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Athiesm doesn't work

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-08 21:58

Intelligent people, including scientists and philosophers, have reasoned for the existence of God.  While it's easy to see their self-justification and rationalization (Aquinas, Chesterton, Sartre, Kant, Pascal), they really are basing their views on belief and faith.  The same with all followers of theistic religions.  Even if one can affirm that no God or afterlife or supernatural exists, there is the sense of emptiness and lacking in a life with no written purpose or directed goal from some superior all-knowing being.  Thus people feel that "it can't hurt" to believe in something anyway, in hopes that that belief will lead to a better afterlife (Pascal's wager).  Many people feel an intrinsic need to be looked after by something greater or have some absolute laws that are unquestionable, putting faith in this authority like a dog would to his owner.  Without a master, humans are lost, empty, and find no purpose.  So religion just "feels good" even if it becomes  proven as illogical.  Besides, what else can prayer, hymns, cathedrals, and complicated ceremonies with special titles and clothing dedicated to a higher glory or state of being be used for, when nothing is there?  Humans hate to worship humanity for its own sake.  Even believing that we create our own laws and morals implies that nothing is absolutely right, as long as we are just simple biological creatures on a life supporting rock for a limited period of time.  Humans have a hard time accepting their uncontrolled, unmonitored position, and put faith in something even if there is proof it doesn't exist, in order to justify that their spiritual bases will be covered "just in case it exists."  It's easy to say God doesn't exist.  It's harder for most people to believe it.     

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-08 22:28

WALL OF TEXT'D GTFO CHRISTIAN FAGGET!!!1!!11

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-08 23:50

y the fuck does any of this even matter.  Some people will believe in God/gods/ect and some won't.  Both of you need to get your heads out of eachothers asses, and those of the rest of us as well.  Damn this argument is nothing but a total waste of energy.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 0:45

umm only >>2 has his head in his ass and >>1 is just stating something that many people feel and is fairly well reasoned. He's not screaming hellfire and brimstone, hes just putting it out there.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 1:39

It would be far better if people simply believed in themselves and eachother.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 1:43

But how

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 2:59 (sage)

>>4
>>1
same person

That being said, I read all of it, and it is a load of crap. Nothing in here is factual, but rather how the OP feels about it. I am 100% atheist and don't have any of these problems that you describe, and I am not alone. When writing about people you don't understand, don't take the word of a completely different group of people.

Name: Styrofoam 2006-06-09 4:17

The trick is that there's no reason we should treat this thing called "god" any different than leprechauns and unicorns.  For rational people, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, for such mythical creatures.  No one claims that the burden of proof is to show that leprechauns and unicorns don't exist.  It is assumed that they do not in the absence of evidence.  But because "god" is such an ingrained meme in our culture, we feel compelled to treat it differently.

The default position is that this thing called "god" does not exist.  It's up to theists to prove otherwise.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 4:25

religious people: die

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 6:12

i am atheist. does that make me a walking impossibility?
does the fact that i believe in myself and am totally realistic make me any less inferior to religious people? if you wish to believe in something that you said yourself is unaffirmed just so that you could "feel better about yourself", go right ahead, but don't go accusing my belief systems and suggesting that yours "work".

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 6:38

What if you don't believe there's something and you don't believe there is nothing?

What if you don't want your mind polluted from either side huh fags?

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 11:54

>For rational people, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

obviously rational people aren't logical

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 13:15

"Even if one can affirm that no God or afterlife or supernatural exists, there is the sense of emptiness and lacking in a life with no written purpose or directed goal from some superior all-knowing being."

It is important to distingush between how a religious person might feel in absense of god vs what a non-religious person feels.  While you may feel god is the center of your universe and your whole life would collapse should god disappear, others will feel much differently.  Others might try to achieve a worthwhile personal goal like becoming wealth, winning a sports match, or finding a cure to cancer. 

