Via
John Martin The Fall of Babylon 1831
Our long time contributor TAE Summary has specialzed in summarizing two sides of the same coin when things are debated either in the media or, as in this case, in our Comments section. Question is/was: is there a God?
What I don’t see mentioned here is: can people(s) live without a religion to explain away what they do not understand in their lives? Or will they always create a story to ‘cover up’ their ignorance, and is that where religion comes from?
And in a logical next step, also in view of the recent Quran burnings in Scandinavia: No, we don’t burn each other’s Holy Books, or insult each other’s prophets or religious customs. We recognize that they all come from the same desire to explain what we don’t know. And we respect each other in that, and because of that. There have been too many Holy Wars already.
TAE Summary:
A Tale of Two Cosmologies
Theism
• Everything that exists has a cause and the obvious cause for the universe is God the creator
• The vastness of the universe with its well-ordered galaxies and solar systems is evidence of a divine creator and his purposes
• The intelligence and self-awareness of man is also evidence of a divine creator
• Science can explain physical cause and effect but can’t explain where the physical laws came from and is unable to give meaning to our lives
• There is no conflict between science and religion when properly understood
• Religion has been instrumental in human progress
• Religion has improved the lives of countless people; Atheistic societies like Soviet Russia and Maoist China are disasters
• Without God and an afterlife this life has no meaning; Atheists have no reason to be moral, ethical people; It’s anything goes and they end up committing atrocities
• Only with the ultimate punishment and rewards from God can men be responsible for their actions and have integrity
• You can only be free when you know that God exists and live the way he wants you to live
• Religions are benevolent organization that encourage people to be selfless givers
• Countless people have had direct experience with God and feel his love
• The holy scriptures show the historical workings of God among men and are a reliable guide on how to live a moral life
• Without religion there is no ultimate justice in the universe
• Atheists are illogical and suffer from cognitive dissonance; Only a major life upheaval like severe illness or death can help them realize the truth; Even then most won’t change
• Once they die atheists will realize how wrong they were
• Atheism is closely aligned with far-left liberalism and spoils everything it comes in contact with
Atheism
• The claim that all things have a cause and the cause of the universe must be God is logically inconsistent because it does not explain what caused God
• The creation and evolution of the cosmos is due to natural laws such as physics and natural selection; Given an infinity of universes one like ours had to exist and we are in it
• The universe has a trillion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars; The notion that one consciousness comprehends all of this and personally cares about the potentially trillion trillion souls in the galaxy is ridiculous
• The intelligence and self-awareness of man shows that belief in a divine creator is an unnecessary pablum
• There are things we still don’t understand about the cosmos but as science advance we understand more and more
• Theists start from an unscientific, non-falsifiable position and have been wrong about nearly everything; Only as they accept science do they become more correct
• Religion has always hampered human progress
• Religion has led and continues to lead to the repression and death of countless people; Religious societies are unerringly repressive and regressive; State sponsored religion is a disaster
• Theists believe that the next life is more important than this one and discount this life and don’t put in the work needed to make the world a better place; Without God man is forced to confront the issues of ethics and morality and make the hard choices; With God men outsource their morality which gives them license to commit atrocities
• Theists believe they are always being watched and ultimately rewarded or punished by God; It is impossible for theists to have integrity; They can never act from innate goodness
• You can only be truly free when you don’t believe in God and realize this is the only life you have
• Religions are by and large driven by control and making money
• People’s so called experiences with God are not reproducible; They are emotionally driven wishful thinking
• So-called religious scriptures are not historical, are full of contradictions and immoral stories and are not a good guide to a moral life
• Religion’s insistence on divine justice makes its adherents less likely to fight for justice here and now
• Theists are illogical and suffer from cognitive dissonance; Only a major life upheaval like severe illness or death can help them realize the truth; Even then most won’t change
• Since there is no consciousness after death theists will never know how wrong they were
• Religion is closely aligned with far-right conservatism and spoils everything it comes in contact with
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Just wake up and look around you. Miracles everywhere. Just think about how the earth is positioned, a little closer to the sun or further away… life doesn’t exist. Look at stuff through a microscope. if you can’t see God’s work, I just don’t know what to tell you.
