Gary M's sour grapes about all things religious

I doubt that belief in God will die out any time soon. Belief in an omnipotent supernatural being who cares about you, looks out for you, and occasionally performs miracles for you is just too appealing and comforting to let go of. Why abandon such a comforting worldview for the cold, harsh reality of a-theism: You are on your own, buddy. No one is looking out for you. This life is it. Enjoy it because death is the end.

I wish I could believe the Christian worldview again. I really do. I was so happy and content as a Christian. But once you no longer believe it is true, the genie is out of the bottle. You can’t put it back in the bottle again. It would be like me trying to believe in Santa Claus again. I loved Santa Claus as a kid. It truly would be wonderful if the jolly old fella existed. But he doesn’t. There is no good evidence that he does. No matter how much I want to believe in Santa my brain knows the evidence says he is not real. Santa is just a folktale. Nothing more. Unfortunately, that is how I now see Jesus, the resurrected Christ. Wonderful tale. Nothing more.

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We get it Gary - you’re so past religion. This is and remains a forum in support of thinking and informed believers. If others feel a need to join in here to discuss this with you, then here is a place for that.

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Wow. I thought we were having a thoughtful conversation. My bad.

I am certain atheism will not die out any time soon. It is a valuable check on excessive religion which has often become quite harmful. Religion is dangerous. But there are many dangerous things which are also valuable when the dangers are understood and countered.

It would be nice to believe in the atheist worldview. The idea of simple nonexistence after death is easy and even relaxing. All you have to do is let go of the ego which requires you to be a part of existence in order to see value in it.

But the simple fact is that people like myself originally having no belief in Christianity and even raised to be acutely aware of all its problems and dangers, can nevertheless find value in it for the living of their lives. They might never have the compulsion to believe or have the centrality of all their life and thought revolving around it, that many raised in Christianity might have. But each generation will make their own decisions about how to live their own life no matter how certain their parents are about their own conclusions. Christianity has been around a long time because it continues to appeal to and convert people again even after its frequent spectacular failures.

Human beings have been telling themselves stories for a very long time. It is an amusing conundrum to wonder who is more foolish, those who cling to these stories or those who try to purge them from their life for whatever reason.

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I/we cannot argue back your faith. Neither can we provide the sort of proof you seem to need that God exists.
If you ae really keen to rekindle your faith you need to find a live community to explore it with. If you are here to moan and deride, this is nt the place to do that either.
People have been accommodating, so far but even Christians have limits. If there are specifics I will always answer PMs, and there are others like me. But, threads like this will not get you want you want, or need

Richard

Another reason why it won’t die out is that even the opposite end of Christianity still exists.

Instead of a god who knows everything and is all powerful there is open and process theology.

Instead of a god who is a genie there to make your life better in every way there is a god who says you will suffer, you will die, life won’t be fair and this is how I still want you to live your life.

Also many Christians don’t fear a nihilistic mindset. Not even all atheists hold to a nihilistic mindset that the cosmos is bleak and cold but that in the same way humanistic philosophy and values
Have arose here where they still come to moral conclusions expects that likewise any other intelligent life out there will also develop compassion. That it’s not just us who are compassionate, though we are not actually a very compassionate species. We can be, but most are not. Most are still perfectly fine with torturing lesser lifeforms and eating their corpses. But many are far more compassionate towards wildlife and livestock and care more about the enviorment in general.

Religious beliefs may never ever die out. The majority of humans hold to some sort of religious beliefs now and a very wide spectrum of them. Christianity is just one of those main categories and it’s so diverse that some are seemingly completely different faiths.

So many of us don’t believe that God’s role is actually here to make life less bleak, but we actually believe it’s the role he intends us to take on. We don’t need mana from heaven feeding the poor, we are a first world nation with people who could not work for 10,000 years and still spend three times as much as the typical American each year. We have all kinds of solutions from taxes to charity to making food more affordable to sharing meals and so on.

And even in the face of miracles, many Christians like myself are cessationists.

Not even all Christians benefit from community. I am a very pro science bluist Christian. The bulk of Christians around me are very much pro red hat anti science Christians. So most Christian’s here have very different values than mine to the point we are actually enemies, not friends and it has even had negative impacts on my life. I’m also a bit of a lone wolf. Outside of work I sometimes go a whole week without seeing another human or talking to them in person. Sometimes I even get in my truck, side 20 hours out and then hike another 40 miles away from the nearest household and will camp for 1-3 weeks. Never see another human the entire time. Can’t even reach them on a phone.

Form fact some of the most hopeful outlooks I hold in life comes
From a far more atheistic starting point. I am very much drawn towards pansychism. None of it because of my faith. I don’t think souls are magical things but simply mean living being. The opposite of a soul to me is a corpse. But consciousness is not the same as soul anyways.

