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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (284595)	12/4/2015 9:56:32 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541778

Atheism seems as much belief to me as other beliefs. I'm agnostic.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (284595)

12/4/2015 12:03:28 PM

From: koan

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 541778

Speaking for myself only, as an atheist, I'm not saying I know anything, or don't know anything. All I am saying is that I don't believe traditional gods are real. That traditional religions make no sense to me, after having studied them for many years. There is no evidence, there is no logic, and the thinking is simplistic, in my opinion. The writings of the ancient Greeks, in my opinion, are much more sophisticated than virtually all religions on earth.

As well, if you substitute the word tribal chief, for God, then all the religious documents make perfect sense. Because to people who lived a couple thousand years ago, tribal chiefs were sort of like gods.

I believe intelligence, is pervasive in the universe, I just don't believe in any of the personal gods on earth I've ever read about for myriad reasons. Not the least of which, is that I would not expect a God to behave the way most religions purport them to behave. The desires that many religions attribute to God are human desires not God desires e.g. prayer, ego, etc. I'm sure no great God, wants or needs people to pray to it and certainly has gone beyond ego needs.

At the same time, Alfred North Whitehead once said: "we have this tendency to divide the universe into the organic and inorganic, I believe consciousness is a third system in the universe". I believe that as well. In addition, I think where the human species is evolving to right now i.e. the human singularity, as mentioned on several posts before, is the way the universe works.

I.e. you have the Big Bang, energy, gas, inorganic matter, organic matter and eventually biological consciousness capable of inventing technology to push it into a state of immortality and the evolution of infinite, intellectual complexity.

So I think our intellectual evolution is our manifest destiny and our job is to try and survive it. I'm sure this process goes on all the time, all over the universe and some species make it in some species don't.

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Belief is part of our genetic make up as a species. There is no way around that. Our brains are pattern processing machines. The more unknowns and uncertainties there are, and the more uncomfortable with uncertainties a person is, the stronger the belief in super natural.

But this doesn't make atheists right. If anything, one could argue that a genetic bias for something is an evidence (not the evidence) for that thing. There is a scientific theory that this world is a "holographic" simulation. If it is, then who is running that simulation.

I can't be considered a "True Believer" in anything. But I am mildly skeptical of all beliefs and disbeliefs.

ST