No one is using those words. Its just a way of saying its inherent in the atheist view that people who believe in made up stuff are wasting their lives, in which case its impossible to not sound rude or condescending.
Last edited:
Religion, what's the point?
- Thread starter TheRedFlag
- Start date
No one is using those words. Its just a way of saying its inherent in the atheist view that people who believe in made up stuff are wasting their lives, in which case its impossible to not sound rude or condescending.
No worries mate, I haven't spoke to you in a bit, I hope all is well!
I know, but sometimes on here it feels like everyone gangs up or has a loaded point to make these days, just wanted to say it's not my intention. Staring at text, it's always hard to tell what's going on behind the words
Interesting question. But would you not consider cancer cells to be an aberration from the norm? It isn't the way it was supposed to be. When you bought your car it was probably beautiful and functioned perfectly. But then maybe a part broke or degenerated. Cars aren't designed to last forever, and neither are human bodies.
Earlier, you wrote that it was hard to not sound rude or condescending. Now you say it's impossible!
I understand it may be hard, but I think ensuring that you don't may work in your favour if you seek to convince someone of your own views.
That's a good point.
Though, why would we make something that broke if we were all knowing and all perfect? And if we did, to test reactions say, why would we allow it to happen to pure innocents? Sure, God wants to be hands off to test us, but surely someone who is so loving couldn't stand back and watch his most purest creations of all, newborns, die through such a flaw? And in creating us, would he not already know of this flaw and fix it anyway, at least in those who least deserve to fall prey to his mistake?
Also, and again thanks for sticking around and answering questions when it's not always easy, going back to what Oates said about getting through the gates of heaven, what happens in this situation with those who have no concept of a God and thus can't have any faith in him?
Both are correct. Its not intentional and yet impossible not to if we're having a frank debate.
As an addendum to my previous response...
I think it would only be inherent in a strong atheistic position i.e. if you assert that God does not exist. If you hold a weaker position of atheism/agnosticism i.e. you don't believe the proposition that God exists, or that you don't claim any knowledge either way, or that you think it's impossible to answer the question, then I don't think any of those positions entail the view that theists are wasting their lives.
Last edited:
I appreciate my answers are going to be rather simplistic and probably won't satisfy you fully, but I'll have a quick go…
Perhaps the intention wasn't to create beings that last forever? Or perhaps we are actually the optimum? (Think of computers having to make sacrifices on portability if more power is required). The flaws in the world could also perhaps be explained by saying that we live in a broken world caused by Adam and Eve's original sin (which I expect will raise more questions!)
As for those who have no concept of God. If God is infinitely just, then surely he would have no justifiable reason to exclude them from heaven. I wouldn't worry about justice on their behalf if the judge is infinitely just!
This is interesting to me.
I'd never use the term "wasting their time", however as someone who believes there is a chance something created us, I will answer that I personally don't view Religion as anything I want to be part of, I believe it's a form of control that man made. I believe that if there was a god in any way, shape or form like the one Christianity presents, then it wouldn't judge us at all. If it did, it would judge us purely on our own lives and how we live them and wouldn't insist on worship because it wouldn't need that.
I'm fully comfortable with people living their life peacefully by whatever moral code they so wish, I'm happy to let people have their faith and belief and I'll even freely admit, at times I may even have envied that faith. But when it comes down to it, when I look at my two little boys and I raise them as best as I can to be decent people, I don't subscribe to some mass idea that either of them will and should be judged to get into some kind of heaven. That is quite clearly a human construct to me, one that doesn't have wholly good intentions.
So yes, I believe it is possible for there to be a 'god' of some nature. But no, I don't believe any kind of religion is a creation of such a god. Certainly not an old book open to interpretation anyway.
That's why we listed 6 different levels of theism/atheism a few pages back. There is a small possibility that atheism is wrong - about the same possibility of a tornado hitting a junkyard and assembling a 747.
Lucifer had the right idea, can you imagine having to spend eternity surrounded by Christians?
No, it's all good, I appreciate you may not have the time or patience to keep responding to every little thing with hundreds of words my friend!
I'm don't really want to go into the original sin, because in fact that kind of shows God to be evil if that were the true reason, but how can both those answers be true? God couldn't possibly be infinitely just yet allow the world to be broken by one single sin surely?
Computers don't HAVE to make sacrifices, their users make that choice. Their creators make that choice. We are supposed to have free will, yet before we even can be aware of what thinking even is, we can be killed by a flaw? Not to mention that if in such an event that soul gets a free ride to heaven, what about the devastation left in it's wake? I struggle to understand how in any way we as human beings can justify loving such a god as that? I get that such answers as "faith" and "trust" in the almighty get used, but being a human yourself, how can you justify in your own mind such a thing? A young child gets cancer and suffers, his/her family suffer, the doctors and nurses who dedicate their lives to the work of helping others suffer. How can that be some kind of divine plan made by a creator who loves us and just wants us to find it? I guess I just don't understand how that can be explained by some words in an ancient book telling us we should just all trust and love such a being capable of creating that situation, or at very least, just allowing it to occur as a test. That's just abhorrent to me, so maybe I have something wrong there, some key to unlocking my own faith.