Don't try to proselytize on this board, I doubt many people will be so weakminded to fall for your week arguments for god.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 18:13

>For rational people, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Not always. Take aliens for example. While we have no evidence that they exist, they still very well may exist in parts of the universe that we haven't discovered due to a lack of technology required to get there or scout. There are other planets besides the ones in our solar system, and if this one can support intelligent life then it's possible that others can, too.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 18:35

>>7 hey fuck tard im 4 and i didnt start this thread so go fuck yourself

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-09 18:41

>>14
also many thought that the coelacanth (a fish that disappeared from the fossil records millions of years ago) was extinct and had ceased to exist until it was recently rediscovered. So did that fishs' sudden absence of evidence of existing prove it did'nt?? no

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-10 1:27

>>15
i'd hide my baby ass if i were you

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-11 2:38

>>17 wtf are you talking about

Name: Styrofoam 2006-06-11 4:01

>>11

Then you are retarded, because it is impossible to not believe a claim and not believe its total opposite.  There is no middle ground.

>>14

There's evidence that aliens exist; it's too damn improbable that our planet is the only one that supports life in the entire universe.

>>16

You are completely correct.  My point is about what it is rational to believe.  For a long time, we had no evidence that the coelacanth existed.  During that period, it was rational to believe that the coelacanth did not exist any more.  Then, we found a coelacanth; we suddenly had overwhelming evidence for the existence of the coelacanth.  After that, it was rational to believe that the coelacanth existed.  In science, there's no shame in being wrong, assuming you acted on the evidence you had at the time.  You simply modify your views as new evidence appears.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-11 4:10

During that period, it was rational to believe that the coelacanth probably did not exist any more.

fixd

Welcome invisible pink unicorn.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-11 4:20

>>1
Kant never mentionned whether he believed in god or not, he encouraged clergymen to use his works to rectify errors and guide the public and he defined metaphysics completely differently from what you seem to believe he has done. You also don't seem to have defined how you formed your opinion, which I believe the subject gives insights to.

It is apparent that all thoughts stem from physical sensations, including messages from the instinctive parts of our mind which are seperate from the thinking part and thus sensations. So for instance the good feeling you get seeing a naked woman is a sensation even though it is developped by a part of your brain.

The thinking part of your brain processes these sensations and long story short, there are base principles that arise purely through experience and from these there are the myriad of thoughts and ideas that can be generated. For instance mathematics, from the observation of apples on a tree the concept of frequency arises, this is called an a posteriori thought, if you were then to think about the different amounts of apples on different trees and try to think of ways to find the total amounts of appls you would generate ideas about counting, then numbers, then addition and so on. These are a priori thoughts. The languaged definition of a posteriori thoughts are a priori, the actual concept of sensations and observations are the a posteriori thoughts. For instance noticing the difference between the brown, green and red colours of the apple tree and it's apples. The concept that these are all colours, they are different colours and there are several red apples on the tree is an a posteriori thought.

All of this is practical thought, based on observations and sensations, however the mind is capable of creating a priori thoughts which are very loosely based on observations to the point where they cannot be conclusively proved. This is the result of flawed reasonning in the development of a priori ideas.

Whatever you think, for situations like this dogmas are eventually created to correct the situation. Since you cannot discover whether dogmas are true or not, they can only be criticised and their effects noted. For instance if a person believes in god and is a very kind loving person, this doesn't prove the existence of god, but it does add to the validity of the dogma through the same principles which allow reasonning to exist.

I think you were trying to put across the premise that science is based on the faith that you need evidence to prove things. Unfortunately you left it at that instead of continuing the examination, which would lead you to the conclusion, that it is a dogma, but it is effective. It is in this same way that god is a dogmatic concept and can only be judged by it's assumption or use as an approximation.

So, metaphysics is based on the reasonning generated by our interaction with the physical world which allow us to generate a priori principles, these are pure thoughts to a certain degree, the framework of how we compose and judge ideas. Science explains the physical world excellently, constructive empiricism is perhaps the only method of discoverring truths which can be considerred absolute concerning the physical world. However there are things which are apparently not part of the physical world which science cannot explain, which Kant oulined as the big 3, god, freedom and immortality.

