I fear in the quest for truth, many atheists become blinded by their tendency to view the idea of God as foolish. In this sense, the very community that sought to reveal truth, becomes increasingly close minded. Many cling to their disdain toward a particular God or religion and because of this are unable to see the potential for an intelligently programmed reality.
By refusing to entertain the idea of any concept that cannot be seen or measured, the atheist runs the risk of cutting himself out of a potentially whole other realm of reality that life has not yet Been able to detect. To assume that humans have access to all knowledge is ignorant. Just like the flower in the meadow is unable to see all the birds that fly by, does not mean the birds do not exist. It simply means that the flower has not developed the senses it takes to detect that part of its environment.
Similarly humans could be at the very dawn of conciousness. We could be just now waking up, stretching our arms and rubbbing our eyes from the long sleep of our species’ predecessors who were living in intellectual darkness.
Stay opened minded atheists. For if you cut yourself off from the possibilities of other dimensions, you may inhibit your descendants ability to develop higher consciousness.
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@Jordan: RE: "Many atheists regard the idea of god as foolish." Well, before I can respond to that, do you have a version of God that is not foolish? Each and every god I have ever heard of has been based on fallacies of logic or actually defined out of existence by the person doing the defining. If you want someone to take your idea of God seriously, shouldn't you have to come up with a serious definition?
"Closed minded." Close minded occurs when you profess to have an answer but can not prove it. The only people exploring the definitions of God are the Atheists. The Religious, (Choose a Religion) all blindly assert their beliefs to be true. If god is ever found, he will be found by an atheist. The theists stopped looking for it 10,000 years ago when they were sure they found it. It does not appear you have any idea at all what the words "Closed Minded" mean.
I am happy to "entertain" ideas that can not be seen or measured. Blue Universe Creating Bunnies with all the same characteristics and powers of your god. Now that we have the idea, how do we know if it is real or not?
RE: "Assuming humans have access to all knowledge is ignorant." We are in complete agreement. So why would you assume your version of god is more real than all the other versions of gods? How did you get this knowledge and why do you think it is reliable? Or are you just professing to know about stuff that you really don't know about?
Um..... RE: "Flowers in the meadows." You are not very good at science or biology are you. Flowers in the meadows can not see the birds because ..... THEY DON'T HAVE EYES. Flowers have sense organs that detect other things. There are a whole lot of things human beings can not sense as well, that is why we built microscopes, radioactivity detectors, the Hadron Collider, space ships and more. We have looked for souls and they have not been found. We have studied prayers and they have proved to be useless. We have sought explanations for miracles and debunked most of them. We have listened to your rants about god and gods and found them lacking. If you got something new we would love to hear it. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO POST YOUR VERSION OF GOD.
RE: "Humans could be" _________________ Fill in the fucking blank dude. Inane assertions don't make it true. The human species with 10 billion people on the planet could be on the verge of..... mass starvation, a pandemic of biblical proportion, meeting space aliens for the first time, colonizing the planets, bla bla bla bla bla. Unless you are professing to be a prophet (Which of course you would have to demonstrate,) You are just engaged in bullshit mental masturbation.
RE: OPEN OUR MINDS. HAPPY TO DO SO. PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH THE EVIDENCE YOU HAVE FOR THE ASSERTION THAT YOUR GOD IS REAL. WE ARE MORE THAN HAPPY TO LOOK AT IT.
Someone’s triggered.
Definition of a God? A conscious being which brought everything in our universe into existence. If all time and matter was created by God then God is most likely timeless and matterless.
If God is found he will be found by an atheist. - you’ve just demonstrated how ill informed even an atheist can be. Many of the greatest minds in science were believers!
You keep saying “my” God? I never claimed to have a God or have evidence of one. I WILL say however if there IS a God, there is not going to be any evidence of “him” in the typical sense because “he” is timeless and matterless. however you would expect to see SIGNS or clues of a creator. And there are many proposed signs and theories especaillly with what we now about simulations, computer programming, the fine tuning of the universe, the complexity of the language code in DNA, molecular machines etc.
We are basically just made up of pixels and math, just like a video game. More than likely God is a programmer and life is just an algorithm being played out.
