How do you deal with life now that you are an atheist? (With a little of my life)

[Whateverist]

@Whaterverist – believers should “settle in a secular society”? Secularism, properly understood, means willfully ignoring doctrinal differences between various religious and philosophical approaches to life to find the lowest common denominator. It is a tool to identify commonalities for the peaceful interaction of various perspectives for the purpose of politically unifying a nation.

I meant this. Separation of individual religious/philosophical commitments from the operation of the state.

Hopefully, I am not reading too much into a single phrase, but I got the sense that you meant something more. Hopefully you did not mean that a secular society is one that requires its citizens to justify their ethical systems without reference to the Divine or avoid groundings their theories of human rights in any transcendent values. It seems a bit authoritarian to privilege a materialist worldview and expect others to submit to its presuppositions. That would be like me suggesting that materialists will be tolerated so long as they do not question Christian doctrines. Again, hopefully, I am taking an innocent phrase wrongly.

I don't recall the original phrase. The bolded part is for the self selecting community who show up on the internet to exchange ideas, justify them when challenged and challenge those of others when the spirit moves you.

@Those Who Kudo Rythym – Personally, I find it very closed-minded to think that the only two options that explain someone rejecting atheism are dishonesty or mental illness. Again this goes back to the pretense that atheists have a monopoly on logic and reason. I find it hard to believe that some of the AF members I respect would applaud this kind of intolerance.

But you do realize he turns some nice phrases and makes good points between the bombast, don't you?

[Whateverist]

This isn't science. It's not a new way of doing science, it's just assuming your conclusion. You're just saying "Designed stuff would act this way. Oh look, it acts that way." I can just as easily say the contrary. Where is your non-designed control data for comparison? And I mean actual data, collected from another actual universe?

I'm not saying "designed stuff would act this way" I'm say a round vibrating container of water predicts a round internal standing wave, a square container predicts a square wave, a spherical container predicts a spherical internal standing wave-form. What are atoms?

A maximum density sphere pack of equal sized spheres predicts an expansive spatial constant of no more than 74% on each sphere

There is no need or possibility of data from another universe.

You often say this sort of thing in response to whether things are designed as they are. But identifying causal relationships in the universe is a far way from showing that anything was designed. It's like looking at how irregularities in grounds surface determine ('design') the shape of a rain puddle. Yes, certain things are owing to certain other things. But from none of this should we feel the coming together of some grand design.

[Whateverist]

I'm twenty and your story is very similar to mine barring some details. I can relate to you.

I know about the whole feeling invincible shtick in young males, people should talk more about it. I don't know if it exists in young females too, though. You're right that it's pretty much indiscriminate in who it affects. I felt like I wouldn't die long after I lost religion and became an atheist at the age of fourteen. I still believe that in a sense - or, rather, I tend to ignore the fact that I'm not going to live forever, else I'd get a little too depressed with how fast time goes and that it's all for nothing.

This is such a misapplication of the capacity for reason.  That part of one's mind, the conscious part with which we deliberate, evolved to solve practical problems - like sleuthing the neighboring tribe's intentions and slaying them before they can slay you (if slaying there must be).

Grand questions of no practical value arise and we immediately set to work as if every imaginable question called for that part of the mind.  The problem with this part of the mind is it gets the idea it is the center of one's whole being, or even the only knower onboard.  But the mammalian brain we had as non-symbolic language users is still intact and handles a great deal of the processing.  But the part of our minds which handle our deliberate fiddling too often just takes credit for it all.  It is hard sometimes to accept that your conscious role, while important and often useful, is not always the best tool for the job.  When you consider the question "who am I" it would be good to reflect on the fact that expressive efforts on the part of our deliberating minds isn't "it".  That's just a tool.

Theists have gods to calm their deliberative minds.  They remind themselves that 'god' has a plan.  They remind themselves that it is best that 'His' will be done.  For those suffering angst of the sort Aroura and others report, it could help to get some perspective on the role of their deliberative efforts.  You're no more "on your own" than the theists are, but for non-theists that something more that is with you is more 'you', just not a part which reflects any deliberative choice you ever made.  If you can learn to esteem the vast storehouse of wisdom which is your mammalian mind, you can feel the weight of the world come off your shoulders a little too.

[LadyForCamus]

I'm twenty and your story is very similar to mine barring some details. I can relate to you.

