I know whatcha mean 'bout the depression. Also, manic-depression = Bipolar disorder these days. :P

The meaning of life is...well, frankly, it's bullshit. I know, you're a Christian and everything, you believe in a god that has an ultimate plan and so on and so on, and you know I'm an atheist... I bring this up for a reason. A very short reason. But communicating the reason will make it sound so much more long-winded than it really sounds like once it's understood. If it's understood. Some people are better at communicating than others, and some people are better at understanding what is being communicated than others, for whatever reason(s).

See...I didn't become an atheist just for a singular reason. It was a multitude of reasons. Obviously it's hard to understand for most theists why someone goes from a faithful belief that they share, to one that is absolutely anathema to that belief, so maybe this'll stick, maybe not. This, the following, is just how I view the world these days, and why things like that which is bringing you so much distress is something I no longer need to deal with.

I look around the world, and I see it for what it is. You ask for the meaning of life. Ask yourself, in that same breath; what is the meaning of the child in a third world nation who lives to the age of 8 before s/he dies of starvation, or dehydration, or a disease s/he got from drinking contaminated water because it was that or the endless thirst? What was the point?

Well. One thing that is to be said about Occam's Razor...it does a marvelous job of making difficult things simple, and helping one to understand the truth of things. Some, if not most answers to questions lead to more questions. But when you are presented with a question, and you seek your answers, if you look at all the possible explanations, you will find one that either answers to completion within a matter of a few...or it will answer it right out. If you look down the line, and see yourself asking more and more questions, and many of which don't have any answers...it is the wrong answer. It is a fatal feedback loop of logic. If on the highway of comprehension, not unlike a highway you drive on, you get off at Exit 1 to get to your destination, then that's it. You take Exit 1. You don't keep driving to Exit 2 or Exit 3, you get off at Exit 1. If there's a couple exits that can lead to your destination, then you get off at the one that gets you there fastest.

You speak of hubris. One of the greatest of all hubris' of humankind is to think that everything has a "why," yet when we notice that there are a great, great many things that, when we ask why, we receive no answer, none that satisfactorily explains anything, we continue to think "everything has a why." Then, in an attempt to convince ourselves we have humility, we chalk it up to as "we're too simple to understand."

We're lying to ourselves, then. It's not humility. It's fear. It's terrifying, unsettling, and disturbing to realize that for a great many things, there is no why; it simply...is. We want a reason for everything, because we are not a rational species; instead, we are a rationalizing species. We try to square the circle with things we don't understand because we are arrogant enough to believe we might possibly know the answers in some way while yet not knowing them at all.

It's scary and disturbing to know that children die, suffering, in pain, starving, thirsty, alone. That good, honest people get fucked over by malicious, greedy shit-lords who never really suffer any comeuppance for it, no matter how extensive their fuck-over-y reaches. It's disturbing because it makes us realize just how apathetic the universe is towards us. Just how unfair, and cruel, and unfeeling it truly is. Many say that there's a great plan of a god that is playing itself out and we just have to accept it. When they wonder "why," they come up with no real answer; and in its place, they invent one. "God moves in mysterious ways" or "He has a plan for everything/one" or "God is vast and unknowable, and we are too insignificant to understand God's plans."

But what basis do these answers come from? The one that comes closest to accepting reality is the lattermost. It simply just has a bunch of unnecessary words. We apply Occam's Razor; "We are insignificant." We add "god" to the explanation to make the answer more comforting, because it is the simplest explanation...and the one that brings us the most despair when we try to glimpse it. We look down that road, and we see that at the end it just simply ends, and once it ends...that's it, journey over. Nothing more. A wall that stretches on for eternity that eventually we're going to hit. To inject other reasons into it is to see the mirage from the heat rising off the asphalt and conjure it into hopeful visions of what we want to be at the end of that journey. An amusement park. A very fancy, eat-for-free restaurant. A giant, glorious mansion full of beautiful individuals who will cater to our every whim, desire, and dream with enthusiasm and joy.

But it's just a mirage. Eventually, that wall looms, and we find ourselves doing one of two things; convincing ourselves it's the wall of that mansion or restaurant or amusement park right until we impact into it, or we accept what's about to happen with no delusions as to what is about to happen.

But see, if you focus on the mirage, you don't notice the scenery alongside the road. The road is rough and treacherous and winding, full of obstacles and debris, and it can get so rocky and unsteady to the point the jostling hurts, sometimes to the point of fatality. And you can't stop the car. The brakes aren't powerful enough to overpower the engine. But we can still push it, we can take detours that extend the trip, so we can appreciate the beautiful view all around us.

But the more you focus on the mirage, the less you see of the wonders that almost literally surround you.

This is basically a very extended analogy. I'm an atheist; I stopped thinking the mirage was something glorious. I started looking around instead, and found the rest of the view much, much more fascinating. If I'm going to hit that wall, I might as well enjoy the road while I can.

That's the closest answer you're going to get for a "What is the meaning of life/why am I here" type of question; you're there to see the scenery. And if that's not good enough, you can always just steer yourself into the nearest tree and make it quick, but then you'd miss out on everything to come later.

Even if there's nothing after the wall, no awareness of anything, the termination of your journey and your surroundings and your senses to take it all in, what does that matter right now? You're still driving, aren't you? You're still experiencing the journey, right? And is it really so bad? If it is, it is understandable to wish the road led somewhere that made it all worth it, but wishing it doesn't make it so. You simply have to realize that there's things to see, other routes to take; even if they all lead to the same destination, some routes are more pleasant than others.

But if you're just staring at the mirage...you won't see those detours. You'll zip right past them, and most tragic, you won't even realize it.

It seems like that's happening to you right now. You're looking at the mirage, and you're trying to make something in it take shape of something pleasurable. And in doing so, you're missing out on the world around you. It's natural that if you're too busy focusing on something that is (frustratingly ((as I came to realize))) giving you nothing tangible, you're not seeing everything else you could see.

It's sad to see other cars crashed along the road. Many of them. Some crashed only minutes into the journey. Some days, some scant few years later, perhaps. But, for you, it goes on, and that's what should be important; there's nothing you can do for them now, so you might as well just keep driving.

See, my bipolarity comes from my "car." The engine itself (my brain) is fucked up and not exactly working right, so it's distracting me from the rest of the world. It makes the ride unpleasantly rough and jarring, but I still look around and take what I can in...and meanwhile, I have other cars, other people, hanging their heads out the window, willing to lean their heads out of the window when I pop the hood to see what's wrong, or to throw a pillow to me so the ride becomes a little easier to tolerate. And in my case, I have a mechanic, a psychiatrist, who is sitting on the flatbed of her truck and is trying to help me figure out what the problem is, so we can try different things to fix it, or at least improve the engine's performance...and it's not free, of course, but...hey, if it fixes the problem, or at least helps it become something less distracting, less distressing, something that lets me spend more time looking around at the sights to see...well, it's worth it.

An atheist is someone who stopped looking at the mirage, and looked up instead, and saw the wall soaring infinitely upwards and across, impossible to avoid, and saw the mirage for what it was; just rising heat waves, in which their brain conjured up visions of billboards advertising some great thing beyond that wall. Products of their mind, and nothing more. They saw the wall, and the wavering blurs, and realized just how boring the mirage was when they started looking more closely at everything around them. They felt despair when they realized the truth of the destination, that there was no amusement park with rollercoasters that went on for eternity...but, eventually, they simply accepted it; all being afraid of the wall was doing was distracting them from everything else. It's always there to see, of course, and they can see it whenever they really look at it again, if they so want to, but it becomes just something in the background. Looming, sure, but no longer something to be afraid of.

One possible reason why you are here is because some supposed entity nobody has ever shown any kind of solid evidence for wanted it to be so. That answers brings more questions...and inevitably, you end at "I don't know," because instead of using Occam's Monomolecular Razor to cut the thread of questions, you kept pulling the string out longer and longer, until it reached the spool and you found it couldn't be cut on its own.

There is a faster way to answer the question, of course, a way of cutting the thread yourself, as quick as is possible; because the randomness of the universe rolled the dice enough times and the end result of those dice rolls was you. Against odds so large that there is no name for the number, you are here, now, unbelievably lucky, astronomically, in fact.

That's the termination of "why." Then comes the questions of "how," but "why" is no longer necessary, nor useful; it serves only as a pointless distraction, something that takes time away from the much more interesting "how." Nobody cares about WHY stuff works; but it's fascinating to see HOW it works, no?

That's why you'll rarely hear of someone committing suicide just because they became an atheist. For some, the road is too rough to want the journey to continue, so they slam the pedal to the metal and get to the wall as fast as they can to just get it over with. But those focused on the mirage aren't any better off, there. Mirage or the beautiful lights, sights, and sounds...either one can provide comfort.

Me, I found my surroundings were much better at distracting me from the wall than the mirage was. Hell, the mirage required me to look at the damn thing constantly, as the mirage is wont to do. The despair I felt whenever the mirage flickered and the illusions in it faded to a blurry nothingness was so intense that it made me want to just get to the wall as fast as possible. I tried several times to pin the accelerator. The wall loomed as I looked at the mirage, and when the mirage stopped distracting me, the wall was all I saw.

