Quote from: Loaf on December 01, 2016, 05:33:48 PM

Quote from: SecondClass on December 01, 2016, 04:03:58 PM

Loaf's post seems edgy and I always hesitate to talk about atheism on the internet, but still.

When I look at a mountain range filled with trees, animals, and rivers, look up and see a huge cosmic generator giving them life, and having it all live in perfect harmony - I think the fact that it just happened through billions of years of astronomical progress is so much more beautiful and awe inspiring than if a magic humanlike god willed it all into existence.

I agree with the part about nature, but my point isn't edgy. We need to make these people stop holding their stupid beliefs somehow, because the world would be much better off without it.

For one, supernatural and religious thinkers have a hard time understanding the natural world. That's why in their heads something like religion makes sense to them. If you take away magical thinking and replace it with skepticism and desire for evidence, you have a much smarter civilization. You also have a civilization who doesn't base their hope for the world on the afterlife, instead of focusing on more productive things like how they can actually look at the life they have as beautiful and worth while. And you take away people's prejudices that arise from when religion divides people, you stop having all these stupid problems with the government where they try to implement laws about social issues, parents stop telling their kids that masturbation sends them to hell which makes them feel ashamed of themselves for doing it, it stops making people who are gay feel ashamed because people keep telling them that there's something wrong with them. It helps the world in so many ways, you can't even imagine how much of a cancer that religion is, it literally makes everything worse.

So yes, we need to make these people stop believing in god. No, that's not edgy because a world without religion would be an infinitely better place.

No, we don't. Nonexistence and death are terrifying concepts, and people cope with that in different ways. Who are you to impose your mindset on others, to force them to believe something they don't want to? You're no better than the religious zealots who want to force everyone to be Christian.

It doesn't matter who's right or how different society would be without religion. What matters is personal choice. If someone wants to believe in something and they're not imposing it on others, then you have no grounds to object.

You bring up the Christians who take it too far and impose their beliefs on their children, that's obviously wrong. But that's a problem with the individual, not the religion. Plenty of religious parents let their children choose what to believe in for themselves.

Religious people can't defend their stupid beliefs with reason which is why people get upset when you insult belief in god. That pisses me off, I don't care whether or not you think I should just but out of people's lives. I will be clear to as many people as I can, I think religion is stupid and I think having supernatural beliefs is fucked in the head. And, not that you need to hear this secondclass, but other people do; can we get it through our heads that if you believe in the supernatural that's just the same as believing in god? I fucking hate it when morons have to say that "I don't believe in god or like religions, but I feel there's a presence". Okay, so you're superstitious either way, you just rebranded it, it's literally no different. You're just trading one silly belief for the other.

I don't see how you can look at all the problems that religion imposes on the world and just think, yeah that's okay, all I need to do is focus on the "bad stuff" that people do in the name of religion and hopefully everyone will just start deciding to be a "good christian". No! The problem is systemic, and it's people not having critical thinking skills in the first place. You need to make everyone knock off the stupid fucking game and start acting like an advanced species of ape, because honestly I feel like, you know how when you're playing a video game against a cpu enemy, but it just doesn't feel the same as playing against a real human being? It lacks that human quality? That's how it feels talking to people in general who believe in god, I just realize that they have an incomplete understanding of the world around me and it's just as boring (not to mention the damage the cause the world) talking to them as it is to play against a video game cpu.

I would like to write a bit on my feelings of not feeling like I’m a part of this world. Perhaps I am a part of this world, in that the universe is intertwined inseparably to itself, and I couldn’t not be a part of this world if I tried. That’s not what I meant, I don’t mean some spooky pseudo scientific sense. I mean that when I try to imagine a world which is more suitable than this one for me, I’m filled with a sense of melancholy over the fact that I can imagine a world which is better suited for me, but I’m stuck in the world that I’m currently in.

Perhaps evolutionary biology is partially to blame. Human beings are vindictive, small minded, superstitious, but they got this way through a long process of evolution. It seems so easy to curse things, but at the same time I wonder why I even feel angry at things in the first place. What is it to be angry? I don’t even really know where that feelings comes from, yet it’s in me as a part of that innate process of biology ingrained in me just as much as it’s ingrained in all of those around me. I feel that I could imagine a world where I am happy, I could imagine waking up in a world where I love the government, I have respect for the people around me and I feel at home, and perhaps in this fantasy world I would even look up to those around me in general with awe, at the intelligence of human beings in general.

Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, it is. I know that I’m basically just saying that I’m better than 90% of everyone else on this planet. But when I look around, it’s hard to not feel that way. Look at the election, look at the history of the human race and the injustices we’ve rid on others, look at the way our society works and how it seems to benefit so few and disadvantage so many. All the while I have to sit around and listen to people talk about how they think god exists, which to me seems like some sort of evolutionary flaw in the human brain. Perhaps we evolved without the need for logical thinking, mystical supernatural thinking fits in just fine with our basic need for survival and our fight or flight response, responsible for keeping us safe for so long up to this point.

It’s funny, I’ve never had any suicidal thoughts in my life, but I hear a lot of other people talking about how they’ve had suicidal thoughts. And they ask me what it is that keeps me going, and I can’t even believe that they’re asking me that question, because honestly it’s not even something that I think about. I realize that in people’s minds there’s simply certain things that some people think about, and there’s certain things that some people don’t. For instance, I realize that when I am feeling anxiety, when I’m not feeling anxiety I simply am not thinking about anxiety inducing thoughts. I know that other people who don’t feel anxiety on an average basis probably don’t sit around contemplating complex theories on how not to feel anxiety, they just don’t feel anxiety. In the same way, I guess that some people just think about suicide, and have that - what is to me - inexplicable urges of suicide, while I do not.

I don’t know what it is that keeps me from feeling that way, but I am glad that I’ve never felt that way. I think about this, because I was just laying in my bed a few moments ago, I just started reading a Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, I’m about 15 pages into the book now, and while I was laying in bed my thoughts drifted to how much I dislike living in this world, while I was reading Hawking’s words and marveling at how intelligent he sounds. I almost feel urged to write about what my ideal world would be like, but then again I don’t really think that anyone would be interested in what my ideal world would be like. Much the same as when people who talk about their dreams, no one really has any interest in hearing about other people’s dreams, I don’t really think that you have any interest in knowing what my perfect world would be like.

I’ve written about my perfect world before. It does seem awfully idealist of me, to think about a perfect utopian world. I often find myself thinking about what things could be, regardless of how you could get there, I have an imagination that seems to like to develop concepts that don’t exist within the frame of reality, or seem beyond feasibility. I find myself particularly fond of futurism, the singularity, theories of a unified theory of everything (a quantum theory of gravity), trans humanism (the merging of man with machine), etc. It could be a part of my creativity, I’ve always been a very creative person. Creative in that I’m always thinking about 100 different ways to look at something, which I think also could be an effect of my anxiety. I don’t know how my brain really works though. And come to think of it, I don’t think that I could really describe my perfect world, just as Hawking can’t define a complete theory of the universe.

In my perfect world I imagine that people aren’t judgmental. You could do something and people wouldn’t think wrongly of you, you could do anything and people would look at you the way they look at a cat, if they love cats, or they would look at you the way a doctor examines a patient, with objectivity, merely to identify what the issue is. I think that it would be amazing if everyone in general was like that, curious and non judgmental, non confrontational. Of course I would also want this ideal humanity to be intelligent, and look at the facts of things, and question their own logic and weigh their own facts against the contradictions in their own logic; dismiss theories inside of their head if they find evidence that proves them to be false (like in science). It seems as though human beings dismiss evidence that conflicts with their current beliefs, and become more entrenched in their own nonsense with self serving biases.

That’s the technical, sort of constitutional side of what I imagine my perfect world would be, if I were to lay out a series of laws that would govern it to be sound and reliable. Now, if I were to just get into my most personal fantasies of what this world would be, I would also match it to my own proclivities, of course. Such a world would be sexually free, a lot of people would have bizarre fetishes and would be completely accepting of even the most disgusting, bizarre fetishes that are out there. Granted this still wouldn’t include hurting other people, but in my world, of course, there isn’t judgment. This conflates with my feelings on the justice system, it sort of unifies in my imaginary world, the fact that I don’t feel that there is real justice in this world, and I don’t believe that a truly intelligent being above arbitrary emotions, would be judgmental of a living creature such as a human being.

My feelings on the criminal justice system are basically, I don’t feel that the way we treat people is what I would consider justice. My idea of justice is one that brings balance to the universe; two wrongs don’t make a right, and what I see is a lot of wrongs basically perpetuating in a vicious circle of vindictiveness. Someone harms someone else, they’re in turn thrown into a prison where they’re treated like sub human animals, their lives are disrupted and disturbed and in some cases socially ruined. Unemployment, stigmatization. Yet these are living creatures, this does not sit well with me, not because of some rigid set of rules either, this isn’t just some mathematical philosophy that cannot be contradicted for arbitrary reasons; on a deep level it really does upset me that we live in a world where people can be punished.