I know about the whole feeling invincible shtick in young males, people should talk more about it. I don't know if it exists in young females too, though. You're right that it's pretty much indiscriminate in who it affects. I felt like I wouldn't die long after I lost religion and became an atheist at the age of fourteen. I still believe that in a sense - or, rather, I tend to ignore the fact that I'm not going to live forever, else I'd get a little too depressed with how fast time goes and that it's all for nothing.

This is such a misapplication of the capacity for reason.  That part of one's mind, the conscious part with which we deliberate, evolved to solve practical problems - like sleuthing the neighboring tribe's intentions and slaying them before they can slay you (if slaying there must be).

Grand questions of no practical value arise and we immediately set to work as if every imaginable question called for that part of the mind.  The problem with this part of the mind is it gets the idea it is the center of one's whole being, or even the only knower onboard.  But the mammalian brain we had as non-symbolic language users is still intact and handles a great deal of the processing.  But the part of our minds which handle our deliberate fiddling too often just takes credit for it all.  It is hard sometimes to accept that your conscious role, while important and often useful, is not always the best tool for the job.  When you consider the question "who am I" it would be good to reflect on the fact that expressive efforts on the part of our deliberating minds isn't "it".  That's just a tool.

Theists have gods to calm their deliberative minds.  They remind themselves that 'god' has a plan.  They remind themselves that it is best that 'His' will be done.  For those suffering angst of the sort Aroura and others report, it could help to get some perspective on the role of their deliberative efforts.  You're no more "on your own" than the theists are, but for non-theists that something more that is with you is more 'you', just not a part which reflects any deliberative choice you ever made.  If you can learn to esteem the vast storehouse of wisdom which is your mammalian mind, you can feel the weight of the world come off your shoulders a little too.

This was really beautiful; thank you.

[Neo-Scholastic]

But you do realize he turns some nice phrases and makes good points between the bombast, don't you?

Then a follow-up post like "I kudosed this because..." Would be a polite way to make clear that you do not agree with the substance of his insults.

[Arkilogue]

I'll give it one last go. This is how science works:

1) Observe
2) Create a hypothetical predictive model
3) Test the model repeatedly
4) If the model is proving unreliable, go back to step 2 and improve it.
5) Get other people to review your work and test your model. If problems are found, go back to step 2 and improve it.
6) You have a working, practical model.

You have got as far as step 2. You have a hypothetical model. Let's say you can run a test T on a universe and it produced two results, D and N.

For a universe U, the model predicts U is designed if T(U) = D, and it predicts U is not designed if T(U) = N.

Now onto stage 3. Test the model repeatedly to see how accurate it is. In this case, we need lots of different universes, some designed, some not. We then need to run the test on them, to see whether the predictive model is accurate or not. If we get flawless accuracy over a very large number of test subjects, with the model successfully separating the designed universes from the non-designed ones, then we can say we have a working, practical model, if the results are confirmed by stage 4.

Then we take this model and apply it to our universe, being confident that the result is probably accurate.

You have omitted the whole of the procedure in italics. You've simply assumed your model is correct, after no testing whatsoever. And of course, you have left it out precisely because we don't have access to large numbers of universes. We have this one. We have nothing to compare it to, except bits of itself, and models based on itself.

Thanks for the structure and procedure.

[The Grand Nudger]

But you do realize he turns some nice phrases and makes good points between the bombast, don't you?

Then a follow-up post like "I kudosed this because..." Would be a polite way to make clear that you do not agree with the substance of his insults.

At some point, yall christing types are going to have to stop telling other people what they ought to do, you know. Is there -anything- you don't feel confident in making pronouncements upon? 

[Arkilogue]

Well then, go ahead and get it peer-reviewed. I won't be surprised if it's wrong. I doubt that you, alone, have made some sort of discovery that everyone else has missed out on, you can't even put it out mathematically to check if everything is correct. I call bs. And it doesn't matter, you still need to do experiments, have equations or something along those lines as mentioned above because you don't know if everything is correct.

One step at a time. The birth of every big idea is messy.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.”
― William Blake

“The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror”
― Gustave Flaubert

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2...8cluWBrjIU

A Crisis in Physics

There are in fact two separate assumptions: “infinitely big” and “infinitely small.” By infinitely big, I mean that space can have infinite volume, that time can continue forever, and that there can be infinitely many physical objects. By infinitely small, I mean the continuum—the idea that even a liter of space contains an infinite number of points, that space can be stretched out indefinitely without anything bad happening, and that there are quantities in nature that can vary continuously.