I believe “Go to Hell” would be the appropriate response to such blasphemy.
You are too modest or too kind, for that IS GOD’s Response.
God bless the faithful witness!
When you are saved by Jesus Christ, you don’t just get to see all the sin, but also the miracles for what they are.
Going to school for sciences led me to God, not away. Or that’s how He brought me in, to look at it more correctly. I never imagined I would go full literal creationist, but there were lots of things I didn’t know and even more I still don’t, so I roll my eyes when I hear people talking about millions or billions of years.
A tilted axis giving a seasonal variability helped immensely
Enoch WALKED with GOD, and GOD took him. First hand testimony. Case closed.
The life and times of Cosmo Kramer, aka Cosmology, is a fascinating topic … yet this article doesn’t mention him even once. What’s up with that?
Theist: Someone who believes there is at least one deity.
Atheist: Someone who does not believe there is even one deity.
And that’s all.
While there are many theists and atheists who agree with your bullet points, there also many who do not. There are hundreds of cosmological models on both sides, and the majority of theistic models are polytheistic, with many deities being responsible for different aspects of the cosmos, while there are theistic models that believe in a creator(s), but that the creation was not supernatural.
Please don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.
Propagandists like Joseph Goebbels were only messengers too. Just sayin…
No, he wasn’t. He was co/author. A creator of the cosmology.
You and Britannica are messengers of Goebbels, not advocates just by virtue of talking about him and what he did in a factual manner.
Noting that there is such a thing as Hinduism does mean, or even imply, that I am a Hindu.
Uncle Joe was a great and honest man. He gets credited for Jewish propaganda, not the honest kind he actually made.
I don’t think polytheism can offer any sort of even internal logic.
Only with the ultimate punishment and rewards from God can men be responsible for their actions and have integrity.
I read a very good article about the above quote. The author brought up the point that the old testament was all about punishments and rewards/Karma. Jesus taught that through Grace, we can go beyond that. As a child I thought the first. As an adult who has studied and practiced Prayer and contemplation for the last 45 years, I know I am responsible for my own individual world. Simple spiritual practices as asking yourself is it true, necessary, or kind gets us into the state of Grace as does starting the day with a reading and contemplation. At the least, it takes us out of the victim consciousness and gives us some control of our lives. I am turning 65 in a couple days and life is good. Just don’t believe the con game the Pseudo authorities put on us.
God blesses you with peace. You and others give me hope.
I’m thinking of a quote, allegedly from Timothy Leary (think of him as you may), my rough paraphrase:
“Throughout human history, as our species has faced the terrorizing and unrelenting fact that we do not know who we are or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the religious, the political, the educational authorities — who’ve attempted to comfort us by giving us rules and order, informing and forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and place yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic and confused in order to inform yourself.”
I’m sure we could all benefit from that venerable open-mindedness.
If an open window let’s in mosquitoes, flies and roaches, what does an open mind let in?
Food for thought.
Excellent thought. Discrimination is one of the abilities that separates lower from higher life forms. See the Philadelphia teens attacking cars is a good example of this. They have no understanding of simple cause and effect. A wonderful little book is, “As a Man Thinketh.” It’s about 20 pages of Wisdom written over a hundred years ago.
The mind isn’t the window, it’s the screen.
Timothy was one of the misguided individuals who thought and taught that drugs can lead to a higher consciousness. When in fact it leads to a lower consciousness. I have no doubt he is doing his penance in one of the seven worlds of Avernus. To the above quote. Satan runs all of the lower worlds including planet earth, and all authorities are his minions.
Learn to doubt, then learn from trying to resolve doubt. In this, as in so many things, experience is the best teacher.
