are you an atheist?

ethan you're gonna spend too much time reading these dudes and become one of em, take it from me man, I spent all last month reading up on NOI and now I don't even feel dressed without my bow tie

coining a phrase just for ethan: "TLDR Bomb"

why a militant agnosticism is the least anybody can do for the kids' sake:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/us/04evolution.html?ref=us

In a Star Trek movie a prophet led the Starship Enterprise to the Forbidden Region to meet 'God'. This god drew them there because he needed a starship. Commander Kirk doubted the entity was really God and asked this rhetorical question, "What need does God have for a Starship?"

The 'god' was angered. Kirk was thrown to the ground. Kirk got up and ask again, "Excuse me, but what need does God have for a starship?

The angered 'god' knocked Kirk to the floor again. Kirk got up again and asked a third time. For emphasis the question was asked three times. There was no answer and this was taken as proof that since God obviously does not need a spaceship, that any person claiming a need for a starship was obviously not God.

The message delivered to the movie audience is , if any personality did come from outer space in a spaceship it certainly would not be God, for "what need does God have for a Starship?"

But what would you do if Jesus returned in a spaceship? Is it possible?

Here is a hymn by the famous Handel. It is dated 1748. That's two hundred and fifty years ago. That is way before airplanes, rockets and our modern marvels. It is still found in some church hymn books such as the Lutheran Book of Worship. It is still sung at some church services. You may have sang the words to this song.

http://www.moseshand.com/images/bright1.gif

And have the bright immensities
Received our risen Lord,

Where light-years frame the Pleiades
And point Orion's sword?

Do flaming suns his footsteps trace
Through corridors sublime,

The Lord of interstellar space
And Conqueror of time?

The heaven that hides Him from our sight
Knows neither near nor far:

An altar candle sheds its light
As surely as a star;

And where His loving people meet
To share the gift divine,

There stands He with unhurrying feet,
And Heaven's splendors shine.

Rhetorical Questions:

What are the bright immensities?

How did Handel know about light-years?

Why did Handel call Jesus Christ, "The Lord of interstellar space and conquer of time?"

A heaven 'that knows neither near nor far'. Is that travel in hyper-space as in the Star Wars movies?

Space Travel in the Bible
How Jesus left.

Acts 1:9 And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.

How Jesus will return

Acts 1:10 -11 And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; 11 Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.

is Jesus Xenu?

I know close reading and rebuttal of these pieces is hardly necessary but

Here is a hymn by the famous Handel. It is dated 1748 ... How did Handel know about light-years?

Even more incredibly, how did Handel intuit the words of a poem written by Howard Chandler Robbins in 1931?!?!?!

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/06/04/cathedral.sex/index.html

"an outrage of notable proportions which bespeaks unutterable squalor."

two people loving eachother... hmm. doesn't sound so wrong.

"We are atheists and for us, having sex in church is like doing it any other place."

I call bullshit. If it were just like any other place, they wouldn't have been in there. It's only exciting because it's knowingly disrespectful.

Churches are kind of cold and hard and uncomfortable, why would anyone choose to have sex in there other than because it's knowingly disrespectful?

... as the choirboy said to the bishop

My point exactly!

He added that a special ceremony would be held to purify the confession box.

I think probably a kleenex would be better.

That box would have heard plenty of sex talk before this I bet.

And plenty of "bashing of the bishop" from priests during esp. fruity confessions I'll warrant

Has anybody seen Julia Sweeney's 'Letting Go of God' on Showtime?

Really enjoying John Safran's Sunday night Triple J show. Dude needs his own thread.

Kinda feel like i woulda definitely voted 'atheist' for most of my life, but in the last year or two that has changed entirely. I think my definition of God just keeps expanding, sometimes it seems to encompass anything that can and/or cannot be true about the universe and reality. If God is perfect and infinite he must embody not just everything good and true, but everything bad and false and - since I'm a fan of Schroedinger - both and neither as well all at the same time. At this point in my thinking I could simply say that the material universe exists only after I have perceived it, that it is a subjective quantum-style creation. Well if God is everywhere and in all things then he surely must be in me and shit that makes total sense then because IM CREATING THE UNIVERSE THAT I EXPERIENCE!!