But ever since I started looking around...I haven't felt the urge to step on the accelerator any harder than I need to. I appreciate every bit that my guttering engine will allow me.

Better that than the wall, right?

If you want to avoid the depression that asking "why" brings you, you're going to have to realize that asking "why" results in a very unsatisfactory answer no matter how you try to ask the question. Much more interesting, though, are the answers when you ask "how." Choosing "how" over "why" tends to fly in the face of what we WANT the answers of "why" to have been, but you start to realize soon enough that you no longer care about that.

Whether you agree with me or not is fine either way, obviously, it's not gonna change my opinion of you regardless, I already like ya as a friend, albeit a friend I don't get to converse with as much as I'd like. I honestly don't like spewing my thoughts on this stuff publicly, because some people can get super offended about it, especially because I'm very blunt about this sort of thing, and people sometimes think I'm arrogant because I speak as if I know. But arrogance, to me, is not in thinking you have answers to a few questions. Arrogance, to me, is thinking you have answers to questions that you believe matter more than anything else, even if you can't answer others when they question those answers. I speak with confidence; what I don't know, I readily admit I don't know, what I do know, I will happily share if I think I can answer to full satisfaction to anyone who asks, and if I find out I actually don't know the answer at some point, then I'm confident enough to admit it whilst I look for the answer, rather than continue on seeming like I do.

To finish this off; I became an atheist because asking "why" led me to no satisfactory answers. I came to realize I was taking someone at their word when they had done nothing to earn my trust, and I have led a life in which I have learned the valuable lesson that trusting someone with no reason for it tended to get me hurt, made me vulnerable to being used, and even outright nearly got me killed a couple times. And when I asked enough questions of these things I was trusting so absolutely, I found the reasons for why I trusted these things did not exist. I was convinced I was at peace as a Christian, that I was happy because I knew I was always loved by something great and powerful and eternal. Yet, looking back on those days, I'm a lot more calm, a lot more reasonable, and a lot more open-minded than I was before. I used to fear death and yet long for it. Now, I'm apathetic to it. I used to wonder why all the bad shit that's happened to me was happening to me. But when I realized that there was, ultimately, no actual reason for it, it just simply was what it was? The moment I came to realize it, all the anger and despair and confusion and frustration that had built up the more I had wondered at that question just...dissolved.

I cried when I came to that understanding. I was sad for a few minutes. I felt empty, in place all of all that emotional and mental turmoil. It had all meant nothing, it had no meaning, no purpose. But then...I started crying for a different reason; because if there was no reason for it happening, then there was no reason to care about it anymore. It became so easy to just let it all go, to move past everything. Now I can look back on my past, to my drug usage, my overdose, the deaths of friends and someone I loved with all my being, the abuses, the literal tortures, the violations, all of it... I can look back, and shrug, and go "well, it sucked, but it happens, and there's no reason to be angry any more." Now, if something bad happens, or is happening, if there's something wrong, if I can fix it, or do something to help fix it, I try to. If I can't, them's the shits, but I won't torture myself over it; bad shit's already happening, no need to needlessly make it worse, right?

Anyway. That's what worked for me. I felt I should share all this because I felt that way once. I remember how it felt. All I can do is relate and share what my response was and what happened as a result. Maybe it'll appeal, you'll try it, and it'll help...or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll make things worse. Or it just won't appeal, for whatever reason. Hmph. I sound like a fucking missionary for atheism. It's not my intention to sound that way. It's just simply the best I can do to help, the best I can provide for advice...hell, the only advice and help I can provide, really. Worked for me, seems to work for plenty of others who try it, so...yeah, that's all I've got to offer.

I probably could've just said "aw man that sucks I hope you feel better." But it felt like an apathetic, non-feeling response that didn't even try to help, so...this rambling reply goes up in its place.

Whatever the case, whatever you do, I do hope you find peace from the hell of that particular turmoil. I don't miss it in the slightest.

Wow. Wasn't expecting a short novel so quickly. That one been bubbling up in you to hit me with? ;P

Actually, its a grand analogy, and it took me more than one read through to properly soak it all in and reply (one of the reasons I believe its part manic depressive [mom side] and part a.d.d. [father's side] in my genetics).

I find myself more driving forward but looking backward in reflection. I've accomplished a number of things and life feels so short and fast at times, and then uncomfortably long other times. (sleep is my reset button it most cases between these two)

I find myself an oddity among my religion. My existential question isn't WHY (My answer is God made it so) or HOW (cause if I can't even finish a long post without taking a break, how the hell will I ever figure out all the "hows" of this universe?) but my question that leaves me looking on blindly is WHAT and WHEN. As in When does it all end (not for me, mind you, but it all) and to What end. Which seems like I'm trying to make it a WHY, but that is where my religion comes in.

To my belief system (since my atheist friends dislike me saying understand and such, since that takes more than gut feeling, faith, and my experiences) we were created by God. Why? That is more on him (cop out, blah) but to live life with free will. We were given life, a chance to experience all we could on a world he created. HOW? You'd have to ask the big man, when/if the end comes and at/if the afterlife, if it so exists. I do not have delusions of heaven like others try to claim. I put no effort into imaging it. I try to grasp what is around me, the feelings that stir and guide me, and more on the faith and morals that I find are my guiding light and religion.

God is written to be the ultimate judge, judging our lives according to his justice as we lived. It is written that he has a plan for us all. Myself, I believe that. He gave us free will (whatever HE is. Sex, age, etc doesn't really matter to an omnipotent being. So that petty argument people have is retarded) and a path. I see our lives as a board game or "choose your own adventure" where each decision has a consequence. Perhaps like a game with moral Good/Bad options, but that is all relative to what is truly just. Not just some arbitrary "This is good, this is bad." So when I come into question, I try to apply the 10 commandments.

Another tangent/side note. I'm not "above" questioning my own belief, what is written, and all that. I don't recall anywhere in the bible (though I only read through it all once) that it is a great and cardinal sin to question what you believe. To question God, perhaps, but if its all to his design, I feel the only real way to question him is looking at how things are and saying "why?" Like, "Why is this platypus the way it is, God? How did you mess that up." Like we'd know whats better or what a platypus truly is (I mean, we've cataloged what we've discovered, but hopefully that point got across). I was going to say "It is said" in place of "it is written" but I felt the distinction should be made as there is what is in the bible, what is in your mind, and what you 'feel' in your heart/gut. Its all writings and workings of mortal man who "felt the presence of God, the spirit of the lord, inspired by, dreamed of, heard a voice, etc" but that would call upon faith to believe all that is written. It would be foolhardy to blindly follow all that is written without question or understanding, because the Bible was also a written history for the Jewish people. Then the New Testament and Jesus. Its been a few thousand years, yet whens the next chapter coming out? Who will write it? Is it left to us? I recall a part where Jesus was telling the people that it is on you to find and make your own testament with God (or something to that extent. Man do I also make out for a horrible Christian as far as reciting literature).

Anywho, I cut through a lot of the "Christian Fat" to get to the bare bones of Faith and it all. I also think and wonder how God and it all ties into our reality. The meanings and taking a new light to it that other "Christians" give me odd looks for thinking it. Such as, If God lives in eternity, which we describe as a place where time ceases and is continuous at the same time, I think "Don't we have something like that in our world? Yes. A black hole. Isn't the certain of our universe thought to contain the largest singularity yet no one can properly look upon, get readings of it? Well, to me it would seem "logical" that if God exists and its written that no man can look upon or truly know/understand God, than perhaps he is at the center of the universe in that singularity (or possibly is the singularity). But, that could just be my wild imagination and grasp of straws to understand and make sense of a universe that is action and reaction.

I had recently come upon the "it is what is it" about our reality, but that didn't shatter my faith. It only led me to question why about other things, I guess. To try and find biblical reasons to help explain it. Such as "We have fallen from Eden. We do not live in paradise." That pretty much wrapped it up for me about "Why do children die over here?" Well, we let them, for starters. Their parents didn't bother to move on to help save their lives. Not enough fight to rise up against those that persecute and down trod their people. Not enough interest or humanity in what is humankind today to fight the wrongs of evil men. So why do we turn at God and ask "Why" about a child dying, when he could simply reply "Why didn't you stop it?" to which we'd all choke.

I'll wrap up the religious part with a joke I heard, that helped me laugh and try to reason (I know, proving your words. I never said you were wrong. :P ): A strong believer lived in a place that often flooded. A weather report warned of the oncoming storm. His neighbors asked him "aren't you preparing for the storm?" to which he would reply "God will care for me." Later on in the week, the rains began to flood and an evacuation call came out. The man stood on his roof as the waters rose. A family in a boat came by and asked him "Do you need a hand? You can come with us on our boat." The man again replied "God will care for me." The waters continued to rise, and the man drowned. He met with God and asked God "Lord, I prayed and obeyed you. Why did you not come for me?" God replied "What are you talking about? You knew the area, you got the weather warning, and I sent a boat!" :D

Believe me, I'm right up there believing believers are thick. :P We sure is.


