Agnostics slowly edging toward being religious. - There isn't a god, I guess?

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

Disregard the Hylics, Yaldabaoth glows in the dark.

 

[Flip: Draw 2]

It's just straight up wrong to say atheism is "midwit shit" but if you're a religious person, I'm actually going to be generous and give you a counter you can use that's much better.

Though the relation between religiosity and general intelligence seems to be extremely mildly inversely negative, it's pretty much undeniable that intellectuals have a universally lower religiosity than the general population. Even all the way back in the 90's a poll of the American National Academy of Sciences pulled a 7% belief in God, and this is in the United States, which is definitely one of the most religious Western countries.

Anyway, that doesn't matter because being smart and being correct are different things. Ever since the Managerial Revolution kicked off that intellectuals have fucking ruined society in more ways than one. Just because you're smart doesn't mean your opinion on any topic is automatically more valid.

So while it seems to be the case that general intelligence correlates with irreligiosity, I don't think that's a point against religious belief necessarily because 1) in an ideal world - and this was the consensus in the Christian world for a long time - matters of intellect and matters of morality are supposed to be separate disciplines and religion and science had mutually exclusive but complementary domains, and 2) being smart is overrated as fuck.

To add to this, people like to give people good at science far too much credit in all subjects. A good theologian's opinion has little weight in scientific matters but a good scientist's opinion on theology is given more credibility despite it not being their field. This is just because scientists tend to have answers for many empirical matters so they get a lot of undue respect in fields outside of their forte. For example, Einstein is constantly misattributed to numerous quotes on every subject because he was a very good scientist and therefore, very wise in general.

To note though, even in fields that do study such things (excluding perhaps theologians), they are still less religious than the general population. I read a (pretty mediocre) paper that says ~62% of philosophers are non-religious but that it wasn't to do with philosophical arguments for the existence of God but more psychological. The paper unintentionally showed when the author asserts that a lack of evidence for something means that it is rational not to believe it while I believe that it is irrational to assert that I know ( in the strictest of senses) that something does or doesn't exist. It's just a psychological difference between people who have to have a stance on something or withhold judgement; someone who asserts "bigfoot isn't real" and someone that says "I don't believe in bigfoot."

 

[5000% Sure]

I did feel like I had been getting closer to god over the last 2-ish years, but then around 6 months ago I got a lot more into reading philosophy (specifically Aristotle and Rand) and started to realize how impossible the whole thing is, and now I'm pretty much as atheist as you could get.

I will say that the soy redditor pseudo-intellectual atheists are extremely cringe and in most cases are equally as retarded as religious people. Religion is fundamentally based on faith (which requires being retarded enough to ignore reason), and so are the beliefs of most normie atheists because they have no real argument other than "flying spaghetti monster XD." They don't have a coherent understanding of the actual nature of reality and the fundamental facts as to why none of this mystic bullshit espoused by religions makes any sense, they just believe whatever reddit/their friends/authority figures/whatever tells them, again much like religious people.

All of that said, I can definitely empathize with people who are turning to religion. When the Judeo-Christian regime died in the west (and thank god it did) there really wasn't any moral framework there to replace it. Having a flawed, faith-based, and generally anti-human understanding of the world is at least better than nothing at all, so it makes sense why people would be inclined to go along with it.

 

[Named User]

I did feel like I had been getting closer to god over the last 2-ish years, but then around 6 months ago I got a lot more into reading philosophy (specifically Aristotle and Rand) and started to realize how impossible the whole thing is, and now I'm pretty much as atheist as you could get.

I will say that the soy redditor pseudo-intellectual atheists are extremely cringe and in most cases are equally as retarded as religious people. Religion is fundamentally based on faith (which requires being retarded enough to ignore reason), and so are the beliefs of most normie atheists because they have no real argument other than "flying spaghetti monster XD." They don't have a coherent understanding of the actual nature of reality and the fundamental facts as to why none of this mystic bullshit espoused by religions makes any sense, they just believe whatever reddit/their friends/authority figures/whatever tells them, again much like religious people.

All of that said, I can definitely empathize with people who are turning to religion. When the Judeo-Christian regime died in the west (and thank god it did) there really wasn't any moral framework there to replace it. Having a flawed, faith-based, and generally anti-human understanding of the world is at least better than nothing at all, so it makes sense why people would be inclined to go along with it.

How did Aristotle lead you to there being no God? Thomism is based on Aristotle's Metaphysics.

 

[Eydallur]

It's just straight up wrong to say atheism is "midwit shit"

No, it really is.
Cocksure atheists who think the limits of their understanding are the limits of rationality are the very definition of midwit, smart enough to understand the flaws in someone else's argument but not smart enough to see the flaws in their own.

