(August 9, 2012 at 3:16 am)Kayenneh Wrote:(August 9, 2012 at 2:24 am)Barbie Wrote: I DO believe in God. Or something, called God by convenience. As I believe in spirits, force and energy, I believe there's something greater than us out there. But I don't believe in the God created by Church, by Religion or by the Bible. I just believe there's something out there.
Hmmm.. Sounds like me anno 2005. That was until I called myself on my own bullshit.
Quote:I'm very annoyed by Christians who believe in God because they "feel it in their hearts" and because "it's in the Bible". Just as I'm annoyed with Atheists who take it as concrete proof that there is no God, the absence of proof of Its existence.
Didn't you just say that you feel that there's something akin to a god out there? What's the difference between your feeling and their feeling? You just happen to be right because you don't support organized religion? Wake up and smell the pancakes, kettle!
You know that many of us who are now atheists, like you and I, did not suddenly jump from belief to outright opposite. For most we went from a specific label, to not sure, to "less likely, but not sure", to "off". That journey can take months years and even, in my case almost a decade.
But in regards to Barbie, the question you seriously need to ask yourself is not what you believe, but WHY you feel the need to jump to such a conclusion?
After looking back at that same feeling you claim to have of "something" being out there, is nothing more than wanting something to be behind all this because of mistaking your "sense of awe" as being the result of a cosmic cognition.
I can have that same "sense of awe" in things like a sunset, kitten, loved one, and lots of things in nature. But I also have a "sense of awe" in the destructive side of reality such as volcanos, poisonous species, black holes.
If you want to know the mental mistake you are making a good example would be:
If you think their is "something" out there manipulating all this, take a trip into space orbit, take a space walk, and take your helmet off in space. I would not recommend it.
I view all the AWESOME things in the universe and life on this planet, not products like a business makes or an inventor makes, but the product of processes that need no cognition. Just like you know that a hurricane does not need an ocean god to be produced. Just like you know that Thor does not make lightening. There is no need for a who, for anything in the history of our universe to happen, anymore than the sun has to be a god or the moon has to be a god for our planet's seasons to change.
I can still appreciate all the good and bad that affect human life without inserting a personal anthropomorphic wish of wanting a super hero to exist. Evolution was around long before humans invented gods and personal superstitions and evolution will occur long after our species goes extinct, much like it continued after the dinos went extinct.
That does not make me fatalistic or pessimistic. It merely means I accept reality as it is, and do not project my personal wishes onto it. I still have joy and sadness and ups and downs in my life, I simply don't make up answers to explain what has always happened in our species history, both good and bad.