I see we have some druggies on this platform. Vax em up boys. Your punishment in the seven worlds of Avernus will be a Daily Fauchi jab, you know the safe and effective stuff..
You call it “open-mindedness”, I call it humility.
To think that authority is something entirely bad (if not evil) is a purely Modernist worldview.
You need to understand for yourself what true authority is and isn’t, to get out of that limiting framework.
Well, there are at least two more coming.
99% (or some portion there about) of people have to have religion and God and there’s nothing wrong with it until they become aggressive and vehemently defend their religion as superior to others. That’s when things hit the fan. If they stay graceful and accept others point of views without harming or bulling them, I can see coexistence without wars. But they don’t. It’s the human nature to prove that what one individual has or believes is superior to others. That’s the start of conflicts.
The other 1% is right. God is a creation of the weak and ignorant. There’s absolutely no reason to state that universe was created, it doesn’t have to have a creator. The analogy that since the stuff we make have a maker, therefore the universe is no different and it has to have a maker is bullshit. Pure unadulterated bullshit. It’s overextending and over generalizing what’s an earthly concept to the entire existence of things, things that we don’t even know what they are. Take dark matter as an example. They’re constantly redefining it and its properties to make sense of things. Take the boundaries of universe as another example. It used to 13.7 B years, now it’s 27B years when expansion is taken into account. The last article I read claimed it was 43B years. People throw these numbers as if they actually comprehend what they mean.
We don’t know diddly about the universe and we are so insignificant that we can’t even begin to put our arms around it.
Time is another example.
Carl Sagan said, we live on the dot and Voyager proved that point. And then after a few trillion miles later, even the dot disappeared.
If astrophysicists have one thumb in the mouth and the other in the lower orifice not knowing how to explain it, how could a guy with one book on his bookshelf make the claim that he knows the answer and that God created all this shit FOR HIS SAKE?
Nice try, Jack.
Look up ‘irreducible complexity’ dipshit.
It’s bullshit, buddy.
It takes a lot of faith to call irreducible complexity ‘bullshit’, pal. Explain how your eyes evolved from the big bang. You can’t.
Look, in one of his programs Hughe Hewitt made an analogy that a dictionary doesn’t just pop out overnight by itself. I suppose that a reverse attempt by him to say that similarly the universe has to have a maker. (BTW, I have less respect for the man since he proved himself to be a never-Trump RINO)
The response to that is that dictionary did pop out in a short period of time, 5000 years or so., almost overnight when you consider and compare it with the age of the earth. In comparison to how long earth has been around, it’s negligible, it’s almost like the duration of a spark. The only requirement for the dictionary was that the modern man had to get his shit together and organize language first, then write it down in a cohesive manner.
It’s a shallow and frankly garbage analogy to begin with but Hughe thinks he’s the smartest piece of crap around and he now has cornered his audience to think about it.
If X exists, X requires an explanation: What is X? How did X get here? Why is X here? What is X composed of? What are the qualities of X? What is X’s duration? What is the purpose of X? Does X operate, and if so, how? Etc., etc.
If X is the universe, or an apple, or a dog turd, all of those questions can be posed. This is philosophy, or to a lesser extent, science. If there is no X, then none of those questions apply, indeed, they are a category error.
If X is God, then you will need divine revelation to even consider them, or in other words, the discipline of theology, which attempts to understand and apply divine revelation.
In their own understanding, and by their own principles, it is atheists who are fools. They hate and rail against a “non-existent X,” and they oppress, persecute, and murder those who believe in a god. They spend countless dollars and hours trying to convince people that there is no god. How can this be described as rational?? But, of course, they fight this struggle against a God that they actually do believe in, on some profound level, and they think they can defeat Him. And they waste themselves trying. It is simply a replay of the ancient revolt of the demons against God, inspired by the same demons, enacted on a human level, and, ultimately, having the same result.
After all, if this god X was truly unreal, they would put no more effort into this struggle than they do into the “wars” against the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Leprechauns, or the Great Pumpkin.