The two assumptions are closely related, because inflation, the most popular explanation of our Big Bang, can create an infinite volume by stretching continuous space indefinitely. The theory of inflation has been spectacularly successful and is a leading contender for a Nobel Prize. It explains how a subatomic speck of matter transformed into a massive Big Bang, creating a huge, flat, uniform universe, with tiny density fluctuations that eventually grew into today’s galaxies and cosmic large-scale structure—all in beautiful agreement with precision measurements from experiments such as the Planck and the BICEP2 experiments. But by predicting that space isn’t just big but truly infinite, inflation has also brought about the so-called measure problem, which I view as the greatest crisis facing modern physics.

Physics is all about predicting the future from the past, but inflation seems to sabotage this. When we try to predict the probability that something particular will happen, inflation always gives the same useless answer: infinity divided by infinity.



It's not useless: The Infinite object divided by it's subjective infinite relationships yields specific qualities which can be quantified.

And the author is also making the mistaking of overlapping perspectives: The singularity, even in the BBT, is not a "subatomic speck" because that is comparing our scale of space to it's scale. Say we shrunk the universe by half and by overlaying perspectives a ruler is now only 6 inches long....no it's not, it's still 12 inches relative to everything in the universe the former perspective is no longer applicable.

And just for fun, lets quantize you! (the human body): How can you be said to exist? What are the spatial relationships your body has with itself? You have external and structural bilateral (horizontal) symmetry, internally (organs) you are mostly asymmetric, and both outside and inside are arranged in vertical hierarchy. Can we simplify you even further? Take all the complex stuff, your fingers, arms, head, etc, everything poking out and smooth them all back down to a curved surface of skin. What shape are you? A sphere? Not quite....you're a torus...there's a tube running straight down through the middle of you.

What's the mathematic equation for the human body as it is? Extremely long.

[Whateverist]

But you do realize he turns some nice phrases and makes good points between the bombast, don't you?

Then a follow-up post like "I kudosed this because..." Would be a polite way to make clear that you do not agree with the substance of his insults.

Just as the heart wants what the heart wants, so the funny bone snickers when it recognizes what it wants.  Nonetheless:

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

I will try to snicker less when Rhythm makes a snarky remark.

[Excited Penguin]

I'm twenty and your story is very similar to mine barring some details. I can relate to you.

I know about the whole feeling invincible shtick in young males, people should talk more about it. I don't know if it exists in young females too, though. You're right that it's pretty much indiscriminate in who it affects. I felt like I wouldn't die long after I lost religion and became an atheist at the age of fourteen. I still believe that in a sense - or, rather, I tend to ignore the fact that I'm not going to live forever, else I'd get a little too depressed with how fast time goes and that it's all for nothing.

This is such a misapplication of the capacity for reason.  That part of one's mind, the conscious part with which we deliberate, evolved to solve practical problems - like sleuthing the neighboring tribe's intentions and slaying them before they can slay you (if slaying there must be).

Grand questions of no practical value arise and we immediately set to work as if every imaginable question called for that part of the mind.  The problem with this part of the mind is it gets the idea it is the center of one's whole being, or even the only knower onboard.  But the mammalian brain we had as non-symbolic language users is still intact and handles a great deal of the processing.  But the part of our minds which handle our deliberate fiddling too often just takes credit for it all.  It is hard sometimes to accept that your conscious role, while important and often useful, is not always the best tool for the job.  When you consider the question "who am I" it would be good to reflect on the fact that expressive efforts on the part of our deliberating minds isn't "it".  That's just a tool.

Theists have gods to calm their deliberative minds.  They remind themselves that 'god' has a plan.  They remind themselves that it is best that 'His' will be done.  For those suffering angst of the sort Aroura and others report, it could help to get some perspective on the role of their deliberative efforts.  You're no more "on your own" than the theists are, but for non-theists that something more that is with you is more 'you', just not a part which reflects any deliberative choice you ever made.  If you can learn to esteem the vast storehouse of wisdom which is your mammalian mind, you can feel the weight of the world come off your shoulders a little too.

What does all that have to do with anything I said?