Since it’s church day for some and nobody else feels like blogging, I might as well give a nutshell version of my own beliefs and how I got there. Born Jewish, I read my Leon Uris but I never believed anything specific, though I absorbed as much as I could from various philosophies. I especially enjoy writers like Karen Armstrong and recent popularizers like Tom Holland who take an informed and fundamentally human look at the history of religions. Paraphrasing William James, whether God exists per se the concept of God has had an undeniably real impact on things. At the same time New Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens rub me the wrong way for a reason that I could not quite put in words.
Then one day I realized what I am: I am a militant agnostic. I support pretty much any search for meaning but to me that grain of doubt is indispensible. Since religion by definition covers things that lie outside the scope of human understanding, anything we authoritatively prove or disprove cannot possibly have to do with God.
That does not mean I disapprove of religion! I can think of plenty of reasons to practice a faith of your choosing. I can also think of of reasons not to. Not being a joiner myself I get nervous around any group of people chanting something, but I can see the appeal. And I get that religious fundamentalists do more harm in the real world than anti-religious fundamentalists like Richard Dawkins. But either way if you declare with authority that you know something which can’t be known then I’m not going to take you seriously.
Chat about whatever, including but not limited to whether theosophy is a pointless waste of good air.
Corner Stone
As I just said in the last thread, Buckaroo Banzai. That is all.
SiubhanDuinne
Apart from the militancy, that’s not a bad description of my own beliefs.
gussie
What’s the difference between being a ‘militant agnostic’ regarding the existence of gods and being a Republican who says, “I dunno, I’m not a scientist?” regarding the impact of human activity on climate change?
RobertDSC-iPhone 4
First Sunday without football/handegg.
The Patriots are Super Bowl champions, I’ve got my champs t-shirt on, and it’s nice & sunny here in SoCal. I’m off to book shop shortly.
A good day.
Baud
@gussie:
Science.
Trentrunner
Are you comfortable declaring with authority that we weren’t created by a porcelain teapot orbiting Saturn?
I am.
And an omniscient, omnipotent, loving God creating all this has precisely as much evidence as the teapot.
So why aren’t you as comfortable with that?
The point is that something as grand and pervasive as God SHOULD have evidence, but doesn’t. And it’s perfectly logical to make claims about things for which there should be evidence but there is not.
And it’s faux-balance horseshit to claim “No one knows, and no one CAN know!” We should have evidence. We don’t.
Hen
a bumersticker seen in Black Mountain, NC sometime during the end of the 20th century:
MILITANT AGNOSTIC
I don’t know, and
you don’t know either.
gussie
@Baud: You’re claiming that according to science, the chance that human activity causes climate change is greater than the chance that god or gods actually exist?
ETA: And if 97% of physicists who’ve tested for the existence of god or gods determined that they didn’t exist, would agnosticism then be precisely the same as climate change denialism?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Buckaroo Benghazi is a nym Lindsey Graham uses on certain websites, according to people familiar with the rumor.
I think of myself as an atheist but allow for the possibility that I might be wrong, which I think kicks me back to agnostic, but I don’t really care. It all comes back to Grouchoism, no club that would want me as a member
Baud
@gussie:
No, I’m saying science speaks to one but not the other.
Corner Stone
@Trentrunner:
I think this is self-defeating. God is not logical because by definition he is a being for which we have no frame of reference. How do you know that the clovers in the field are not, in fact, evidence of His power and influence?
Why do people insist God must fit into some framework that we lesser beings could possibly understand?
Baud
I’m also not much of a joiner. I would have had a tough time in the military.
Hildebrand
Just wondering – has there ever been a group of people (pre-historic and historic) that have started out without some kind of belief system.
Trentrunner
And, as always, xkcd said it best: https://xkcd.com/774/
greennotGreen
Someone I know and otherwise respect is a militant atheist. As far as he is concerned, anyone who believes in a god or universal consciousness or life after death is irrational.
I think that each person should hold beliefs that comport with their own experience of reality. My experience may be different from yours. My interpretation of my experience may be flawed, but how can anyone else possibly know that? How can anyone sit enshrouded in their own personal experience and tell me mine is incorrect?
What I believe is that there’s something beyond this physical realm. I don’t know what it is; I don’t think my finite brain is capable of understanding what it might be. I know that to not believe it would be incompatible with my sense of life and the world. If someone else does not hear the Divine like a low-pitched hum through their life, that’s fine. I do. Don’t ask me to deny it. It’s possible that I’m hearing things. It’s possible that other people are deaf.
MattF
If you’re interested in history of religion, I’d add Diarmaid MacCulloch and Gershom Scholem to your list of authors. Both are erudite and readable– and Scholem’s book on Sabbatai Sevi (‘The Mystical Messiah’) is a classic. Also, I found Scholem’s earlier books on Kabbala addictive reading, but maybe that’s just me.
Corner Stone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I think you mean Dr. Big Booo-tayy!
Trentrunner
@Corner Stone: Well, that’s convenient, as the kids used to say.
The evidence of my God is all around us, but you just can’t know it or see it or otherwise detect it.
If that’s the case, then why the fuck is anyone anywhere making any claims about it? If God is beyond any detection of any kind in our world but exists only as a hypothetical construct, then keep it to yourself, just as I’ll keep it to myself that we are all really living our lives inside a snowglobe shaken by Michael Jackson’s ghost.
But I will add that note that every person–EVERY person–who trots out this unprovable hypothesis also WANTS it to be true.
And wishful thinking is one of the most pernicious cognitive biases.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Trentrunner:
Who’s to say that any God or gods that exist are omnipotent or loving? Given how vastly other species outnumber humans, we may not even be that important in the grand scheme of any God or gods.
The problem with a lot of atheists is that they seem to think that if they can disprove the Christian God in the modern translations of the Christian Bible, that proves that no kind of God or gods exists.
greennotGreen
@Trentrunner: Do you think an earthworm has recognizes the evidence for the existence of Jupiter?
There is one belief I hold that I’m absolutely convinced of: I don’t know so much. And I suspect you don’t either.
Hildebrand
@Trentrunner: Or, they are just willing to say that they don’t know. I am okay with not knowing, figure I will find out at some point. People who are dead certain about these kinds of things, one way or the other, scare the hell out of me.
hoodie
I would say I am a non-dogmatic atheist. Religion, at least in the Judeo-Christian forms with which I am familiar, seems clearly anthropomorphic, i.e., we made god in our image, so the old boy is immediately suspect as being made up and/or the product of delusion. Yeah, you can run into Christians that try to turn that faith into some sort of generalized mysticism, but I wouldn’t call that religion. I certainly am willing to be persuaded otherwise, but in 50+ years I haven’t been convinced that God exists and I’ve seen plenty to make me suspect he doesn’t. The problem with saying you’re agnostic is you’re giving up the presumption. I’d go further than saying that it’s unknowable whether god exists, because the evidence, while not conclusive, is tilted in the other direction.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Trentrunner:
If you were red/green colorblind, would you argue those colors don’t exist since you, personally, cannot detect them? After all, your only evidence is that the people around you say they see those colors. Maybe they’re just deluded, or lying to you.
