Answers needed

[Redbeard The Pink]

Hi everyone!

I'm not sure whether this is the right place to post this, but I'd really appreciate some answers to some/all of the following questions. I'm interested in how an average atheist thinks about these topics. It would be great if you could give some explanation for your answers. I'm coming from a protestant worldview.

1. Does God exist?
2. Where did the universe come from?
3. Does my life have a purpose?
4. Why do people suffer?
5. Is there life after death?
6. Can I distinguish right from wrong?
7. Can people know truth?

Sorry for being point form. 

I wouldn't call myself an average anything, but here goes nothing.

1. Which god(s)? There are so many, the scriptures about them are filled with obvious fiction, and they all have about the same level of evidence to demonstrate their existence (which is to say none). My studies and understanding indicate that the very idea of god is a man-made concept originally formulated to do a range of things, from filling in the gaps in our understanding to controlling our thoughts, feelings, and actions. If there really is an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing entity in the universe somewhere, and it's trying to communicate with us through some or all of the world's various holy texts, it's doing a shit job. If it's so knowledgable and so powerful, why would it be making such a cluster-fuck of something so simple as communicating with humans?

2. We don't know. How's that for an answer? We don't know, and we don't believe there's any use or justification in saying that a deity might have done it. Until we find some evidence to give us a really good answer, that's the only good answer we have. We have some idea of how the universe began, but what caused it to begin is still something of a mystery. There are a few schools of thought on the matter at the upper end of physics: one postulates that some form of material reality has always existed; another suggests that by adding matter and anti-matter together you actually get nothing, and so the process could theoretically be reversed to bring matter and antimatter out of nothing. Honestly, though, we don't fucking know, and I'm pretty much ok with that. I certainly don't lose sleep over it.

3. "Purpose," like value, morality, and many other abstract ideas, is completely subjective. While life as a phenomenon does seem to have things that it consistently does as a matter of function, there is no purpose in the sense you seem to mean (as in, does life have an inherent purpose that is somehow dictated by a higher order of the universe?). The purpose to your life is whatever you make of it.

4. People suffer because suffering is part of the condition of being alive and conscious. Sometimes it happens at the hands of other humans, sometimes it happens because of the environment, and sometimes we even do it to ourselves. One thing's for sure, though: religious thoughts and actions have added a lot of suffering to this world any way you slice it.

5. All evidence indicates that the self rests within the brain, and that when the body and brain die the consciousness dissipates. What one experiences during death varies widely from person to person (if near-death accounts are any indication), but something interesting happens when many people die: their brains release a substance known as DMT. DMT is a powerful hallucinogen that can dramatically warp one's sense of time and cause hallucinations that are a complete sensory disconnect from reality. Some people just see auras and funny colors and shit when they do it recreationally, but some people have vivid, dream-like hallucinations that are entirely subjective. The experiences are usually only a few minutes long real-time, but I've heard stories of people having DMT trips where they spend years on an alien planet learning another culture's language and customs. When it's not used recreationally, DMT is only released during death and extremely intense transcendental/religious experiences (go figure). Taking all that into account, it's possible that many people experience an "after-life" kind of hallucinatory phase to brain death where one spends a stretched amount of time experiencing what feels like passing onto and becoming a resident of a new dimension. I don't know if that's really what happens, especially to people who die in such a way that their brains are instantly obliterated, but I think it could happen to some people.

6. I think the question you mean to ask is whether humans can distinguish right from wrong, and I'd contend that this is an overly simplistic question. The real question is whether morality is objective or subjective, or more simply whether morality comes from within ourselves or from some outside force. The evidence as I understand it indicates that our morality is subjective, personal, and sourced by the evolved senses of empathy and social justice. The closest thing we have to objective morality is social morality, which is usually just the average of a population's personal morality, and so will vary from population to population (meaning it's actually still subjective).

7. A skeptic would say that we can't know much of anything for 100% certain because we're always learning new things, but in some cases we can gain a sufficient level of evidence and clarity to justify the claim that something is probably true. God is not an example of one of those things.