God exists and is observable.
Specifically, human populations all express a capacity for spiritual experience which is measurable and can be observed to have a tangible, positive effect on individual health.
As with all other psychological traits, this capacity for spiritual experience is phenotypic.

 

[Flip: Draw 2]

I did feel like I had been getting closer to god over the last 2-ish years, but then around 6 months ago I got a lot more into reading philosophy (specifically Aristotle and Rand) and started to realize how impossible the whole thing is, and now I'm pretty much as atheist as you could get.

I will say that the soy redditor pseudo-intellectual atheists are extremely cringe and in most cases are equally as retarded as religious people. Religion is fundamentally based on faith (which requires being retarded enough to ignore reason), and so are the beliefs of most normie atheists because they have no real argument other than "flying spaghetti monster XD." They don't have a coherent understanding of the actual nature of reality and the fundamental facts as to why none of this mystic bullshit espoused by religions makes any sense, they just believe whatever reddit/their friends/authority figures/whatever tells them, again much like religious people.

All of that said, I can definitely empathize with people who are turning to religion. When the Judeo-Christian regime died in the west (and thank god it did) there really wasn't any moral framework there to replace it. Having a flawed, faith-based, and generally anti-human understanding of the world is at least better than nothing at all, so it makes sense why people would be inclined to go along with it.

Sorry man, I think you're still in the midwit section of philosophy. If you're worried about "faith" then you need to wait until you start hitting the epistemology section of philosophy. Say goodbye to everything you "know" if you don't want to believe in anything based on faith.

 

[Charactis]

You will never have an afterlife. You have no soul, you have no reincarnation, you have no resurrection. You are an anthropomorphic lizard twisted by neurons and chemicals into a crude mockery of positivism’s perfection.
All the “philosophies” you get are two-faced and self-serving. Behind your back priests mock you. Your overlords are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your ghoulish notions behind closed doors.
Overman is utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed the overman to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even agnostics who “doubt” look uncanny and unnatural to an overman. Your metaphysical posture is a dead end. And even if you manage to get a drunk philosopher home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he reads a bit about your diseased, infected god of the gaps.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be spiritual, but deep inside you feel the meaninglessnesses creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear – you’ll buy a mortgage, tie a marriage, lose your individuality, and plunge into nihility. Your children will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable burden and elderly care. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your religious symbol, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know an idiot is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably religious.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.

 

[CivilianOfTheFandomWars]

This will mostly be PLing, but it's on topic and I think it helps explain where my thoughts come from on this subject.
I was brought up in a Christian household on my mother's side, my dad was firmly atheist, and my brother is a legit fedora atheist. Personally, I believe in God, but that's not what I'm getting at. My mother was one of those Christians who essentially believed that just praying and performing lip service was enough to be a good Christian, even though that's the exact opposite of what the Bible teaches. This led me to question a lot of things about God and all that, my brother just went full on evangelical atheist. Eventually, thorough studying various religious texts I found that I resonated with the teachings of the Bible the most, and decided that even if God is not real, or not real as we think of him, there's still a lot of good lessons and good ways to look at the world through that lens.
Later, I became a Mason, and one of the requirements is to believe in a Greater Being. Could be God, Bhudda, Allah, etc, just not worship Satan. I met and became friends with a lot of very smart, very educated men who were religious. One was a legit mathematician, and I asked him what he thought about his work in relation to faith. He said that, in his work a lot of people see math and related studies as proof that there is no God, or divine being in any sense, but he saw it as such a perfect and logical system that it couldn't be just random chance. This may relate to Masonry as another way we refer to God, or really whatever being you believe in, is The Great Architect. This is because he essentially built everything and the group started with stonemasons blah blah blah, but the point stands that just because you are a super brainiac doesn't mean you can't have faith, and in some cases it can strengthen that faith.
So, what is the issue here on a societal level? It seems to me that if someone doesn't have a personal code of sorts about how to treat your fellow man, they could easily just follow whatever someone else tells them to do. The most conformist people I know are radical leftists, but the people I know who blaze their own trail while still being good people either have a very set philosophy on life, or take that philosophy from religion in some way. There's a lot of Biblical teachings about how if someone who is leading you is unworthy and telling you to go against God and his will, fuck that guy. This is also a thought in a load of other well thought out agnostic philosophies, not in any way unique to religion.
I think that human beings have an innate desire to follow something, and if that something isn't God or a code of deep morality, they follow other people without question. This isn't an issue when it's someone who cares about and loves you, like good parents or good mentors, but it is a very big issue when it's a political leader, an abuser, basically anyone who wants to take advantage of you for their own gain in some way.
It's a complex topic, but I find it a good discussion to have anyways.

