If I were an atheist

[SaidNobody]

3. Authority as someone who is reliable about a topic is a different thing which goes more to one's inability to personally test out all propositions.

Authority is a power that the group agrees to. If you don't agree, then authority is tyranny.

4 Sanctitiy is mostly nonsense imho. And it's counterpart disgust is usually useless too. Just look at how these issues have been used in Racisim, LGBTQI, TBL and so on.

You cannot dictate what is sacred to people. If a cow is sacred and you kill a cow, you are not in my group. If cows are sacred to you, than I don't care about your race, sexual orientation, gender. Sacred is strongly tried to identity, which we get from God. Atheists are like warts on the body. They claim not to belong to the body but they could not survive if cut off.

5. Honor is a toxic sludge pit. Honor is imbued by the society and impugned by the society, usually devolving to might makes right, honor killings, drive by acid attacks... Dignity is far more useful as that is within one's self. Look up the difference between honor cultures and dignity cultures. Stark differences.

Honor is a force, a power, not necessarily a formula. But if we don't agree we will not last long in the same group. If you decide I'm dishonorable, would you stay willingly in the same group. There is honor even among thieves, because if there is not, even thieves won't work together.

[dogbite]

Arbitrarily narrow in and out group thinking causes a lot harm. It creates rigid monocultures that lack adaptability and flexibility. It's also much easier to dehumanize the out group for extermination as shown with your wart comment.

Cooperation is much more productive and powerful. It only needs more pluralistic starting definitions to include most everyone in the group and gain the most benefits for the most people.

Tyranny is still authority.

Forces can be destructive, and avoided rather than endorsed for their damage.

[dogbite]

I have no interest in dictating what people find sacred. Similarly, they can not bind others by what they find sacred. Sacred should be a personal matter, not a community at large matter. Tolerating other views peacefully is simple and respectful.

I don't find honor matters for cooperation. Don't initiate harm is all it takes; basic reciprocity. Honor need not enter into it at all.

[Cnsl1]

Can I get an amen for the atheist?

Good stuff.

When it comes down to the very basic parts of belief, aren't we all really agnostic? Nobody really knows. We might hope, we might believe, we might hope to believe, but we do not know.

We might be agnostic atheists, in that we don't know but we believe that there isn't a God, or we might be agnostic theists, in that we don't know but we believe there is a God.

Lots of people say they know, especially on the first Sunday of the month, but they only believe so strongly that they think they know, or they've experienced feelings or events they can't explain, which makes them more sure in their belief.

At least.. that's what I think.

I suppose that if two shiny white haired old dudes suspended in air above you and one called you by name, and said "Yo, Jack! This here's my boy. Check out what he's gotta say", you might.. just might.. think maybe this means that there is a God, even maybe a couple of Gods, or that your brothers got some wicked joke going on.

Or maybe you're just minding your own business making a sealed boat-sub with no windows, ventilation, or bathroom, and your biggest concern is "how the heck are we gonna see inside this thing in order to play checkers?" so a giant finger appears out of nowhere to light up some rocks for you.. well then maybe just maybe it might cross your mind that there's really a god, or at least a powerful digit divine.

Or, say you just wake up.. like you FIRST wake up, and some guy is saying "let's put this man back to sleep so we can make a help meet for him" and before you can even ask what the hell a help meet is, you're back asleep and you wake up with a pretty fine looking lady friend but a splitting sideache. And say then the guy says ok I'm your God and you need to obey everything I say, and I say do whatevers you want except DON'T EAT ANY OF THAT FRUIT FROM THAT TREE OVER THERE or your ass is dead, son. But then some other dude comes up and says, "just eat it, it's great and you'll be a god", and the fine looking lady walks right over there and eats it then tells you hey buddy if you wanna be in the cool club you better eat this stuff.. then if that happens to you I guess you might think there is really a God, or maybe you're just going through one of those Carbonaro effects.

[SaidNobody]

Can I get an amen for the atheist?

