What do athiests think happened 2009 years ago?

[prepstudinsc]

Accepting a simple explanation is an acquired talent. A very desirable acquired talent.

I believe that we only have to have faith the size of a mustard seed...that's incredibly small, we don't know about such things here on LPSG. :tongue:

 

[prepstudinsc]

Atheists may have coping mechanisms different than a what a Christian has in dealing with things. They may not be right ways for you...but they are right for them.

I understand that, I'm just curious as to what some of the athiests here do to get them through.

 

[Pendlum]

My faith in God and Jesus is what sustains me through the good times and the bad times. What I don't understand is what people who are truly atheists turn to in times of trouble. In good times, or when anything good happens, it can be called "luck" or "fate" or whatever and can be easily played off to circumstances that we control.
When things are bad, how does an atheist find comfort--such as when a close friend or family member dies, or when someone is sick, or when you need financial help.
Maybe I'm just a simple-minded Christian, but I need something/someone in which to trust.

Can someone explain???

I don't need that comfort, only myself. I don't ask myself why when a family member dies, because I already know that everyone dies. And why can't you trust yourself?

Good things happen, and bad things happen. There is no rhyme or reason to why one happens instead of the other. In fact the only answer most Christians can come up with in situations where people ask why is "It's God's plan." That isn't comforting at all in my opinion. Religion is a crutch to many people, but bones don't stay broken forever.

 

[B_bi_mmf]

My faith in God and Jesus is what sustains me through the good times and the bad times. What I don't understand is what people who are truly atheists turn to in times of trouble. In good times, or when anything good happens, it can be called "luck" or "fate" or whatever and can be easily played off to circumstances that we control.
When things are bad, how does an atheist find comfort--such as when a close friend or family member dies, or when someone is sick, or when you need financial help.

Maybe I'm just a simple-minded Christian, but I need something/someone in which to trust.

Can someone explain???

I can only speak for myself, of course. As an atheist, I think I might actually have an easier time coping with adversity than you do as a believer.

The reason I say that is this: Believers have to do such mental gymnastics to reconcile the cruelty and misery that comes to them and others with their faith. The world is just so full of patently clear unfairness in terms of what so many people are dealt in life. Things such as illness and natural disasters are very hard to reconcile with a loving and all-powerful God.

Trivial little sets of circumstances intersect to create horrible consequences for individuals. It is so, so difficult to convince one's self that yes, this is what a loving God intended. This is simply the human condition. Clinging to myths as if they are literally true seems to me like an odd way to find comfort.

When bad things happen to me, I turn to the people I love for support and understanding. We are in this together. The fact that I am 99.99999% confident that this life is the whole deal just leads me to be all the more committed to making my life as full as possible and to try to treat everyone around me as if today might be their last day before death takes them to utter oblivion, as it will us all. Got to make every day count, even make it "meaningful," if you will.

 

[Phil Ayesho]

Fixed that for ya, buddy.

Sorry- you are incorrect.
God has never answered any prayer.
It's been tested scientifically.
Intercessory prayer has ZERO effect on outcomes.
Period.

If you can not tell the difference between God answering prayers, and randomly occurring positive results among those who do not pray, then God is not answering prayers.

If prayer is efficacious- it MUST DEMONSTRATE EFFECT.

If it can not, it is not.

 

[_avg_]

What I'm more interested in understanding is why non-atheists believe whatever it is that they do.

 

[invisibleman]

Sorry- you are incorrect.
God has never answered any prayer.
It's been tested scientifically.
Intercessory prayer has ZERO effect on outcomes.
Period.

If you can not tell the difference between God answering prayers, and randomly occurring positive results among those who do not pray, then God is not answering prayers.

If prayer is efficacious- it MUST DEMONSTRATE EFFECT.

If it can not, it is not.

You are right about prayer. I have prayed lots of times for things and people and got nothing in return.