Hildebrand
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): I have heard a great many atheists argue from a position that could only be called biblical literalism. Allow nuance into your scriptural exegesis and a great many problems start to fade away.
greennotGreen
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Good point.
Once, learned persons knew the sun circled the earth. Once, learned persons thought protein carried genetic material.
Science has been wrong, yet we haven’t abandoned science. In seeking the Divine we may stray onto erroneous paths, but that doesn’t mean we must give up on the search.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Hildebrand:
This is where I’m at, too. I’m unwilling to say categorically that there absolutely, positively is nothing that happens after death other than the body rotting away. It’s weird to me when people say that they know something for sure that is by definition unknowable.
NonyNony
@gussie:
Science can actually make a claim about climate change and the impact of human beings on the climate because the climate is an observable phenomenon that we can track, analyze, and otherwise explain.
God, on the other hand, remains hidden from view and won’t let us make an observations. Without observations science remains silent on the subject.
However I personally find the kind of militant agnosticism that Tim describes untenable. I’m agnostic about the existence of gods in general, but I can say that any god that exists is not simultaneously all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful. As evidence for this claim I present – the Earth and its history. See especially the suffering of animals for any refutation of the idea that there’s a god that exists that has all three attributes ascribed to the Christian God.
(If an omnipotent god exists, at best it’s probably a lot more like Loki or Coyote than the Christian God. Or possibly the God of Calvin who is not, in fact, all loving – the only way to make the omnipotent God idea work is to make him a vindictive asshole or vaguely indifferent prankster given the evidence. Or possibly Azathoth. I’d prefer to not worry about it unless such a god shows up and starts demanding worship or something.)
Amir Khalid
As far as I know, it’s impossible to determine scientifically whether or not God exists. The investigation of physical phenomena has so far led to the discovery only of other physical phenomena; I don’t see how it could lead anywhere else.
And if God did exist, I think it would not be a “person” as we understand such a thing. It would certainly not be the often abusive and insecure Super Father depicted in the scripture of the Abrahamic faiths.
patrick II
@RobertDSC-iPhone 4:
A real patriots fan would go back to Massachusetts and help the dig out.
the Conster
There is a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander who spent a week in a deep coma, who emerged determined to explain in scientific terms the hyper-reality spiritual realm he experienced, and his assessment of the brain’s relationship to the spiritual is that it functions as a filter – a bottleneck – that rather than the brain creating the mirage or hallucination of an afterlife in a near death experience situation, the brain’s filters are down and the spiritual realm – Sunyata – is allowed to be experienced. The sense of becoming one with everything and overwhelming peace that seems to be a universal response to near death experiences is in fact because that’s what we swim in, all the time, and is essentially inexplicable like Lao Tzu said, and Buddha taught. Our minds need to be pried open – way open, and religion will fall away like a vestigial organ.
@RobertDSC-iPhone 4:
I’m on the hunt for a t-shirt that says “The Butler did it, in the endzone, with a pick” that’s not from Amazon.
Schlemazel
I used to be an agnostic because I didn’t think I was smart enough to say for a fact there is no God. That after being raise going to Sunday School and church every week and a weekly bible study class. But eventually I came to the realization that there is no way a sane and in any way caring let alone loving god could ever allow the shit I have seen happen. I am now comfortable saying if there is a god he/she has a fuck of a lot to answer for and I would not want to spend eternity with a being who was – at best – disinterested in the suffering and struggles of their creation.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
And if you want to get really weird about it, “color” as we think about it doesn’t actually exist, and what we do perceive is extremely subjective. Humans don’t even see colors the same way other organisms do:
http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/06/q-do-colors-exist/
greennotGreen
@NonyNony: If a two year old whose mother and father won’t let him have candy were to have the communication skills of an adult, he would be able to talk about the tragic unfairness of his cruel and unloving parents.
The universes are vast and we are small. If God is as vast as the universes, our travails are infinitesimal. If death releases us from our tiny viewpoints to that vastness, we might see our miseries as so much lost bits of candy.
This does not mean, at least to me, that we don’t try to minimize the hardships people endure. If the lost candy doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, then it won’t matter if people don’t suffer.
Hildebrand
@Schlemazel: Rabbi Kushner said you could either have an all-loving God or an all-powerful God, but not both.
MattF
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): There’s an odd fact about color perception– the eye is capable of ‘sensing’ colors that don’t exist in nature. It’s possible to produce these color sensations in (roughly) the way one evokes various optical illusions, by altering the environments of ‘ordinary’ colors. So, e.g., it’s reportedly possible to make your garden greener-than-green with careful landscaping. All very weird.
wasabi gasp
…all its artifacts are bullshit.
Baud
@MattF:
I’ve read the real world is not as “green” as we perceive it. Camera sensors have twice the green pixels as they do red and blue in order to compensate.
Gary Panos
@the Conster: In a wide-ranging investigation of Eben Alexander’s story and medical background, Esquire magazine reported (August 2013 issue) that prior to the publication of Proof of Heaven, Alexander had been terminated or suspended from multiple hospital positions, and had been the subject of several malpractice lawsuits, including at least two involving the alteration of medical records to cover up a medical error. The magazine also found what it claimed were discrepancies with regard to Alexander’s version of events in the book. Among the discrepancies, according to an account of the Esquire article in Forbes, was that “Alexander writes that he slipped into the coma as a result of severe bacterial meningitis and had no higher brain activity, while a doctor who cared for him says the coma was medically induced and the patient was conscious, though hallucinating.”
Unfortunately, the Esquire article is behind a paywall. I read it, and Mr. Alexander comes across as the fraud that he is.
Tim F.
@Hen: Zactly.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@greennotGreen:
It does usually seem that when people genuinely get in touch with something that I would call “the divine,” the message they get is, Stop being assholes to each other. All of the other stuff seems like window dressing to me.
Amir Khalid
@the Conster:
I’m not convinced that Dr Eben Alexander saw anything but a dream state during his week in a coma.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@MattF:
I took a color knitting class and one of the things we discussed is that your perception of a color alters based on what colors are surrounding it. One shade of green will look more yellow next to one color, but more blue next to a different color.
the Conster
@Amir Khalid:
As a neuroscientist he would have said the exact same thing until his experience taught him otherwise. Now he’s on a mission to explain why it wasn’t using his lifetime of medicine and scienctific knowledge. I’ve heard him speak about it and he’s extremely compelling.
BruceFromOhio
Gaia smiles at this. May She bless your lands, your loves, and your lives.
@Hen: LOL.
@greennotGreen: Ah! The more you know, the more you know how much you really don’t know. It’s like the mobius strip of human awareness.
raven
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
Some say once you’re gone you’re gone forever, and some say you’re gonna come back.