*big breath* Thanks though. This did help me shake some of that funk. I enjoy looking at it from both sides. Both side have arguments, and while the atheist portion has more solid, physical evidence, the theist side is strongly rooted in Faith. Which is the whole point of belief and religion. I'd bring up the lesser degrees of "faith" but I'm losing my train of thought. The 'weak' point is that you believe a chair will hold you up, but do you inspect the chair each time before you sit down? No. What we've learned and experienced with chairs solidifies our faith in sitting down in them. I've had a few chairs break underneath me or bend or shift and toss me out. I have not stopped believing in chairs. :3 (Laugh, shake your head, call me a stubborn believer. Its what I do) My last line before we begin "counter arguments/discussion" is "Its harder to believe than not to." Saying it doesn't make it so.


I appreciate it. I actually get that a lot from my pals on here. ^^; So many wish to talk more with me, yet I never feel I've got more to say or carry a conversation well that isn't on an actual "thing" such as a game where we can discuss. Perhaps its my lack of focus, and I'm going to be seeing someone about that (finally) in the next year when I'm able to be home long enough.

We can move to notes on more personal stuff. Or *points at last bit of journal* you have a way to contact me if you so choose. I appreciate you being open. I find there are a handful of such folk on here. I try to be honest and accommodating. Taking the "confessional" bit of religion to a higher standard than others of the Catholic faith it would seem. (mainly after seeing chaplains in the military turn people away from them after recounting people's complaints of the leadership to said leadership and them getting reprimanded for it) I vow to never willingly or knowingly manipulate, abuse, or destroy someone's trust in me. We are all people, different beliefs, ideals, imaginations, and if a world where so much is possible, people need reprieve. So I try to provide that by letting it be free-for-all.

So, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkNmmG_McNw I'm a big Offspring fan. Been listening to a handful of their tracts and working on my habits. (kicking gambling and hook ups) and trying to better myself, not just for my sake, but for others too. Nothing like being a continuous loopy artist who can't follow through. How the hell can folks trust me for art and then me being hypocritical about other artists? (mainly because I've admitted I'm terrible with time and the other artist had a better rep about being on time. :P )


So. . . I'm lost and may have more to reply to on the 3rd read through. ^^; Take care my Brovna.

I'm glad I got ya to pull yourself out of the tar pitting quagmire that being stuck in that kind of mindset tends to get people stuck into. If all else fails, go to the core of your personality and start looking at things, and it'll help with that. As is evidenced. :D I read through your reply, but I don't think you quite took what I was saying to heart. :P To demonstrate: Why did God make it so? And it's not about seeking every answer to every "how" in the universe. As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it best; "As I reach for the edge of the universe, I do so knowing that along some paths of cosmic discovery, there are times when, at least for now, one must be content with simply loving the questions themselves." It's a bit of wisdom you will never really find any equal for in any religion no matter how philosophical they may try to sound; being content with not knowing despite wanting to is perfectly fine. We are humans. We are naturally curious and inquisitive, because our evolutionary path bred a need for adaptability in order to survive and prosper. But we are also animals, and as such, we are driven by instinct, and amongst those instincts is fear. There is a reason why, when we do not understand something, or someone, the majority reaction tends to first be fear. For example, anyone who understood what the Lard Hadron Collider was felt no fear about its construction and activation. But to everyone who DIDN'T, all they heard was "it generates miniature black holes" and immediately started decrying it as a bad thing. Death is most certainly an unknown; life and, by extension, experience via our senses is all we "know." A lack of that is something we are not capable of imagining. After all, can you remember what it felt like before you were born? Nope. Hell, you can't even remember what it was like during or after your birth, and imagining returning to that state, ergo, is impossible, and fills us with fear. So, to rationalize away that fear, because again, remember, we're animals, and ergo not rational, but rationalizing entities, we feel a natural urge to calm ourselves, and if that means pretending something is or isn't there, well, you only need to look around at society at large to see just how often human beings do that in many, many ways, and given the broad range of ways in which human beings do so with such frequency, religious beliefs are barely a blip on that radar. Now, you say we fell from Eden, and this is not paradise. But what is Eden? After all, the book of genesis is full of stuff that science has long since dismissed as inaccurate and impossible (you can either say it's literal, as in days, or you can say it's non-literal, as in eons of distance, but neither will be compatible with anything a very brief scientific analysis will determine, nor even an analysis of mere common sense), so it can't have been a literal thing. As evolutionary biology has shown us, we did not just pop into existence one day. It took a very, very long time to become what we are (and so help me if you go creationist on me... XD), and the concept of free will is, frankly, a joke.

Free will implies we are capable of making our own decisions and finding our own way all on our own, but that implies we are all in control over our own minds to the extent that we are not being influenced by anything other than ourselves. As someone with a borderline personality, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder (amongst a few others suspected but not confirmed), I can assure you that free will is a joke. After all, how can I call all my actions my own, when I'm not even able to call all my emotions my own, when my emotions do not fit with the current situation(s)? What about someone who has schizophrenia, who sees things and hears things that are not there to everyone but themselves, and who acts on these things that are of their own mind, but not of who they "are?" A schizophrenic on medication that mitigates the malfunctions in the brain no longer feels the urges to act as s/he would have otherwise during their psychoses. Are we to say they had free will the entire time? I think not.

Alas, you admitted it yourself; your answers to such questions are, well, a cop-out, which is what I have come to expect of religious beliefs. I do not say that as a dig at you, either; it's actually the driving reason I'm no longer religious. Where'd those presents from under the tree come from? Why, Santa Claus, of course! That kind of answer may satisfy many. Me? I wanna know who this Santa dude is, and where he is, and what he looks like, and I'm not going to be convinced so easily as to be shown a guy at the mall who fits a description I was given by another. Allegorically-speaking, of course.

Maybe being told that being good little boys and girls will get them presents and bad little boys and girls get nothing but coal is all it takes to make people behave. But alas, what you call a good moral backing, I see as the basis for a lot of despicable acts of violence, horror, and cruelty, all done by those who actually never really believed any differently than you did; they just interpreted what they believed differently. And that's the problem with religion, and with basing your life on religious beliefs and calling it a good thing to morally ground yourself on.

To quote Bertrand Russell:

"Christians hold that their faith does good, but other faiths do harm. At any rate, they hold this about the communist faith. What I wish to maintain is that all faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions. Christians have faith in the Resurrection; communists have faith in Marx’s Theory of Value. Neither faith can be defended rationally, and each therefore is defended by propaganda and, if necessary, by war."

You may be stubborn if you so wish. But that's not a quality I can say I admire; it's a quality I find highly unpleasant. Just saying, it's not a criticism of you directly, but it's not something I hear from people with a smile on my face, it's something that'll actually tend to make my smile drop and my feet to sloooowly start moving backwards... XD Stubbornness begets ignorance and stagnation. Hell, there's even a saying there, too, from another man of great brilliance: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Something from this guy, ya mighta heard of him, name of Albert, came from Germany, is the father of the theory of relativity, among other things. Just keep that in mind.

The chair analogy, well, you trust a chair to work like a chair because you can see it; its design is that of a solid piece of furnishing fashioned into a platform upon which one may place their ass to ease the load from their feet. It's trustworthy because it tells you, silently, what its purpose is. Now, in that same analogy, faith is to sit upon ANY chair no matter its design and expect it to always hold up...even if that means sitting on a chair made of paper and held up only by four twigs.

Also, no, there are no black holes at the center of the universe. XD At the center of the galaxy, yes, there is a supermassive black hole, but a center of the universe? We don't even know if there is such a thing, since "center" would imply a part that all outermost dimensions of the universe can converge into, and given the "shape" of the universe, well...that's just not a possible thing. lol

The thing is, is that people say God intervenes all the time in all these many ways, which is, apparently, why people pray. But more than that? There is the problem with God being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, the "force of absolute good and absolute power." The presence of evil, and God's tolerance and allowance of it, is not explained away by "free will." He nevertheless displays an apathy to suffering and cruelty. Do you think the child who dies of starvation does so as the only one in the village? No. There is rarely just one starving to death. And things over in other countries are not like they are here in our comfy little developed world; much of the world still relies on nature itself for its succor; a drought can result in half of a village dying of starvation. Was that their fault? And if nobody else in the world knew about it, because they likely didn't have electronics or cell phones, how were they supposed to be helped by others?

There is no such thing as simply "try hard enough and you will succeed." That's a delusionary belief meant to blame the victim in an attempt to dismiss the possibility of culpability due to another, for many reasons, but one of them primarily being how it uncomfortably displays how free will is, again, a joke; quite often, things are simply stacked up too high against people to an extent that, even with help, they cannot overcome the obstacle, even if it's an obstacle of the basic needs of living.

If God were real, and its reply was as such, I wouldn't choke. I would reply "Well, I'm not the supposedly all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing deity, now, am I?" Who is more at fault? The one with the least power? Or the one with the most? The one with the least influence? Or the one with the most? The one who was created? Or the one who created?