There are a lot of things in the world that are different now. I still think that Americans have lost themselves. Maybe people put their faith in intangible entities because reality is a let down. When you look at reality, it is disheartening. Sometimes I want the superhero or a savior to rescue me...but at the end of the day, I will still be steady wishin' and thinking certain that the superheroes are on holiday. There is only me...still with the prayers in the pocket. And it will have to me that puts on the cape and get to work on things myself or be satisfied with lint.

 

[Calboner]

Your meaning of agnosticism is not the correct meaning.

You told me to do some research, so I went back to the originator of the term 'agnostic', T. H. Huxley. He wrote quite a lot on what he meant by the term, but the following passage seemed to me particularly pertinent (from "Agnosticism: A Symposium," published in The Agnostic Annual, 1884; bold type added):

Some twenty years ago, or thereabouts, I invented the word "Agnostic" to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with the utmost confidence; and it has been a source of some amusement to me to watch the gradual acceptance of the term and its correlate, "Agnosticism" (I think the Spectator first adopted and popularised both), until now Agnostics are assuming the position of a recognised sect, and Agnosticism is honoured by especial obloquy on the part of the orthodox. Thus it will be seen that I have a sort of patent right in "Agnostic" (it is my trade mark); and I am entitled to say that I can state authentically what was originally meant by Agnosticism. What other people may understand by it, by this time, I do not know. If a General Council of the Church Agnostic were held, very likely I should be condemned as a heretic. But I speak only for myself in endeavoring to answer these questions.

1. Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.

2. Consequently Agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology. On the whole, the "bosh" of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by reason and science, and orthodoxy does not.

3. I have no doubt that scientific criticism will prove destructive to the forms of supernaturalism which enter into the constitution of existing religions. On trial of any so-called miracle the verdict of science is "Not proven." But true Agnosticism will not forget that [6] existence, motion, and law-abiding operation in nature are more stupendous miracles than any recounted by the mythologies, and that there may be things, not only in the heavens and earth, but beyond the intelligible universe, which "are not dreamt of in our philosophy." The theological "gnosis" would have us believe that the world is a conjuror's house; the anti-theological "gnosis" talks as if it were a "dirt-pie" made by the two blind children, Law and Force. Agnosticism simply says that we know nothing of what may be beyond phenomena.​

Now, I grant you that Huxley does not say that being an agnostic, in the sense that he originally gave to the term, means holding no opinion as to the existence of God. He does not say that agnosticism is incompatible with theology or what he calls anti-theology, but only that it is incompatible with "the greater part" of each.
​

But note two things. First, agnosticism as Huxley defines it has no specific connection with religious belief. It has no more to do with the question of the existence of God than it has to do with any other question. It is simply a principle of conduct in thinking (and in declaring one's thoughts), namely the principle of always proportioning one's judgments to the evidence supporting them. So if there is insufficient evidence to support either affirming or denying a particular proposition, an agnostic will be bound to hold no opinion in that matter. Huxley does not say merely that one should not profess to know what one does not know; he expressly says also that one should not even profess to believe that which one has no justification for believing.

Second, despite the fact that the mere definition of agnosticism makes no reference to religious or theological matters, Huxley immediately recognizes that it has implications for such matters. (As Huxley says at the beginning of the passage, he invented the term specifically to describe his attitude toward matters about which "metaphysicians and theologians" had "dogmatized" -- plainly meaning questions of religious belief and theology.) It is not a matter of definition, but it is an implication of the definition of agnosticism that an agnostic, at least in Huxley's view, rejects the greater part of theology and anti-theology, and "the forms of supernaturalism which enter into the constitution of existing religions."

