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This is priceless. Why atheists laugh at religion (satire)

ashurbanipal said:
My posts are written in perfectly comprehensible English. We do not know the final answers to the most basic questions of human existence, and more to the point, it doesn't seem reasonable to be optimistic that we ever will. Science, for all its illuminative power, doesn't answer the Big Questions--despite attempts by folks like Richard Dawkins to insist that it does. This is an old (5th c. B.C.) problem sometimes called the Dialellus--all explanations must end in mystery.
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The answer to your question is all around you and yet you can't see it. Everything that lives also dies. Are humans alive? Then you know that they also die. "Mystery" solved.
 
ashurbanipal said:
Of course I have not interviewed every atheist in the world. Why would I need to do so for such a claim to be true?
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You said this. "Even atheists recognize this Mystery". You did not mean all atheists? Can you quote some atheists who believe this to be true? No. You made it up.
 
ashurbanipal said:
Really? What do you mean by that? Do you think there are no mysteries that import some profound philosophical or existential consequence?
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Yes, but there is no need to involve imaginary beings such as gods.
 
ashurbanipal said:
Why do you say that?



.
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Are you really saying that it was only recently that Christians believed in the literal Resurrection? Try and recall how Christianity started.
 
zyzygy said:
Yes, but there is no need to involve imaginary beings such as gods.
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If you could ask God just one question that seems mysterious, what would it be?
 
ashurbanipal said:
My posts are written in perfectly comprehensible English. We do not know the final answers to the most basic questions of human existence, and more to the point, it doesn't seem reasonable to be optimistic that we ever will. Science, for all its illuminative power, doesn't answer the Big Questions--despite attempts by folks like Richard Dawkins to insist that it does. This is an old (5th c. B.C.) problem sometimes called the Dialellus--all explanations must end in mystery.

I suspect one way to state the most basic claim of religion is this: when one follows the chain of explanation on seemingly diverse intractable questions, those explanations ultimately end in the same mystery, which earns it status as Mystery with a capital 'M'. That's about as neutral a way as I can think to state it. The problem the atheist faces is that most people have something like that intuition--that if we could finally, comprehensively understand the mystery of consciousness (say) we would also understand something about the mystery of the origin of the universe. I don't think that's as crazy as it may initially sound.

But my point is that if atheists want to make any headway against religion, this is the claim that has to be addressed.
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You've not been keeping up with physics then.

1 There is little mystery in consciousness. It is an evolutionary advantage. It can be modeled in computer science. What do you want to know?

2 The whole of physics is basically the quest for exactly what you are after; Where did all this come from and how does it work?

They have begun to actually get from hypothesis to theories (confirmed ideas) about the nature of what is beyond our universe and the cause of the existence of the universe.

The gaps in human knowledge you seek to hide gods in are disappearing very quickly.
 
iguanaman said:
The answer to your question is all around you and yet you can't see it. Everything that lives also dies. Are humans alive? Then you know that they also die. "Mystery" solved.
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I don't see how. What happens when we die?
 
zyzygy said:
You said this. "Even atheists recognize this Mystery". You did not mean all atheists? Can you quote some atheists who believe this to be true? No. You made it up.
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I did not mean all atheists, but again, why would I need to in order for the claim to be true? Normal usage in such sentences implies that it would mean "some," but not "all."

As to atheists who have thought along these lines: Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson, Laurence Bonjour, Graham Priest, Sam Harris, Immanuel Kant, Peter Unger, Derek Parfitt (sort of), Raymond Tallis, Jean Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, J.S. Bell, Fred Kutner, Albert Einstein (sort of--he may not have been an atheist, so don't count him if you don't think he was), C.S. Peirce, William James, Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein...I'm sure I could think of some others if given a little time, especially if I were to cite people who aren't famous but who I know personally. Nevertheless, I take it that these are all prominent thinkers. Most have written something explicitly in line with what I said. Some have written in such a way as to suggest they'd agree with what I wrote.

zyzygy said:
Yes, but there is no need to involve imaginary beings such as gods.
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This seems to get the causal structure backwards if my point is correct; which is to say that you're begging the question. The mystery comes first, and then the myths accrete. If there is a God, it's not a person like you or I or your eighth grade Latin teacher, if it even qualifies as a person at all. The stories of personhood probably got their start as a means of telling us something about ourselves. This seems to be explicit in the very oldest religious texts (the Pyramid Texts in Egypt, and possibly the Rg Vega).

zyzygy said:
Are you really saying that it was only recently that Christians believed in the literal Resurrection? Try and recall how Christianity started.
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Not exactly, but that's entirely consistent with my claim. The details about (since you cite it as an example) the passion and resurrection were seldom if ever taken literally until the latter part of the 19th century, and that idea only became widespread in the 20th century. That is, the story of the crucifixion and resurrection weren't taken as historical documents until the last (roughly) 150 years. This is not to say that they were taken to disclose no facts about the world. But, that said, those theists who promote such an interpretation are now in the majority, so it's not the case that atheists are mistaken for attacking those ideas.
 
