(June 2, 2020 at 9:48 pm)Ryantology Wrote: wut up dudesWelcome! I agree that every earthly religion is crap but recently I have been checking out the Tralfamadorians. Maybe there is hope.
As certain as I can be about anything, I'm certain that every earthly religion is full of crap. The gods we all worship are fictional characters. Every person who claims to have communicated with some god is, at best, confused about an unusual experience. I guess that still makes me an atheist.
But, I feel that there's enough of an opening in my mind to where I can say that I can accept the nominal not-impossibility that something like a god exists, and even that it was responsible for the creation of everything we consider reality. We are just stinky, sweaty meat bags with limited senses and perception. We know there was a big bang, and that set in motion all the mechanical and physical processes which govern the universe. We don't know, and perhaps can never know, if that event was the absolute beginning of all time, or if literally anything else happened before that. We don't, and cant, know why anything is here at all.
What separates this understanding from a theist's understanding is, these uncertainties and un-knowable factors do not mean a god is true, or likely, or possible. They merely provide an opening for the existence of such a being. Maybe a god, existing on a level we could never comprehend or sense, is behind it all. Maybe the universe, itself, is a god. Maybe existence is a daydream. Maybe a god is a fat, undersexed computer programmer on a higher plane of reality and we're all assets in a simulation. I really do not think any of these scenarios is impossible. Which, of course, does not imply any probability, but it also makes me reluctant to ever think the phrase "there's no such things as gods", because while that seems apparent to someone who isn't indoctrinated in a belief system, it's also maybe not true, and I don't believe science, or any other tool, can ever resolve that uncertainty.
God thinks it's fun to confuse primates. Larsen's God!