Del Amitri

"Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before

And we'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow."

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

going to hell

My experience of God is the most convincing evidence I have that there is no God. I was asleep, about eight years old. I had a visitation from God and he told me that because I said "God" I was going to hell. Theists might say I was dreaming and I would agree. I do not "think" that I am going to hell because I said "God.' Nor do I think that any of the prophets experienced any more clarity in their dreams or waking visions than I had in mine. They were dreaming or hallucinating too. Clarity of visions is of course a difficult thing to argue but something I can say with utmost certainty is that I experienced my vision and the theists did not. It might be possible to have a clearer, stronger experience than I had that night but I simply do not believe it. I do not think that your experience of reading this is a clear and unequivocal as was my experience of God telling me I was going to hell. The problem of course is that there would be no reason to send a child to hell for saying "God." There are then only two possibe scenarios: 1) The most real thing I have ever experienced in my life was a dream. 2) I spoke to God and am going to hell. As a child I tended to believe that 2) was the more likley of the two possibilities but then as I grew older and a bit more analytical I tended, of course, much more strongly towards option 1). As old age begins to settle in now I am instinctively tending towards option 2) again. Such is the toxic force of religious conditioning

non-compliance

Non-compliance is human nature.

pissed edited

Fortigurn wrote:
Being an agnostic does not give you the right to make illogical arguments, sorry. That's RDO's point. I've made the same point myself. If you want to live according to blind faith and illogical reasoning, I suggest you become a North American Fundamentalist Christian. You have the makings.


I doubt that you could follow my reasoning well enough to comment on whether or not it was illogical. I'll spell it out for you one more time....

We don't know if there was an intelligent force behind the big bang or not. The exquisite patterns found in nature, human consciousnees, ethical impulses etc. cause some people to believe there was. I don't know and admit I don't know and am therefore an agnostic.

Some people postulate that the creator of the universe spoke using a human language. On the basis of that belief religions developed: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, for example. These religions have inspired the best and the worst from humanity but are nonetheless based on the essentially psychotic notion that God "spoke." Christianity plunges a little deeper and asserts that "God" took on a human form and suffered the tortures that God made possible as a "sacrifice" for the "sins" that he also made possible in order that we "might' be able to spend an eternity at his side in a body that nobody can see. Hello? Could you get any more nuts?

We have vast amounts of evidence which shows that human beings lie, hallucinate, fear death, feel guilty and seek to delude and aggrandize themselves. What we don't have is a single scrap of hard scientific evidence that God spoke. Yes, we have the testimony of some prophets, whom we admire, and hundreds of thousands of psychotics whom we tend to admire less, but perhaps there is less to differentiate them than some people think. That is my point.

Somebody is right here and somebody is wrong. "God" caused the molecules in the air to vibrate according to the patterns established by a number of languages: Hebrew, Greek if I am not mistaken, or he didn't. Some people believe that he did. I think it is an insane belief to hold given what we now know about the physical world and human psychology. I don't think that people like RDO are completely crazy, just crazy in relation to their religious beliefs. Like the prophets he can function beautifully I imagine, perhaps a lot better than people with no "faith" in an omniscient, compassionate God. Religious faith certainly has it's value as a defense mechanism and that is why it is so common. There is no convincing logical reason to accept it as literal fact however and otherwise perfectly intelligent people who continue to do so are deluding themselves.

You might not agree with this assesment but if you want suggest that it is based on faith or a lack of logic you'll have to back that up. I put too much into this argument to accept half baked criticisms from you or anybody else.

pissed

somebody wrote: Being an agnostic does not give you the right to make illogical arguments, sorry. That's RDO's point. I've made the same point myself. If you want to live according to blind faith and illogical reasoning, I suggest you become a North American Fundamentalist Christian. You have the makings.


bob - I doubt that you could follow my reasoning well enough to comment on whether or not it was illogical. I'll spell it out for you one more time....

We don't know if there was an intelligent force behind the big bang or not. The exquisite patterns found in nature, human consciousnees, ethical impulses etc. cause some people to believe there was. I don't know and admit I don't know and am therefore an agnostic.

Some people postulate that the creator of the universe spoke using a human language. On the basis of that belief religions developed: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, for example. These religions have inspired the best and the worst from humanity but are nonetheless based on the essentially psychotic notion that God "spoke."

We have vast amounts of evidence which shows that human beings lie and hallucinate. What we don't have is a single scrap of hard scientific evidence that God spoke. Yes, we have the testimony of some prophets, whom we admire, and hundreds of thousands of psychotics whom we tend to admire less, but perhaps there is less to differentiate them than some people think. That is my point.

Somebody is right here and somebody is wrong. "God" caused the molecules in the air to vibrate according to the patterns established by a number of languages: Hebrew, Greek if I am not mistaken, or he didn't. Some people believe that he did. I think it is an insane belief to hold given what we now know about the physical world and human psychology. I don't think that people like RDO are completely crazy, just crazy in relation to their religious beliefs. Like the prophets he can function beautifully I imagine, perhaps a lot better than people with no "faith" in an omniscient, compassionate God. Religious belief certainly has it's value as a defense mechanism and that is why it is so common. There is no convincing logical reason to accept it as literal fact however and otherwise perfectly intelligent people who continue to do so are deluding themselves.