If you need me to elaborate on any of these, I’d be happy to.
Ps obviously flowers don’t have eyes.
@ I never claimed to have a God. "Then what the fk are you talking about?" "God is the creator of the universe." Are you just being a trolling ass?
God is timeless and matter-less, he is universe creating, a conscious "BEING," Let's pretend your assertion that something timeless and matter-less actually could "be"..... How would you know it? Do you have any actual evidence or are you just making an inane assertion. How is your god different from the flying spaghetti monster or the very real Blue Universe Creating Bunnies?
@Jordan
"Timeless and matterless" How do you know that? You have tea with Him every morning? What do these terms even mean? You just spouting the old canard of "God is beyond time and space", and that, is likely a sign that you are making shit.
That is not a tenant of atheism.
You know this how?
Do you know of another reality?
If nothing has been detected, then there is nothing to entertain, that is axiomatic. As usual you're putting your clapped out pony behind your cart.
They could about to discover unicorns and mermaids are real, or leprechauns and garden fairies. Are you saying we should give such things credence, only if you're not then it's hard to believe you can't see the obvious bias in your reasoning.
Could you explain why not believing in a deity is biased please? Only it is your apologetics that seems to involve unevidenced bias, and that is the opposite of open minded. You are also misrepresenting atheism, as it does not require any assertion about hypothetical possibilities of a deity existing, though the hypothesis is of course meaningless without any tangible objective evidence.
You seem to have made up your mind here, are you even prepared to entertain the possibility that no deity or anything supernatural exist? As that is the very definition of closed minded.
Jordan: "Stay opened minded atheists. For if you cut yourself off from the possibilities of other dimensions, you may inhibit your descendants ability to develop higher consciousness."
I am almost 60 years old. My children are grown. How does my skepticism inhibit my descendants ability to develop to develop higher consciousness? And what the fuck is higher consciousness?
not all life is as conscious as we are and higher consciousness would be if our awareness evolved to even greater heights.
How does natural selection select consciousness for a non physical realm? Do you really not see how stupid that claim is? The clue is in the word natural...
@Jordan
Have you ever considered that the current religion/god ideas actually inhibit and can also likely cause people to never reach "awareness evolved to greater heights?"
I submit there is real world evidence of this, where the heavy hand of various types of religions have stunted human consciousness growth potential. Some of the evidence is obvious but we do not assign blame to religious ideas a whole but instead a particular one, when in my mind all god based religious ideas should share at least part of the blame.
I am all for being open minded, but the sword swings both ways, and the evidence I have seen shows that the cuts are quite a bit deeper on the "religious" side of things when it comes to this argument.
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Jordon, it appears you have only one crayon in your box and you’ve used it to color all folks identified as atheist in the same shade. Additionally, I think your OP sounds condescending.
I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.
Jordon, I do not believe you are sorry at all. I think your purpose for posting here is specifically to be offensive. You don’t seem to be debating at all. You seem to be engaged only in making statements the smell of prejudice. I’m waiting for you to start a thread that begins with, “Your mama is so fat, she....”
@Jordan
The only thing you've offended is reason.
Jordan: "Many cling to their disdain toward a particular God or religion and because of this are unable to see the potential for an intelligently programmed reality."
If reality is intelligently programmed (as in created by a god), then so are diseases like cancer, leprosy, malaria, ebola, rabies and many others, like the ones listed here: https://www.medicaldaily.com/10-most-frightening-and-deadly-diseases-his...
If reality is intelligently programmed, so are parasites, like tapeworms, scabies mites, guinea worms, filarial worms, paralysis ticks, screwworm flies, etc.
If reality is intelligently programmed, then so is the infection of little children by any of the above.
You have to be a particular kind of weird to accept that these diseases and parasites were designed/programmed by a benevolent god.
To the rest of us, all of the above are tell-tale signs of evolution, and contradict design.
Yes, yes. We humans have senses and cognition that has evolved to survived in the African savannah with competing human groups. Our senses and cognition is deeply flawed, because not always does evolution favour truth, but sometimes caution and believing our own lies is adaptive. So yes, unseen worlds there most likely are.