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Tim the Plumber said:
1 There is little mystery in consciousness.
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My jaw is agape.

Tim the Plumber said:
It is an evolutionary advantage.
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Really? That sounds false to me. Any being that behaved exactly the way I would under the same circumstances would do just as well as me in terms of resource gathering and reproductive success, regardless of whether it was conscious or not.

Perhaps even more damaging to your claim is that beings which are surely not conscious seem to be quite successful in evolutionary terms. Since, say, amoebas reproduce by asexual division, it's no exaggeration to say that the original members of their species are still with us today--and they've survived far longer than any conscious species have done.

So, what evolutionary advantage does consciousness provide?

Tim the Plumber said:
It can be modeled in computer science.
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Normally, I'd play coy and ask you what you mean and to give some citations or something, but I'm in a bad mood. Your claim is simply false. No one has any clue how to get a computer to be conscious, let alone "model" it, whatever that might even mean. Worse, no one really has any fresh ideas about how to begin. It's become fairly obvious that the optimism attendant on GOFAI programs, and NAI programs, is unwarranted. We've been "10 years away" from conscious machines for well nigh 60 years.

Tim the Plumber said:
What do you want to know?
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A start would be just how we go from neurons to mental events.

Tim the Plumber said:
The whole of physics is basically the quest for exactly what you are after; Where did all this come from and how does it work?
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Yes. And how many times has physics been declared nearly complete, only to have new mysteries gape open beneath us? I don't hear anyone making such claims these days...

Tim the Plumber said:
They have begun to actually get from hypothesis to theories (confirmed ideas) about the nature of what is beyond our universe and the cause of the existence of the universe.
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This misses the point. Victor Stenger has made the claim (falsely, it seems to appear to many physicists) that we know that the universe arises from the laws of quantum mechanics. Fine: where do the laws of quantum mechanics come from?

Worse: the Schrodinger Equation requires an initial state. Where did that come from? If there are other universes (say, across m-branes), where did those come from? Where did the branes come from? If the most basic unit of matter is some form of superstring, where did those come from?

The problem is that matter is intrinsically responsive to causation, but the origin of everything cannot be. That's a problem that simply cannot be resolved.

Tim the Plumber said:
The gaps in human knowledge you seek to hide gods in are disappearing very quickly.
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No, the gaps evolve as our knowledge grows, and hence myths change. I suspect the next three centuries or so will see the death of many religions, but new ones will spring up because there simply isn't a way to close all gaps. This is partially due to the nature of explanation, which strikes me as intractably epistemic: for any explanation, we can ask for an explanation, ad infinitum. But this is also partially due to substantive facts we've discovered in our empiric investigation of the universe--some of which I've hinted at, above.
 
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grip said:
You're asking a question from a Being that you positively exclaim doesn't exist? Curious?
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You asked me a question, I was polite enough to answer. I didn't know that you were laying a cunning trap. If I'm wrong and I ever do meet god then that is one of the pertinent questions that I will be putting to him.
 
zyzygy said:
You're wrong there.


If it's a mystery then how do you know it is there?

You have interviewed every atheist in the world? Here is one atheist who thinks that your "mystery" is nonsense



Why would atheists want to address a delusion?
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are the z's silent?
 
zyzygy said:
You asked me a question, I was polite enough to answer. I didn't know that you were laying a cunning trap. If I'm wrong and I ever do meet god then that is one of the pertinent questions that I will be putting to him.
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That wasn't very nice of me and you have been a pretty good poster, so I apologize. I guess I was trying make you question your convictions as not being as solid, as you think?

Since you at least admit to possibly being wrong, let me take a stab at an answer.

In the Adam & Eve story, which is most likely allegorical, the premise is that God puts humans in everlasting paradise at no cost. A chance to live forever and in ease and pleasure, if only they can appreciate it by obeying one rule. But of course they don't know how good they have it, because they've never experienced having to work for their rewards or feel displeasure.

The point is that a God might allow pain, suffering and death as a comparison to the eternal heaven we inherit after our sojourn here. If all you ever experienced was pleasure, how would you know what it really is with no other experience?
 
ashurbanipal said:
I don't see how. What happens when we die?
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What happens to all animals and plants when they die? They decompose and return to the earth. Humans are animals that evolved on Earth like all other life here. Just because we don't like that fact does not mean we can change that by making up something else that is just a fairytale to make us feel better. I truly feel sorry for those who live their life believing the Earth is not their true home.
 