You might not agree with this assesment but if you want suggest that it is based on faith or a lack of logic you'll have to back that up. I put too much into this argument to accept half baked criticisms from you or anybody else.

Tull

1 In the beginning Man created God;
and in the image of Man
created he him.

2 And Man gave unto God a multitude of
names,that he might be Lord of all
the earth when it was suited to Man

3 And on the seven millionth
day Man rested and did lean
heavily on his God and saw that
it was good.

4 And Man formed Aqualung of
the dust of the ground, and a
host of others likened unto his kind.

5 And these lesser men were cast into the
void; And some were burned, and some were
put apart from their kind.

6 And Man became the God that he had
created and with his miracles did
rule over all the earth.

7 But as all these things
came to pass, the Spirit that did
cause man to create his God
lived on within all men: even
within Aqualung.

8 And man saw it not.

9 But for Christ's sake he'd
better start looking.

no scholar

Gao bo han - I have to wonder how a man who can say this:

Quote:
You will forgive me if I bring a certain tenacity to this arguement. Organized religion for me was a highly toxic experience and I enjoy this opportunity to confront what appears to me to be widespread, organized, legitimated, blatant lunacy.


Can say this:
Quote:
Buddhism I think is a scientific point of view...


The atheist Sam Harris, in his scathing attack on religious faith in his book, "The End of Faith," spends the last chapter...can anyone guess? After he lambasts Christianity and Islam...? The last chapter of his book is essentially a plug for Buddhism, which he considers to be a very rational religion and whose meditation techniques he has practiced for many years.

As I said before, I have never studied Buddhism. What little I do know comes from books about Chinese culture and history. But a quick search online reveals several aspects of Buddhism that are obviously dogma, no more or less irrational than anything you'd find in the Abrahamic religions. So what's the story here? A genuine belief that Buddhism is scientific or at least highly rational (rational enough to plug for in your vitriolic tome against theism)? A prejudice against Christianity and love for all things non-Christian? Inquiring minds want to know!

Bob - That was me. You were correct in pointing out earlier that I am no scholar. My understanding of Buddhism for example comes almost entirely from what I would call "Buddhist psychology" as described by the Dalai Lama in "The Art of Happiness" and "Ethics for the New Millenium" in which he describes Buddhism as the science of the mind. It is the mind watching itself "very" closely and admitting with complete honesty the situation in which it finds itself. Driven by desire and the tendency to compare it becomes aggressive, competitive, jealous, sometimes hostile. This works in complete opposition to the deeper need to connect with people on the basis of love, respect and compassion. If you look at your own psychology you will discover this to be true, or not. Buddhism doesn't dictate anything but simply encourages people to think clearly and be emotionally honest with themselves.

The theological aspects of Buddhism, whatever they are, don't interest me much and to be perfectly frank I don't think they interest the Dalai Lama much either. He is a figure head and so cannot express himself honestly on the issue but he will go so far as to say that if all the pomp and pagentry surrounding the "religion" disappered tomorrow it would not make a bit of difference.

I think that an element of insanity runs through the entire human experience and most of that insanity comes from the anxiety created by our understanding of time and the absolute reality of ethics. If we look forward we see the inevitability of suffering and death, we see that we have choices that might affect when death will occur and how much suffering we will do in the meantime but have no way of knowing with any certainty what the outcome of our choices will be. We know also that the things we do will affect other people and given our innate compassion for them we naturally feel guilty for the wrongs we commit. That is the soul of man and I doubt that it has changed at all over the last two thousand years. The prophets catered to man's anxieties with stories of forgiveness and everlasting life. They either made up these stories or they honestly believed them because they had experienced a temporary split from reality. It doesn't suprise me at all that such sensitive people would write such beautiful texts. Look at me, I'm nuts, but I wrote

halo story

Did I ever tell you guys the halo story? Anyway, I was in church, this is when I was about 17, and the minister was there doing his sermon and all that and I'm sitting there thinking about God's love and how pure it was and everything and all of a sudden I got this warm feeling like, well, perhaps I better not say what it ws like, anyway I got this warm feeling and suddenly the light around the minister became a deeper yellow and brighter too at the same time and I knew I was having a vision sent from God. Later I got thinking about it and I realized "gee that was pretty nuts actually" and was probably the product of all the weird stuff they were teaching us in church and all the horrible stresses I had been under all my life actually.
Religion is a lot like that generally I figure. People are anxious about their futures and the inevitability of pain and death and the seemingly random meaninglessness of it all and so contort their otherwise sound intellects in all manner of ways to find a solution. It is a coping mechanism, and like most coping mechanisms basically nuts, but effective at least in warding off the larger anxieties, reality and such, until it is rationally challenged.