Theists have a funny way of trying to shift responsibility from their god(s) when it comes to the unpleasantness of the world, yet they have an equally comical way of being quick to attribute everything good in it to their god(s) before anything or anyone else...especially considering that when they do the latter, they do so in complete ignorance of how another situation that was the exact same thing went in a horribly different direction. And then comes "god moves in mysterious ways." So mysterious, in fact, they're indistinguishable from him not doing anything at all. Almost like...nah...surely he...hmm...

It didn't shatter your faith, because you didn't think about it when you realized it. :P Instead, you shrugged it away and didn't think any more on it. But you should. You say "what" and "when," but these are questions that are mundane, unimportant, and uninteresting if you already know "why" and "how." But if you find yourself stuck on them...it's because the "how" and "why" are still left blank in your mind. You can fill in the "why" with "goddidit" all you'd like, but as you are experiencing, and as I once experienced for years, you might as well have left the answer to "why" blank for all the good it's doing.

It's harder to believe than not to believe for a reason; and that reason is because there is no reason to do so.

Faith is insanity, my friend. If you're wondering why this conundrum you are in is driving you nuts...well, that's because it is. XD

Oh its a carnival ride for me. Up and down, its all around. Turn me side to side. but I've gotten over the concept that I'll try to figure it out. I've got a creative imagination and do plenty well with filling the blanks in, either trying to seriously or with silliness to just get it out of my mind. God to me isn't just a belief but like a looming feeling regardless of how I feel. Through events in my life, a presence and stirring from within that comes in the good, the bad, and times in between. Like "Big Brother" feeling, but not in a paranoia way like people actually have with Big Brother. I don't see how Free Will is a joke when its proven. We're rational people who behave irrationally. We can defy our beliefs, morals, instincts, and block out the wills of others and do all kinds of heroic, demonic, and insane acts that defy logic. I'm all for listening up to science and such but there are those that preach science like an infallible thing. We discover new ways, rewrite laws, and measure (which in and of itself changes outcomes based on us measuring) so I don't feel you can blindly go all in science or religion.

Well, it is still technically "Them" with the choices. Sometimes our choices are random, but free will is to go with how we feel, how we think, our gut instinct, or we can try to logically or irrationally think of ways that are counter to our thoughts, feelings, and instinct. Is it insanely difficult to be of complete free will with such afflictions? Yes. Is it impossible? No. I know of only one person in my life who has managed to control her mental instabilities without medication, and that is because she trained herself to see the signs of when it started to take affect, and then created a set of rules to follow when she was "out of her mind" to help keep her stable and it has worked for 18 years so far.

It is the main fault of religion. Our rational minds demand evidence, and science has proven a way to give concrete evidence. Religion is based on more than just what we can see and touch. It requires faith, which is just about anathema to science; other than the part where you hypothesize and with tinges of doubt hope your conclusion is accurate and then you strive to prove it. I always felt it took a pinch of faith to go on such discoveries, as science is more proving ways things don't work than proving the only way. Hell, many of the laws of science were considered insane thoughts and theories til proven. So I put religion under that category. To the most stubborn of scientist and evidence mongers, it will seem utterly insane until proven a working theory, except by its own definition religion can not and its effects on people are not considered hard enough evidence. Santa Claus is a convenient belief given to fill that "what/why/how" void within, but you should then look to discover the truth beyond the convenient. That is why I say you can't just blindly believe everything in a religion. What if people mistranslated? What if there is a mistake? And then people who followed blindly are so dejected by the discovery that they renounce and give up on it. (No offense) But doesn't that even go against scientific theory in a way? "Hey, we were always told X happens because of Y!" Do the scientists then give up and start only looking and following the answers of Z or do you discover what went wrong or why doesn't X and Y work out the way you were told? Maybe its just me. I say christian, but I guess Pentecostal is the closer relation to it, as I'm a firm believer in Redemption. Nothing is every fully concrete, which means there needs margin for error (science. :P )

No, you can't just tell people to behave and expect them to when they have free will. You lay a foundation of rules and then have to follow through with actions, examples, and discipline. Other than the first few commandments about God, which we would argue over the whole God is real/fake, you can't say the other portion of the 10 commandments are a bad moral basis. Telling people not to kill, steal, and be honest are not bad in the slightest and help everyone except those with selfish and cruel intentions. There are plenty who use religion as merely a cover to commit those heinous acts, and the fearful zealots follow their word out of fear and lust (see the crusades) but to rope all religious peoples into that is unfair to religion. Sadly, religion and believers have the stigma of "You're suppose to be perfect and good people like your God," but I'm just as flawed and capable of evil as the atheist serial killer down the road from me. (if he should happen to exist) The difference is we try, and if we fail, we get up and try again. There are too many who become jaded after a bad experience that they'll throw the whole thing out and give up on the bigger picture of striving for good though perfection is impossible to reach.

Well, the problem I see with his quote is that should have "The majority of" in front of Christians. I don't believe Buddhism does harm, from what little I know of it. I don't believe many faiths try to do harm at all. The extremist and radical groups do, but they are splinters of the whole, and people judge the whole on but a splinter. [Remove the plank from your eye before you worry about the speck in your neighbor's eye] That could/should also read "Blind devotion to a cause does harm when they brainwash themselves to believe they do good" [ie Nazis or Crusaders]

Well, looking over definitions, stubborn is the wrong word. Stalwart would serve better, as I'm open to hear people's good points. I'm open to reason and debate. Stubborn is more akin to ignorance, which I try to chisel off of me when I can. (other than up play it for comedic purposes) That insanity quote I remind to myself and pass along to others.

Exactly. But the analogy stands. There are those who feel their belief is a strong and sturdy chair they can rest in. Though if it was ever to break, what happens then? What happens when you go to sit in a chair and it does not support you? Do you give up on chairs and move to sofas? Do you then have a shadow of a doubt in chairs until time erodes the memory of that failed chair from your past? [I feel I'm going off point, but I hope the message is there]

What? Have we not determined the universe is expanding? Are the galaxies bouncing off one another without a converging central point to which all of space is expanding from? Granted, it'll be some time til we can measure that, but you can't toss it out as completely ridiculous (mr. science. :P )

Well, I don't recall putting out there that God is "omnibenevolent." God is Just. He is the truest and purest judge of all things. God is our father, and like peoples physical fathers, the idea (hmm, can't think of the right word, so we'll stick with "idea" though thats an opening against me) is that God is the father over us. He gave us life, the ability to reason and grow and go our own way (of which many paths were laid and given in our hands which path we will take) and he asks us to honor, love, and do right by him. As far as starving deaths, is it out of kindness of God? No. Is it at their fault? I don't know. I gave the option of finding food, moving on when the well is dry, asking for help, but what keeps people where they are? Fear? Pride? Ignorance of the world around them? At the mercy of others? There is no one answer. I put it again, that suffering is allowed because we allow it and he made it so. If we were truly rational people, we would see and understand that working as a community is ultimately better for mankind. Unite and take to the stars. But we don't, because many have the option to be selfish and so choose that easy path. This causes us to suffer, those around us to suffer, and unintentional suffering. If God is just, as he is claimed to be, and if there is an after life, which is claimed to be, then even those who perish will be judged and find their way in the afterlife. If they did right and just, then their suffering was not for naught and they'd be rewarded as this life is but a shadow.

God is apathetic? Perhaps. Just like a judge, he has to remain neutral and judge the actions of others without bias. What would you have God do? Just endlessly provide to all who suffer? That is what we hope, but that is not what life is. That is not free will. There is a passage in the Bible that speaks of relying solely on the lord, but that is where I wonder and give the analogy of that man who drowned after all the warning signs. How much is in our hands and how much is left up to God? How does God intervene? If he is everywhere and everything, then all is because of God. God caused the tsunami? God caused the drought? Or did God create all and set the wheels in motion for things to play out based on the coarse of actions we do based on our free will? *tosses hands in the air* I do not know. There are many definitions of God, and that is why I try to cut through all the religious padding and get to the core of what is written, what is said, and what is believed. Then there is what I believe [as we're to find and make our own pact with God] but then does God and the here after change and shape with each of us and our own pacts with God?

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it make a sound? Part 2: Does anyone care?

Well, my addendum to the argument would be all things are possible, including the understanding to know when a task can not be accomplished by yourself. Try hard enough and you can succeed, but to believe you can do anything if you try hard enough could also lead to the realm of pride, which could be your downfall. (what can I say? There are plot holes. But lets face it, if there weren't, then everyone would believe if it was air tight)

So you want God to live your life for you? If God is everywhere and everything, as most claim, then there will always be a part of fault and blame on God, but what about the rest of that pie chart that isn't all on him? What happened to Cause and Effect? People just rail against God when they didn't like the outcome.