It reminds me of this thing I read about one of Crowley's methods, where he begins to invoke a deity and keeps on it, amping up devotion and bhakti and concentration and embodiment of this deity, chanting and dressing up and immersing in the rituals for this deity. And once you have got to the point where you experience contact/a very real vision of the deity, then you start back over with a totally different deity. The purpose is to enhance your control of your willpower, to beef up your creative energies and hone them. You could say this deity is only a figment of your mind, a hallucination you experience after focusing so much time and effort on it. But really you could say that about the everyday reality we live in as well...

But if the definition of atheist is 'lack of belief in a personal (likely Christian) deity' then I might still be that. Then again I've come to realize that if JHVH exists and truly interacted with ancient Hebrews, they would naturally be describing Him in human terms because they were not exactly privileged elites who had been initiated into the mysteries of and abstract mysticism. You try and describe the workings of an infinite consciousness, it ain't easy.

i dunno y'all, the universe is a mysterious place, i'm not ruling out anything

i am an atheist but i hate the whole richard dawkins new atheism pish. Not just because the tone can be tiresome and it's preaching to the converted, but also becuase i don't really subscribe to its worship of rationalism - no one lives their life in an at all rational manner and no-one would want to.

in a way i'm agnostic - i accept that i am completely fallible, so that must apply to my ideas on God as much as anything else - but i have an innate and strong feeling that there is nothing benevolent or all encompassing in the universe. I was raised catholic but doubted as soon as i could even begin to think about religion in any way at all, i was 5 or 5 iirc. The moment that confirmed for me that i didn't believe in god was when i was 11 and i saw someone die for the first, and so far only, time. A maybe 16 or 17 year old stranger drove a moped into a tree when i was on holiday with my family in Rome and after that i felt that my suspicion that there was nothing orderly or good about the universe as a whole was confirmed.

The irony that i reject superstitious, subjective, irrational religion on the grounds of feelings is not lost on me.

5 or 6, lol.

Sometimes I wish I believed in God. Like when I found out John Donne had a portrait done of him as he thought he'd look when he was resurrected at the Apocalypse, so he could hang it on his wall as a memento mori.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Donne-shroud.png/453px-Donne-shroud.png

That's a cool thing to do that necessitates a belief in God/Christianity for it to be anything other than just a weirder-than-average portrait. But, ultimately, I'm too angered by religious paradoxes to just accept them. Like, I think I'm an atheist because I can't handle cognitive dissonance in the slightest.

Yes, atheist. Tried not to be once when I was 12-13 to get a boy to like me, didn't work (he liked me but I just couldn't get into God). Anyone else raised to *not* believe in a higher power or deity? That said, I did have a pretty spiritual upbringing (buddhist).

Was Richard Dawkins the one who said rather than "the creator" being a watch maker, "it" is a blind watch maker? That makes sense to me although I don't think there could be an "it".

Answer to OP: no, I don't have it in me to be an atheist. I'm fine with the magical-thinking aspect...actually I think I prefer a world where some things are unknowable, mystical, all that jazz.

It's the nitpicking ORTHODOXY of organized religion that I can't stand. I just can't imagine why I should care that any human authority throughout history or the present would award themselves the authority to proscribe the beliefs of others. Or me. Especially me!

all the antitheists in the house throw your hands up

I think the orthodoxy is useful because over time people found that certain rituals, certain thoughts, certain actions help program the mind in a way to put it in this spiritual state. You could reach a spiritual state sans orthodoxy but it's sort of a proven tool - to the converted - and this is why they want to share it so badly.

throw your hand in the ay-er
if you eschew prayer

I dunno, I am in awe of so many things even while being an atheist. I forget how lightning is formed every time I watch a thunderstorm (this seriously happened to me, like, yesterday. It was all like boooom! and I said to myself "wow, how does that even happen? Oh wait, right." But lightning is still kind of mysterious because how on earth do clouds get their charge anyway? I guess everything has an electrical charge and maybe clouds are just super unstable because it's all this water vapor hustling around? Is this completely inane?).

The idea that the universe has always existed and will always exist, that it expands infinitely, and that every thing is made up of and connected to everything else is pretty magical to me.

I know, and in an intellectual sense it's orthodoxy that interests me, because the Evangelical movement pretty much washed their hands of literacy and reading comprehension in the '70s with the rise of the Moral Majority and I still kind of find the idea of "respecting tradition and putting any stock in the writings of the great minds of history" to be a charming novelty.

