Children of Abraham: tell us what you believe atheists believe

Well in the more generic take on deist/theist I kinda feel that the universe is big enough and old enough that there well could be something out there that is for all intents to us would be a god. Though all evidence points to that if it exists then it cares not one fuck for our little speck of dust.
Praise Bob!

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This sort of discussion always takes me back to the late 80s:

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I know all babies look like him, but is that actuallyCChurchill?

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So, what about all the non-Abrahamic religions?

Although, I love the title, actually. Keep it… and just…

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Quite possibly, but legend says that the image is of Todd Bushman (from December 1977). I suppose that if there is 12 yrs worth of bureaucracy to deal with, it could be the second coming…

Children of Dog = Dogmatists

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I chose the original wording so as to not exclude the non-Abrahamic religions which also have deities. But the reality is we’re only going to hear from a particular flavor of religionist, and it’s gonna be Abrahamic.

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https://www.google.com/search?q=papal+sex+scandles&ie=utf-8&q=papal+sex+scandals

le sigh

I know. And if you’d like I can rattle off a dozen even worse. But in my opinion… And this is obviously cruel to survivors… Forest for the trees.

I accept that you will probably think I am an ass. But 1% of a two thousand year old organization is still 1%.

More like 1,4000 years and it is 1,400 years of shit (and I grew up Catholic, thanks).

The Catholic Church is a worldly organization dedicated to its own survival and politics and only incidentally to anything redeeming or higher. This is like being nostalgic for Hitler if the Third Reich had lasted a thousand years.

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Tends to happen most of these organized rackets.
https://www.google.com/search?q=buddhist+monk+sexual+abuse&oq=buddhist+monk+sexual+abuse&aqs=chrome..69i57.1898j0j4&sourceid=chrome-mobile&espv=1&ie=UTF-8

This kind of comparitive thought process almost instantly gives me acid reflux–on the shitty scale is X more or less shitty, given that virtually every human organization is on the scale somewhere.

So why don’t I detach from this conversation. I don’t think pseudo anonymous internet chat is the most nuanced way of discussing this, at least for me.

And I sincerely wish you the best.

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Yeah but the monks are not getting run out of my state for diddling boys and then covering it up for decades. The Catholics are.

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I feel like there are a lot of god-believers who genuinely don’t understand what not believing in a god means, and who think it must be just like believing in a god except with something else in the place where god goes. This seems like a narrow case of not being able to imagine that other people actually see things differently than you do.

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It’s been months!!!

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One problem I present to avowed atheists is that a deity can basically be anything, but they themselves tend to nearly always use the definitions internal to the religions themselves to support or refute them, which IMO is poor methodology. For instance, even atheists will insist that god(s) cannot exist because they would needed to have created the universe, or some such thing. But I have read about hundreds of gods, and hardly any of them are said to have created everything! But this gets swept under the rug, because it doesn’t jive with their conceptual baggage about the subject. And that’s the problem, both groups arguing for and against deities bring a nearly insurmountable amount of semantic baggage to the debate, which results in the same circular arguments.

I cut through some of this BS on the net when some people were discussing movies and arguing over whether Thor is a god, or an alien. What amazed me was that the opinions were neatly polarized, without having established any of the basics: How would you know an extraterrestrial if you saw one? How would you know a deity if you saw one? Are they even distinct categories - if the god comes from or lives on another planet, isn’t it also an alien? Doesn’t it depend upon the observer - might some revere it as a god, while others don’t? What difference does it even make?

The refutations, even by people of reason, were that “Of course we know what gods and aliens are really all about! Because they’re in the media!”. The idea that something can be a real metaphysical concept, and that it does not matter whether or not it is real in any other sense, seems to bother a lot of people.

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Personally, I like the whistle…


Via

(ok, sometimes I stuff a few donuts in there, but that just makes a more interesting whistle)

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God is the slow moving filaments between super cluster galaxies. And thought process takes millions of years for God to conceptualise.

And god cares as much about us as we care about a stray but interesting hair follicle.

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The universe is really big.

A better sense of scale would be the planet Jupiter caring about the up quark in one of its hydrogen atoms.

You said it more poetically though. Which makes more of a difference than all my sour-stomached rhetoric.

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