Yeah but it’s a little bit like putting your hands in front of your eyes and saying “nanana I can’t SEE you”.
Also, any idea or concept you pick up and elevate over everything else would by definition become your God, even if only temporarily. The only way to ensure you are actually atheist would be to turn completely chaotic and change your mind every five seconds.
God is the idea that a magic force is responsible for everything, atheism is rejection of this fantasy and the assumption that life is simply the result of natural processes existing without will.
What if that “magic force” is simply consciousness itself? Because that does seem to do pretty strange and inexplicable things if you leave it alone for long enough.
Also, does this mean true Atheism would require you to give up your self-will? How then can anyone choose to be an Atheist?
Where did you get the idea that those are assertions? Did you miss the question marks or something?
how would being atheist require you to give up self will?
That question was based on the previous commenter’s assertion that “atheism is […] the assumption that life is simply the result of natural processes existing without will.”
I think you misunderstood the meaning of the comment you are referencing. natural process without will doesn’t mean self will, it means that everything that’s happened is happening without the will of a deity.
a belief system isn’t something that one just picks up and puts down every 5 minutes, as you described. you’re basically just saying that if i don’t believe in a deity, then whatever my focus is at the present time is my belief, which is incorrect. A belief system, or a religion, exists in order to explain what we cannot comprehend. How the earth was formed, how we came to be, etc. My current focus of analyzing data with power BI doesn’t answer those questions, nor would I want it to, since it’s power BI.
however, we are advancing our understanding of how the universe around us works, we are learning, researching and asking questions which would have been considered heresy a few hundred years ago. Science tries to answer questions, but science is not a religion, because religion relies on belief. science relies on reproducible data.
So would you say that a belief system is more correctly described as a narrative about how the universe came into being and eventually lead to exactly to where you are right at this very moment?
If so, then isn’t that narrative sort of a God-construct, because it explains who and why you are and why you do what you do? Because I would argue that this narrative then IS your God, as that is what created the world YOU live in, and determines everything that you do. You are therefore functionally behaving like a theist, whether or not you deny it makes no difference to me.
science is not a religion, because religion relies on belief. science relies on reproducible data.
Science is the belief in the scientific method as the best tool to determine the truth. And it could certainly be said to fit the definition of religion if you go by Cicero’s explanation of its etymology, which says that religiō comes from relegere: re (meaning “again”) + lego (meaning “read”), where lego is in the sense of “go over”, “choose”, or “consider carefully” — all of which are certainly required in order to correctly do science.
Yeah but it’s a little bit like putting your hands in front of your eyes and saying “nanana I can’t SEE you”.
Also, any idea or concept you pick up and elevate over everything else would by definition become your God, even if only temporarily. The only way to ensure you are actually atheist would be to turn completely chaotic and change your mind every five seconds.
God is dead. God remains dead. And ADHD has killed him.
That checks out
God is the idea that a magic force is responsible for everything, atheism is rejection of this fantasy and the assumption that life is simply the result of natural processes existing without will.
What if that “magic force” is simply consciousness itself? Because that does seem to do pretty strange and inexplicable things if you leave it alone for long enough.
Also, does this mean true Atheism would require you to give up your self-will? How then can anyone choose to be an Atheist?
where are you coming from with these assertions? how would being atheist require you to give up self will?
Where did you get the idea that those are assertions? Did you miss the question marks or something?
That question was based on the previous commenter’s assertion that “atheism is […] the assumption that life is simply the result of natural processes existing without will.”
I think you misunderstood the meaning of the comment you are referencing. natural process without will doesn’t mean self will, it means that everything that’s happened is happening without the will of a deity.
a belief system isn’t something that one just picks up and puts down every 5 minutes, as you described. you’re basically just saying that if i don’t believe in a deity, then whatever my focus is at the present time is my belief, which is incorrect. A belief system, or a religion, exists in order to explain what we cannot comprehend. How the earth was formed, how we came to be, etc. My current focus of analyzing data with power BI doesn’t answer those questions, nor would I want it to, since it’s power BI.
however, we are advancing our understanding of how the universe around us works, we are learning, researching and asking questions which would have been considered heresy a few hundred years ago. Science tries to answer questions, but science is not a religion, because religion relies on belief. science relies on reproducible data.
So would you say that a belief system is more correctly described as a narrative about how the universe came into being and eventually lead to exactly to where you are right at this very moment?
If so, then isn’t that narrative sort of a God-construct, because it explains who and why you are and why you do what you do? Because I would argue that this narrative then IS your God, as that is what created the world YOU live in, and determines everything that you do. You are therefore functionally behaving like a theist, whether or not you deny it makes no difference to me.
Science is the belief in the scientific method as the best tool to determine the truth. And it could certainly be said to fit the definition of religion if you go by Cicero’s explanation of its etymology, which says that religiō comes from relegere: re (meaning “again”) + lego (meaning “read”), where lego is in the sense of “go over”, “choose”, or “consider carefully” — all of which are certainly required in order to correctly do science.