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grip said:
The point is that a God might allow pain, suffering and death as a comparison to the eternal heaven we inherit after our sojourn here. If all you ever experienced was pleasure, how would you know what it really is with no other experience?
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A good point, but why do Christians call god a loving father? If he was a real father then he would have been charged with child abuse. My youngest daughter was born with brain cancer and her life was saved by a team of dedicated surgeons during a ten hour operation. I can't see why a god would have such a down on a new-born child. It's just another proof of the non-existence of gods, in my opinion. Yesterday was the anniversary of the 1966 Aberfan disaster. I have no idea why a god would do something like that, unless he was a psychopath.
Aberfan Disaster Description
 
zyzygy said:
A good point, but why do Christians call god a loving father? If he was a real father then he would have been charged with child abuse. My youngest daughter was born with brain cancer and her life was saved by a team of dedicated surgeons during a ten hour operation. I can't see why a god would have such a down on a new-born child. It's just another proof of the non-existence of gods, in my opinion. Yesterday was the anniversary of the 1966 Aberfan disaster. I have no idea why a god would do something like that, unless he was a psychopath.
Aberfan Disaster Description
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I'm very sorry to hear that about your daughter. I had a 10yr old niece, barely cured of brain cancer that went thru a 10hr operation also. When my sister told me of her grandchild's brain tumor, my father had just died an agonizing death, and I told her that her niece was in the best hands possible. It was all I could do to say that with any belief. No doubt, there are some horrible cases, and I don't think it's always so specific or personal, but everyone has their own relationship with their creator. I tried to get in the way once and it did not go well for me.

As far as making specific horrors happen, I believe it's more of a hands off approach and not to directly interfere. Not an active act of destroying things with malice. I by no means have all the answers, only some reasoning that helps me cope and hope. I'm sure if we get to the other side, there will be some sort of revelation, and I sincerely doubt we'll be disappointed. If God truly is a being of joy and love, I can only imagine, with infinite power and wisdom, how much He's capable of compensating for any perceived slights.
 
zyzygy said:
That is debatable. Why would any sentient being with only a trace of joy and love want to create something like this?
Parasitic wasp turns roaches into zombie slaves using neurotoxic cocktail | IFLScience
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First of all, you're focusing only on the negative. If life were that miserable, all the time, people would be committing mass suicide. And second of all, we're only here for a short time, compared to a possible eternal afterlife in heaven. That's not really comparable for a short period of some work and misery to a perpetual reward.

Things could always be worse.
 
joG said:
Lots of people laugh, when they don't understand something.
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No people laugh because that's the way fundamentalism comes across.
 
zyzygy said:
A good point, but why do Christians call god a loving father? If he was a real father then he would have been charged with child abuse. My youngest daughter was born with brain cancer and her life was saved by a team of dedicated surgeons during a ten hour operation. I can't see why a god would have such a down on a new-born child. It's just another proof of the non-existence of gods, in my opinion.
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See, this is the kind of hysteria that goes along with your pernicious brand of atheism. You spend hour after hour bashing Christianity and you don't even have your arguments right.

It's obvious you've never studied the "Fall" of man and its consequences for disease, death, etc., and what part the devil also plays in it.

God has delivered hundreds of millions of us via faith in Christ, and God's love for us in eternity.

Personally, I'm thankful the Christ-bashing will come to a quick and final end at the Judgment of the antichrist crowd.

John 8:24
 
zyzygy said:
You'll be dead.
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Hmmmm....

Q: What happens when a baby is born?
A: A baby is born.

Q: What happens when atomic chromium combines with chlorine.
A: Atomic chromium combines with chlorine.

Q: What happens when a young man falls in love with the daughter of his enemy?
A: A young man falls in love with the daughter of his enemy.

All three answers (and all those of the same or similar form) have two things in common. First, they're not informative at all. Second, they're just like the one you gave.
 
iguanaman said:
What happens to all animals and plants when they die? They decompose and return to the earth. Humans are animals that evolved on Earth like all other life here. Just because we don't like that fact does not mean we can change that by making up something else that is just a fairytale to make us feel better. I truly feel sorry for those who live their life believing the Earth is not their true home.
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I'm not sure what that last part means, but this doesn't tell us anything. Animals may well experience an afterlife, just as human beings might. Stock in such beliefs ebbs and flows, but it's a pretty difficult question to adjudicate without prejudice. For my part, I'm at least convinced that not everyone who believes in an afterlife does so because they're uncomfortable with the alternative.
 
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