But woe to him or her that actually BELIEVES any of it. Ritual is a great tool but I'm pretty sure there are several hundred aphorisms about a good tool turning in the hand of its user.

xp to Adam

dunno, I am in awe of so many things even while being an atheist. I forget how lightning is formed every time I watch a thunderstorm (this seriously happened to me, like, yesterday. It was all like boooom! and I said to myself "wow, how does that even happen? Oh wait, right."

but surely most theists are ok with "that sort of science", though?

(I hope?)

Hmm, atheist, with the added belief that female followers of Abrahamic religions might as well be turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. Have mellowed in that I don't mind other people's religion if they're not using it to enable bigotry, sexism or the control of some other person's behaviour by threatening them with Hell.

Anecdotally, all the people around me who went Evangelical in the '70s were not very bright, with stupid parents to boot, and were as scared of a three-syllable word as THE DEBBIL himself.

female followers of Abrahamic religions might as well be turkeys voting for Thanksgiving

haha yeah :/. i don't really think of myself as an atheist and am close to many female followers of Abrahamic religions, so this is a thought i usually only give vent to privately but yeah.

i was always p. neutral on this but i have been getting like militantly atheist in the last year or so

but surely most theists are ok with "that sort of science", though?

Science & religion are alot closer than popular (political) opinion seems to think. Big Bang first theorized by a Catholic priest and all. Increasingly science describes a universe that is more and more magical, interconnected, unseen, etc. The more dogmatic, mythical stories in the Bibles of the world may be incompatible with archeological/geological findings, but I think the spiritual & cosmological makeup of the universe (particularly in Eastern religions) tend to benefit immensely from scientific study.

If science directly contradicts the bible then its wrong (evolution)

If it wasn't something people who wrote the bible had any concept of (gravity) no big problems.

obv some religious people accept evolution and some don't that's the problem with religion multiple grey areas and interpretation means its not really comparable with science apart from for extremists.

I think there's enough leeway in Xtianity to take what you want if you personally are able to reimagine it without the patriarchal elements. But it's also possible that the foundations of the language and theology are too much based in patriarchy/male power to ever be truly gender-value-neutral and still call it Christianity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg

female followers of Abrahamic religions might as well be turkeys voting for Thanksgiving

love this. yup.

i'm not a fan of dawkins-style militant atheism but i'm way way less of a fan of organised religion making its presence felt in my life, and the latter's rather more dangerous, so railing against dawkins seems a bit wrong-headed in a "fight the real enemy" way

....and women wonder how come they fall into abusive relationships, convinced that there is some redemption to be had for being involved. The major western religions pretty much show me how that happens, whatever the religion.

I like being atheist *but* it's no fun unless you've read the Bible, at least, just to put the wind up the annoying end of the God-botherer brigade. Any human being that's ever tried to emotionally blackmail me using their imaginary divine friend has gotten a big earful of 'no, actually you're the blasphemer here, trying to say what God wants or needs from me, a third party, to suit what you happen to need or want from me yourself'.

I'm Irish Roman Catholic (IIRC)

But that's a background as opposed to practicing. I'm happy enough that nothing happens for a reason, that there are basic constants in this particular universe, and that there is no overarching consciousness controlling it all.

I can dig Dawkins as a science writer, and I kinda enjoy that he's out there pissing off organised religions, but I think he'd be better off chilling out with some bones in a lab somewhere doing some actual work.

Are there any mainstream rappers outed as atheists?

I like being atheist *but* it's no fun unless you've read the Bible

yeah! i'm an atheist/anti-religion because i was raised in a religious household with all the attendant crap that comes with that, but i'm so glad i do have that knowledge of xtianity and its workings

Without god how would rappers win Grammys?

oh, mainstream

haha I'm gonna post this anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii1dtebj24M

amazing track, mebbe they got personal religions tho

I can't think of any public figure atheist who happens to be black, interestingly enough.

this will end well

I'm Irish Roman Catholic (IIRC)

But that's a background as opposed to practicing. I'm happy enough that nothing happens for a reason, that there are basic constants in this particular universe, and that there is no overarching consciousness controlling it all.

i like Dara Ó Briain's thing about being catholic, which i totally agree with.

"I’m staunchly atheist, I simply don’t believe in God. But I’m still Catholic, of course. Catholicism has a much broader reach than just the religion. I’m technically Catholic, it’s the box you have to tick on the census form: ‘Don’t believe in God, but I do still hate Rangers.’"