. If the last reply you made was all you meant, you sure could have foregone the jabs at the "dream world" and voicing your certainty that they're in for 80 years of hell on earth, now couldn't you?

0 Replies

snood wrote:

This is what you said...

Kara:

Quote:
religion is a comfort to many people who lead hard, brutal lives in abject poverty. They look forward to another life, a dream world of warmth and security. They will not be so thrilled to find out that they will live not 70 but 150 years in pain and deprivation. Eternal life? I don't think so. Not in your or your grandchildren's lifetimes.

...and when I replied in direct response to the pointless sarcasm evident in the above, you come back with this...

Quote:
I was saying to JoeR that, even if a person lived a very long life, he might still seek religion or spiritual succor.

OBVIOUSLY an entirely different tone. If the last reply you made was all you meant, you sure could have foregone the jabs at the "dream world" and voicing your certainty that they're in for 80 years of hell on earth, now couldn't you?

I think you are mistaking what Kara is referring to in her comments.

She was directing a bit of attention to what Joe said on the page previous to this one about science making people live forever...not mocking the afterlife.

Refer back to Joe's last post...and then re-read what she wrote.

0 Replies

As far as mocking the afterlife goes, did you know that the Egyptians promised the slaves that if they were good, they would go to "The happy field of food?"

Upon dying, they believed if they were good they would go to the happy field of food. The name pretty much describes the place.

Mark Twain has written some great stuff on the Christian version of heaven, pointing out that joys in heaven are things that people find generally boring in life. In heaven they all wear white, and are wholesome, and listen to a lot of light harp music. A heaven reflecting our joys in life would be colorful and have lots of sex, rock music, drinking, fun parties, etc.

But hell I personally find even more entertaining, there's some great literature springing up from the concept of hell, as well as great artwork. look at Hiernonymous Bosch's tryptich "Garden of eartly delights*" *it was an ascribed title so you can find it under different names. I also love Rodin's sculpture of the gates of hell. Be good or you'll be beaten with a pointy stick for all eternity, and drown in seas of fire an blood!

central panel
Bosch's Hell - in which you are punished in accordance with what sins you committed
detail

Rodin's Gates of hell - much better in person

0 Replies

Quote:

OBVIOUSLY an entirely different tone. If the last reply you made was all you meant, you sure could have foregone the jabs at the "dream world" and voicing your certainty that they're in for 80 years of hell on earth, now couldn't you?

Snood, I am totally baffled by what you write. My response was directed to JoeR's (unlikely) suggestion that we humans will live forever, thanks to science, in the foreseeable future and thus, he posited, would not need a god or religion or an "after" life. I did sound ironic, I suppose, when I noted that a bitterly hard life, be it 70 years or 700, would still cause humans to long for a wonderful afterlife. My comment was not meant to be sarcastic.

I would never denigrate any belief, any myth, any religion that allows a person to make sense of this world unless that belief becomes fanatical and infringes on the freedom of others to believe as they wish. Almost everyone I know believes in a god and goes to church, all of which makes me the odd one out. I wasn't there when faith was passed out. I don't really consider myself an atheist because that takes believing that there is no god. I simply do not know, but I find the search interesting and rewarding. (I enjoy pondering such questions as: How could this well-ordered universe come from nowhere, from chaos? There are pundits who deny the possibilty of self-organization, but their thoughts are countered by many fascinating rational arguments from astrophysics and similar arcane realms.)

I do not believe that a person must be religious to be moral. In fact, I think the real tragedy of our country is that we do not teach ethics and public policy from the first grade. These can be taught without reference to religion. Most of the Ten Commandments are based in reason and in what is best for a community. The rationales for honesty, faithfulness, loyalty, charity, work on behalf of one's family and village, etc., have a basis in principles of public order.

This does not mean that one cannot speak (out of school...) of transcendence or of the life of the spirit, but these matters must be spoken of allegorically or in symbols. And one must, most of all, make definitions clear and note that one is speaking in fact or in allegory.

(Thanks, Frank.)

0 Replies

Almost all depictions of heaven and hell are only literary. I am appalled when people teach/portray Dante as religious doctrine.

0 Replies

This is a thread about us atheists. The hell with afterlife.

0 Replies

Quote:

The hell with afterlife.

0 Replies

Portal Star, thanks for the Bosch and Rodin. (I have always chuckled at how Bosch "air brushed" his subjects, long before Photoshop.)

Some of the greatest art and architecture has been inspired by religion. Hell, as a concept, has always been more provocative than heaven, which is apparently more difficult to describe graphically. Great religious music is an exception.

0 Replies

What makes theist characterize atheists as those who "choose not to believe in god," as though they were willfully obstinant?