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour if in sinful ways you lack.
Some say that they’re comin’ back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
Gary Panos
@the Conster: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/07/02/esquire-unearths-proof-of-heaven-authors-credibility-problems/
Tim F.
@MattF: Thanks, I will follow up on those suggestions.
@greennotGreen: One of the most elegant and compelling comments I have ever seen.
MattF
@raven: She’s so great. Also, ‘Our Town’.
raven
@MattF: “Easy’s gettin harder every day” is pretty devastating.
Tim F.
@Amir Khalid: That is most likely true, but I would not discount the usefulness of trying to understand that dream state. One of the reasons I am perfectly comfortable with religion and other ways of embracing the ineffable is that a whole lot of ineffable things are perfectly real, science just hasn’t got to them yet. Without any way to know for sure which ineffable things are hokum and which will produce fascinating and valuable insights, we might as well leave space for any hokum that isn’t actively hurting anyone.
brent
I don’t know where this definition comes from but it certainly doesn’t describe how most of the people I grew up with – very religious people – think about their faith. On the contrary, their religion is about revealing God to human understanding. The attempt to define God as being outside of observability has always stuck me more as an attempt to avoid confrontation and argument around a pretty shaky set of claims than any real principle.
Indeed, the whole attempt to define agnosticism as something separate from atheism has always had that sort of ring to me. I, as an atheist, say Lepruchans don’t exist. You, as a militant agnostic, say well, technically, Leprechauns could exist, just in a way that we will never be able to explain or demonstrate to any other observer. The world of Leprechauns exist in such a way that it is with respect to everything that we can actually observe and in every context that actually matters (how lucky I may be at the craps table for instance) functionally identical to their being no such thing as Leprechauns. Well, I suppose thats true but it doesn’t strike me as a particularly useful distinction.
jeffreyw
I like pie!
raven
Well, I sent this to Betty and Anne but they are out of the loop so I’m bringing it up now. There is a lot of negative stuff about sports here at BJ. I think it’s healthy but I also think that when someone like Dean Smith dies it’s worth taking a look at who he was beyond the court. I was never a Carolina fan but I love the game and the Heels are an intergral part of it. So,. . .
BillinGlendaleCA
@patrick II: Is this the latest “Big Dig”?
the Conster
@Amir Khalid:
Also, what exactly is a “dream state”? Everything the mind can conjure reflects consciousness, and reality as Dr. Alexander notes is really quite subjective – it’s what your brain allows your mind to process through its filter. Reality comes down to an agreement amongst a group as to what is perceived.
Buddy H
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Father Guido Sarducci, on UFOs:
“I once saw a UFO near Bologna. I was driving from Assisi on this road here, and it was late at night, and from nowhere there were these two giant white lights and it just zoomed right past me real fast and it just seemed to disappear. It was about ten feet long I would say — real sleek looking — looked a lot like a Corvette. And as soon as it was gone I said to myself, did I see that or not? And you see, that’s what they do to you. They shoot you with something, some kind of ray gun — and it makes you doubt that you saw them. If you think you’ve never seen one, you probably see them all the time.“
MattF
@raven: And it is a big deal. Standing up for the right thing is no small accomplishment, and I’m sure it mattered in Topeka.
raven
@MattF: He protested the war in Vietnam and the death penalty as well and that was in North Carolina.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: I don’t think you’ll ever convince Burnsy that there was anything good about him.
Baud
@raven:
I hope they front page it.
raven
@MattF:
piratedan
@Corner Stone: “well, no matter where you go, there you are…..”
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: Xin Loi!
BruceFromOhio
@raven: That’s pretty sweet, thank you for sharing that. This stood out, too:
The man knew how to put together teams that could win.
Corey
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Let’s follow this analogy to its logical conclusion. Suppose I’m red-green colorblind. You come to me and demonstrate that most people can pass the pseudo-isochromatic plates color vision test. To prove there’s no spoof, you give me the tools to construct some plates myself; even though I’m unable to read my own plates, you can. You then explain to me how photoreceptors work and how genetic variations can result in individuals who lack some kinds of them.
Do I believe you? Indeed I do. Why? You offered evidence about some regularity of the structure of the universe that had predictable consequences.
raven
@BruceFromOhio: It’s a Worthy topic!
Pogonip
@Hildebrand: Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist, as Mark Shea says. Both groups understand Christianity exactly the same way: poorly. They may not understand the other religions, either.
Pogonip
@the Conster: I read his book; extremely interesting.
The Dangerman
Trying to prove or disprove the existence of The Divine to someone else is a fools journey; each has to find his or her own way. Namaste.
Now, if we were to postulate there is no Divine, there would be an argument that Man would be the most intelligent beings in the Universe. I would find that profoundly troubling.
Pogonip
This I believe: that Cole should post more frequent pupdates.
Everything else, who knows?
MikeBoyScout
Perhaps the best argument for agnosticism is the, to date, unexplained frequent appearance of deities in food and food products.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/arielknutson/people-who-found-jesus-in-their-food?s=mobile
Where is science when we need it?
Emma
‘For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.’ Stuart Chase
“There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?” Robert Heinlein
This is the silliest argument ever in this place and that’s saying something.
Baud
@Pogonip:
Your god is my god.
the Conster
@piratedan:
“the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once”
BillinGlendaleCA
Anybody here ever use Bluetooth trackers, I’ve left my wallet at home several times. I’m a bit frustrated after walking(or driving!) to a store and find that I’m wallet-less. I’m looking at Tiles.
jl
Gun nuts protest Washington gun sale restriction initiative passed by state voters. The good news, IIRC, is that the organizer claimed several thousand would show up. News reports said 50 showed up to swagger through the WA state capitol with the pieces hanging out.
Armed gun-rights advocates rally at Washington state capitol
” Their complaints against state government stem from the 2014 passage of Initiative 594 by voters statewide. It imposed new background-check requirements on several types of gun transfers, including purchases and loans, and opponents say the new law infringes on firearm rights guaranteed in the state and federal constitutions. ”
…
State Reps. Elizabeth Scott and Matt Shea addressed the crowd. Shea, R-Spokane Valley, gave a fiery speech that included a list of more than 20 grievances against the government, including militarization of police, high taxes, surveillance programs, Sharia law and restrictions on guns. Scott, R-Monroe, opened her coat to show the crowd her pistol.
“I carry at least one gun every day,” Scott said, “because a cop is too heavy and a guard is too heavy.”
http://news.yahoo.com/armed-gun-rights-advocates-rally-washington-state-capitol-213750603.html
I didn’t know WA had Sharia Law. That damn Jay Inslee! A Democrat traitor!!!
Tim F.
@brent: I think the Old and New Testaments make pretty clear that people do not have the capacity to understand what God does or why. In both books He uses both a carrot and a stick (lots of sticks) to persuade people to go along with His plan, but in both cases He does not exactly encourage us to figure out His thinking.
