So far most of you who have encountered me in the Religious section may have concluded that I am an Atheist. Always attacking guys like Angus Buchan with harsh words. I will even go so far as to say I would knock the Pope out for six if I should ever get the opportunity. Come to think of it - I would most probably kick him in the balls. Same goes to the priests and Dominee Koos over at the NG church. Most of them are a bunch of old pricks who preaches on Sunday's and sin between Monday and Saturday.

But I will have to disappointed some of our more practical thinking members in admitting that I believe more in the fact of a God existing than the Pope believes Pasta should be 'el dente. Why? Because I can think of more reasons for us having a creator than having not. My mind has raced to hell and back trying to think of a justification for our consciousness and could not muster up even 1.

A lot of arguments, self reflection and thought - just pure non restrained thinking could not justify reason to not believe there is a God. Humans have this absolute impulse to believe in a God and we cannot ignore this and pass it off as something "proper education" will fix. The problem the scientific and debating world has with Faith is not with God, but with the STUPID reasoning man has around "God". Stupid fucked up morals and disciplines.
 


/ducks

 

lol - I knew you would be the first to respond nemesis 
I will never be able to make you see my "non reasons" for not thinking this and you will never be able to make me see your take on "reasons why" there is no such thing. But at the end of the day when we are in a situation where we have to choose between options good and evil (which is basically every day in most situations) I know you will opt for good. So I'm not going to worry about Jacques suffering eternal damnation because that is non logical thinking. But what I can look forward to is maybe meeting your consciousness in eternal peace somewhere simply due to the fact that you had a righteous nature about you, which is damn hard to have - all the while - even when you do not believe in any creator.

It's odd. As much as you say you can think of more reasons for a creator than not, I have the complete opposite feeling.

Everything makes so much more sense without adding some higher power to the mix.

My problem is with faith being punted as a virtuous way of looking at reality. I cannot see a way to believe in god without resorting to faith and this makes no sense whatsoever to me.

You talk of meeting a consciousness elsewhere, how does that consciousness survive biological death?

When I use to be "Christian" (the passed down belief from my parents) the whole church scene and endocrines and rules and damnations drove me nuts. I felt evil and I felt I was the antichrist because of my hatred towards this same system I used to judge myself against - being "evil" or "bad". Because hear me it made life depressing just thinking about this system and how it "works". It did not compute. Then I became an "Atheist" with a half stiff upper lip. That did not work either - because it drove me up the wall once again trying to fit what I feel with something I do not truly believe in.

And I cannot give you the answer to how it works Ziltoid. Maybe the guys at CERN will discover s little something in the 90% of mass the Universe is made up of which we cannot see. Maybe we are truly only now at an intellectual dawn of man where he may discover his place in the universe.

 

Perhaps I am wrong though. I cannot truly know.

Maybe I am wrong as well, but it would be much cooler if I were right and you were wrong would it not?

Man does not really have a grip on the total universe and all it's mechanics. As I said earlier - about 90% of all mass cannot be seen and measured.

Jacques had a good column at the daily maverick and the intro of it explains pretty much what I feel regarding this :

"As that master epistemologist (and occasional US defence secretary) Donald Rumsfeld reminded us in 2002, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.”"
http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2010-03-17-beware-the-orthorexics-as-you-chomp-down-on-your-boerie-roll

And while that statement rings true I do not want to make any hasty choices. I'd rather trust my gut instinct.

Jacques - it's a long read and I got past paragraph 3. It's heavy and I need quiet time to read it and digest it without distractions. So my lack of response is purely due to me reserving my comments until I fully understand what you were trying to say when you wrote this entry.

Your first comment on this thread hinted that you were expecting me to revisit the stance I had over at bbl. You will not find that I want to take the same approach and I hoped you would read what I have to say not through the lenses of the judgement you made in "that" thread. I do not wish to "bait" anyone and my reasons for starting this thread is not to argue with my counterparts but to publish my feelings regarding faith and religions.



_


My personal opinion as to why religion is so stuffed at this stage? It's because man is not accepting the Maternal side of creation as part of the package. The outer, the flesh and the natural/physical habitat our bodies grew in. Where we are now is a place where we can see where we came from physically, so that question has been answered - we evolved to get where we are now. But that simply is a question to the answer - "How did we get here?". It does not answer "why are we here?".

"Why are we here?". It's a question worth asking and if you ignore this question you are missing out. If you have answered this question you were probably lying to yourself as no one knows.

Your first comment on this thread hinted that you were expecting me to revisit the stance I had over at bbl. You will not find that I want to take the same approach and I hoped you would read what I have to say not through the lenses of the judgement you made in "that" thread. I do not wish to "bait" anyone and my reasons for starting this thread is not to argue with my counterparts but to publish my feelings regarding faith and religions.

It's not that I'm not engaging because of how you engaged there - it's about the content. A key difference between us on this issue is that I don't care about "feelings" - I care about what makes sense, and where the evidence points. When our feelings contradict that, we should usually try to change the feelings, not ignore the evidence. We should certainly not expect anyone else to take those feelings seriously (except on a purely psychological level).

My personal opinion as to why religion is so stuffed at this stage? It's because man is not accepting the Maternal side of creation as part of the package. The outer, the flesh and the natural/physical habitat our bodies grew in. Where we are now is a place where we can see where we came from physically, so that question has been answered - we evolved to get where we are now. But that simply is a question to the answer - "How did we get here?". It does not answer "why are we here?".

"Why are we here?". It's a question worth asking and if you ignore this question you are missing out. If you have answered this question you were probably lying to yourself as no one knows.

Quick thought/examples: religion is "so stuffed" because it is a system built for primitive, pre-scientific brains, and its usefulness is no longer clear. Most of the questions religion was used to answer in the past now have more robust answers, which rely on evidence rather than faith. So it's stuffed because its time has run out, and it will continue to get more stuffed, until most nations treat religion according to the European model, where it's now more of a social club than a belief system.

Read your last sentence again. Doesn't invite much discussion, does it?

Because let's face it. Atheism is also just a belief and it could also be wrong regarding everything.

And that, in a nutshell, is why it's pointless for me to engage in this discussion. Atheism is not "just a belief" - it's simply one of the conclusions one (inescapably) reaches as a product of discarding various myths and sloppy epistemologies, alongside similar conclusions about homeopathy, astrology, etc.