ok, so why not another philosophy post, just cause i can download music and i downloaded some spacey shit. The older i get the more intricle durgs to themusic making do seem.
So what we will talk about today, is why I am an atheist, not cause I want to force my atheist agenda on y’all but that it is a good topic that goes into a lot of tings. First of all, I fell that atheism is not a beleif system, but a lack of a belief system. For example, you can say christians are atheists about Zues. So there are many reasons that I am atheist, reasons that have popped up at different times in my life, I think if I go in a vaguelly chronilogical order that will be best.
My memory of when I realised there was no god is very distinct. It is actually one of the few really strong memories I have about a significant change in my way of seeing the world from my childhood that I actually have. I can’t remember when I stopped believing in Santa or the Easter Bunny. It happened when I was studying for a biology test. I was trying to get the concept of osmosis through my head. I couldn’t see how the particles would just move by themselves. There had to be something making them move. But then all of a sudden it hit me, that it was just random movements working. The system was set up to be stupid. Once I figured this out I remember thinking to myself, there is no need for god. Things just work themselves out. It was this understanding of the power of basically random, non thinking process, and that most of our universe is controlled by these types of process that showed me that god was superflous and unneccessary and probably fake. So I never got laid in highshcool and thought about osmosis alot maybe the too are connected.
So this is basically a rejection of god from a scientific standpoint. I think this is the best reason for rejecting god. If you take the claim that there is a god seriously, that is when people say they believe in god they are making a statement about the world, this statement does not hold up to modern scientific evidence. Pre-enlightenment theories about god are mostly pretty rational. I am particularly sympathetic to pagan religions with lots of gods. If you don’t really know how the world works, then things like diesease and lightenin bolts annd earthquakes will seem like they come from gods. Given the evidence they have It isn’t really that bad a hyposthesis that there are all these crazy jealous gods running around.
But the fact is we have evidence now. We know how diesease, lightening and earthquakes are caused. Basically everything earthly has been explained enough so we know that there was no neccessity for god to be involved. When we get the the heavens we know how stars where formed, We know the size of the universe is basically beyond comprehension and we are very close to understanding how the universe itself started. And all this has been done without the need to use a supreme being as a cause, let alone an anthropomorphic god.
The only evidence we have for god are religous texts and the testimony of people who have had religous experiences. I’m going to dismiss religous texts without much argument. There are alot of them and none of them are the same, there is no reason to privilidge one above the other, and the claims all of them make about the world are demenstrablyt false. Why should I should I believe the bible and not the epics of gilgamesh? As for the testimony of people who have had religous experiences, there has been much reasearch done on the reliability of witnesses and it is incredibaly lacking espeicially when somebody has something to benifit from staying to a particular story line. Look into UFO abduction stories or tales of satanic abuse. The evidence for these kinds of stories is equal to the evidence for different kinds of religous experience.
Even if I myself were to have a religous or spritual experience, i would hope it would not change my mind on being an atheist. The human mind is very able to create it’s own reality and it is not to be trusted, espeicially when someone is under great stress or has been fed a lot of propaganda. Personnel terstimony about religous about religous experience would not be accepted as evidence in a court or a laboratory. There is no reason we should accept them when we are trying to figure out the meaning of life.
Souls afterlife reincarnation
After asserting the scientific argument against the existence of god, what a religous person will through up a metaphysical argument. That is they will try to argue that you can’t see god as part of a scientific world view, spirtuality is somehow disconnected from the world of science. If they took to much philosophy in school they will pull out some shit about wittgenstenian language games. Or they will say they aren’t “religous”, they are just “spirtual.”
All these arguments are bullshit. All religions or talk about spirtuality clearly make claims about the world that can be verified. They make claims about what will happen to people who follow the religion. They make claims about how the spirtual world interacts with the real world. The fact is these claims cannot be backed up by the facts. If someone says they are just spirtual ask them how this spirtuality interacts with the world. How does it have consequences on how someone acts. Either they will say some stupid superstitious shit, obviously false, or they will say some nice sounding truism that has no impact on how the world is or how we should act like, “every living thing in the world is connected somehow.”
To make this point a little clearer, I need to elucidate what a scientific world view is. Sience is a systematic way of making observations about the world. That is all, it’s about. So if there were things like mircales in the world, they would not be outside of science, science would simply try to explain them . The fact is that there never has been evidence for miricles.
This brings us to another facet of my atheism. Even if there were a god, I see no reason why I should worship him or do what he commands. What could possibly give him the moral authority to command me? Your parents created you, yet they should have no moral authority over you when you are an adult.
i understand that this kind of reasoning is probably baffeling to believers. That is because for many of y’all you philisophically see morality as coming directly from god or some kind of spirtuality. This is probably the hardest objection for athiests to overcome, because in order to do that it seems like we have to come up with a whole other philosphy of morality. I’m not really sure I have that quite down yet but I am not worried by this. First of all, like in all other matters, there is not evidence that god has anything to do with morality. That is if you are talking about a descriptive morality instead of a presecriptive morality.
It is fairly clear that all societes past and present have had morality, a morality that has had some consistent charecterstics. The most basic being the concept that harming other people is bad. These societies have had vastly different theologies and some of the most moral (as measured by societal measures of how they treat the poor and unfortunate) have been the most unreligous (modern europe and to some degree the modern U.S.). Being moral is an intrinsic in being human, it is not intrinsic in being religous.
To be honest I find the claim that one needs to have his morality validated by religion to be childish and inhumane. I guess some people need that extra boost to do good beside a basic feeling of compassion toward their fellow man. I should put this together better in the future.
The last reason why people believe in religions is political. They believe something because not to believe it would mean a change in the power structures of their lives. An extreme example of this is the amish, who chose to reject education and technology in order to keep a certain order to their lives. But this type of thinking constantly comes up in debates about the existence of god and is a pain in the ass. Intelligent design is largy this about politics of education for example.
One last thing I want to see is fuck agnostics. Make up your fucking mind. Both atheists and religous people have clearly stated positions and there is loads of evidence for you to deside on. Agonstics are pussies.
You have misunderstood agnosticism. It is not the search, it is a fully valid end point of said search. It is the only scientifically defendable position: the standpoint that most ideas about the supernatural are untestable (and therefore unscientific)… and, by extension, it’s a waste of time to try to test them. Atheism most assuredly is a belief system: the belief, as opposed to knowledge, that no supernatural beings exist.
This self-ironic site is a very good explanation of agnosticism. It says “unknowable” instead of “untestable”, but that may well be the same (…now we’re in science theory… and that means we’re back to philosophy, hooray).
I don’t agree that most ideas about the supernatural are untestable. If religion is to have an effect on humans then it should have observable evidence and we should be able to do test on that evidence.
If the suoernatural is truely untestable then it has no bearing on how we live our lives at all, because it can have no effect on us. It is like wondering what is on the other side of a Black hole. It might be interesting to talk about, but it is just a fun story because we can never know what is on the other side, and the other side of the black hole can never do anything to us.
Agnostiscm fails to take religous and supernatural claims seriously. All religions make statements about how the world is. To not take these claims at face value is to do a disservice to religous people.