To sum up: Huxley defines agnosticism as the principle of holding no belief and claiming no knowledge for which one lacks sufficient evidence, and he asserts that the question of the existence of God (or more generally of "what may be beyond phenomena") is a matter in which there is no evidence to justify belief one way or the other. So while an "agnostic atheist" or an "agnostic theist" may be a theoretical possibility -- i.e., neither combination of words is self-contradictory on Huxley's definition of "agnostic" -- the originator of the term "agnostic" certainly did not recognize such a thing as a real possibility.
​

 

[JustAsking]

This is a very interesting thread. I believe the Son of God was born 2009 years ago (or thereabouts). I am a devout Christian. However, I do believe that this confession will not really inform any of you of what and how I believe what I believe, because most people equate Christianity with fundamentalism and Biblical literalism. I am not a fundamentalist nor do I (along with 80% of the world's Christians) believe the Bible must be inerrant and interpreted literally in all passages.

I am also a trained physicist, electrical engineer, and software developer. One of my favorite topics (besided God's Grace) is the history and philosophy of science.

Although I am a Christian, I have a lot of respect for agnostics since I think a position of not knowing is a very reasonable position to take. Also, I have a lot of respect for what I would call casual atheists. As Richard Dawkins says, (one of my favorite writers), we are all atheists about some Gods. In other words, most of us in this thread are atheists when it comes to belief in Zeus. Dawkins adds that he shares this non-belief in Zeus, so he and Christians are fellow atheists. The only thing that is different between them, he says, is that he disbelieves in one more god than they do.

One thing I also believe is that a conflict between religion and science is not a necessity. In fact, some 80% of the world's Christians belong to denominations that feel the same way. These denominations have official social statements of doctrine that embrace science and explicity mention the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory to be the best explanation for the diversity of life on the planet.

One thing I do have problem with is the naive notion that science (the ultimate expression of empiricism) is a complete replacement for received knowledge as a path to cosmic truth. I am talking about those who like to apply rules of scientific investigation to the question about the existence of God. I know all of those rules and think that it is quite valid to say that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of God. I cannot disagree with that.

What I do disagree with is the idea that the problem must be therefore settled. Few people, including scientsists, spend much time thinking about empiricism in terms of philosophy of science. We came to realize in the 20th century that all of our theories are provisional and will be replaced over and over again by an endless succession of theories, each being totally different than the one it replaced.

This realization has led us to believe that although scientific theories have massive explanatory and predictive power, the endless succession of them show that they are not necessarily converging on the real cosmic truth.

So don't be so hasty to base your entire world view solely on science, evidence, and logic. Even though all of these things are so useful they must be considered almost holy in its pursuit, we cannot say we are seeing The Truth(TM). You need to leave a little room for understanding the cosmos in a non-rational way.

By the way, I am not offended by even the most outrageous criticism of religious faith. I find much of religion to be quaint and in some cases downright silly. But that doesn't mean that I don't have a very strong and very conventional faith.

Naturally, the place where I ponder the biggest mystery in regard to faith is theodicy, or the problem of evil, or you might say the question about what the heck God is doing. Any reasonable person of faith who is also a child of The Enlightenment has to go there and ponder, or they are in denial.

 

[Calboner]

Added in editing: JA, so glad to see you here! I was wondering how long it would take before you appeared in this thread.

So we CAN know that God does not always answer prayers.

Fixed that for ya, buddy.

Sorry- you are incorrect.
God has never answered any prayer.
It's been tested scientifically.
Intercessory prayer has ZERO effect on outcomes.
Period.

If you can not tell the difference between God answering prayers, and randomly occurring positive results among those who do not pray, then God is not answering prayers.

If prayer is efficacious- it MUST DEMONSTRATE EFFECT.

If it can not, it is not.

Just to amplify Phil's point:

Suppose that a man tells you that he can make it rain by doing a rain dance. You are doubtful. One day, he does his rain dance and shortly afterwards it rains. He says, "See! I told you that I can make it rain!" You are not convinced, so you wait until a dry spell is forecast and challenge him to make it rain again. He does his rain dance and there is no rain that day. You say, "There! You can't make it rain!" He replies, "No, no, it's just harder to make it happen sometimes. I will try again tomorrow." So he tries again and the same thing happens. He does his rain dance every day for weeks, and then, eventually, it rains, whereupon he says to you, "There, you see! Didn't I tell you that I could make it rain?"