There are two basic elements to the universe, or existence itself. Consciousness, who is mother God, and infinite possibilities and ideas, which is Father God.

In the beginning, there was pretty much nothing. But when Consciousness takes upon itself an idea, it can create that idea even if just in its imagination. Anything in existence must first be believed. Or at least come from something that is believed.

Knowing is something that cannot really be done. For example, I can practice kung fu but I cannot be Kung Fu. I can practice or act as if I know something, but I cannot actually know it. Everything is simply too deep and too interconnected. To really know any one thing is to know everything.

I like to make up little sayings. These are some that I have become very fond of.

Gnostic is the art and practice of knowing.
Agnostic is the art and practice of not knowing.
Atheist is the art in practice of knowing nothing.

No one can really be any one of these. No one can actually know. But at the same time, you cannot actually not know something either. When the sun comes up in the morning, you might not know what the sun actually is or how the processes by which it works happened, but you still know that it came up.

But my favorite, is the atheist. The art and practice of knowing nothing. Without a god, there is nothing. There is no such thing as particles and matter and photons. If there was a fixed amount of matter somehow all of the multiverses, it would have been destroyed a long time ago. The creation of new universes is also the creation of new matter, but behind the creation is still the void. To truly know nothing and how everything came from it is the explanation of who God is.

It has become one of my favorite practices, discovering how things can exist out of nothing. But I am all three, but not any given one.

[dogbite]

There are two basic elements to the universe, or existence itself. Consciousness, who is mother God, and infinite possibilities and ideas, which is Father God.

Why should I think so?

[SaidNobody]

There are two basic elements to the universe, or existence itself. Consciousness, who is mother God, and infinite possibilities and ideas, which is Father God.

Why should I think so?

Besides the fact that it is me saying it? There is no reason. If you have a different model we can work with, I'll try.

[dogbite]

I accept, based on the understanding of high regard professionalS in the field, the Standard Model as the best explanation of the available evidence. I don't pretend it is complete, that it answers everything.

My opinion is that no Theory of Everything is likely, that primary forces will probably not have a unified theory. I lean this way because of Goedel Incompleteness concepts about math and logic. But I'm happy for new discoveries.

My opinion is that we have a very poor understanding of consciousness. My current thinking is that it is an emergent property of the underlying processes and mostly if not totally illusory. That it arises from our ability to regard ourselves separate from ourselves, though that is also the basis of the illusion. In simple terms, consciousness is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

[dogbite]

Besides the fact that it is me saying it? There is no reason.

If you don't have evidence to support your premise, why should we take it seriously?

[SaidNobody]

Besides the fact that it is me saying it? There is no reason.

If you don't have evidence to support your premise, why should we take it seriously?

With 100,000 years of human civilization, if you had asked for evidence for any number of things, I,e., computers, airplanes, water heaters, pumpkin pie, etc, you couldn't have provided it. But, now, we have it.

I can't provide you evidence and won't even try. But I do have ideas worth thinking about.

You are right, we don't understand consciousness. But I think about it a lot.

Imagine that God is all knowing, as scriptures claim. First, imagine footprints in the sand. Whether anyone sees them or not, the marks are there, a powerful record that someone was there. God is the universe. God knows someone walked there because the universe moved and adjusted as the person walked. In a much deeper sense, even small events that happened billions of years left footprints that even were humans can read. Nothing happens that doesn't leave chain of cause and effort for millions of years.

Next, imagine a car speeding up on the freeway. With calculus you can pursue a near infinite number of variables from that event. As gas goes into the engine it leaves the gas tank. As the fuel burns, carbon bonds to the oxygen, which creates a displacement bubble that pushes the normal air away, creating wind, etc, etc. The ripple effects could also go on for millions of years, creating trillions of unique relationships. This is an expression of consciousness. Putting gas in the engine could create acid-rain 20 years later. The reactions only happens because something is aware of other things happening.

