How can you be sure that God doesn't exist?

[Aegon]

@Aegon The very act of subjugating yourself to a creator God, I mean there's not much more of a way to interpret "If anyone wants to follow me, he must deny himself, pick up his cross, and follow me continuously" Christians can be pretty far from it at times, I'm certain you and I both have seen first hand. But denying the natural self is pretty fundamental to Christianity, IMO. We could start a thread on it if you're interested, I don't want to derail whatever this thread was about.

I can tell we have very different ideas of "denying the self." It is important to note I do not mean ego in the sense of vanity, but the ego in terms of the *you*. When you think to yourself, that thing. The "I". The sense of self you possess. Christianity takes ego for granted, and there isn't much dialogue on whether the sensation of having an ego ought to be questioned - in fact, it embraces it, and accepts a permanent soul that is separate from the physical body and continues upon death. Additionally, I find that the concept of God that Christians inflates our importance so much that there is an even a creator God to subject yourself to. From your point of view we have directly interacted with a supreme deity and are a significant component to the overall picture, which by definition inflates our importance to an incredible level. That, to me, is awfully egotistical - in both senses of the word.

To expand, I see myself, and you, and everything else as manifestations of energy in a closed universe. (As far as we know) 13 billion years of constant change and evolution led to this point - where we are now sentient creatures with a brain powerful enough to grant us the ability to think of ourselves in a way that (as far as we know) is unrivaled. And now we struggle to make sense of it all, but "it all" is under no obligation to make sense because it wasn't created for us to make sense of it. It's an inherently purposeless excistence because the mere concept of a "purpose" is something we've made up. I'm trying to find the words to convey to you how far removed I am from any concept of God that is so... human-like.

Perhaps this old TED talk from Dawkins can help paint my perspective a bit better to you (I know, I know... but he is focused solely on science and the nature of reality here, no Christian-bashing.) What he talks about are things that I consistently think about. Things are just... so much more than we can perceive, and there's action happening on levels we don't even dream of. Even language can be limiting, the "true nature of reality," to stick with consistent language, is something that ultimately can't even be described (something that both Buddhism and Taoism acknowledged long ago.)





(I suppose we could take this to another topic, but this topic is pretty general. It still has to do with why I don't believe in God)