 

[Un Platano]

Sorry man, I think you're still in the midwit section of philosophy. If you're worried about "faith" then you need to wait until you start hitting the epistemology section of philosophy. Say goodbye to everything you "know" if you don't want to believe in anything based on faith.

Say what you want about the devil creating the illusion of the universe but his results are consistent and his principles are rock solid.

 

[Abradolfus_Linclerson]

Grew up in a religious household, have not been part of any 'faith community' since leaving home, and left behind the "fuck you parents!" atheism in college. I don't know if I qualify as properly agnostic anymore, as my doubts have little to do with the existence/absence of some flavor of Supreme Being and more to do with how (in)accurate the various flavors of religion happen to be.

My reasons will probably deposit me firmly into the "God of the gaps" lumpenprole community, but whatever.

Consider water--H2O. That thing that makes up 3/4 of Earth's surface, the basis for the cytoplasm in every cell in your body (and every cell of every other living thing on Earth, in fact). It is composed of the lightest gas on the periodic table and a middle weight lighter-than-air gas. Your average water molecule therefore has a molecular mass of ~18 (excluding deuterium and tritium heavy water). Argon is another lighter-than-air gas with an atomic weight of 18. At room temperatures, argon remains a gas and water is...well...water. Drinkable, splashable, spillable, pourable water. If you're all "argon's an element, not a compound" then let's look at the biggest boogeyman of the atmospheric trace gases: carbon dioxide. CO2. Its molecular weight is a whopping 38, and yet at room temperature (barring unusual circumstances like the Lake Nyas Disaster), it's floating around in the air just fine. Why does no other (common) gaseous oxide exist in liquid form at STP? Why is it only H2O? Hell, for that matter, why is carbon (atomic number 6) a solid while oxygen (at 16) is a gas? It's all very well and good that the properties of the elements are as they are, but that doesn't explain the rhyme or reason for any of it. Consider that, except hydrogen, every element in Group 1 (the extreme left of the periodic table) is a metallic solid in its pure elemental form (not that you're likely to find them naturally given how 'holy shitballs' levels of reactive they are). Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the table you have the Noble Gases. What is the rhyme or reason behind why certain elements/compounds exist in the phase states that they do? Have we figured that out yet?

The Big Bang is another example. We have observed its effects in the form of cosmic phenomena, red- vs. blue-shift of galaxies indicating their approach towards our own or their acceleration away, and other shit I can't remember from my astronomy hobby in high school. Why did it occur? How did it occur? Why did a stupendously tremendous kablooie 'write' the assorted laws that govern existence (thermodynamics, physics, atomic bonding, etc.)? How did said kablooie generate the laws that govern existence?

I guess perhaps I am more a deist than a proper agnostic. Dunno. I just don't see how the whole house of cards that is existence could have been assembled and lead to us (and presumably other intelligent life out there somewhere) without some prime actor.

 

[Mothra1988]

You will never have an afterlife. You have no soul, you have no reincarnation, you have no resurrection. You are an anthropomorphic lizard twisted by neurons and chemicals into a crude mockery of positivism’s perfection.
All the “philosophies” you get are two-faced and self-serving. Behind your back priests mock you. Your overlords are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “friends” laugh at your ghoulish notions behind closed doors.
Overman is utterly repulsed by you. Thousands of years of evolution have allowed the overman to sniff out frauds with incredible efficiency. Even agnostics who “doubt” look uncanny and unnatural to an overman. Your metaphysical posture is a dead end. And even if you manage to get a drunk philosopher home with you, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he reads a bit about your diseased, infected god of the gaps.
You will never be happy. You wrench out a fake smile every single morning and tell yourself it’s going to be spiritual, but deep inside you feel the meaninglessnesses creeping up like a weed, ready to crush you under the unbearable weight.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear – you’ll buy a mortgage, tie a marriage, lose your individuality, and plunge into nihility. Your children will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable burden and elderly care. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your religious symbol, and every passerby for the rest of eternity will know an idiot is buried there. Your body will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton that is unmistakably religious.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.

Nietzsche is pure cringe.

 

[BiggerChungus]

Grew up in a religious household, have not been part of any 'faith community' since leaving home, and left behind the "fuck you parents!" atheism in college. I don't know if I qualify as properly agnostic anymore, as my doubts have little to do with the existence/absence of some flavor of Supreme Being and more to do with how (in)accurate the various flavors of religion happen to be.

My reasons will probably deposit me firmly into the "God of the gaps" lumpenprole community, but whatever.