Personally, I like the angle that Futurama took. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO21ze8Up34 What I don't get is if God is a part of everything, why focus on him being the one at fault? What about cause and effect? Action and reaction? I said that God set the path for all things, and then its on us and our free will to navigate life as such. Who and whats to blame is the wrong focus to me. What caused it, sure, and now I hopefully learned to avoid, react to, or change the outcome when I have identified such a cause. I mean, if we're to fully take the Bible, he flooded the world to wipe out life and start us again! Thats a big one. So compare global genocide to those starving to death we used in the other example. Is God a part of that? Yes. Is he the ONLY one effecting it? NO. To me, we're looking to solve Y, and X is God. We already know he is in the equation, and has a part in the blame, cause, etc. So what happened to Y? Screw it? [Why does it happen? Because it happens]

My conundrum is more akin to not "Why are we here" when the answer is to live and experience life with out free will. (At least that is my answer, but as its far larger than just me, how anyone feels they can have an acute answer to the meaning of life other than to live is beyond me.) What more drains the life from me is other people. If you ever see that Russel Crow movie NOAH, I'm all in favor with Noah. I thank the Lord for all that I've experienced. The good, the bad that led me to the good, the downs that enhanced the ups, and the ups that I appreciated and were thankful for after climbing out of the downs. What I can't stand is humanity. How we are all created and equal blank slate, with life ahead of us and the world against us, that so many still dwell in ignorance, hate, selfish actions that cause suffering, scarring, and the drudge of life. I'm eerily content with life and at the same time can't stand it for all that we have done. When the "Big One" comes for the next hard reset on life, I guess I'm in the opinion of "its about damn time." Though, I guess that makes me a sith, as only they deal in absolutes. :P

I will admit, this conversation has caused my brain to wrack and think back on "Wait, how did that go?" which is why I strive to keep it to the building blocks of faith and God. (to the best of my ability) because we're so great at making shit up as we go. (another great soft ball against religion pitched by me. :P )

I'll have to address this in semi-short bursts, because there's a looot of logical fallacies and outright false statements, here. But before I do, I need to reiterate; none of what I say is meant to mock, deride, condescend, or insult you. I say this because, well, this is the internet. No, I don't mean http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/f9/f9d4.....792d49668e.jpg but rather, we aren't speaking face-to-face, ergo you can't see my expressions or hear the tone of my voice, and the words themselves can come off as almost sneering contempt at some points. When one stance contradicts the other, that tends to be the case, after all, but unlike in person, where one can both see and hear that that is not the case, well...we're kinda limited in our sensory input on the matter here.

So, to begin. Free will is not proven. Freedom of choice, yes. Free will, however, is a topic of contention in philosophy, and the theological definitions of free will are included in the realm of philosophical discussion and debate of the concept. Wikipedia's article does a great job of summarizing the free-will condundrum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will To quote the first couple paragraphs:

"Free will is the ability of agents to make choices unimpeded by certain prevailing factors. Such prevailing factors that have been studied in the past have included metaphysical constraints (such as logical, nomological, or theological determinism), physical constraints (such as chains or imprisonment), social constraints (such as threat of punishment or censure), and mental constraints (such as compulsions or phobias, neurological disorders, or genetic predispositions). The principle of free will has religious, legal, ethical, and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent, omniscient divinity that raises certain injunctions or moral obligations for man. In the law, it affects considerations of punishment and rehabilitation. In ethics, it may hold implications for whether individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions. In science, neuroscientific findings regarding free will may suggest different ways of predicting human behavior.

Though it is a commonly-held intuition that we have free will, it has been widely debated throughout history not only whether that is true, but even how to define the concept of free will. How exactly must the will be free, what exactly must the will be free from, in order for us to have free will?"

So...no, free will is not proven to any extent whatsoever. Indeed, there isn't even a consensus as to what free will is even defined as.

Now, as for science, I don't know quite what you mean by going blindly into it. That's a very redundant statement. Science is the process by which we learn about and understand the world around us. Hypotheses are the beginning step of going from blindness to something, to proposing a means of opening the eyes. If it becomes a theory, then the eyes are open and comprehending. In order for an hypothesis to become a theory, though, it must be potentially falsifiable. If there is no way it cannot be conceivably disproven, it is not a hypothesis; it is an opinion, or an exercise in what I like to call "mental masturbation," and nothing more. Science proves things. Religion does not. In fact, religion by its very nature is completely antithetical to science...despite many theists trying their hardest to square that particular circle. Unsuccessfully in every account, I should point out, and you are welcome to try to tell me they are compatible...or you can take me at my word and save yourself the trouble. XD

And, again, no, we are not a rational species. In fact, several of your first few sentences show, rather starkly, why that is not the case. Again, wikipedia does a better job of summarizing than I can, and in the interest of avoiding me writing a post twice as long as any I've made thus far here... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ration.....of_rationality
Quote:

"It is believed by some philosophers (notably A. C. Grayling) that a good rationale must be independent of emotions, personal feelings or any kind of instincts. Any process of evaluation or analysis, that may be called rational, is expected to be highly objective, logical and "mechanical". If these minimum requirements are not satisfied i.e. if a person has been, even slightly, influenced by personal emotions, feelings, instincts or culturally specific, moral codes and norms, then the analysis may be termed irrational, due to the injection of subjective bias.

Modern cognitive science and neuroscience show that studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no affective feelings, for example an individual with a massively damaged amygdala or severe psychopathy. Thus, such an idealized form of rationality is best exemplified by computers, and not people. However, scholars may productively appeal to the idealization as a point of reference."

Again. We are irrational. We are capable of rationalizing and understanding rational facts and realities, but as far as ourselves being rational in how we approach things? Not even close.

Now, see, the amusing thing about those ideas we now know as scientific laws and theories? They were called insane by people with prior bias. The source of their bias? Religion. Faith. The group-mentality so common to humans. To try to equate religious claims in the same realm as possible hypotheses...yeah, no, that's not even remotely possible to logically achieve. You can test scientific analysis. You cannot test religious claims. You are arguing that the subjective view is something that should be given weight when it comes to fact-finding, but the REAL fact of the matter is, if 7,000,000,000 people believed 2 + 2 = 5, it still would not make it true. It is also the reason why eyewitness testimony alone is rarely if ever sufficient to convict someone of a crime in a court of law; because people can be subjectively mistaken. The world around us cannot be, but we ourselves? We make all sorts of assumptions, and we conveniently ignore when those assumptions go wrong so that we can continue telling ourselves that our subjective experiences MUST count for something when it comes to the universe. Sadly, that is only wishful thinking.

The universe's "expansion," so says Mr. Science, is not as you think it is. The universe, you see, is..."flat." When we say the universe is expanding, we refer to the space-time continuum, not the physicality of the universe. To say the universe has a center would mean to imply that there is a geometric equality to the universe itself. Ignoring its lack of, uh...dimensions, for lack of a better word, it would nevertheless have to mean that everything is expanding at an equal rate, with equal trajectories, and equal velocity. In truth, if we viewed the universe as, say, a globe, it would look more like a misshapen bundle of spikes, few of which would be of equal length or distance from one another, if any were at all, really.

As for the chair analogy; if a chair breaks, I have two options; I can look for the cause of it, or accept an assumption of what the cause was. You are trying to say that just because religion fails on one account or the other [one chair broke, all chairs ergo will break if they are seated in; one claim of a religion is proven wrong, all of that religion must be wrong. I think that's what you're going for here], it does not mean the entire religion is wrong. Swap out the word "religion" for anything in science. If one thing was wrong about a theory, the theory would, well, not be a theory. It would have to determine what is true about what was proven wrong first. A theory is a body of evidence; once something becomes a theory, it is essentially a fact, because it has exhausted all possible attempts to falsify it. A theory can adapt new information, ergo providing more understanding of what it is explaining, but as we have come to discover, no theory is ever broken once it becomes one. What it explains is factual, tangible, and real, and has evidence for it. I can look at the chair and determine why it broke pretty easily. I can then check and see if the next chair has that fault. But if I sit in another chair and it breaks, and another chair and it breaks, and another and another and another with the same result, I eventually have to come to the conclusion that chairs are simply not something to sit in. Carrying the analogy into tangibility, I can break any religion of its claims enough times to be well-aware of why I cannot sit in the chairs of faith and expect them to hold up at all...as you might be finding, and I can promise I can show if you are so inclined to indulge me in doing so, though you will have to make the claim first before I can disprove it.

Buddhism, quick aside, is not a religion, but rather a philosophy, although Buddha himself has some mythical claims regarding his life. But the actual practice of Buddhism is not actually religious; it requires no faith, but it does require thought that, honestly, tends to lead nowhere, from what I've discovered.

Now, I find it amusing you mention God judging people by their deeds. That essentially means you are not a Christian. The importance of Jesus was that he died for our sins, and therefore when we die, we are absolved of our sins by accepting his sacrifice as an absolute truth, in both its supposed happening and its reason. Good works, as defined by the Bible, should be present in the life of whoever claims to be a spiritually reborn Christian. If they're not present, they're not real Christians. Good works are a necessary symptom or sign of someone who has truly been regenerated (saved) by the Holy spirit, but they are not a prerequisite to that regeneration. According to God's standards, it isn't possible to be holy, righteous, discerning, wise or to perform what He considers to be good works until you are first regenerated through faith in Jesus Christ, because only Jesus as the son of God and God himself are capable of being those things. After all, you said it yourself; God is pure and absolutely just. But your holy book does not agree with your stance that people can be granted access to heaven simply by being good without believing in Jesus.