So I first realized that we’ll us humans are obviously consciousness. But very early in life realized that somewhere animals. Some conscious more so in a human relatable way. Dogs. A dog that’s happy and loved reacts very different from a dog who grows up abused and hated. An abused and hated dog can learn to know what being loved feels like. Pigs in factory farming shows great levels of stress, depression, rage. Some that have been rescued takes years to learn to be loved and to love. I volunteer at animal sanctuaries and see it all the time. Even roosters who show pure fear when you approach but can’t really run because of damaged legs or in a smaller space. Turnover weeks of just sitting near them, followed by weeks of them letting you sit next to them can even result into a rooster that loves to be petted in your lap. Wild birds can learn to not fly away from you in your yard . So we see consciousness in animals for sure.

Then we get to forms of consciousness that is even debated if it’s consciousness. Plant intelligence is a growing study. Especially as we begin to learn more about how thinking can happen in species like jellyfish ( which can think and move ) and learn more about things like how sometimes cells can operate as many brains all kinds of stuff .

But even deeper and harder is we don’t really know how consciousness developed. We don’t fully understand it. We dont fully understand how life begin. How did abiogenesis occur. At one point there was no life as we understand it. There was molecules aligning into patterns.

I’m too bored and busy to go further. But panosychism is not something cultivated personally out of my faith in any god but stems from questioning implications in the gaps we have about memories, the mind and life itself. That maybe just like how consciousness looks very different in humans and dogs, or humans and ants, or humans and jellyfish, that perhaps it’s also very different between humans and plants, humans and mushrooms and even humans and rocks. That as we learn more and a more about abiogensis, the less and less district life and material will look. Which to me is rather hopeful for not just us but the whole universe: for a fact it’s even how I mostly envision god. Not as an old man, but a consciousness that developed like a giant cosmic supercomputer by matter we don’t even understand aligning over billions of years.

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Religions are the oldest working artefacts on the planet. They evolve even more slowly than languages, which they preserve. Hindi, evolved from Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic.

We are believing machines and it is impossible for us to evolve from that. And, to paraphrase Hume, rightly so.

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I am truly sorry for the heartache you have had. I think God honors you for doing what you think is right.

Blessings.

Randy

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I have certainly said we are religious animals.

I think the difference between machine and living organisms is the fact that machines are a product of design and living things are a product of self-organization. I do speak of biological machinery to say if we learn to use the machinery of biology to make medical tools then it would not be creating life but machines.

But since creationists and even many evolutionary creationists do believe in design, I suppose they would not draw the line between living organisms and machines in this way.

We’ve been crafted by evolution, biased in the neuron.

LOL

Anthropomorphizing the evolutionary process… reminds me of how Dawkins anthropomorphized genes giving them a similar role as well as personality traits like “selfishness.”

Though I suppose you could simply attribute intentionality to a delusion of some mechanical systems (which we give the pompous name of “life”) and thus seeing no real difference whether the process or the genes actually think they are designing things or not.

Of course I don’t think that way. I think intentionality is present implicitly in all living organisms. I think it comes from living things taking ownership of the choices they make – as something they do rather than something which has happened to them. And they do this practically as a means to survival.

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I’m honestly not sure what kind of thoughtful conversation you would expect to have in response to your first post…and I’m not trying to be confrontational. More…curious?

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Hi Gary,

From a christian scriptures standpoint, this statement isn’t actually the point. The focus of the scriptures is external from the individual - it is about how our relationship to the world (others, nature, civilization) is broken, and how God seeks to redeem that and let us be like Him to the wider world here and now. It’s not even about going to “heaven”, its about now. I know people have various objections to things in the Old Testament, and things Paul says, thats not the point here. The birds eye view is others centered, not individualistic.

But, as I have said before, if the proof you need is scientific, you won’t find it. God has made a rational and coherent universe which he sustains. To show the one who made it would require a universe that was less than - that had gaps, and imperfections in its laws where you could see they broke down - God of the gaps. But neither will you find scientific proof God doesn’t exist - such is impossible to prove. Both come down to a metaphysical choice we make when we trace back to the impenetrable veil of the moment of creation. You cannot see past it, science doesnt exist beyond it, because the universe doesn’t. Beyond it is ineffably unknowable. Any claim about it - God, eternal infinities, multiverses, branes, etc. is a metaphysical statement. I am open to being proven wrong in these, if someone can provide sound evidence in research and articles that these things are scientifically knowable beyond mathematical models - please do. Until then they remain metaphysical concepts.