If two things can crash into each other, they are, in a sense, conscious of each other. For example, of you direct two radio signals of the same frequency at each other, they cancel each other out. If you turn on antenna 90 degrees they go past each other as if they weren't in the same universe.

Point is, the universe never forgets a process.

[dogbite]

Cause and effect...

You should look into the idea of the light cone

[dogbite]

As to whether your idea is worthwhile from my point of view.

There is essentially an infinite idea pool. A slightly smaller infinite subset is just nonsense. Invisible nerve gas farting dragons in my garage for example. These ideas aren't worth pursuing because of our limited time and resources.

So we need a filter. This is the point of Russell's Teapot argument. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

You're welcome to think about anything of course. But if you can't offer substantive reasons and evidence, I'm not interested in pursuing them. They need much more development.

[SaidNobody]

You're welcome to think about anything of course. But if you can't offer substantive reasons and evidence, I'm not interested in pursuing them. They need much more development.

I don't provide evidence because, well, you wouldn't accept it. So many times, someone will make a point and link it to Wikipedia or something like that. People claim to believe in facts so they can arrange them like modules to form their reality. Of course, they look for better facts, meaning facts that have more support and more popularity. But if it doesn't have a million likes or hearts, they won't consider it. It is so rare that someone can be like, "Yeah, the Aztecs thought the Spaniards were gods because they had white gods in their legends, I wonder if they might have been the Jaredites or the Nephites." Then, once the idea is set, then you seek to prove or disprove it. In science, you set your null hypotenuse and then seek to disprove it. Like, "there were no white entities that the Aztecs could have confused with gods."

I'm not going to beg anyone to chat with me. I know the power and importance of faith. Facts are almost worthless in the face of faith. It isn't facts that inspire the next generation, it's faith. Without faith, facts won't make it another 3 generations.

[dogbite]

Faith is a belief without evidence or reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.

Richard Dawkins

[Hagoth]

I don't provide evidence because, well, you wouldn't accept it.

You might humor him with some evidence and let him consider it, rather than deciding for him in advance how he would handle. Withholding evidence isn't a very good way to show confidence in your argument. Withholding weak evidence or non-evidence is an admission of its weakness or absence.

[SaidNobody]

Faith is a belief without evidence or reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.

Richard Dawkins

This is stupid. Faith is the power to act. Belief is the reason you trust that effort.

Delusion is thinking anyone can act with belief.

[dogbite]

That's a very strange definition that sounds more like how the term free will is usually used.

[SaidNobody]

I don't provide evidence because, well, you wouldn't accept it.

You might humor him with some evidence and let him consider it, rather than deciding for him in advance how he would handle. Withholding evidence isn't a very good way to show confidence in your argument. Withholding weak evidence or non-evidence is an admission of its weakness or absence.

I'm not withholding evidence. It's that the evidence is self-evident but people cannot see it. Break down the mechanics of how consciousness lifts a finger, blinks an eye, builds a home, lives a life and you find that the only consciousness picks one action out of a infinite array of choices is faith and belief. The reason you use a switch to turn on a light is because you believe it's the best way. It's not the only way, but you believe it's the best way.

Everything is built upon faith. The family, civilization, life, everything. There are many laws of the universe, but if consciousness doesn't believe them, they are useless.

[SaidNobody]

That's a very strange definition that sounds more like how the term free will is usually used.

No. Without faith, why would you try? You could be dying of thirst and have a glass of water in your hand. If you didn't believe it would help, you wouldn't lift it your lips. Belief is like a mental path to obtain. If you wanted a sandwich, there is an near infinite number of ways to obtain, too many to try randomly. You must assemble a method, using tools you have tried, like walking, bread, sliced meats and veggies, mayo, and then have enough faith in the method to try it. If one is your tools is missing or broken, like maybe you can't walk, you might not even try.

Many people here take faith for granted. You think that because you already have families that somehow you don't need faith. The faith to make families took tens of thousands of years and now many don't even see how it works

[dogbite]

And it just keeps getting stranger.