But we are all as an unclean [thing], and all our righteousnesses [are] as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.
Isaiah 64:6

How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
Hebrew 9:14

To open their eyes, [and] to turn [them] from darkness to light, and [from] the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.
Acts 26:18 (this is a quote from Jesus)

He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth.
Luke 11:23

You are guilty of committing the cherry-picking fallacy, I'm afraid, which puts you grandly at odds with your own religion's doctrines and claims. That's just scratching the surface there, too. God does not want to make a personal pact with you save for you to accept his son's "sacrifice" as the purging of the sin of being a human being.

Now, YOU didn't say omnibenevolent in regards to God. But that is one of the central concepts to being pure; to be "pure" is to be all-loving. All-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful. That is what absolute purity would be. But this is a fallacy in and of itself, an absolute paradox. “Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find The Omnipotence to Change His future mind?” Attr. Karen Owens.

Now, once again, I put it to you; who is more responsible for a situation? The one with less power, or the one with more? If it is through your own fault, of course you are responsible, but if you are not at fault, then what is? Well, God has dominion over all, so you claim, but he did not act. Ergo, the responsibility would seem to fall on him. If he were real. And if he's responsible, and capable of acting, and yet does not, that seems as if he is not very benevolent. Now, interesting you mention the thing about natural disasters, by the way. You say god gave us life. Well, the theory of evolution proves a million [probably more actually] times over that the story of creation is just that; a story, with no merit of fact or evidence to support its claim, but lots of evidence showing it is simply not true. So, how IS god responsible for our lives? Because we can trace our genetic ancestry all the way down to the most basic single-celled organisms. The claim tends to be, at this point, that God seeded life on earth in this way, and set up everything in motion to lead to our existences; everything must have a beginning after all, right? Life can't just spontaneously come into existence from nothing, right?

Wrong. Abiogenesis. If you don't know what that is, it's a theory (as demonstrated in the Miller-Urey Experiment) in which organic life can come from non-organic matter. The most likely conditions of early Earth were, as the experiment demonstrated, sufficient to create RNA, amino acids, the basic chemicals of life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abioge.....Current_models

Quote:

"There is still no "standard model" of the origin of life. Most currently accepted models draw at least some elements from the framework laid out by Alexander Oparin (in 1924) and J.B.S. Haldane (in 1925), who postulated the molecular or chemical evolution theory of life. According to them, the first molecules constituting the earliest cells "were synthesized under natural conditions by a slow process of molecular evolution, and these molecules then organized into the first molecular system with properties with biological order." Oparin and Haldane suggested that the atmosphere of the early Earth may have been chemically reducing in nature, composed primarily of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon dioxide (CO2) or carbon monoxide (CO), and phosphate (PO43-), with molecular oxygen (O2) and ozone (O3) either rare or absent, however, the current scientific model is an atmosphere that contained 60% hydrogen, 20% oxygen (mostly in the form of water vapor), 10% carbon dioxide, 5 to 7% hydrogen sulfide, and smaller amounts of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, free hydrogen, methane and inert gases. In the atmosphere proposed by Oparin and Haldane, electrical activity can catalyze the creation of certain basic small molecules (monomers) of life, such as amino acids. This was demonstrated in the Miller–Urey experiment by Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey reported in 1953.

So now we have a perfectly logical explanation for why life on Earth exists...or, more accurately, HOW it came to exist. So where does God fit into this equation? The gap has been filled and he is no longer necessary, so he must vacate it and move the goalpost further back. After all, there are only two possibilities, here: One is that the universe is chaos given physical expression, and the other is that it is ultimately all ordered. The odds for everything happening by chance may be extraordinary to our primitive little minds. But when taken into the context of the astronomical scale of the vastness of the cosmos and the enormous gulf of space-time, suddenly, those odds don't seem so high. If you roll the dice enough times, you're bound to end up rolling one side sooner or later. Take a 100-sided die and roll it a few hundred thousand times. You are very likely to come up with every single possible side at least once. If not, keep rolling. Eventually, it'll happen. Is that God's plan? Or is it that if a possibility is tried enough times, it'll come to be? It's reasonable to assume that it's merely the result of enough rolls of the die. There is no reason, however, to assume that some other force was responsible for determining it would happen that way.

Also I'd like to point out that you stated we are a rational species, and then said: "If we were truly rational people, we would see and understand that working as a community is ultimately better for mankind. Unite and take to the stars. But we don't, because many have the option to be selfish and so choose that easy path."

When your argument starts folding in on itself, it's time to acknowledge it's faulty. :P

I bring that up to address your second-to-last paragraph...but first! Why are we here? The answer is to live and experience life with our free will. Ignoring that free will is not real nor even is it defined, as I have demonstrated, then I ask, why are we to live and experience life? What's the point of that? As is always the case, "why" leads nowhere and ends up requiring one to square the circle. You are free to delude yourself into seeing it as a square, of course, but even if you call it a square, reality of it is, it's still a circle. Therefore, you are most likely left with nothing more than "because of God's inscrutable plan." Well, where's the rationale behind that, the justification? Sounds more like a product of the irrational human mind, and not the logic of reality; more like grabbing for straws than seeking truth. And if something does not adhere to the logic of reality, well...it sounds like it's not logical. In order to be the perfect judge, one must apply absolute logic. But if God is operating outside of the realms of logic, and ergo operating illogically, then he is not the perfect judge, nor is he acting impartially; he is acting chaotically. If he is acting chaotically, it means he is acting without plan or forethought. At this conjecture, you may, if you so wish, continue to believe in God's existence...but if so, you must acknowledge he has no involvement with us in any way whatsoever, as there was no plan, no conscious act.

Now, to carry on with what I was beginning to address. I have not seen Noah, but as it is a Darren Aronofsky film, ergo a film by the man I believe to be the greatest film-maker ever, I am obliged to watch it. ...Seriously, Requiem for a Dream. *shudders* I cannot watch that movie without crying my eyes out by the end, and especially AT the end...it's so fucking powerful. As for humanity...you give us too little credit. Consider the environment of the world in which we evolved, and the process in which we evolved, and, in a rare instance in which a "why" comes up without needing Occam's Razor, why we evolved in the way we did. Look at any wild, uninhabited place, and you'll notice a common theme; they're all hellholes, completely inhospitable to humans. The further back in time you go, the more wild and untamed the world was. We evolved in that world. We came to begin forming our sapient minds during the Ice Age. As you pointed out; the world itself is against us. We have two primary instincts; communal bonding, and self-preservation. Those are the two strongest parts of our instinctual subconscious, the former a response to the needs of the latter...meaning, self-preservation is first and foremost to our instincts, and everyone else is, supposedly, second. Now, you say we're born equal...and I shake my head in amusement at your naivete. Equality... Mongoloids, people with too many or too few chromosomes, people with Asperger's, autism, or disease [for example, AIDS from a mother who has it as well]...people born with brain damage or physical defects... Tell me, just how do you define "equal?" Because all those things completely ignore any definition of equality that I can think of, and I'm rather fond of the English language...

So we evolved in a highly hostile environment, one which has ALWAYS been overtly, viciously hostile, in fact, and was much more so the further back in time you look. Our individual primary imperative is the preservation of self first and the preservation of the rest comes second in our animal minds. We are not the strongest, or fastest, or largest species on this rock. The only physical attribute we have that is superior to all other species is our ability to run for long periods of time. We can literally walk our prey to death. In fact, it's how our ancestors hunted; the fastest gazelle in the world still has to stop and rest. A human being may not move as fast, but s/he won't have to stop nearly as soon from exhaustion. Other than that, we have our faces and eyes; we are expressive, and ergo, highly communicative, which has allowed us to successfully unite and cooperate with other members of our species.

Now, you demonstrate the very worst aspect of your religion: The fact that it, like every other religion out there, is basically a self-centered death cult, eagerly awaiting the destruction of everything and everyone; valuing the life of yourself, while looking forwards to the deaths of billions of others because of your own subjective, and wholly inaccurate, perceptions. Now, we are not created; we are formed. We are not born equal, we are born into whatever situation the galactic dice-rolling determined it should be, for better or worse. We are plagued by members of our species who dupe others, use them, hurt them, abuse them, kill them. And yet despite all of that, if you do a search on Google of charity services in your general vicinity, you'll found quite a few. In times of disaster, danger, and strife, you hear of people who risk their own lives for the lives of others, and not rarely, either. You have doctors, people who spent years upon expensive years in medical school, foregoing lives of luxury from private practicing to instead travel abroad and provide aid and medical care to those who otherwise would never be able to receive any. You have people sending their hard-earned money to complete strangers who are starving, suffering, sick, poor, destitute. Despite the vast differences of opinions between our species, opinions being the thing we supposedly cherish most about ourselves, we somehow find it in ourselves to find unity with millions upon millions upon millions of others in spite of those differences, unity that can be so strong we willingly put our lives on the line and even willingly allow ourselves to die or be killed for the sake of others. It happens much more than we give credit for in this day and age. Those of our species who ARE cruel and selfish are, by and large, very much the minority of our species. It was only about a hundred thousand years ago that we came to learn the ability to actually make and control fire. Nowadays we have nearly instantaneous mass-communication, we've harnessed electricity and the elements of the world to fuel our pursuits of everything from pleasure to production to medicine to power. We developed the means to move faster than the sound of our passing could move, and then we developed the means of breaking the barrier of gravity, and overcame the obstacles the hostility of the airless, radioactive vacuum of space presented, traveled a distance many times the size of our entire planet to actually land on a surface that was not Earth's. We throw out intellectual capacities into stopping, preventing, and alleviating suffering, pain, and disease. Now we're planning on and putting together the means of having human feet touch the surface of Mars within the next 15 years. One of the most awful and hideous plagues that ravaged mankind, polio, was defeated by a man who, upon making his vaccine that effectively stopped this nightmarish disease from threatening humanity at large after years upon years of study and testing, literally gave his vaccine away, when he could have become a multi-millionaire by selling it and controlling its distribution and production and price. Despite our primary instinct being to preserve ourselves first and help others next, we seem to do it in reverse order a hell of a lot when we're not influenced by certain outside forces. We literally defy our evolutionary nature to help others of our kind, at the sacrifice of ourselves, and we do it a lot.