People who point to instances in which something happened for which they had prayed as evidence of the efficacy of prayer follow exactly the same defective pattern of reasoning as the rain dancer in my anecdote. They believe that there is a causal connection between something that they do and something that happens subsequently. Observation of the two phenomena has never established any significant correlation whatever between the two phenomena. There is therefore no reason to believe in any causal connection -- nay, more: there is every reason to believe that there is no causal connection. (If there were one, it would eventually reveal itself to observation; repeated observation does not reveal it; therefore, we have compelling reason to believe that it does not exist.) But the believers, rather than weighing the positive observations (rain dance followed by rain, prayer followed by fulfillment of the wish expressed in the prayer) and the negative ones (rain dance not followed by rain, prayer not followed by fulfillment of wish) equally, take the positive instances to confirm their belief while they either disregard the negative instances or attribute them to other factors (usually equally unobservable).

 

[JustAsking]

Hi Phil, Good to see you on the airwaves as usual. I enjoy all your postings. You and I are fellow ranters at times. And Cal, yes I can't stay away from a discussion like this. I am taking a break from busting Intelligent Design retards in a facebook forum.

As for this, though:

Phil writes....
"But the believers, rather than weighing the positive observations (rain dance followed by rain, prayer followed by fulfillment of the wish expressed in the prayer) and the negative ones (rain dance not followed by rain, prayer not followed by fulfillment of wish) equally, take the positive instances to confirm their belief while they either disregard the negative instances or attribute them to other factors (usually equally unobservable). "

Yes, this is what we would call "confirmation bias". The problem with the entire question is the need to subject it to empirical testing to begin with. I know that will sound silly to a lot of readers, but I never make the mistake of thinking that my faith is rational. We pray because we are asked to in the Bible. And we don't do that because we think the Bible is inerrant, but we do it because the Bible talks about it often.

What we don't do, however, is demand an answer, nor do we expect that an answer will come in any way that we may have imagined. I am not suggesting that because it solves the falsifiability problem. I am saying it because I believe it. As my Pastor said once, prayer is like a rolling stones song. You can't always get what you wanna. But if you try real hard, you just might get what you need. And then he added, "and what you need is God's Grace."

No, prayer is ridiculous when looked at from an empirical point of view. We all talk about petitionary prayer and realize that the stats just doesn't bear it out. But what about people praying for specific other individuals to be healed from a disease? What kind of God needs a kind of American Idol vote thing to happen before he heals someone? So yes, much of this is ridiculous from a logical point of view. But there is nothing logical about faith, and there is nothing so liberating as realizing that (perhaps both for someone of faith and someone with no faith).

My favorite gedanken question about prayer for healing is, "Why does God never heal amputees?" It kinda gets right to the essence of things, doesn't it?

 

[Phil Ayesho]

Agnosticism = can we KNOW if God exists. It has nothing to do with opinions on as to whether God exists.

Sorry- but what you said is exactly what he said.

IF you can not know about god's existence, then you do not form opinions regarding god's existence.

Again, the common mistake on agnosticism is the notion that it "entertains the possiblity" of God.
It does not.

That would be allowing belief that lack of evidence implied credibility.


In point of fact, true agnostics do not accept the notion of god.
because god is unknowable, anyone claiming knowledge of god must be, de facto, either lying or delusional.

 

[JustAsking]

...IF you can not know about god's existence, then you do not form opinions regarding god's existence.

....

We can not know about infinity, but we have all kinds of mathematical opinions about it.

 

[Phil Ayesho]

There is only me...still with the prayers in the pocket. And it will have to me that puts on the cape and get to work on things myself or be satisfied with lint.

so true...

that being said, I actually am not opposed to prayer.

Just because there is no god, there is no such thing as redemption, no one to hear your pleas, that doesn't make the IDEA of such things any less beautiful.