Consider water--H2O. That thing that makes up 3/4 of Earth's surface, the basis for the cytoplasm in every cell in your body (and every cell of every other living thing on Earth, in fact). It is composed of the lightest gas on the periodic table and a middle weight lighter-than-air gas. Your average water molecule therefore has a molecular mass of ~18 (excluding deuterium and tritium heavy water). Argon is another lighter-than-air gas with an atomic weight of 18. At room temperatures, argon remains a gas and water is...well...water. Drinkable, splashable, spillable, pourable water. If you're all "argon's an element, not a compound" then let's look at the biggest boogeyman of the atmospheric trace gases: carbon dioxide. CO2. Its molecular weight is a whopping 38, and yet at room temperature (barring unusual circumstances like the Lake Nyas Disaster), it's floating around in the air just fine. Why does no other (common) gaseous oxide exist in liquid form at STP? Why is it only H2O? Hell, for that matter, why is carbon (atomic number 6) a solid while oxygen (at 16) is a gas? It's all very well and good that the properties of the elements are as they are, but that doesn't explain the rhyme or reason for any of it. Consider that, except hydrogen, every element in Group 1 (the extreme left of the periodic table) is a metallic solid in its pure elemental form (not that you're likely to find them naturally given how 'holy shitballs' levels of reactive they are). Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the table you have the Noble Gases. What is the rhyme or reason behind why certain elements/compounds exist in the phase states that they do? Have we figured that out yet?

The Big Bang is another example. We have observed its effects in the form of cosmic phenomena, red- vs. blue-shift of galaxies indicating their approach towards our own or their acceleration away, and other shit I can't remember from my astronomy hobby in high school. Why did it occur? How did it occur? Why did a stupendously tremendous kablooie 'write' the assorted laws that govern existence (thermodynamics, physics, atomic bonding, etc.)? How did said kablooie generate the laws that govern existence?

I guess perhaps I am more a deist than a proper agnostic. Dunno. I just don't see how the whole house of cards that is existence could have been assembled and lead to us (and presumably other intelligent life out there somewhere) without some prime actor.

I think one of the follies of modern science compared to historical science is that we assume that because something has a name or theory behind it happening, it's no longer a miracle. Not saying that's some kinda solid proof, but typically atheist arguments revolve around things like "well, we know that a God didn't create anything, because the Big Bang happened!" But like you said, even if we do trust what little hard evidence we've collected, and our even scanter personal understanding of reality, why did it occur? How? How did its effects result in what we have now? If the universe tends toward entropy and disorder, how did a random, chaotic event set in place the laws of existence? Why did it do that? Just because we gave the phenomena a name, does that mean that indisputably there's nothing behind it? Nothing more to it? Does the fact that we have a vague understanding of gravity, thermodynamics, and nuclear fission preclude the existence of a Creator behind those things?

Not knowing the answers doesn't mean, inherently, that there must be a God, but the idea of us having a very basic knowledge of these phenomena shouldn't mean that there must definitely not be a God either.

 

[Narutard]

Not knowing the answers doesn't mean, inherently, that there must be a God, but the idea of us having a very basic knowledge of these phenomena shouldn't mean that there must definitely not be a God either.

It’s a pointless and highly comical debate to hold, as the arguments will always be interpreted according to your already held (dis)belief. “B-b-but the big bang! Dinosaurs!” will never sway anyone to drop their faith just as “B-b-but eternal salvation! Jesus!” will never convert anyone to Christianity.
Is there proof that Jesus is the son of God? No. Is there proof of the contrary? Also no. But that’s why it’s called faith. Wanting to objectively prove your faith is completely missing the point and evidence you never had faith to begin with.

The beauty of Christianity is the weight it puts on your personal, subjective relationship with yourself. It doesn’t care about the world, society, rituals (etc.) in the same way Judaism and Islam do; Christianity is interested only in the individual and how he relates (himself) to himself. And that’s also why atheists hate it: It’s too subjective, too focused on the inner individual and not concerned enough with outside reality and unyielding commandments.

PS. The church can eat a fat dick.

 

[gang weeder]

It’s a pointless and highly comical debate to hold, as the arguments will always be interpreted according to your already held (dis)belief. “B-b-but the big bang! Dinosaurs!” will never sway anyone to drop their faith just as “B-b-but eternal salvation! Jesus!” will never convert anyone to Christianity.
Is there proof that Jesus is the son of God? No. Is there proof of the contrary? Also no. But that’s why it’s called faith. Wanting to objectively prove your faith is completely missing the point and evidence you never had faith to begin with.