There are most probably many unseen worlds yet to be discovered, and possibly worlds we can't ever even see, but that is the realm of science. I'm sure most (if not all) atheists are ready to acknowledge that we don't know everything. How do we go from that to there being some specific god is beyond me. And if we can't know which god exists, why bother with any of them?
Being open minded does not mean you have to give up your own thoughts and beliefs and follow a different one.
And not all atheists have this bias against belief in God. If they do, there's probably a good reason for that.
Please, don't mark all atheists as all the same. Group thinking can cause many problems.
If you're going to engage in this speculation, wouldn't voxels make more sense?
@Jordan: By refusing to entertain the idea of any concept that cannot be seen or measured, the atheist runs the risk of cutting himself out of a potentially whole other realm of reality that life has not yet Been able to detect.
And by refusing to entertain the idea of a godless universe, theists run the risk of cutting themselves off from the only reality that life has been able to detect. Faced with the grand mysteries of the cosmos, theists slam the mental door with the sign that says "god did it".
@Jordan Just like the flower in the meadow is unable to see all the birds that fly by
We can't see x-rays, ultra-violet, or bacteria, but we can use our science and technology to expand our senses.
@Jordan: an intelligently programmed reality
Well if a god designed the reality I'm seeing, he must work for Microsoft. This reality, including our DNA, is full of errors, bugs and prone to lethal system failures.
And here we see supernaturalist hubris and presumption at its most odious.
First of all, refusing to treat unsupported mythological assertions as fact, in the same uncritical manner as supernaturalists do, isn't being "closed minded", it's the proper application of the rules of discourse to those assertions. I suggest you learn about these before embarrassing yourself further.
Second, that which cannot be observed, is by definition indistinguishable from that which does not exist. The assertion that there exists this other, fantastic realm separate from, but purportedly sharing the same space as, the realm of the observable, is one of those assertions we've been waiting for supernaturalists to support with genuine evidence for 5,000 years, and in all that time, all we've had from them is rhetorical spells and apologetic fabrications. In the meantime, scientists working in the realm of the observable, have alighted upon vast classes of entities and phenomena that supernaturalists were apparently incapable of even fantasising about, let alone placing within usefully predictive quantitative frameworks of knowledge as those scientists have done. Supernaturalists were apparently unable, even to fantasise about entities as diverse as bacteria and neutron stars, and we had to wait for scientists to come along and say "here's the observational data establishing that these entities exist". On the other hand, the limited and parochial fantasies that supernaturalists have engaged in, have all been centred upon ludicrous anthropomorphic constructs for which there is not a shred of evidence.
Here's a clue for you. If you want us to take your infantile attachment to mythological fantasies seriously, you can start by placing them on a properly constructed, evidentially supported basis, instead of asserting that our refusal to accept mythological fantasies just because those mythologies present them purportedly constitutes some sort of "deficiency" on our part. Which it doesn't - it's called being grown up.
@ Jordan
Do you need some Aloe Vera for that burn? Dang it must smart...no, don't bother, thoughts and prayers will fix you right up!
Love your work Calli...*saunters off laughing quietly*
For some reason, I'm reminded of an individual who used to frequent these boards called Programming God Jordan.
Right, except this incarnation seems to be taking their medication, at least somewhat.
That occurred to me initially, but if memory serves he was an atheist, claiming he could convert all theists with "non-beliefism". This amounted to him not grasping that beliefs are an essential component of human interaction with reality, and his risible claim beliefs can never be factual or evidence based.
He'd written a thesis on it apparently. He could have saved himself some time by consulting a dictionary.
As could Jordan of course, but there I think the similarity ends.
Ah yes, I had noticed the difference in belief and gender as mentioned in their profile, but their views are rather idiosyncratic and I have no reason to consider such details accurate.
Bloody hell, not this bollocks again...
Too many false asumptions. By examining and denying all man-made religions as false, we're not closed off from future advances and discoveries.
They've got to be provable and testable, not based on revelation to one illiterate goat-herd and then taken on faith by everyone else thousands of years later.
Just because we're closed off from the Revelations of the bronze-age goat herd, we're not denying that there's lot out there we don't and can't yet understand.
Theism denies new discoveries by torturing and killing the ones making the discoveries.