In other words the Divine Mystery is not like a Hardy Boys mystery where we’re expected to figure it all out by the last chapter.
Baud
@jl:
They are protesting the government because of a voter initiative?
BillinGlendaleCA
@jl:
He’s just following the lead of the muslin sochilist in the White House.
Amir Khalid
@Emma:
Arguing is fun, and therefore never silly.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
No, it’s not.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: That is correct, they want the peoples will to prevail. Eh, wait a minute..
Chris T.
One problem with atheism is the same as one problem with theism: you must pick a definition (or as many definitions as you care to) for the term “god”.
There are quite a few specific gods (or uppercase versions) that I don’t believe in, but given any sufficiently slippery definition, I won’t say that I disbelieve, just that I mostly don’t care. :-)
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I came here for an argument, not abuse.
the Conster
@Tim F.:
The Old Testament god is a fucking bigoted side-choosing asshole. That was what turned me off at a very young age to religion, even though in my little white Methodist congregation Sunday school we were taught that the New Testament god is love. Sorry, god doesn’t get to be both, and the fact that god… what – got more sentimental in his old age, now that he has a “son” – so we non-Hebrews just have to forget all about the land grabbing and slaying He commanded earlier in his god career? Really? It’s just a bunch of man made fucking bullshit nonsense, and I came to this conclusion at the age of 6. YMMV.
Corey
@BillinGlendaleCA:
No you didn’t.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m calling for a new rotating tag
fleeting expletive
Can someone please tell me how to turn the Scroll Lock feature OFF on my MacPro? I don’t know how it got turned on and it’s a pain in the ass. I googled and wikipedia’d it and the Apple site tells me something about an F14 button which my keyboard doesn’t have. Scroll lock has made my computer time seriously frustrating.
Thank you, someone, I’d really appreciate some advice.
jl
@raven: @raven:
Thanks for info. I didn’t know all that about Dean Smith.
The first black professional golf player died this week, Charlie Sifford, who I do not recall hearing about before.
Gary Player introduced him at his Golf Hall of Fame induction. I had heard Player was a racist and big supporter of apartheid, but looks like not true or he changed his beliefs at some points. Wiki says he was in trouble with South Africa Nationalist government for bringing black players to South Africa and promoting racial integration in sports.
Charlie Sifford induction to Golf World Hall of Fame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49beEipdd2s
Charlie Sifford gave a moving and funny speech.
marduk
Yeah, that’s the exact argument that led me to the realization that agnosticism is untenable. There’s an infinite set of assertions you have no evidence for. Do we take the same stance toward them all?
Nobody pretends agnosticism about Cthulu. But by the logic of agnosticism, one must.
Hildebrand
@Tim F.: Yep – YHWH’s speech toward the end of the book of Job addresses this notion, which I find to be an interesting construction of the human understanding of the divine.
jl
@marduk:
I am an agnostic, but I damn well know Cthulu.exists. I see its influence every day in the news.
BillinGlendaleCA
@fleeting expletive: I think you’ll have to go to the Apple Store and buy an iF14 key. I hear they’re on sale for $200.
ETA: Though not an Apple user, I suspect it’s a key combination.
srv
Was 15 when I realized the last place I’d want to spend eternity was with the god botherers in heaven.
Then I worried I’d still end up with them in hell.
Perhaps the parties are good in purgatory.
srv
@fleeting expletive: SHIFT+FN+F12 ?
Or reset your keyboard shortcuts to default.
Buddy H
@srv: Perhaps the parties are good in purgatory. Limbo used to be a cool place to hang out, with all the unbaptized babies, but it was closed I think a few years ago.
Baud
@jl:
His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention will convince the unbelievers.
Schlemazel
@Hildebrand:
Perhaps I should read Reb Kurshner but did he say why? the two are not mutually exclusive.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@fleeting expletive: I see some threads claiming that you’ll have to use a USB keyboard that has a shift lock button. Another suggests SHIFT+FN+F12. Yet another says there should be a picture of a keyboard in the taskbar at the bottom of the screen that will have a scroll lock in it. And another says to try SYSTEM PREFERENCES>KEYBOARD>KEYBOARD and look in the function box.
Disclaimer: I own nothing Apple, so I can’t say that any of those suggestions actually make sense.
jl
@Hildebrand: I think Job is the last book in the Bible where God is portrayed as directly addressing humans. The last book of Jewish bible with the Old School God:
from Job 1
6 One day the angels[a] came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan[b] also came with them. 7 The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?”
Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.”
8 Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”
9 “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied. 10 “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. 11 But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.”
12 The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your power, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.”
Chris
@Hildebrand:
There certainly seems to be a consensus between Christian fundamentalists and the more militant atheists that Christian fundamentalism is the only valid interpretation of Christianity, and that anyone who isn’t a complete monster therefore doesn’t count and is not a true Christian. And then the lambasting of the “moderates” begins.
Kind of reminds me of the left wing puritans of the old days who loathed FDR and his ilk for being capitalist while failing to display the proper degree of cruel, oppressive, exploitative greed.
the Conster
@Gary Panos:
I will try to find that article, but if some of those things are true, it doesn’t mean everything he says is false.
jl
@Baud:
” His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention will convince the unbelievers. ”
And reinforce my agnosticism. I don’t believe a thing anyone says there.
JPL
@srv: The Catholic church lost me when I was old enough to realize that they preached unbaptized souls went to purgatory. This applied to infants who died shortly after birth. I’m not sure if that is still the teaching but at the time, I remember thinking nice god you got there.
also.. buddy reminded me it was limbo not purgatory. I’m glad it was closed.
Schlemazel
That is hilariously stupid.
Buddy H
@Baud: His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention will convince the unbelievers.
You mean the Kochs found someone more likable than Scott Walker?
Schlemazel
Beautiful! This explains so much
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@the Conster: You are aware of Eben Alexander’s history I hope? He was at the time of his coma, a man in need of reinvention. The Prophet, from Esquire.
I give him mad props however, for inspiring the Dalai Lama to point and laugh. That takes talent.
@Gary Panos: Or beaten to the punch. It’s not behind a paywall for me, but I bought access to a copy because it’s so important.
Schlemazel
@Chris:
Nice that you can create an atheist monster via strawman. Because of my upbringing I can argue the strict interpretation stand point but I don’t unless someone wants to take that side. Many of the worst bits of organized religion are not common to all religious people but none of the good bits cease to exist without religion.
Chris
@JPL:
I think it’s the concept of hell I had the most trouble with as a child. The inherent contradiction between the concept of an all-forgiving God (who’d actually bothered to come down to Earth and die horribly for everyone’s sins, no less) and an eternal punishment from which there could be no escape was quite blatant.
Despite frequent jokes to the contrary, I really didn’t believe anyone deserved that – and I didn’t think an all-forgiving God would believe that either.
fleeting expletive
Thank all of you for your suggestions. I just tried the SHIFT + FN + F12, and all it did was confirm that F12 is maximum speaker volume. I guess I’ll just futz around some more and hope for serendipity.