I believe in the Resurrected Jesus because I made that choice of God of the two options beyond the veil. And in the scriptures and the gospels I see a God I can believe in, and the world makes sense to me through Him. But not everyone agrees. Such is their choice, and that is OK.

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Point of order. WTF???!!! Gary_M gets his own public play pen where he can say anything he wants and won’t be flagged?

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If @vulcanlogician were around, I think you and he might have some good conversation about the value of philosophy as well as a form of Christianity without God. Unfortunately it’s been some time since I’ve sensed his presense here.

Is there any particular direction you hope to go with this thread?

In the original thread, someone was arguing for the benefits of philosophy, in particular, metaphysics. I quoted Stephen Hawking where he said, “Philosophy is dead”. I personally believe that philosophy has been very beneficial to humanity but I’m not sure it serves any purpose today, in particular, metaphysics.

A moderator responded to my comment saying something to the effect that a lot of people think God is dead. I replied explaining why I no longer believe in God. It isn’t because I don’t like him. I used to love him. It is because my examination of the evidence tells me he doesn’t exist. I then made a comparison to Santa Claus in my comment: I loved Santa Claus as a kid. Even as an adult I wish that Santa Claus existed. But I’ve seen the evidence that Santa doesn’t exist. So no matter how much I might want to believe in Santa, I can’t. I then said, ditto for Jesus, the resurrected Christ.

The moderator felt I was trashing Christianity (again) and moved my comment to a new post.

I loved Jesus and I loved Christianity. I and my family were attending a “high-church” LCMS Lutheran church. I loved it! The rich Lutheran liturgy was so beautiful. We took Holy Communion every Sunday. Before the Eucharist, I sincerely confessed my sins. I then drank the true blood and ate the true body of Jesus, real because of the mystical power of the Word of God. The people in the church were kind and wonderful. They were a lot of fun too. How can you not like a church that throws a big Oktoberfest party on the church patio every year with a German band and kegs of beer! One fateful day, I was surfing the internet and came across the website of a Baptist pastor turned atheist. I tried to reconvert him. But he exposed me to evidence that demonstrated very clearly to me that the Resurrection Story was a legend. Fiction. I fought my loss of faith for 4 months. I reached out to Lutheran and evangelical pastors for help. “I’m drowning,” I told them. “Help me!” They tried to help me but my faith slowly dwindled away until it was gone.

So as much as I would love to believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior again, I can’t. It’s not because I don’t want to. It is because I’ve seen the evidence.

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Thanks, Gary. It’s hard to keep track of the births, deaths and branching of threads sometimes. I thought the choice of title was surprising if you had named it yourself.

I’m sorry about your loss of faith and the pain it has caused you. I have a few friends who have gone through similar processes, and I could only stand by and unhelpfully watch their anguish.

Your rational approach to the world, as well as your avatar, reminded me of @vulcanlogician who is also an atheist, but one who philosophises. Metaphysics are, as far as I understand, not in his area of interest nor in the area of interest of most contemporary philosophers.

I am not a philosopher and have read very little and none that interests anyone else. But as broad as the philosophical sea is, there might be something there to interest you and much that would surprise you.

If you have the slightest interest, a definition of philosophy at the (free and excellent) Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy might be a place to start:

Another excellent resource is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which oddly does not include a general definition of philosophy:

Although the Wikipedia, which is generally excellent for “academic” topics, does:

As well as many outstanding articles on philosophical topics of all kinds.

Kendel

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No … the title was my off-the-cuff and admittedly a bit snarky label when I put this all in its own thread (and not at Gary’s request.). So if he feels a bit huffy with me right now, it’s nothing I don’t deserve.

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I am sorry, Gary, about the difficulty of this journey you have found yourself on. While intent can be hard to ascertain in a virtual text world, I thought I heard a genuine desire for dialogue on these things in your words. It genuinely seems your faith was sincere until you encountered that situation.

I hope you have been able to find some peace in what you now believe.

It is hard to respond to what instigated your deconstruction without knowing the substance of what that individual claimed. I am not an expert in history anyway, to be able to have a genuine knowledgeable discussion on it. I can say that I know of people (these would be the people I have primarily learned by reading or listening to) much smarter than me who know the new testament more thoroughly than I do, are well published and well known, who readily affirm the legitimacy of the gospels. Who does one believe? It is hard to know sometimes.

I hope you can find what you are looking for, Gary. I’m always open to a genuine discussion if its something I feel I can contribute to.

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I am reminded of G K Chesterton’s compassionate remark from one of his skeptical characters in “Father Brown”:

>>I wish to God there was a God. But there ain’t. It’s just my luck.”

and George MacDonald’s quote,

“You doubt, because you love truth.”

It is hard.

Blessings.

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