What’s a few more billion years? If you’re in purgatory you know you’re a winner.
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Exactly! And any amount of waiting means nothing against the eternity of kneeling before the throne of God and singing his praises that will be your reward!
Oh…wait a second
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I think most witches deny any responsibility for them. More than a few have attempted to curse them too.
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So they will sink and posthumously be cleared of all charges. I see no problem here.
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There is a difference in perspective you’re sidestepping here. One of these groups sees the ignorance and uncertainty as things to be decreased in our pursuit of knowledge, and the limits of our knowledge as boundaries to be pushed forward and outward, whenever possible. The other often tends to worship sacred mysteries and oppose attempts to resolve or dissolve them.
I would also highlight that the early Christians did not see their faith as separate from the kinds of things one concludes on the basis of evidence encountered in life. John 15-24: “If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin.” Jesus only considered it a sin to not believe in him, because he provided what he judged should have been clear evidence in the form of miracles.
For my own POV, I would add that once you start considering science as being like a religion, then you have to acknowledge that it is the religion whose priests heal the sick, and fly through the air, and foretell the movements of the heavens, and deliver miracle upon miracle, day after day. In Job 38-42, God tells Job he has no right to question Him because he lacks God’s power and understanding. Today, some of those limits are no longer beyond us, while others are clearly achievable with more research, and the rest are mostly poetic and not literal. None of this is an argument against there being a god. I’m just highlighting an issue with a specific way of reasoning about faith and knowledge.
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Mark 9:23-24
23 Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.
24 And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.
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It does correspond to the “spiritual but not religious” demographic. I answer yes when asked if I believe in a power stronger than any individual. But if asked whether there is a benevolent force that prioritizes the needs of people who format requests properly, I would say that is the opposite of how god works. I know a number of people with similar beliefs, but I didn’t meet them at church.
Really, I think that most of what people consider their relationship with god is the relationship between their conscious and unconscious brains. The unconscious definitely can respond to properly formatted requests.
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Not in my experience. Antitheism is opposition to theism, like thinking no one should be a theist and that theism is dangerous or harmful. It’s being against rather than simply being neutral not engaged in theism.
Atheism (a- meaning without) is simply not being a theist or not believing in a theos, a god.
And agnostic is about not knowing.
It’s like the Christian theist watches the Christian channel and the Muslim theist watches the Muslim channel. The atheist doesn’t watch TV. And the agnostic isn’t even sure if there is a TV or if it’s even possible to really watch it.
‘Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting “Gotcha”. It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.’
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If the number of U.S.ians who believe in God is at its lowest point since… (whenever), I guess this is but one reason white evangelical GQPists are doubling and tripling down: heavens forfend that their dominance in the public conversation, in government, in schools, in U.S. culture should be challenged by people who do not believe as they believe.
A brand new church and complex (vaguely modern dark metal building, a few windows, a few rain tanks) just opened down the street from us based on their research of how few churches there were in our area, and how many people were “unchurched” because of the massive ongoing population boom here in central Texas. Yes: market research. To locate a new church. Fishing indeed. Here’s hoping when they cast their nets, they are kind.
I am surrounded here by Xtian believers. Some are my dearest neighbors. They know I am not a believer. They have never tried to proselytize at me. One took my partner to the hospital and saved his life when I was out of town. Another helped me when all I needed desperately was a babysitter so I could take an hour’s nap. Some of them are 
voters. I have to leave that part alone. We have to help each other. We are each other’s closest aides in an emergency–we are pretty far from EMS, and have no city services at all.
I too deeply admire Rev. Warnock.
Same. He stays human. I have much to learn from him.
I am having trouble finding my compassion for Xtians actively trying to bring about The End of Days:
Not helping:
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I interviewed, and did not accept the position, at a company called Gloo that is basically using big data personal information feeds designed for targeted advertising to specifically target people that appear to be in distress or crisis - drug addicted, divorced, recently lost a loved one, seriously ill, or just alone - for their clients - Christian Megachurches. While sure that could be beneficial, I really got the feeling that was not what was going on. It’s pretty gross what all is going on out there
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Far more women than men were burned at the stake and tortured for ‘heresy,’ whatever TF that’s supposed to be.
It actually means, “We want your land and money, and this is the only way our dumb asses can think of to take it away from you.”
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Not disagreeing with your last sentence, but can you explain why you think religious people need to explain where God came from?
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No. But there is the makings of an answer anyhow.
There are known limits to direct cause and effect. If you have two apparently identical atoms of some radioactive substance, one might decay in a given time period, and the other might not. This is not like two apples on a shelf, where one may go rotten and the other not, because the first had a bruise, even if you could not see it. There is no evidence that the atom has some internal clock that tells when it will decay. This does not stop people postulating hidden variables because people like determinism, but these theories have not yet given useful predictions. So, as far as we can see, at the microscopic scale, shit just happens.
We can see stuff appear and disappear in empty space. Electrons and positrons can appear, and then recombine and disappear again. The only way we can know they are there is when some high energy photon that happened to be there knocks them apart. The Casmir force also is predicted from this sort of thing. It is not a violation of physics for a whole universe to appear out of nothing, if particles are popping in and out of existence within that universe all the time. In fact, we seem to have a good model for the very early universe, and we know less about the cosmic inflation period after it.
So, what happened before the Big Bang? Was there some big guy lighting a firework? It seems more likely that there was no ‘before’ - all the dimensions go down to a point (or maybe a slightly fuzzy point because quantum physics doesn’t like points). Or if you can keep going (and we can’t) we would see a mirror-image universe with time tuning backwards…
Meanwhile, atheists do not feel free to rob, steal, lie, and murder because they do not believe in an ultimate cause. In my experience, we tend to behave as though someone was watching us, just as religious people do. It’s a good rule, whether someone is watching or not.
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“There is no ‘before’ in this mathematical model” is all we could say about that one
More generally, whether we’re doing science or making up a new religion or following an old one, if events in the story happen in a chronogical order there will always be a first known event in the list, and nothing on the list before that
Our inner child who always asks “what happened before that” cannot be satisfied by any finite story, no matter what the story is, whether the first thing is an eternal void or an eternal Person
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They don’t need to, I need them to. It would help me with my belief.
But like I said earlier no matter how they explain where God came from it will always cause me to have more questions.
Just things I wonder about when I can’t sleep or when I I’m in full cardiac arrest with a room full of people working on me. And whenever I take a nitro pill wondering if this is it.
Ultimately none of it matters because we all find out eventually.
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There’s always The Nothing with the possibility we’re just someone else’s fantasy.
Or the snow glove scenario.
Or we could be Bob’s dream.
In this case, the dimension of time is very much like going north-south on the surface of planet earth. At most latitudes, it seems like a perfectly sensible cardinal direction, and seems to extend off infinitely if you extrapolate from your local conditions. But some clever people have proved that the earth is actually curved in a subtle way, which means that if you keep going north, you’ll eventually reach a singularity. A point where “north” no longer makes sense as a direction.
To someone who has always lived with north and south being fundamental directions, this can seem odd, but this odness isn’t a justification for saying that if you keep on going north beyond the north pole, that’s obviously where Santa Claus lives.
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Jesus is Tyler Durden? It all makes sense now.
I assume that the Ven Diagram of 20% of Americans who don’t believe in God, and the 20% of Americans who don’t believe in School Shootings overlap like this:
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Sadly not. There are enough crank atheists everywhere to mess things up for the rest of us. We are only human, just like religious people are only human.
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