There are three things that breed the suffering we experience in this world. Greed, ignorance, and arrogance. Greed is a necessary evil that nevertheless can be controlled...and most of the time, it is. You find much more humility than greed if you look around and pay attention to that sort of thing. But when there are those less-common times in which greed is a prominent force in the life of an individual who is weak to their own desires, they tend to cause problems for a great number of others. A few can do much harm to magnitudes greater their numbers, you see. This is made worse by arrogance, the idea that we are each so much more important than we objectively are, and ignorance. The latter two of which are the products of delusion, sometimes by the self, most often by others who themselves are deluded.

Religion and "faithful thinking" breed the lattermost by the metric fuck-ton...and are, in fact, the primary antagonists of those things. After all, it's hard not to be ignorant when you supplant your own answers based on "gut feelings" and "personal experience" to things that you otherwise have no answer to because of one's arrogance making their egos sting when they consider the possibilities of not being nearly as important or meaningful as they want to be.

So, are you sure you really want to say that you eagerly hope for the total destruction of mankind because of a vast minority's actions and because of the ignorance and arrogance fueled by faith that plagues mankind? After all, when you look at places in the world with much more 'secular' populations, they seem to be doing a LOT better as far as their quality of life and generosity towards others goes. You look at the US, and find there's studies where areas with higher population percentages of atheists and agnostics tend to have better education scores and less violent crime, and then areas where religious identities are strongest, the education scores are at their lowest [and ergo the ignorance is at its highest, which breeds...] and the violent crime rates are at their highest.

Hell. I'm a humanist. "Good without God," as the motto for it goes these days. Every religion and religious person tells me that for not believing in their deity, I am damned to an eternity of hell. Yet I look around and see religion and faith causing far more suffering than providing our species with a respite from it. I cannot even fear hell, an eternity of suffering, even as a concept or even a possibility, because I am more afraid that allowing myself to take the slippery slope of making grand or even just moderate assumptions about things will deprive me of my compassion for others. I would rather burn for an eternity in death than compromise my ability and desire to help others.

An entire childhood of being beaten, starved, malnourished. Raped. Violated. Even tortured. Seeing friends and loved ones die. Falling prey to narcotic addictions. Only in the last 12 years has my life been free of all that. 15 years was spent suffering it. And yet I have no urge whatsoever to see a hard reset on life. And if it happens, I will wail in despair at the potential that was and never will be.

So...with that in mind,.. What's your excuse for such an inclination? :P

You don't need to answer, however. I already know the answer. It's hard to view humanity in a positive light when you are of a faith that says we're all as a race disgusting, unworthy creatures. :P I should know. I felt that way once, too.

Unlike a few other discussions I've had on here, I never once felt you were being any of those things. Hell, it'd be easier to just mock and laugh and call me an ignorant, foolish semi-christian than to take the time to explain all you've done. I appreciate it, though see my lack of focus in these long texts does often miss my point just a bit each time. ^^;


Well, our first argument just seems to be over semantics. Freedom of Choice is to replace Free Will. Lets face it, these religions are from ancient times and dealing with plenty who could not read or write. Big and easy words without too much stress on semantics is the way they worked. That's another tic against religion from me, but I'm not the finest speaker, well versed in science and the English language (and in fact love to create my own ways and reuse words to my own liking which doesn't help the case) Religion and Science are pitted against one another via proven evidence and faith. A weak argument, but seeing as definition, time, and science are man made ideals and values, wouldn't it seem science is pitted to win over religion when we can't quantify and show a physical God? That faith is but a definition and seen as irrational without a scientific way to describe it or determine it from other mental facilities or being able to define past our own inadequacies and ignorance? Though Science wouldn't work so well if all we had to do was have faith and believe that it'll work based on "gut feelings," though that is either where such premonitions start or come from common sense or definitions that came before.

There is no consensus defined by us. Yet we're the ones who have made and defined all that we can. All words are created by us. All names, labels, measurements, and such of our world is man made. We also love to redefine, change meanings and definitions, and when we have nothing we create something. Heh, I guess that would be a great explanation for "God" as well then, eh? A simple answer to our "Why" of life and creation. My experiences, my feelings and happenings I can only give the details and can't explain them further without faith and belief; that its all just irrational imagination gone mad from staring at the emptiness of the end of the road? That is what you're saying my faith is?

Of coarse faith and science will be at odds. Faith is to God as Science is to man, I'd say, since Science is man made. If life were a video game, this would be our "moral choice" in the game, as far as which we lean more to. Just as people say God is a crutch we invented to deal with the vastness of the Universe, isn't Science like that in a way as well? All our laws and theories are man made and developed by our "irrational minds," to quantify and explain the universe around us. Though we do rationally prove what we can on paper, there is this whole Time thing we invented to measure events and yet even though Time is man made people give such a fit about "Creation in 7 days," except "What the hell is a Day to God?" It takes greater minds than mine to try and rationally prove out God on paper. All we have in religion is to go by our faith, what we feel, what is written, and the "personal pact with God." Is it irrational? Of coarse. From an objective and scientific point, religion is utter nonsense if you cut out Faith/Belief because its not proven rational. Yet that is the glue that holds those of us who believe. Its different from telling someone something in quantum physics where they reply with "thats nonsense" but Science has the luxury of showing it on paper to people compared to a feeling from within that can't be explained. [Though, now that I'm thinking, have people done MRIs and the like when dealing with religious stuff?] So without having the proper tools, words, or ability to explain it beyond how I can, I guess my religion is nothing more than a Psychosis to the Scientific Community.


What about taking in account emotions and their effect and still being able to make a decision that its not considered rational? Its biased? That using what I know of my belief system, the legal system, and its effect on my psyche and own well being, that I am considered to be thinking irrational when I use my ability to disarm and disable an assailant after they mock me and get me angered. That is all irrational? Yet I was able to rationalize with myself to not kill the man but to preserve us both and find the best outcome to do so. That is irrational? Would the rational mind be to kill the man? To let him attack and harm me further? So only computer are rational? *shrugs* I guess I have a different definition for it then. [Either proving my ignorance and/or proving how we can redefine and make anything to be so.] Sorry, I'm just reminded of a comedian telling a story about us rationalizing anything. He was diabetic and talking about how he wanted cookies and the thought "I don't need both my feet," is how he rationalized it to himself to eat them. :P


Well, I'd argue in that example WHY do 7 billion people believe 2+2=5 when we can show them 2 apples plus 2 more apples equal 4, not 5 apples. Then again, I could use that example and using our ability to change and rationalize things to fit the way we need, that 2+2=5, because the symbol for 4 has been changed to 5. We had it wrong/mistranslated so that the count is actually 1 2 3 5(four) 4(five) 6 because they are symbols we gave meaning and not concrete but a widely accepted symbol to represent a quantity. Its rarely efficient on its own, but it is not completely written off as imaginative and irrational.

Its not Flat, its spherical if anything (though I read up on that quickly to see why it is deemed "flat" but that is my own ignorance to take flat meaning more 2d than 3D flat) We can't calculate a given center because everything is expanding and all we can do is measure everything and compare it to everything to measure our known universe and the rate at which it grows by our definitions of time, distance, etc. That doesn't mean there is no center, we just can't discover or define it. Kinda like God. :P Just like the time before the Big Bang, we can't measure or define the time before it, but only our physical and known universe as defined and observed by us. God could have made the Big Bang. Perhaps that is all God did was to get the ball rolling, perhaps influence intelligent design, and then left life to go on on its own. But then we have Christianity and The Bible and its story. Though how much is story, how much is parable to teach meanings, and how much is history for the Jewish and Christian peoples?

Fair enough. I cannot provide an air tight explanation of any particular faith to put up against my "Chair" argument, as our scientific tools to measure are for the physical and known world, and religion requires one to believe beyond the physical, which is deemed irrational by Science, so moot until a new way can be found.

