Choosing a faith

Not really. After all, we humans have a long history of creating our gods in our own image.

And such they are. Including yours.Your beliefs about a god, a consciousness of love, are indeed GDR-made. You have acknowledged there is no evidence for your beliefs. Instead you are steeped in the logical interplay of this vs that philosophical plank and the resultant comfort level they give you in your views of god.You just pass over whether any of those planks reflect any reality to begin with. It doesn’t seem to matter. It is the emotion, the comfort level of your world view, you seem to be after, not the truth. Your religious reasons seem to be that which makes your endorphins stand to applaud. Emotion in place of analysis. Dopamine in place of logic.No problem. You are so entitled. I just wish you would recognize such. But that would destroy the fantasy.I suffer the same kind of problem with religionists they suffer with me. They cannot comprehend “no belief in gods” claiming I disrespect or disobey their gods. I have major issues with someone who can so callously disregard the reality we know trying to claim, unevidenced, there is more.There is no more. There will never be any more …… until someone comes up with some compelling evidence.Scientists can do that. Even knowledgeable laymen can do that. But religionists cannot. It’s not for a lack of trying, it’s a lack of ability. You guys think in fantasy and your emotional judgements cannot be trusted to be accurate. You haven’t shown the ability to deal with reality.Stumbling around in such a fog how do you keep from mentally stubbing your toes with each step? GDR, you must suffer constant cognitive dissonance. You poor poor creature.But I have a solution. Become an atheist.I’ve done this with Phat. I still think, with some work, he can become a good humanist of the highest atheist order. I want to invite you to join with him and you both cross the Christopher Hitchens Bridge together.I know you would make a most excellent humanist. In casting off the yolk of religious chains your mind will be free to see the real beauty this universe has in making all this with nothing but mindless particles reacting to the flow of energy gradients.You were proud to put a directed majik in your religion. Come to us, GDR, and be awed by the true magic of the mindless reality of cosmic creation.Relieve your cognitive dissonance. Join us. November timeframe, TBD, Phoenix Area Annual Atheist Baby-Eating Gala. Along with Phat’s, I’ll hold tickets for you. You and a friend.Afterword we’ll go deep into the dark desert and watch the Milky Way blaze in the cosmos. We’ll look out over the world to despair the stupidity and the violence that is still so deep in humanity. Then after another hit on the vape, we can cry in existential angst, which I understand this year is to be accompanied by a recording of Mozart’s Requiem. Fantastic!

Fair enough. I see this tendency in many believers. By and large you have laid out a case for why believers (in general) have emotional reasons for believing, needing to believe, and justifying their belief based on emotions. Atheists, in contrast, use vast systems of logic, reason, and reality. One thing, however, stands out about the late Hitch and many of you. You get hyper emotional in describing the God character and organized religion as a destructive monster. I, on the other hand having never limited God nor Jesus as mere written characteristic behaviors in a static book am able to be at peace with the idea that the God of this moment is good.I watched Hitch as he began to die. He bravely held on to his world view yet was more in touch with his inevitable limit to mortality. Apologist Frank Turek debated Hitchens a couple of times and was on a first-name basis with him. On a related note, you are right AZ. We believers cannot comprehend a people who believe in no gods at all and yet are seemingly content and happy. ]-->Humanism, emotional angst, and a hypnotic plant. That sums it all up, eh?Very well. It is hard for me to accept the idea that you and I will be forever so different. I believe that Jesus exists and accepts you and other humanist atheists as readily as He (hopefully) accepts us. The only disconnect in all of this is that you don't seek to entertain that a particular human could be eternal and could love us all so selflessly.Maybe I take it all for granted, I dunno. I will die someday just as everyone will.All that really matters in my mind is that we can disagree and yet communicate so well in the here and now. Which is all we really have.
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We might be talking about two different things. Learning how to deal with death is a cultural thing. Knowing that bringing about the purposeful death of another human being is wrong is an inherent thing.--Percy

You said that morality makes sense if we start from a theistic position. For the source of that theistic position I went to the Bible, which is "internally inconsistent and contradictory (there's a reason they're called apologists) and externally fantastical and wrong." In addition you concede that it isn't evidence, anyway.Where is your evidence, GDR? You've said several times that you draw your conclusions from observing the world around us, which is the very definition of evidence. So what's your evidence? Please end this merry-go-round of the contradictory. "I have no evidence, but I do have my observations of the world around us." Evidence is evidence, and observations of the world around us are evidence. You can't claim you both have evidence and don't.--Percy

Would he be a Jack Benny type? Will Rogers? Red Skeleton? Bob Hope? Gallagher? John Pinette? Mitch Hedberg? Looking forward to his show. Of course there's evidence. This is a well researched area:

• Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives - Google Books
• Frontiers | Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Insights From Non-human Primates
• How Compassion Made Us Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust ... - Penny Spikins - Google Books
• The Origins of Morality: An Evolutionary Account - Dennis Krebs - Google Books
• Morality: An Evolutionary Account
  
• ...