Corey
@jl:
That’s not Cthulhu in the news — that’s Moloch.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
In moderation for one too many links.
brent
@Tim F.:
I disagree that either the Old or New Testament is as clear on the concept as you seem to think and in any case, any definition of religion certainly expand well beyond the bounds of the bible of Abrahamic religions. But no point on getting into that because that is all really beside my point.
My point is that, in my experience, religion is understood by the religious as a way to “know” God. I daresay I haven’t, in my life, spent more than an hour around someone discussing their faith where they didn’t use that exact phrase. Whether that means they know God’s “thinking” as you put it, is a disputable point. But they absolutely believe that things like Bible study and prayer reveals God’s will to them.
In other words, in their understanding of religion, and really, their understanding is what matters to me here far more than any kind of abstract philosophical conceptualization, God is absolutely knowable. Religion, employing both ritual and study, is the means through which one actually gains this knowledge and forms a relationship to the divine.
The reason this matters is that because when I say I am an atheist, what I am saying is that I don’t accept that what they are referring to as knowledge is actually knowledge. Among other reasons, they wish to apply what they “know” of God’s will in both positive and negative ways to the world around them and so the foundation of this “knowledge” deserves to be confronted with some very pointed skepticism.
But the whole “militant agnostic” bit seems to me to be a case of avoiding this confrontation. Of saying really, that even if beliefs themselves can be consequential, the foundation of religious belief is not because it is, by definition, formed from an unknowable premise. One, that definition is one that many religious people would rather strongly disagree with. Two, I don’t think the distinction matters much in principle.
Chris
@Schlemazel:
Didn’t say that they did. I’d know; I haven’t been religious in some time.
JPL
Who said …
This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.”
Sarah..
Huck
other
all of the above
the Conster
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
“Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.”
– Joseph Campbell
jl
@Hildebrand:
I was going to paste in end of Job, but too long, so I summarize. Job laments his misfortunes and demands an explanation from God, a damn personal explanation and maybe(?) an apology. God comes in a whirlwind and says “what the hell, who are you, where were you when I made the earth buddy?” Then Job responds saying either contritely or sarcastically (I think it is unclear which), “yeah you are big and I am small and you know stuff I don’t”.
Kind of an ambiguous ending. A nice touch is that both Job and God tell Job’s piously religious moralizing scolds that they are jackasses who should shut the F up.
Buddy H
@the Conster: I remember the Esquire article. Some serious investigative journalism. Alexander had been in some serious malpractice trouble. The author of the piece spoke to the attending physicians, who contradicted the details of his hospital stay. Halfway through the piece, you can tell Alexander is getting nervous about the direction the whole thing is taking. I believe he thought it would be just another puff piece for publicity.
jl
@JPL:
” This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.”
The famous logician Kurt Goedel said something more or less like that. He was a Lutheran and apparently believe in a personal god and an afterlife. But he also was a little funny in the head and went into paranoid episodes where he thought mysterious people, maybe ghosts, were trying to poison him. I think Goedel might have gone crazy from reading too much Spinoza and taking him too seriously. (Edit: he claimed he was a Platonist who thought that the infinite number of increasingly infinite infinities were really real things, like that table over there. So he believed in several types of things that cannot be observed empirically.)
My experience, personally and from what I read is that something close to conventional religious belief is more common among mathematicians than other numbers type people. You want a cold atheist, go find a biologist.
Amir Khalid
@the Conster:
If some of Esquire’s allegations against Dr Alexander are true, then one must be sceptical of his other claims.
Hildebrand
@Schlemazel: He was arguing that in order to understand theodicy, an all-loving and all-powerful God doesn’t seem to make sense. He was willing to give up on god’s omnipotence in order to preserve the all-loving nature, because he couldn’t understand god’s seeming capriciousness any other way. Either god can do anything, and chooses not to, even when those loved are harmed (he was thinking most specifically of the Holocaust, but not exclusively), or god loves and suffers when we suffer. (It has been quite a few years since reading his book, so I may be fumbling his understanding a bit.)
JPL
@jl: google helped me with that one but it was used in a speech by the most notorious monster of our modern times. Here’s another one although Sarah or Huck wouldn’t speak in such terms because it’s not quite folksy enough.
We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments ……… The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession….”
Hildebrand
@jl: I think that is why I like Job so much, because the pious economy-based scolds are shown as useless hacks.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Amir Khalid: I am, in that I believe he made the whole thing up. The Esquire article is well worth the $3-4 USD to unlock the paywall. I read it at the time and wanted to continue to have access to it.
jl
@Hildebrand: The struggle between Job and God seems to me to be an extended revisit and elaboration on the mysterious episode of Jacob wrestling the supernatural something or other, an angel, or God, at the river.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Amir Khalid: Which is exactly what the Dalai Lama said!
Buddy H
@fleeting expletive: I guess I’ll just futz around some more and hope for serendipity. My life story.
jl
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Buddhists would be classified as atheists, and they believe in too many afterlifes, heavens and hells and reincarnations to count, and they are all illusions anyway. So, I don’t see why they would lake excited tales of visiting THE afterlife very seriiously.
Steve from Antioch
I declare with authority that God does no exist.
I declare with authority that rainbow shitting unicorns do not exist.
So both of those sentences would make you not take someone seriously?
Tree With Water
@Baud: Then again, the writer William Manchester was pleasantly surprised by how quickly he took to Parris Island boot camp during WW2. He wrote later that by understanding its purpose, he easily adapted to its various regimens. Not that boot camp did him any good a year later, when a mortar shell shredded him and his fellow Marines towards the end of the Okinawa fight. He survived and prospered, but lived with a damaged brain from that day forward.
Hildebrand
@jl: Martin Luther spent a great deal talking about the ‘hidden’ and ‘revealed’ god, and that even when god revealed himself in the Jewish bible, he still remained hidden. Then again, Luther was often thinking in these kinds of ways, even to the point where he said that we shouldn’t try to read the mind of God, gets one into rather a lot of trouble (which is why he didn’t agree with the whole predestination business). The whole question of the knowledge of god – and how humans ‘know’ anything about the divine is infinitely more nuanced than most right-wing Christians would like to admit.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@jl: They wouldn’t take the excited tale seriously at all. I believe the usual response to such visions during meditation is to focus again on your breathing; the fit will soon pass.
Corner Stone
@Trentrunner: No, I argue the exact opposite. It is, in fact, the most inconvenient thing or idea possible.
A God or being who has so little compassion, and for whom we can never have any inkling of understanding or basis for what love truly is.
One needs to hold to a set if circumstance that is an impossible load. Just to have a shot at regaining His love.
I contend that we here are all in Hell, which is the absence of His light, or His love. To be denied His presence is the same as wandering blind in the darkness.