If you don’t believe your religion to be superior to others, then do you really believe in it at all?
No, I don’t have any religion whose central point is a knowing, an all capable supernatural. When you don’t have an answer for the stuff you see in the night sky and you become philosophical about your existence, you’d end up saying there has to be some intent behind all this crap.
Look, modern man has been around 30 to 40 thousand years (not 6) and if you compare that with the age of the earth, it’s like a thin layer of onion skin on a ten foot diameter onion. We are not that significant. We are just another animal that could get wiped out easily. Hell the dinosaurs were around longer that 40 thousand years.
It just makes no sense for a being, an all powerful being, to put all this shot together and wait for 13.7 billion years for the moment that he would create his favorite—the modern man. He could have built a million other things. In the meantime, I suppose, he wiggled his thumbs trying to figure out what to do with women, big mouth ugly women like Wasserman Schultz and Maxine Waters.
I have nothing against people believing in supernaturals—they can believe in cows, for all I care—so long as they don’t hurt others like the Muslims do or the Christian’s did in Middle Ages.
Atheism is the result of a dysgenic society.
It would be more proper to ask, what is God? God is real, just grossly misunderstood.
God is the energy current that not only drives the engines of the universe, his life code causes life to begin assembling as soon as it is possible on any given planet in the universe which can sustain life.
Then the instructions automatically increase life complexity until the creative process creates “sons of God” or, people.
His pure wisdom exists in every particle of the universe.
The holy books generally explain these truths through allegory.
The vedic physics texts are speaking of electromagnetic plasma and more.
The bible, does a good job of summing up the creation of a solar system pretty good.
I need to study more of buddhism but the yin/yang sure seems worthy of revire.
The various groups fighting over orthodoxy of the bible parables continue to miss the point:
Parables represent something else, or they would not be parables.
Everything in the bible is an illustration/parable.
The prophets said so:
“Indeed, without an illustration he would not speak to them, in order to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet who said: ‘I will open my mouth with illustrations.'”
And since Jesus is all God, all the time; then God spoke only in ilkustrations.
E is D
Review sheesles
Review, sheesh.
I am admittedly just a simple guy so I’m sure that some brilliant atheist will be able to provide for me a logical path around this particular problem aspect of my current position that there is intention behind our existence . So here it is ,what I cant get around is the very existence of our capacity for reason and intention . I find it it to be inconcievable that a dead ( in the sense that there was no reason and or intent behind its existence or genesis ,it just happened or has always been, for no reason ) random ,meaningless universe would by chance somehow produce reason and or intention along with its intendant desire and expectancy for meaning from what is essentially the antithesis ? “Nothin from nothin leaves nothin , so ya gotta have somethin?”Billy Preston . How does a certain quality/ faculty /just appear from a vaccuum of those qualities / faculties ?Respectfully , your favorite “flying spaghetti monster” believer .
I guess nobody wanted to straighten me out on my thinking here ? Hmmm ?
“…can people(s) live without a religion to explain away what they do not understand in their lives?”
The individual points listed above can be reduced to mere talking points when one comprehends that all if this boils down to a single fundamental question: Why are we here?
And the answer, which so many cannot deal with, is: “It’s up to you.” A certain level of intellect is needed to be able to deal with this situation.
Having said that, I am the last guy who would deny that the western world we until recently enjoyed, with its unique ideas of individual rights and responsibilities, honor, duty, justice, fairness, and cooperation, are based on a worldview most recently fostered in a society using Christianity.
Article totally misses the point.
Everyone needs to find their highest value. (Along the way you will need to realize that value is higher than yourself.) If you look and think and compare long enough, you will arrive at a highest value very, very similar to the ones of other people.
That highest value is your God, doesn’t matter if you’re religious or not.
And beyond that Christianity seems to be the only religion that identified the ‘perfection paradox’, and how to get out of it.
Nag Hammadi e os livros gnósticos podem trazer uma luz para essa discussão sobre o Criador e suas criaturas.