It is fine to seek redemption... as long as you know you will only find it in your own heart, or the heart of those you have wronged...
It can be beautiful to say a heartfelt prayer.... as long as you know you are appealing to the idea of a guiding spirit... and not confusing that wistful wish with reality.

 

[Calboner]

Phil writes....
"But the believers, rather than weighing the positive observations (rain dance followed by rain, prayer followed by fulfillment of the wish expressed in the prayer) and the negative ones (rain dance not followed by rain, prayer not followed by fulfillment of wish) equally, take the positive instances to confirm their belief while they either disregard the negative instances or attribute them to other factors (usually equally unobservable). "

No, that was Cal, not Phil. Phil doesn't use such long and heavily burdened sentences. (Actually, Phil doesn't even write paragraphs that long!)

 

[Phil Ayesho]

What I'm more interested in understanding is why non-atheists believe whatever it is that they do.

I was raised catholic, but realized it was a lie by age 8.

Since then I have studied most of the world's religions and spiritual traditions, from the Koran to the Gita, and found most to be compelling metaphors of human fears and ignorance.


The only philosophical tradtion that I felt was entirely honest with itself was taoism. A discipline that celebrates the beauty of being without making up any malarky about deities, afterlives or magic.


WHile I do not have a particularly strong position either way on the core concept of the divine... I can easily prove that every single characteristic assigned to God by religious bleievers is impossible, and that, therefore, the God they think they believe in can not exist.

Whatever fouks might want to believe about God... its a safe bet that anything we could conceive of would be so far off the mark as to be ludicrous.

Could there be something we might call a god?
I honestly do not know...

But I am dead certain God can not be any of the things thus far claimed.

 

[JustAsking]

No, that was Cal, not Phil. Phil doesn't use such long and heavily burdened sentences. (Actually, Phil doesn't even write paragraphs that long!)

Yeah, see? I am just out of practice. Sorry for the misattribution. That was definitely one of your dense paragraphs. Phil's style of ranting is different than yours and mine. Where you and I are obsessive and dense, Phil has that kind of frantic collection of isolated sentences. I am trying to figure out if I should adopt that style for ranting. Either way, I enjoy both of your screeding.

 

[Calboner]

The problem with the entire question is the need to subject it to empirical testing to begin with. I know that will sound silly to a lot of readers, but I never make the mistake of thinking that my faith is rational. We pray because we are asked to in the Bible. And we don't do that because we think the Bible is inerrant, but we do it because the Bible talks about it often.

Though an unbeliever myself, I distinguish between forms of religious belief and religious thinking that I can respect and ones that I cannot respect. The kind of thinking that people express when they say things like "I know that God answers prayer because he has answered my prayers repeatedly" is a kind of thinking that for which I have no respect. I can respect the people who engage in such thinking in other regards, but not as thinkers. And I can condone their way of thinking, but I cannot respect it. Their upbringing and their whole way of life may be built on that way of thinking, and I don't favor depriving them of it if doing such a thing (assuming it to be possible, which it rarely is) would do them no good -- if, say, they would merely embrace some even worse way of thinking. That does not mean that I attribute any value to it as a way of thinking in its own right. (A parallel, in case my point is not clear: I don't favor disillusioning small children who believe in Santa Claus -- such a belief may be perfectly suitable for some children -- but that doesn't mean that I have any respect for their belief.)

On the other hand, I can respect the idea that prayer has some necessity and even a kind of efficacy that is inscrutable to us -- inscrutable not because its effects are hidden from our view, but rather because we have no way to determine exactly what those "effects" would have to consist in. Such a view acknowledges that we have absolutely no basis for pointing to something that happens in our lives and saying, "That was God's doing," as if the event were evidence of God's work. To do that would be to get things backwards. An event looks like God's work to you only if you believe that God works in our lives; it is not evidence for that belief, nor are a million such events evidence for that belief.