What kind of foolish mind says with such certainty that a being who created all the rules, and exists outside time and space, must cohesively exist in a way that we can understand.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@jl:
The Esquire author describing a conversation with Dr. Alexander.
Baud
@Tree With Water:
It’s impossible to know unless you go through it. I’m, of course, guessing based on my impression of military life and my only slightly clearer impression of myself.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@raven: Awesome link, thanks for posting it.
Keith G
What, no Grammy thread?
Music is my religion.
pat
After many years of not actually categorizing my “belief” or lack thereof, I went to a Catholic Palm Sunday service with my sister-in-law, a nun, in Austria. The service is very much as I remember it from my youth in the Episcopal church. But when they got to the “and on the third day…..” I suddenly thought to myself, This is a fairy tale. Someone made this up a couple of thousand years ago…..
My personal belief is that religion was concocted by men who wanted to keep the women (and other men) in line. And it is still being used for that purpose.
Have not had time to read the thread, looking forward to it tomorrow!
Baud
@Keith G:
AC/DC opened with Highway to Hell. So we use this thread and stay on topic.
Keith G
Sam Smith gets a trophy!!
Corner Stone
@Keith G:
Sounds like a made up name, if you ask me.
Baud
@Keith G:
The British always have an edge.
Corner Stone
@pat:
I don’t know about “concocted” but it certainly was organized that way.
Corner Stone
@Keith G: Why is this duck faced person on my teebee?
Violet
Not on topic but funny if someone wants to troll. Sarah Palin is speaking at a some leadership lecture series on Thursday.
The paper that’s sponsoring it, the Odessa American, is asking for people to suggest questions to ask her.
Some of the responses are pretty funny. Like:
Heh.
Corner Stone
Oh, God. Not Top Gun.
Keith G
@Corner Stone: I guess you mean Ariana Grande. I know nuttin about her.
But OMG Tom Jones still has pipes.
Baud
@Violet:
And they chose Palin?
jl
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I went to a couple of weekend Buddhist meditation retreats to see what it was all about. One of them was pretty strict ‘staring at the wall’ meditation which I do not think I will try again -don’t seem to be cut out for it. The one where they did working, and walking and different sorts of meditation was easier for me to handle. They said to throw all of our concepts into the garbage can for the weekend, everything we ever though about ourselves. The one where we stared at a wall for, well pretty much the whole time all weekend, they said if we saw or heard or felt anything that seems mysterious or supernatural, so we should just wait it out, it was all nonsense, and it should go away all by itself, if it didn’t we should get up and talk with one of the meditation supervisors about what was happening.
The one where we stared at a wall, there was a motorcycle repair shop nearby that opened up around 10 AM. We had been meditating since 5 AM. All of a sudden all this noise and racket started. People complained that they could not meditate with all the noise. The lady in charge said ‘what do you people know about meditation? The noise is part of the meditation.’
The food was great at both places, is what I remember most vividly, even if it was very vegetarian.
Keith G
@Baud: The Brits have an ideal setup in place to nurture talent.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: We were kickstarters with Tile. I took 2 years to get them and the work fine for something like when you think you left them somewhere. They show you where it is but if you are like me, and I think you are, they are really hard to hear when they beep.
Poopyman
@Baud:
Fergit it, Baud. It’s Texas.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@fleeting expletive:
Is it doing it in all your apps or just in your browser? I had this problem in Firefox after the housecat trampled on the keyboard. I did a search and found the solution was something simple like shift-F8.
JPL
God punished me … ugh.. Is anyone having problems with the pbs feed in the Atlanta area? Downton comes on at nine and I’m getting sound only. I actually pick up several pbs and pba feeds and only the main channel is a problem . .
Baud
@Keith G:
You talking about Simon Cowell?
raven
@jl: I went to a Soto Zen center for about 6 months for hour long mediation sessions. It was right on a bus stop and that made it a challenge.
the Conster
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
I’m inclined to take his side in this. The “forest for the trees” analogy he uses is apt. It really doesn’t matter why or how he came to it, but he’s become compelled to share something he believes is beneficial for everyone to allay their fear of dying – the fear religion uses to manipulate and control – to let go of religious dogma and become more fully awake to the vast ocean of universal consciousness that we’ve always been swimming in, that no ideology can stake an exclusive claim to.
jl
@Steve from Antioch:
” I declare with authority that God does no exist.
I declare with authority that rainbow shitting unicorns do not exist. ”
Are you the one that is to come, or should we expect another?
jl
@raven: OK, but did they feed you?
Man, the food was great at the two places I went to, even though it was almost vegan type vegetarian. At one place, the cook pointed out all the stuff with milk or eggs in it so the vegans could avoid it. One woman was a ‘no honey’ vegan, since the bees were exploited when humans stole their honey. So, OK, fine, more of the cornbread for the rest of us.
edit: “hour long mediation sessions”: missed that bit. Probably no grub then.
Keith G
@Baud: No. Among others:
-Pub culture in a limited geography.
-A state run media that actually searches out new talent and provide access to multiple platforms.
-An hour or so away from major urban centers on continental Europe.
Corner Stone
Miranda Lambert, anyone?
JPL
@raven: Are you able to watch pbs? I can get the children’s channel and the other channel.. but not the main one. I’m getting sound only.
Corner Stone
Pentatonic!
Oh, wait. Barry Gibb!
Corner Stone
Why is a beer maker winning a Grammy?
the Conster
Tom Petty will be laughing and laughing all the way to the bank…
Tree With Water
@jl: “..since the bees were exploited when humans stole there honey”. Damn capitalists- always at the throat of collectives, including mother nature’s own.
Gin & Tonic
My back-of-the-envelope calculations tell me that today I shoveled between three and four tons of snow off the garage roof.
raven
@JPL: Wow, me too! ESPN 1 and 2 HD were out yesterday but the analog was on. I just checked both PBS’s and it’s audio only. I was told there was a fiber optic cable cut somewhere. Funny but I get the subtitles. Now it all went off.
raven
Now it’s on!
JPL
@raven: it’s back
raven.. ha.. I really like Grantchester too
Corner Stone
Nicki Minaj must be 4 feet tall.
the Conster
@jl:
Does the no honey vegan eat fruits and vegetables that are picked? Real vegans only eat windfall.
Corner Stone
Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Madonna?
raven
@JPL: We just watched the Hepburn Philadelphia Story.
raven
Better Call Saul 10pm.
the Conster
PATRIOTS!!!! SUCK IT H8ERS
ETA: Tom Petty should have won because symmetry, but love Beck who hasn’t aged one bit.
BruceFromOhio
@jl: One of those Level Five Vegan types, eh?
Stop breathing, your stealing my oxygen!
Pappenheimer
Mencken’s hypothesis that first priest=first really successful con man has always made the most sense to me, but I also find interesting the hypothesis that religion is a by product of our ability to form into large groups and thereby displace or eliminate other hominids; you can’t get a chimpanzee to die for king/country/72 virgins, so Pan is still hanging out in Africa and some laboratories while H Sapiens inherited the earth – and the bones of his/her competitors.