You have to stop you're "we're both an equal footing" campaign. We are not on an equal footing. As we keep telling you over and over again, we have evidence and you don't. If you like we can dive into any one of those books. That murder is wrong is inherent in our makeup as human beings. How we incorporate that moral feature into our behavior is individual and a reflection of our free will. Atheists seeing themselves as gods while at the same time being materialists is contradictory. I think you're still hung up on thinking that atheists know there is a God but just deny him. Being in charge of and responsible for your own life makes you a human being, not a god.Like most groups atheists are highly varied, but for the most part they're materialists. Both atheists and materialists should have no trouble accepting the existence of dark matter since there is so much evidence for it beginning at least as early as the 1930's. Your contradictions abound. Here you say that, "Religion isn't just about love," but in your previous Message 358 you said, "I would add that the only rule is to love others which includes being good stewards of all of creation."It's like human beings have a switch inside their head that when turned on says, "This makes sense," no matter how irrational. Your making contradictory, nonsensical and just plain wrong statements left and right, but your "This makes sense" switch is on, and so you'll never see it.--Percy

For future reference, atheists tend to use skepticism which incorporates the features you are describing.I also see nothing wrong with atheists being emotional when human beings are indoctrinated into beliefs that contain such evils. I'm sure that you get emotional when you hear some of the things Muslims are taught, and you probably don't believe that Muhammad was God's prophet. If we are arguing morality then we must be the source of that morality. If we don't have an inner moral voice then what does it mean to say that God's commandments are moral? Are we amoral robots that simply follow commands, or do we believe religious teachings hold value because we can judge their morality for ourselves?

I especially love bacon, on the hoof as well as in the pan. But vegetarians don't love lions. They think they "know better".

You should also notice that God approved of King George V as well as Kaiser Wilhelm II as well as Tsar Nicholas II and He supported all three of them in World War I (the War of the Cousins).

We also get emotional about Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, mass murderers, Trump, Hitler.... It's a long list. Why shouldn't we get emotional about evil?

I'm on holiday at the moment, having a day in Cork, Ireland. Instead of the usual tourist things, I took a walk around the older parts of the city that haven't been redeveloped for 200 years.Ireland has always been a poor country and it can be seen in these parts even though most of the worst slum areas were cleared in the 1800s the houses that replaced them still look poor so god knows what it was like before. Most of the emigration to the US left Ireland from Cobh harbour here.The conditions people lived in then must have been horrendous but in the middle of all the squalor was the church in all its power. There's an enormous infrastructure of religious power; the massive St Fin Barre's Cathedral, St Stephen's Church, St Nicholas Church, Holy Trinity Church the Scottish Presbyterian Church(!), the Red Abbey, Capuchins Friary, numerous smaller (but still large) churches with their support buildings - the Episcopal residences of the Bishop of Ireland, the Deanery, the Organist's houses, and a stack more in a very small area.It's a terrible statement - immense wealth and power surrounded by poverty and starvation. Yet it was the poor that paid for and built these insane monuments to stupidity.Religious institutions preach godliness and claim the moral high ground but behaved like wealthy overlords. It made me feel sick and angry. Religion is not a meme, it's an industry and a con and we're still falling for it.

God approved of none of them. Man, acting on his own behalf, ceremoniously inducted them. Everyone is quick to call God (character in the book specifically) a monster, yet it is man who initiates wars, promotes and deposes Monarchs, and prints money excessively. God is folding His arms waiting for us to come to the end of ourselves. Critics like you would argue that were God actually real, He was either sleeping on the job or a monster.I believe that He knows what He is doing and is no monster. The question remains if humans know what THEY are doing.

We who? I never give money to any church or their building fund. I prefer to give to those in need directly.

I see science as being agnostic as meaning the same as "science being silent on God". Theology and draw non-scientific inferences from science but that is as far as it goes. It went from particles to cells to conscious sentient beings. If it walks like a duck.......

Evolution is a tree, not a ladder. Last I checked, E. coli is not sentient.