I think you got ponied by Bill Maher. This was almost exactly his ending monologue yesterday.
Yeah, especially when it comes to religion in politics.
I’ve become less of a militant atheist over the years. I believe that personal spirituality can have its place in people’s lives. However, I think the second that that spirituality crosses a person’s front door and attempts to convert others to the same form of spirituality, it’s become a dark insidious thing that has no place in a culture that should be based on facts and evidence.
I have often had conversations with people who claim I’m not an atheist because my go to answer of “How was the universe created” or “what happens after you die” is “I dont know.”
Like, of course I dont. Claiming I do is just as faith based as those who claim they DO know those answers. But when it comes down to it, we have evidence of the big bang. We have evidence of that event forming into rocks and planets and everything we can see in the universe. We have evidence of evolution and global warming. Your evidence mainly consists of feeling that there HAS to be a creator or that a sci fi book written by middle east peasants contains all the answers of the universe.
I’ll take my evidence and call myself an atheist all day. You dont get to say I’m not an atheist because I dont know what happens after we die and you seemingly do because your book says so.
Just stream of consciousnessing here, but bottom line is, yes, religion within the halls of our democratic society, making laws and moving to make people conform to their version of religion is a highly destructive thing and has no place in a society like ours and should be removed completely, hence I also feel as though I am an anti-theist
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oh cmon dude while the first one is somewhat debatable and “I don’t know” is I guess fine, the 2nd one is “nothing” and you and everyone else knows it.
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Of course I know it, but I dont have any evidence for it. Until I do, my answer will be, I dont know and neither I nor you will ever know for sure.
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Why is there something instead of nothing is the big one for me that I use to relate to theists. The biggest question we can possibly ask is a paradox. That’s pretty cool. If you want to call that God - sure.
I’ll be happy to say I don’t know what happens after we die to find common ground with them. But like Grue said, 99.99999% it’s nothing.
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I realize my experience is kind of atypical since I know basically no Trumpkins in real life. However, I do know plenty of religious people, and they’re all mostly fine. In fact, on average, I’d say they’re better people than the non-religious ones. Here’s what they’re like
-All highly educated, believe in science
-Attend religious services regularly
-Don’t take every word (or even most) of their religion literally
-Think Trump is a stupid immoral, piece of shit who is basically the opposite of everything their religion stands for
-Give to and do a lot for charity (mostly through their own religious institution, though)
-They don’t try to convert people to their religion
And I’m not thinking of a specific religion, I can think of people from lots of different religions that meet the above criteria. I realize my sample is skewed (highly skewed), but don’t you all know people like this?
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I was raised similarly to wichitadm and I have relatives that are exactly as you described, and others who are straight up trumpkin4lyfe.
something like 16-18 years ago i used to watch the oreilly show because i thought i needed to be on top of what those racists are saying. so today i decided to look what he is saying about lou sobbs cancelation. unfortunately he hasn’t tweeted anything yet, and his last two video clips are … just sad. the mental decline is fucking obvious. it’s grandpa doing the news to himself. i’m not even sure his producers are helping him.
I still do that. But only for major events. For example, about 50% of the election coverage I watched was on FOX.
I don’t get it.
Good religious people are good in spite of being religious though. That is the distinction.
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I kind of find it funny without really getting it either, honestly. I think of it whenever I hear ‘something instead of nothing’ which I’ve never really understood the big puzzlement over. Why would there be nothing?
Not if you ask them. Many of them will tell you that they truly believe that their religion has, in large part, made them into the people they are.
Why wouldn’t there be nothing? Nice, quiet, don’t need no gods nor science.
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Well, I guess you get the credit. But with the fabric of the space-time continuum such as it currently is, Nov 2019 is just too many Scaramuccis ago for me to remember. That’s at least a good decade in pre-2000s years.
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Why would there not be nothing? Every bit of energy, force and matter we can observe in the universe is a zero-sum game. Why is all of existence the only thing that breaks those rules?
Just the potential to create a big bang out of the nothingness that was there before it (according to some theories) in our 3D plane of existence is something. Potential energy is something. If dark energy turns out to be some repellant property of empty space - that means empty space isn’t really empty - but some kind of field with the ability to apply force.True nothing would be nothing, with no potential to apply force, or ever spontaneously become something.
How did the original something spring out of nothing? I know this is based on our conception of time. But still - that means the biggest question we can ever ask is a paradox that we’ll never be able to comprehend - which blows my mind.
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I’d tell y’all that without religion, I’d be more Sklanskyesque.
I just don’t think of it as a paradox or even very interesting. If there was nothing, there would be no reason that there was nothing, for example. And if all of existence breaks that rule then doesn’t everything break that rule (ie, it’s actually not a rule)?
By our concept of time (which I get is because of the 3D world we’re trapped in) - there has to be a beginning to everything. We can always ask, “Well what happened, before?” about any event we could possibly consider, except one.
I think it’s pretty interesting that either a) the universe didn’t begin, it was just always there in some dimension at least - waiting to spring into other dimensions, or b) the universe began out of nothing.
I refuse to accept the latter because nothing with the potential to become something is not nothing. In that case I would consider the universe as the nothing with the potential to become something, and ask when that began. So we’re left with a paradox. How can a thing exist without being created?
Even if all of existence is just equal and opposite stuff, which is someday going to come together and cancel itself out back to nothing - it still took energy to pull all that apart to create the universe we live in.