(Sorry for the run on sentence)
Regarding the truth of the untestable, it is certainly worth arguing over but not worth killing over.
the Conster
@Gin & Tonic:
but it’s a dry snow…
Gin & Tonic
@the Conster: My back hurts.
the Conster
@Gin & Tonic:
Think of it as building character.
Keith G
Ed Sheeran….Amazing talent
Gin & Tonic
@the Conster: You’re not helping.
Elizabelle
@Keith G: Anne’s put up a Grammys thread.
Joining late. Bummed to have missed Kanye.
ETA: ELO? Interesting.
Corner Stone
@Gin & Tonic:
The Man can’t ride you unless your back is bent over.
Keith G
@Elizabelle: Cool. Thx for the h/u.
Librarian
I believe in peanut butter.
Gordon
@raven: I like that one from Iris Dement. And although I try not to derive too much of my religious philosophy from country music lyrics, I also really like this one from Lubbock, TX songwriter Cary Swinney: “I was born into the mystery, and into the mystery I will go.”
kdaug
@Hildebrand:
FTFW. Though, the dead can be scary.
Ruckus
If, and it’s a huge if, there is a god I agree with Stephen Fry. All the moralizing, sermons, rituals, chiseled rocks, guilt and blind acceptance hasn’t moved mankind forward an inch in thousands of years. Most every religion I’ve studied has at some point in it’s lifetime been used by at least a good portion of it’s followers/leaders as a bludgeon rather than a guide. I see no upside and huge downsides to letting mystical practices inform and guide my life.
mainmati
Hi Tim, I believe you are a Pittsburgher. I grew up in Pittsburgh’s well-known, predominantly Jewish neighborhood, Squirrel Hill (though I was raised Catholic; am not any longer). I loved Squirrel Hill (and Pittsburgh was a great city to grow up in). Did you live in Squirrel Hill? If so, where?
JimV
For some reason people who aren’t atheists like to tell me what I mean by calling myself an atheist. They’re usually wrong. This is what I mean:
Just as asymmetrical means lacking symmetry, atheist means lacking theism, that is, lacking belief in any theistic god. A theistic god is one who takes a personal interest in humans.
Agnostic/gnostic are orthogonal to atheism/theism. An agnostic doesn’t know for sure/is uncertain about, that about which he or she is agnostic. A gnostic knows. So one can be an agnostic atheist (doesn’t believe in any gods, doesn’t know whether any exist or not) or a gnostic atheist (is certain there are no gods).
Richard Dawkins, for example, defines himself as an agnostic atheist, although very close to being a gnostic atheist (he is almost but not completely certain there are no gods).
I’m also an agnostic atheist, but right up there with Richard Dawkins: a) I know of no convincing evidence that any god exists – liars like Eben are much more plausible to me than the hear-say reports of miracles and UFO’s; and b) the god hypothesis doesn’t really explain anything. It’s more of an excuse for not having an explanation. (I call it the “god ate my homework” excuse.)
Examples from human history to illustrate the latter point:
Why does it rain? Answer: the rain god makes it rain.
Why does fire burn? Answer: the fire god makes it burn.
As Karl Popper said, a theory which explains everything explains nothing.
As for the question of an afterlife, we know that damage to various specific regions of the brain causes: loss of memory; loss of ability to recognize shapes; loss of emotions; and changes in personality, among other things. Therefore it seems likely to me that when the brain dies, our existence ends. As cosmologist Sean Carroll says,we should appreciate the one life we will have, try to make good use of it, and help the others who are alive at the same time.
mainmati
@Hen: That’s always been my position, too. Being an atheist is affirming something that is simply unprovable, i.e. that there is no omniscient (or any other) “God” that created the Universe and is responsible for everything. Yes, the proposition is ridiculous, but it is also unprovable because it is not subject to proof only belief.
mainmati
@Pappenheimer: Agreed. Good post.
Marmot
It’s so weird to hear otherwise intelligent people exclaim how supernatural woo is maybe true–but maybe not! You wouldn’t be so wishy washy about other wild claims, if they did not also serve your fondest wishes.
So ridiculous.
Omnes Omnibus
@Marmot: Question: If a person is decent, why would you care about the person’s religious beliefs? The same if the person is horrible…. Isn’t the question whether the person is decent or not? Not what their religious beliefs are?
brent
@Omnes Omnibus:
I can’t speak for Marmot obviously but I would say that whether one cares about another person’s beliefs or not sort of misses the point. Oddly, I know plenty of perfectly decent people who believe in bizarre Government conspiracies about UFOs and such. I may or may not care about someone else’s belief but that is not necessarily related to whether I think those beliefs are reasonable which I think is the crux of the issue here.
Setting aside whether decent/non-decent is such an easy categorization criterion, I don’t think it matters much to the question of whether the things people believe actually make sense. If I am defining my own belief, as Tim F is doing in his post, as an atheist I am happy to take and defend the position that it is reasonable to believe that deities do not exist and less reasonable to believe the opposite. Tim F finds that position to be untenable in its certainty. The decency of the believer is not really germane to that disagreement.
Caravelle
Oh, look, another militant agnostic who thinks they’re the only one who’s watched the Matrix.
Theism or Atheism isn’t whether you know, at the 100% proof level, with no grain of doubt whatsoever, whether there’s a God, it’s a description of what your opinion is on the question.
Not even that, because at the most basic level atheism is commonly used just to mean you lack a belief in Gods, not that you have any particular belief in their nonexistence.
But I’m a strong atheist, i.e. I do believe there isn’t a God, and appeals to “but we don’t know everything” don’t change it. I also believe there aren’t any purple kangaroos in Amazonia, and that’s even though there are tons and tons of species in Amazonia we haven’t discovered yet, so I can’t know there aren’t purple kangaroos there. But I know enough about kangaroos, Amazonia and animals en general to think it’s very probably not true that there are purple kangaroos in Amazonia, and if we did find any it would lead me to revise most of what I thought I knew about biology, ecology, and paleontology. Of course there’s always a “grain of doubt”, but who are you to tell me how big my grain of doubt should be? Have you carefully evaluated all of my reasons behind my opinion and calculated that the the amount of doubt I display is inappropriate with respect to them?
It’s all the stranger seeing a militant agnostic be OK with religion but be rubbed the wrong way by Dawkins or Hitchens, who never denied that “grain of doubt”. Because no religious person has every claimed to “know the answers”.
cokane
Agnostics are just atheists playing intellectual one-up-man-ship. Poorly.
Look you can go through a myriad list of things that we can never know about, but you don’t believe in any of them. God is just one of those things. Almost no atheist runs around saying that they know there is no god, so what are you even defining yourself against? Virtually every atheist is agnostic.
cokane
Many commenters here are pushing back against strong atheist arguments. Saying it’s intellectually dishonest to say that God/the afterlife/the soul is bullshit. Because apparently those things are unknowable.