0 Replies

Kara:

Quote:

I did sound ironic, I suppose, when I noted that a bitterly hard life, be it 70 years or 700, would still cause humans to long for a wonderful afterlife. My comment was not meant to be sarcastic.

Kara - potato, potatoe - ironic, sarcastic. No harm, no foul. I understand what you're saying. Thanks for the patient response.

0 Replies

Thalion wrote:

Almost all depictions of heaven and hell are only literary. I am appalled when people teach/portray Dante as religious doctrine.

So am I, and they do it fairly often, but to his benefit - throughout history things have been added and taken out of the bible. Different writers, myths, pharos, and kings have all sliced and diced, and added to it at their whims. Religion is intrinsically tied into politics because you can use it as a means of control.

The Low-landers had a series of apocryphal texts and rules that never quite made it into the cannon.

Hell is also a new-testament concept. The old testament doesn't refer to it at all, which means Jews generally don't believe in hell. It doesn't talk very much about heaven either. In the old testament [Torah] god deals out punishments and tests to his populous. It is the kind, forgiving god which doesn't like animal sacrafice introduced in the new testament which accompanies (or introduces) lucifer and hell.

I find it difficult accepting that people can take the concept of hell seriously. If people deserve punishment, give it to them while they are still alive! (And by legal means, if the law is good.)

Another interesting side note, did you know that there were other messiah's, (called "false messiahs) springing up all around the time of the new testament? The most likely messiah didn't make it into the bible, was Simon Bar Kochba ("The Prince of Israel.) Even the most famous rabbi of the timek, Akiba, slated him to be the new messiah. There were tons of messiahs from all different jewish cultures in the world, I have often wondered what made Jesus win out above the others. Maybe he is a combination of some of them.

0 Replies

Portal Star, I think on the contrary that most people find a world without heaven or hell hard to comprehend. How do those folks who seem to get away with murder receive their due? What about the saintly woman who is killed by a landslide? What people find impossible to accept is that life is random, as well as being brutal and short for many.

As the Bard put it:

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

0 Replies

Kara wrote:

Portal Star, I think on the contrary that most people find a world without heaven or hell hard to comprehend. How do those folks who seem to get away with murder receive their due? What about the saintly woman who is killed by a landslide? What people find impossible to accept is that life is random, as well as being brutal and short for many.

As the Bard put it:

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Then, instead of being cowards and waiting for an invisible man in the sky to deal out punishment after these people have lived their lives, they should change the earth they know and live on for the better. Kill or jail the murderers.

Heaven is much easier to understand. Everyone wants their loved ones to not really be gone, or even landslide-suffering saints.

But justice should be done in our lifetime.

0 Replies

Kara wrote:

Joe R, interesting thoughts. However, religion is a comfort to many people who lead hard, brutal lives in abject poverty. They look forward to another life, a dream world of warmth and security. They will not be so thrilled to find out that they will live not 70 but 150 years in pain and deprivation. Eternal life? I don't think so. Not in your or your grandchildren's lifetimes.

Karen Armstrong wrote this in Shambhala Sun about religion and the rise of fundamentalism.

The article...

Maybe I should have been more clear, when I say "eternal life" I am merely stating the technology will exist to promote an outrageous lifespan. Now, during that lifespan, technology will increase and allow the lifespan to further progress. I think stem cells and cloning will lead the way, and I also think this is why various religious dogmas are so stringent against increasing the technology.

As far as repressed and impoverished people, they would not have the technology available due to the lack of money. It's not pretty, but it's true. Besides, just like you said, who would want to live 150 years if they spend it starving.

Now, in the far future, I think we will discover a way to "download" our brains to a hard-drive and possibly "upload" our brains to another host body. Ideally, this would also lead to eternal life, but the technology is probably 500 years away. We are just learning how the brain works, let alons how it stores information, but once this is figured out AND the ability for our brain to communicate with machine, we will have essentially found "god".

Interesting link BTW, and it poses some real strong questions. It also throws my theories right out of the water.

I do think our generation, the X-ers, will be the ones to shape the next millennium. If we can somehow manage to rid the world of extreme fundamentalism, and survive long enough for technology to flourish, the bounds are endless.

0 Replies

I just saw 'I, Robot'. It was an interesting commentary on the potential of technology.

0 Replies

Read the book, Boss, you'll be even more interested. Azimov wrote several "Robot" novels, and they are all thought-provoking.

0 Replies

Setanta wrote:

Read the book, Boss, you'll be even more interested. Azimov wrote several "Robot" novels, and they are all thought-provoking.

Really? Asimov wrote about robots? Wow!! I must have been under a rock for fifty years not to know that, huh?

I just meant that seeing the movie and reading some of the comments here brought those things back to mind. I last read the book when I was a teenager.

0 Replies

What Makes People NOT believe In God? (Atheists Come!)

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know