I prefer to simply refer to it as 1, sentience. I exist, I think, I percieve are absolutely true, yet they have no evidence, and if we are to use reasonning we are forced to work from these answers down in order to look for their evidence, which goes absolutely goes against science which declares answers can only be found from the evidence. To a certain extent it seems we are organic super computers, if you tamper with someone's brain they lose some ability to think, they lose emotions or other effects, but even if in the future someone creates a sentient computer and knows exactly how it works, why it allows sentience to occur would still be a mystery. Since the science cannot yield any answers, the issue must either be examined to the point where a particular solution can be induced or we must try and test dogmas and place them under criticism to evaluate them in the hope of validating them or validating elements of their nature. It is here that god exists.

This can be applied to Pascal's wager and several of your ideas. However it appears god can never be anything more than an assumption, which many atheists have already displayed in that typical rude 4chan manner. I assume god exists sometimes, or that there is at least something that will look at my actions and decide I should live after death, though apparently this will not be the case. I am in effect an agnostic who assumes god doesn't exist, but recognises the fact that sentience is an unanswerred question.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-11 15:33

Religion is stupid. 

Name: Sage Killer 2006-06-11 15:37

"Religion is stupid"

Damn fucking right! Religion is enslaving mankind. Some motherfucker had the idea and other morons followed this
one! WAF!!

SAGE IS DEAD - LONG LIVES SAGE KILLER

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 10:10

http://dis.4chan.org/read/newnew/1150007779/1-40

People may believe whatever the fuck they want to believe just leave others alone in your quest for immortallity.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 11:42

You retards !!! All is one. You fail to realize that all of you are all that it exists experiencing itself from different perspectives. There is nobody to serve, no rules to obey(besides the ones you simply can not obey - those that are the are a part of this universe here). So relax, enjoy and feel, my fellow retards.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 13:40

Is the Christian mind capable of processing simple logic?

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 13:44

no more than the atheist

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 15:19

>>27

True. Some christians are just as good as atheists at processing simple logic. However, no christian is better at processing simple logic than an atheist... ever.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 17:07

>>28
Incorrect. Atheists can be some of the most irrational people in the world. I mean, they're the ones who came up with communism, for God's sake. I've seen fundies more rational that commies.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 18:21

Maybe generalizing a group of people as wholly intelligent or ignorant doesn\'t work. Some Athiests and some Christians can be extremely intelligent. But then again, some Athiests and some Christians can be extremely ignorant.

TL;DR: Not every christian/athiest is idiotic. Stop overgeneralising, you faggots.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 18:28

>>1
Indeed atheism(and blind trust to current science) is religion of fools, but so is any religion. Agnostism is the way to go. We can't deny that god exists, but we can't prove it either.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 20:09

>>31
Atheism is not a religion. A religion is a system of god-worship, and atheists by definition don't believe in gods.

And it's possible that there's someone on this rock that can prove God does or doesn't exist and that they just haven't done so, or they have but the person or people they proved it to stuck their fingers in their ears and went "La la la, I can't hear you!" You know how some people are.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 20:55

>>32
Atheism is religion cause they BELIEVE there are no gods. Real science doesn't deal in such absolutisms.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-12 22:12

>>33
That makes it nothing more than a belief. Religion is defined as the belief in and worship of one or more gods. Since atheists don't believe in gods they certainly don't worship one, so atheism isn't a religion.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-13 10:37

>>29
lol. Proof that christians fail at processing simple logic.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-13 13:58

>>29

...Communism was invented by British, silly

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-13 21:21

>>33


So basically.. not giving a shit.. is a religion..interesting..

I must contemplate my next move in my athiest temple. thank you earthling.

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-13 22:23

atheism is not a religion. i wish christians would stop being faggots

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-13 22:25

>>36
Oh yes, because Carl Marcston invented Marxism, not Karl Marx

Name: Anonymous 2006-06-14 1:40

>>1

If you think there is no purpose in life other than that which is given to you by god, maybe you should read some philosophy? I suggest Ayn Rand.  Start with Atlas Shrugged.

http//www.amazon.com/...

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