But people forget that the modern concept of God in most religions is unknowable by design, not by circumstance. Ancient believers of Christianity/Judaism/Islam had lots of supposed real-world evidence for why they believed. The vault of heaven. Miracles. Human diaspora.
As real knowledge progressed the domain of the Lord shrank and shrank. Such has been the history of the idea of God. An ever receding circle of ignorance. If you want to play the game where you get insert God or whatever magical faith into the unknown that science has yet to explain, that’s fine. Just don’t pretend like that requires intellectual rigor and be prepared to calibrate your faith as science progresses.
brantl
There is enough cultural evidence that people form gods that are culturally in their own image. (As life improved, the Judaic vengeful god became a forgiving God, with his “son” taking on the mantle of humanity, to be killed by us, for our forgiveness (mishuganeh! (SP(?)).So, the likelihood is, any particular religion is the result of “I-want-to-feel-good-about-what-happens-to-me-when-I-die” is almost a lock. The “teapot circling Saturn” is spot-on.
brantl
@Corner Stone: Because in all of the religions, god is always concerned that people believe in him, and if that’s true, and god has any real effect in the world, then the world as it is, would lead all good people to believe in him, and it doesn’t, in my opinion, what about yours? I think that, at least in Christianity, if God created the earth, created man, and is all knowing and all powerful, then God has created an imperfectly programmed AI robot, and is blaming.the robot for the imperfections that he inculcated into the design, even though he should have, and theoretically did, know better.
brantl
@Tim F.: There is seldom any hokum that isn’t hurting anyone.
Caravelle
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
Except that there would be extremely consistent (and not just superficially consistent, if at all) agreement between people who claimed to see red and green over which things were red and which things were green. Also, the moment I had the technology to understand how light, eyes and the visual cortex I’d be able to detect red and green with my instruments, and account for the fact that others can distinguish them and I can’t.
You know, like I know infrared and ultraviolet exist and that snakes and bees can see them but I can’t.
If none of these things were true, how would I know that red and green were real things and not illusions or imaginary ? “Just trust other people implicitly” only works if our minds and senses are completely unable to make mistakes about reality, which clearly isn’t the case. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t trust other people’s reports of their experiences at all either, since our brains and senses are quite good at perceiving and reasoning about reality. Deciding for oneself what’s true and what’s not is a lot more subtle than that.
@greennotGreen:
Here is a very interesting question: how would an earthworm arrive at the belief that Jupiter exists ?
How would an earthworm distinguish between Jupiter existing, and a Jupiter-sized space unicorn existing in Jupiter’s stead ?
If the earthworm has an epistemology that gives them a flying chance of finding out about Jupiter’s existence, then that epistemology is what they’d judge the evidence by.
If they don’t have such an epistemology, then the odds of them encountering the (correct) belief Jupiter exists, as opposed to any of the infinity of possible incorrect beliefs (such as a Jupiter-sized space unicorn exists), are basically nil.
Just like nobody knew the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics until our physical and intellectual tools brought those aspects of reality within our reach. If we want to say that giving evidence for God is like giving evidence for the theory of relativity to Aristotle, then the fact that nobody in Aristotle’s time had the right idea about the theory of relativity is kind of relevant.
Caravelle
@marduk: I think agnosticism is a perfectly tenable position, if you really aren’t confident either position is correct, i.e. it could go either way for you. Like, you’re at 50/50, or even 80/20 and that 20% likelihood is significant enough for you not to come down on one position.
But that’s not the same as the “we can’t KNOW anything, silly atheists” position, which basically says that anything other than 100/0 is agnosticism. Which as you point out is inconsistent with humans’ attitudes to their own beliefs in every other context other than discussing solipsism.
Caravelle
@Pappenheimer: Imagine the cool bloodthirsty religions ants must have then… especially Argentine ants (which are basically the Borg, except they kill you instead of assimilating you)
brantl
@Tim F.: This fails to account for why God would be mysterious to his supposedly most valued creations’ most identifying trait, free will/sapiency.
Tim F.
@mainmati: Yep. I spent some years attending Rodef Shalom, aka Saint Rodef’s, before we went our separate ways.
Robert Waldmann
I accept that you are a militant agnostic. I notice an asymmetry. You hasten to add that you are not opposed to religious faith in general, but you don’t (explicitly) add that you are not opposed to atheism in general. I infer that not all atheism rubs you the wrong way, because of the qualifier “New” in ” New Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens rub me the wrong way ” and the word “fundamentalists”.
Or to put it another way, what about me me me ? I am an atheist, but not a new atheist. I feel sure that there is no God, but I don’t claim to have proof that their is no God. The post doesn’t assert that no such person as me exists, but it seems agnostic on that question too.
Frankly, it seems to me that the prefix “a” in atheist is often read as “anti” . Better to use “new atheist” to mean “antitheist” but it sure seems to me that “anti” is a perfectly good prefix and there is no need to rewrite it as “new a”. Also “gnostic” is odd — there is an equation of “firm belief without doubt” on the one hand and “knoweldge” or “assertion that something is proven” on the other. the idea that people might have belief without doubt and not believe that we have proof — that is that people might have faith — is excluded from the discussion of faith. This is odd.
Caravelle
@Robert Waldmann: That’s the thing – New Atheists don’t claim to have proof that there is no God. One can easily find quotes of Dawkins saying so; dunno about Hitchens but I expect the same is true there. Insofar as there is a difference between small-a atheists and New Atheists, claiming to have proof there is no God isn’t that difference.
ShadeTail
I forcefully reject this idea. On what basis does anyone claim that religion regards “things that lie outside the scope of human understanding” anyway? Inevitably, the answer is always some variation of, “Because I say so!” There is no good reason to give this idea any credence.
And for that reason, agnosticism is completely irrational. It takes the most incredible and ridiculous claim of religion and says, basically, “OK, I’ll grant that.” In reality, when there is no evidence for a claim, the only rational conclusion is to reject it.
Marmot
@Omnes Omnibus: Brent is right that a person’s goodness is pretty much beside the point.
But I’d add that understanding how a person apprehends this stuff gives you a window into their thoughts. And here, they’ll give greater consideration to implausible scenarios consistent with their wishes.
That’s not evenhandedness, but it’s presented as such.
mainmati
@Tim F.: Interesting, I went to Central District Catholic High School just a few blocks from Rodef Shalom. Our only serious academic competitors were Taylor Alderdice HS in Squirrel Hill and Mt. Lebanon HS both areas with significant Jewish populations. Talking about the late 1960s-early 1970s. There were/are a bunch of schools along that stretch of Fifth Avenue in Oakland in addition to yours. WQED, Pittsburgh’s original “educational station (now PBS) was actually attached to our school. I love Pittsburgh but unfortunately don’t live there anymore given work and family exigencies.