Of course, in some cases it seems justifiable to punish people, right? Such as rape, torture, murder. Well, there’s certainly a lot of cases where it doesn’t feel justifiable. But also, when you’re punishing a person, a lot of times they may feel that they don’t deserve to be punished. I know that there’s times when I’ve been punished, for doing things at school or with my parents or online, where I felt that I didn’t really deserve to be punished. Sometimes when I feel this indignity, I feel that I wish that if only the person punishing me understood my train of thought, that they would no longer feel the desire to punish me anymore. That is something I do believe about the world, that if everyone basically understood each other, there wouldn’t be any hatred of frustration with one another. It’s hard to imagine a world where people don’t feel that of one another and still have characteristic traits of personality that could be considered human. Perhaps the only solution would be complete mind sharing, where you could connect with another person’s mind instantaneously, and know exactly what they’re feeling, and the totality of their existence. 

Now, that sounds like a breach of privacy, does it not? Surely though, if you understood someone on such a deep level, there wouldn’t be any need to feel embarrassed, because you would understand that person just as well as they understand themselves. And if there wasn’t the vindictive and judgmental side to human beings, then pretty much you would never be able to convince the other person with your own thoughts, nor they with their own thoughts, that you or they are somehow a bad person. I really do think that in a perfectly peaceful world, we wouldn’t have these sorts of thoughts in our heads at all. And it’s interesting to me that this seems to be such a pervasive theme that goes through my head, it goes through my head a lot, this sort of perfect world.

It’s so frustrating though, because I have this ideal version of what I feel that human beings should be inside of my head, but when I turn and gaze at the real world, I am quickly disappointed with it and I am reminded that the world that I live in is far from the world that I wished that I was living in. I suppose that brings me back to what I was talking about a little while earlier, I hope that I adequately described and explained in at least a brief and concise way, how I feel about the my discomfort with living on this planet. However, I know that my thoughts will continue evolving, I always seem to be finding new thoughts to add to the continuous snowball that keeps accumulating new ideas inside of my mind. My arguments are always evolving, my thoughts are always finding new ways of looking at things. I know that perhaps some day in the future I will be writing about this same thing again, but hopefully I can write it even more in depth, and in a way that more deeply expresses my feelings on the matter. Until then.

Quote from: Loaf on December 01, 2016, 05:35:47 PM

Quote from: Aether on December 01, 2016, 04:55:06 PM

Sure, you can believe whatever you want. Regardless,

Facts>feelings.

Okay, you better not be religious, because if you were then this would be hugely hypocritical. Which wouldn't be surprising, because you wouldn't be the first religious person to say something hypocritical of an atheist.

I'm not atheist but I don't follow any Abrahamic religions nor am I a very religious person in general.

Okay, then it's still hypocritical. If you believe in things which can't be supported by evidence then that's listening to your feelings over facts.

Sure, you can believe whatever you want. Regardless,

Facts>feelings.

Okay, you better not be religious, because if you were then this would be hugely hypocritical. Which wouldn't be surprising, because you wouldn't be the first religious person to say something hypocritical of an atheist.

Love science. Just think that a lot of science oriented people (not necessarily just scientists themselves) have begun to feel like they have all the answers. Seems rather arrogant.

Embrace the unknown and our lack of understanding, that's how we keep progressing. Humility is a good thing.

that's the opposite of what I think, actually.

Quote from: Loaf on December 01, 2016, 12:19:16 PM

Quote from: PSU on December 01, 2016, 11:36:49 AM

God exists and you will realize that when you grow up and you're not an edgy little kid.

Can you explain this to me in anything other than cliches and platitudes?

No thanks.

Just remember this conversation 10 years from now.

Hmm, so you have nothing to say.

Quote from: Loaf on December 01, 2016, 12:21:25 PM

So I'm gonna break it to you, this thread was to show you that there's no difference in believing in god than denying the holocaust, or global warming, or the moon landing. They're all ridiculous beliefs that people hold that they simply because they choose to.

Must feel bad knowing everyone thinks you're not above holding such shit opinions.

More like it makes me feel bad for you.

God exists and you will realize that when you grow up and you're not an edgy little kid.

Why will I realize this when I grow up, what about this makes me an edgy little kid? Can you explain this to me in anything other than cliches and platitudes?

point —-->
all of your heads

Holy shit this comic is amazing, I just found the website it's from. Bookmarked.

No, you can't. Nor can you prove to me that the holocaust happened, or that god doesn't exist. This is what I choose to believe, I choose to believe that holocaust footage was faked, that cancer isn't real, and that god actually exists, and that the moon landing was faked. This is what I choose to believe and you have to respect that.

No.

But you have to consider the question and present your reasoning, or else your response is irrelevant.

I just made this my facebook profile picture.

Quote from: Loaf on November 26, 2016, 12:28:05 PM

Quote from: Casper on November 25, 2016, 07:53:01 PM

Can you not

no

Threeway with me and class?

ok

rip comrade ☭