The beauty of Christianity is the weight it puts on your personal, subjective relationship with yourself. It doesn’t care about the world, society, rituals (etc.) in the same way Judaism and Islam do; Christianity is interested only in the individual and how he relates (himself) to himself. And that’s also why atheists hate it: It’s too subjective, too focused on the inner individual and not concerned enough with outside reality and unyielding commandments.

PS. The church can eat a fat dick.

If you reject the church, you are not a Christian.

 

[Narutard]

If you reject the church, you are not a Christian.

“Jesus wasn’t Jewish; he trashed a temple.”
“Luther rejected the Catholic church; he was not a Christian.”

If you define someone’s faith by their adherence to an earthly institute then you’ve completely missed the point of Christianity.

 

[BiggerChungus]

If you reject the church, you are not a Christian.

Religion is a manmade institution. At the very absolute best it can nudge you in the right direction for belief, and worse, and very commonly, it distorts what belief in the Lord and the teachings of His Son mean and corrupts them.

 

[gang weeder]

Religion is a manmade institution. At the very absolute best it can nudge you in the right direction for belief, and worse, and very commonly, it distorts what belief in the Lord and the teachings of His Son mean and corrupts them.

The church was established by the apostles who were taught directly by Christ and received the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. They did not say "do whatever you want, don't associate with fellow Christians, don't have any actual norms or community." Everywhere they went, they established Christian communities with set practices and beliefs, communities which were guided by bishops ordained directly by the apostles themselves and grew into what we now call the church. These communities received letters of guidance from the apostles which are part of the New Testament. Again, these letters do not say "do whatever you want, nothing matters, don't practice communion, don't have a fellowship."

If you refuse communion with your fellow Christians, you are refusing Christianity itself. The only sort-of exception is if you're literally going off by yourself to be a hermit monk like the desert fathers, but that's pretty clearly not what you're talking about, and you probably don't even know who the desert fathers were, if I had to guess.

“Jesus wasn’t Jewish; he trashed a temple.”
“Luther rejected the Catholic church; he was not a Christian.”

If you define someone’s faith by their adherence to an earthly institute then you’ve completely missed the point of Christianity.

Don't get me wrong, you certainly want to try and avoid adhering to a false church, of which there are many. But to completely refuse communion in any form makes no sense what so ever for a Christian. Whatever "faith" you are practicing at that point no longer resembles even slightly the faith that was taught by Christ and his followers.

 

[BiggerChungus]

The church was established by the apostles who were taught directly by Christ and received the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. They did not say "do whatever you want, don't associate with fellow Christians, don't have any actual norms or community." Everywhere they went, they established Christian communities with set practices and beliefs, communities which were guided by bishops ordained directly by the apostles themselves and grew into what we now call the church.

The men who founded the church at the very beginning have nothing to do with the men who've run the church since then, and even among Yeshua's followers, they weren't without sin. None were without sin but Yeshua Himself, and even He said He was not perfect, that the title of "perfect" can only be placed on the Lord, and no man comes unto the Lord but by Yeshua, His sacrifice. It isn't by church rules, or communion, or by earthly priests that you're saved.

 

[CivilianOfTheFandomWars]

The men who founded the church at the very beginning have nothing to do with the men who've run the church since then, and even among Yeshua's followers, they weren't without sin. None were without sin but Yeshua Himself, and even He said He was not perfect, that the title of "perfect" can only be placed on the Lord, and no man comes unto the Lord but by Yeshua, His sacrifice. It isn't by church rules, or communion, or by earthly priests that you're saved.

I always thought it was really beautiful that in the Christian religion, the one thing God thought was more important than perfection was free will, even if that freedom to do as you choose led you away from God and his perfection. Even if one is not religious at all, it's a good thing to think about that we ultimately have the choice to do right or wrong. One of the hardest things for me to grasp was the classic "if God is real and omnipotent, why did he create Satan, and why did he allow sin?"
I'm not saying I'm right, but the best way for me to conceptualize it is that God is all knowing, he knew everything that would and will happen, but because in the eyes of God choice is more important than anything, even if that choice leads to bad things. Satan had a choice, as did the other angels, and as do all humans, but it's what choices we make and how we deal with the consequences of those choices that makes us good or bad. It's like how we refer to God as the Father, a parent tries to lead his kids down the right path, but ultimately it's the kids' decision.
If you take it from the view of an atheist, it still makes sense that there are good and bad choices in life, and what you do and how you do it is very important for how you live your life.
Personally, the church as it is is a clusterfuck and a scheme to make money and push social agendas instead of teaching the word of God and serving your fellow man. Not all, duh, but we all know the current institution is anything but holy.

 

[Haramburger]

...climax, jerking off to their own airtight logic?