Here is my favorite bit of dialogue from the movie (perhaps originally from the play, but I only know the movie) Shadowlands, based on the history of C. S. Lewis's relationship with Joy Davidman. I had to look the text up at imdb.com; the line that lingers in my memory is the last one:

Harry: Christopher can scoff, Jack, but I know how hard you've been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.

Lewis: That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.

 

[JustAsking]

Lewis' answer is more like I would say. It is a very Christian answer.

Any discussion about God frequently answering prayers in an overt way must ultimately come down to an examination of large catastrophes. When people tell me that "God has a plan for each and every one of us.", I have to ask them what God's plan was for victims of the Holocaust? You get all kinds of funny answers with that one.

On the other hand, I do believe that God works creatively in the universe at all times. And that God's plan for us is to be reconciled to him for eternity. Why the world is so broken so as to allow such misery and suffering, I can't answer. There is a funny Christian joke that the reason why we killed Jesus is because it was the only part of God we could get our hands on.

However, it is telling that by only the 2nd chapter in the first book of the Bible, Creation breaks God's heart. It is telling that God's answer to Job's suffering is basically, "shit happens". It is telling that God enters history as a helpless infant born of an ignorant teenage mother into a pig trough only to end up being nailed to a tree by the local board of education.

The comfort in this is that God has no illusions about what it means to suffer mortality. The comfort is that God is the god of tears. The God of the powerless, the marginalized, the least, and the lost. I think if Jesus were to come back on some Friday night, he would make for the closest AA meeting, NA meeting, or gay bar because in those places where people are suffering or marginalized he would feel most at home.

That suffering will come to an end some day, is God's promise.

But the God that controls and directs the daily events of each of our lives every day, I have trouble with. I am not a Deist, mind you but daily intervention into each of our particular stories, I think not. That he would abdicate Godlike power to die for each of us, I think so.

 

[AquaEyes11010]

My faith in God and Jesus is what sustains me through the good times and the bad times. What I don't understand is what people who are truly atheists turn to in times of trouble. In good times, or when anything good happens, it can be called "luck" or "fate" or whatever and can be easily played off to circumstances that we control.
When things are bad, how does an atheist find comfort--such as when a close friend or family member dies, or when someone is sick, or when you need financial help.
Maybe I'm just a simple-minded Christian, but I need something/someone in which to trust.

Can someone explain???

When times are tough for me, I seek rational responses to alleviate whatever possible. Though I do not believe in a god, I do find inspiration in the prayer that has to do with being able to change the changeable and accepting the unchangeable, and understanding the difference. The difference with me is I look into myself for the answers, or seek the advice of others. As to the death of a loved one, my coping mechanism is acknowledging the steps of grieving, and finishing with being happy for having had that loved one in my life at all. Understanding that, from my perspective, there is no orderly logic to people coming in and out of my life, I feel I become more appreciative of the good that comes. While believers in a god or gods will be thankful for that higher power getting them through the tough times, I believe that the tough times strengthen me as a person -- "that which does not kill us makes us stronger" -- and finish by using those challenges as life lessons for myself.

I do believe there is wisdom to be found in religious teachings. I also believe that being a "good (fill in the blank religion)" can lead to being a good person in general. I, however, do not feel a higher power is a necessary part of the equation, and the general golden rule of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" can be followed regardless. I believe that doing something small but out of your way to be good to another person can uplift that person's mood, which will affect his/her behavior toward another person, thus starting a chain reaction. Religious people might say that random acts of kindness count as points toward heaven. I say they make life more enjoyable while still living.

Conversely, I also believe that the hold religion can have over people can (and repeatedly has) been abused. The bible is a big book, and one can find references that can support all sorts of bad behavior. Leviticus is rife with that ("thou shall not let a witch live" or the punishments recommended for children denouncing their parents, for example). But there are lots of other literary works which can be interpreted to one's own life that do not have a god character included. Since I believe humans wrote the bible, along with countless other books and stories, I believe it is within the human mind that true wisdom exists.