A few pages back, but this is a flawed idea. You can only disprove within the realm of your theory, not outside it. Disproving something that doesn't exist requires you to imagine the (possibly infinite) set of all hypothetical explanations. Which must be an assumption, thus outside the realm of your theory, meaning it cannot be used as proof.
Which means it is possible to disprove, in a modern scientific sense, only a subset of that which doesn't exist. A subset which contains what we can measure and have the imagination to test.
I don't understand what you mean by the bolded part.
That makes no sense whatsoever..
You are really trying to make atheists and science into some evil tools that are out to stop god.. No scientific theory was built to disprove the existance of god. Science doesn't give a s*** about god. Science is trying to find answers to questions about the world we live in and just because every single answer so far hasn't given any evidence for a god doesn't mean it's "seeking to disprove god".
That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
No that's not what I was getting at, it's what you're supposing. Many atheists make use of science in attempt to understand questions about our universe, but at the same time tackle long held religious beliefs,
It's irrelevant either way. It is what I think is true.
I know it does. Exactly in the same way that I described atheism before.
I don't believe in gods - atheism is a lack of belief.. what exactly am I confused about?
Because a lack of belief in the existence of God, originates from a choice not to believe. All you are doing is trying to rule out defiance, but it is defiance if you refuse to believe in the possibility of God existing.
If you say that it could be possible for a God to exist without you knowing it, well that's agnosticism. If you say that it is not possible, that is atheism.
Now look how you contradict yourself because of confusion. I said.....
You responded....
You then said later
Which is how I described atheism.
OK, I get that it's a new testament but it doesn't change the past, it doesn't say that god didn't do all the smiting?
So what are we to make of the idea that we have a reformed god who doesn't do the genocide, mass murder and enslavement anymore. Are we saying that god realised it was wrong so we forgive him and don't mention it?
Yes I agree with that, but that's not what you wrote though. Using science as evidence to disprove the great flood or how the universe was created is not the same as
Perhaps you misspoke? To be honest, I still don't know what you meant by that.
No it's certainly not irrelevant if you believe something false to be true.
If you believe every atheist to be the same, that wouldn't be irrelevant. It would be incredibly ignorant.
Again (!) you are putting words in my mouth. You are trying to change my argument to come out ahead. Not believing in god is not the same as not believing in the possibility of a god. There's a massive difference between the two.
As for agnosticism vs atheism, we clearly have different views on that. I'll say it one last time, atheism (I guess I have to add "to me") is the lack of belief in a god/gods, not the belief that there isn't any gods, or the rejection of the possibility of a god/gods. I'm pretty sure most atheists around the world would agree with me on that as well.
MoneyMay touched on it here. I also said the exact same thing last night but edited my comment since I said it in a bit of a condecending way..
You started by defining atheism incorrect (imo), saying
to which I said NO.
I certainly didn't contradict myself because saying "I don't believe" and "a lack of a belief" is exactly the same thing.
Dios mio! Oates, you are being weird here.
Do you want people to just use the word god in another language?
Think of it as layers. We have a theory about physics, using the forces of nature (e.g. electromagnetism). However, we cannot use that to assert anything about how that force came to existence. That is a question for a different layer. Which means that anything that is disproven, is done so within a boundary.
Another example: If you use a different set of axioms in Mathematics, what you previously had disproven under the initial set may not be false anymore.
Right, but what has that got to do with proving that something doesn't exist?
So... you're no different to a dog or cat who simply lacks the mental state of 'I believe in the existence of a God'? Because if that's your definition, all animals are atheists.
Or a newborn who hasn't been introduced to the concept of a deity. We are atheists by nature.
What/who is god?
Correct. As @InfiniteBoredom said, we are all born atheists. We are indoctrinated at a young age. That's why most Irish people are Catholic, most English are Church of England, most Indians are Hindus or Sikh, most Syrians are Muslim, most Japanese are Shinto. And you know what, if you're a Syrian Christian, you probably had Christian parents. If you're a muslim in Ireland, you probably had Muslim parents. If you're Shinto in the US, you're probably of Japanese descent.