Hmm. Is that the same as Taoism and the like? I'll admit ignorance as to not knowing or looking it up offhand, as I've only but a few hours inbetween sleeping and driving to hold this debate. ^^;

God is the father, creator, and judge of life. Yes, Christianity asks us to accept and believe in Jesus' sacrifice so that we may enter heaven, but then it falls upon "is that all you must do?" Can someone who commits horrible atrocities repent of their ways, ask for Christ to be accepted and forgiven and cleansed of their past? Are you required to continue to do good works til your death? What if you backslide? Do you ask for Jesus again or need you only do it once? That is where I believe (look out, I used believe. How irrational :P ) God is still there to judge in the end. Though, is that me being arrogant to think that is how it works? Do I honestly think that someone would/could try to 'pull a fast one' on the Almighty by accepting Christ after a murder spree and believing they can just waltz into heaven? What if they can? What if it is that easy? I believe in Redemption, but to what extent? "On the Earth as it is in Heave," comes to mind, why God is still the judge at the end. Though that is still adhering to the irrational religious thought of the meaning of life.

I'm pausing here for now, as without taking a long aside to put my own personal "faith & belief" notes in order, I can't proceed as 'logically' as I possibly can. (shut up :P ) I take a step in my faith each day while also looking at it from the outside. I make no assumptions that plenty of this sounds crazy and have to review it myself. Trying to logically define and preach religion is irrational. Yet there is something within that always points the way, I sort it out, and my faith strengthens and I move on. I have no rational way to put it beyond that, other than putting it again that it either is the work of God and him pointing the way on my path of choices, or my own irrational brain making heads and tails of it all in a grand delusion. Shadows of a doubt to confirm ones belief? Perhaps I'm not a Christian but a simple theist. Jesus is for losers


I know I'm guilty of cherry picking. I'm one of us stupid, irrational humans who is imperfect. What are the odds (since we enjoy the dice rolling) that I'd be the one who had it all figured out and could logically debate and explain it? [quick aside. When trying to find your definition of all purity to explain God, I came across Hegel and this https://www.marxists.org/reference/.....hl/hlbeing.htm. Pure being and Being nothing are one in the same.] That just makes me think up that argument that simply thinking there is a God while not being able to positively quantify its existence neither proves nor disproves the existence of God. God is a paradox. We have but only our way to know and discover God. God is unseen but presence felt. Perhaps God is the dark matter holding the universe together. (thats the kind of random thoughts my mind takes me that keep me from just being a good little Christian I suppose. Trying to blend science and religion) But to bring it back to that quote, Why would God need to change his future mind?

If God is omnibenevolent and has dominion over all, he could make life blissful and easy and that such situations would never come to pass. Yet that would also undermine our free will/freedom of choice. Or perhaps it'd be like the cartoons, that no matter what we got ourselves into that God would rescue us and put us back on our marry way? If God created all, then all must be allowed to be. Perhaps as a demonstration to help define what is right and wrong. What is benevolent, just, and such.

I already put to bed that Genesis is an easy story to explain the start out of life. Perhaps a very simplified version so the most basic of peoples could understand it. That is the scientific world taking it so damn literal. I love when people argue "How could God create all there is in 7 days?" when the first thing is "What is a day to God when man kind created time?" If God is within everything and omnipresent, then what is time to God?

Moving on to the "dice rolling" on the chaos of the universe, it only got rolled once. Unless multiple universes exists, there was only one roll of the dice and the odds turned up this way. There is no "roll enough times" because it was once and done. So it came this way. All by chance? Fine. I'm too insignificant and irrational to accept it was all coincidence. Particularly when we still can't define, describe, or theorize as to what came before the Big Bang, which scientists refuse to answer just like religious people can't get past faith and belief. Both have their dead ends and only in the end will we get our final answers. (To which point, life just seems a test to survive and see it through)

I say we are rational beings in that we are capable of rational thought. For the love of a God you once believed in, cut me a little slack on my choice of worse, cause not once did you ask if I'd like to revise my statement in my little free time. (nor did I save/cut/paste and review enough times I my own before posting, so it is mostly my fault but shut up. :P )

Rational reason of life. Well, to live and experience life and to see what choices we took and the end result of ours lives. Perhaps its like a giant data base God is collecting on human life to see if we're worth it or to create something new? To see if we're worth having about or to be smote out of existence? Perhaps all you had to do in life was experience what you could, and look out onto the cosmos and say "Thanks God" and that is all God ever wanted from you. Who knows. Scream "Cop out" all you want, but being that I nor none living are anything remotely like God nor can fathom truly what omnipotence and omniscient are, how can I even come close to a full rational explanation for his plan other than what we know now, what is written, and what each of us decides about our reality?

I recommend it. Its a great visual. It has biblical references on the story of Noah and the great flood. Christians railed against it too, as the ignorant and scared are often led to do.

I guess I still am a naive patriot. Equal in the idea that we were born and can experience what we can in life, but I guess equality ends around there. Another conclusion I jumped to too fast because I was starting to go cross eyed as my attention can't handle this sort of thing, which is probably helping my case that I must have either a form of depression or A.D.D. that keeps my focus.

Now, I don't EAGERLY await the destruction of us all, but rather answer that nagging doubt filled question of what comes at the end. Do I just cling to religion as a fear of getting past the great nothing that lies beyond death? I don't know. I don't fear death for I am thankful for what I've enjoyed of life, and I don't worry much about what happens to everyone else cause I'll be dead. So why the linger of what lies beyond then? Am I scared to the not knowing of when? No. I don't want to know when it'll end but I don't feel that subconsciously causes the thoughts. There is simply a feeling from within, that my 'heart,' mind, experience, education (laugh all ya want :P ) points to something must be out there that we can't prove nor disprove. God. The creator. The being that started this grand old universe. Now, as far as religion and Christianity. I'll admit I'll have to go back over the 'good book' and see if I really follow all of it. Perhaps I'm not a Christian after all. *shrugs* but I feel the effects of religion. I believe in God and the good things that can be done. I thank the lord for the things in my life and for guidance. Perhaps I'm praying to the universe and it sees me through.


One of my personal experience and faith that God helped heal me was my eye. I had a rock shot into it while driving. Rushed to ER. A millimeter from going blind and the doctors said there was a good chance my vision will be worse if not lost in my left eye. (This was also on a Sunday. Go figure) So my dad, who was driving, turn around and took me back to see the pastor of the church we visited that Sunday morning. He laid hands and prayed for healing on me, with my dad and I praying with him. Next day, i go to optometrist and my eye is fine. There is barely a scratch where the rock impact and caused such hemorrhaging that my vision was blurry. (In fact, I believe my left eye is now stronger than the right eye, though I still have glasses) So to me that was a simple miracle. Fine, out of ignorance of not knowing how fast my eye may heal, the effects of a rock being shot into the eye at 55mph through an open window. Perhaps the ER doctor of trauma misdiagnosed? Was there actual healing done through the Lord? All is speculation without measuring. What rational way to I have to explain what the trained doctors could not other than a miracle?


So, my excuse to God and religion. Well, it has to be beyond me growing up in a religious family, as 2 sisters are not believers and I don't even walk the exact path of a Christian. With all we can rationalize, explain, theorize, measure, and create, I can't just believe random chance through all we have seen. There was something that started it all. That is God. The exact definition of God is hard to explain or fathom without me trying to research it and giving you an "on the spot" answer (which is what I'm doing, so hush :P ) They have records of Jesus existing and his ordeal, but it started a movement that has effected so many and continues to do so. How can that all just be coincidence? Do I still have questions? Yes. Do I have my doubts? Yes, but I try to seek answers, even knowing I may not discover truth. I do not reject science nor what it has taught us, like so many other "believers" [I say in quotes, because the idea just makes me want to choke them with their own Bible] but as a tool to help us find our way in the world. If we were created in God's image, which image? That he was a creator and so we have discovered ways to create like him? Is that not Science then? All we've discovered, if God is omnipotent and knows all, are we not shown the way to possibilities through Science? [Okay, that is the reason I want to smack Christians who rail against modern medicine. Like we figured this shit out without God knowing. THAT is arrogance and ignorance mixed of "believers."]

Okay, focusing. My Creed: Until I find truth and am satisfied with it through the use of science, I will continue to believe what my religion has taught me and what I feel and believe. I continue to believe that there is a God, he gave me life and this world (no, not personally all for me, shut up :P ) and a path to call my own among this world that was created. There were many paths laid and I have the freedom of choice to choose my own destiny available from what he laid before me. That God loves me, loves us all, and showed that through Jesus. That though we are imperfect people, he knows this and will accept us if we willingly accept it ourselves and ask for redemption from ourselves. To let go of my pride and do good works in his name. Though I am not forced to do so, I choose to, and the joy of those good works may yet shine his light onto others so that they may awaken from their darkness. That I will try my best to do right by the Lord. *hmm...* and then something about the 10 commandments, a bit in there about loving thy neighbor as myself. *shrugs* I don't know. Perhaps I'm just an irrational boob. :P

((... wow seriously?

...well... I've never been good with any sort of condolenscens and stuff.

Anyway... I guess I should read the novel-length pre-replies.

Caroline ))

I appreciate it. At least 2 folks replied to it. It helped. :3

I've still gotta re-read and reply properly to your note as well, but just as I'm feeling better I come down with a sinus infection. @_@