If you live in Central or South America, you're probably Christian, most probably Catholic. Strange isn't it. Those countries colonised by Catholics are now predominantly Catholic. The people of Australia and New Zealand are mostly Christian with Anglican and Catholicism being the two most popular. Imagine that, fill a country with Irish and English people for hundreds of years and the two most popular religions are the ones that are most popular with Irish and English people. The most common religion in South Africa is Christianity. Imagine, Dutch and British settlers colonise a country and suddenly the most popular religions are the religions of those two countries.
It's such a coincidence isn't it.
Obviously there are exceptions. Some native Irish people may have adopted Islam and so on, but the vast, vast majority of religious folk are the same religion as their parents. I teach in a catholic school in Ireland. 95% of the children are catholic. Of the other 5%, guess how many have Catholic parents. Correct. None. Of the Catholic Children, guess how many have Muslim, protestant, Sikh parents or parents of any other religion. Again... You've guessed it. None.
And you know what is even stranger, all of these people in all of these countries truly, truly believe that their god is the real god.
If there was a law that religion was taught as an 'Education of Religion' type subject in schools all over the world, where throughout your childhood you were exposed equally to all religions but not indoctrinated into any one, never told that this one or that one is right or true, I would say that in 100 years time, at least 90% of the world would be atheist.
Great post, just what i was saying a couple of pages back, but more eloquently pointed out!
A bit of a rough way of putting it but fair enough. Yes I believe that all animals are atheists, but unlike a dog I could be convinced that there was a god if I was presented with evidence of that. A dog is most likely not capable of even understanding what a god is, unless you go with something like 'there's a magic link between god and all animals that for some reason us humans aren't priviliged to in the same way'.
There we go, the massive red flag I mentioned earlier. Faith is taught in most cases, not found.
You really can't...
You're the third person to tell me it can't be done. It's interesting that none of you have asked me to do so. This seems to indicate a certain degree of being closed-minded, or the possibility of discovering that one's opinion is wrong.
1) We're born atheists? Well if an absence of a belief counts as atheism, then atheism is not a view. Trees and rocks are atheists. To say that one is an atheist is therefore to say nothing at all.
2) Your argument cuts both ways. Those brought up in an atheistic society are indoctrinated in their view. Though if I understand you correctly, you're saying you can't be indoctrinated in atheism because atheism is no view?
3) To show how a belief originates does nothing to show whether or not the belief is true or not.
Does this mean trees go to hell? That place sounds better which each passing statement.
I don't know what your first point is, but your second point is right. If you are born into a religious family, you obviously tend to follow the religion. If you are born in the home of atheist couple, you are bound to grow up as an atheist.
His point is religion is also taught as science, maths, atheism or any other taught discipline and it is not a spiritual journey, at least not for a child and I do agree with him. I'm a Lutheran Christian because my parents were. I haven't had a spiritual experience yet and I'm almost 36. I go to church every week, I've been a church organist, a choir singer and a praise band singer most of my life, but I choose to be a Christian because I believe in something against all proof available elsewhere. That is a personal leap of faith though. I bet if I was born into a Muslim family, I would have been a Muslim still.
You are born with no belief system - it is acquired through socio-cultural conditioning (or some might say brainwashing) as you grow up.
Perhaps you could proffer a view then?
You can't really use points 1 and 2 in conjunction. As atheism is the absence of a belief then atheist parents can't really indoctrinate a child can they?
1) We've been over this. Atheism is the absence of a belief in a god. So yes, we're all born atheist. No child has ever been born believing in a god. No one has ever been a Christian without being taught about Christianity by other Christians. Same goes for other religions. Which leads nicely into point 2
2) Agreed to a point. If an atheist has children and chooses to actively 'indoctrinate' their children into atheism then it's comparable. However, if an atheist raises a child and never mentions the word atheism, but doesn't bring their child to any church/temple etc., if they just live their lives as normal, exactly as you or any other religious person does, except for the prayer and church going then there is a massive chance that child will grow up atheist. Not because the parent has raised the child to be atheist, but simply because the child has not got the chance to be indoctrinated into any religion. That is not comparable to a religious parent raising their child to be the same religion as them.
3) You've lost me a bit. But feel free to expand and I'll reply.
Which is why in the second part of 2), I did qualify what I said with reference to to RexHamilton's post.
How can you prove God doesn't exist ?
It's not difficult to prove specific gods don't exist. i.e, every god who loves us goes out of the window when toddlers die of cancer, or have their eyes gnawed by a parasite.
That doesn't prove any god doesn't exist. Just proves it is evil if it does.
I mean testing us to get into heaven is one thing, but testing it on innocent children is an entirely different league, and I struggle to understand any mindset that would brush over such a thing to still claim God loves us. It's ok, it's a test. That kind of thinking just doesn't sit right with me at all, how can people who claim to devote their lives to the good not only turn a blind eye to so much evil, but also when questioned and made to acknowledge it, make excuses for it.