Metal Reviews

Badly. They think I'm throwing my life away, yadda yadda, no spiritual side, pessimistic blah blah blah depressed blah.



Psilocybin mushrooms, not psilocybin, mushrooms.

But honestly, I don't care, same damn thing. One nutcase or four, they're still all crazy.[/quote]

My thoughts exactly. I mean, look at the aboriginals of North America, who for almost 2000 years were disconnected from Europe and any notion of Jesus. They had no way to "accept Jesus' sacrafice" because they simply did not know of his existance. Are they all to go to hell because of it?

That's not to say that there isn't a God, but he definitely wouldn't adhere to any of our religious doctrines. Perhaps people's conviction and feeling of attatchment to a deity is real, but it's not the attatchment to "their God" as they believe. A God also seems very reasonable when you try to concieve concepts such as infinity... in time and space. Infinity seems to defy everything we understand, and something simply could not come out of nothing.

The contrasting argument is that we only create that feeling of a deity because were are super intelligent beings and we understand the concept of death, thus it helps us deal with life. But there are two billion athiests and agnostics in the world and they seem to be able to deal just fine, so this is a bit of a flimsy argument. The latter argument in favour of the existance of a God is much stronger, but nonetheless, it does not prove that there is a God, infinity is just so inconceivable by a human (I think a human trying to understand it is like a cat trying to read).

Yes I agree with this. The presence of a higher being isn't so outrageous as people would often believe, its simply the concept of 'divinty' that I take issue with.

Are humans divine compared to lions? Or are lions divine compared to shrimp? A 'God' may actually be nothing more than a higher intelligence.

Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine, I know that much.

Well there you have it.

I agree. Especially since evolution is rationally indisputable.

By that logic, are the Raelians correct?

(Note: I'm not disputing evolution.)

Hmm, the concept of infinity never seemed that difficult to me. In the case of numbers, for example, I would find it more odd / unsettling to think of them as a finite set rather than an infininte one. Their very nature suggests that they're infinite, even from elementary studies. Most people, at that time, just haven't stopped to think about it yet... The notion of God on the other hand, generally proposes that something did, in fact, come from nothing. Namely God. I fail to see how that is more reasonable than the notion that existence itself exists (or has always existed). Thus, is it even reasonable at all?

-Tyrion

i don't think the concept of infinite is all that difficult.. in terms of mathematics infinity is 10^10.. just ask my old math teacher, and it did seem to be true when you used your calculator..

of course this only happened to be true when you asked these kind of mathematical questions:

what happens to f(x) when x goes towards infinity

ex. f(x)= 1/X + 2 , in this case f(x) would go towards 2.. see?.. not that hard

someone asked how people lost their faith or whatever.

i was hindu (my family originally comes from india), and my dad was really religious. he was honest, hard working and always helped those who needed. he got cancer in 2001 and died in 2002, and i couldn't understand how god would let that happen. either he/she/it wasn't there or didn't give a shit, and either way there was no reason to stay religious.

my sister on the other hand is now more religious than ever. go figure.

as far as family is concerned.. none of them knows. it'd break their hearts and if it keeps them happy if i pretend to be religious then so be it. the only one who knows is a cousing of mine who's also atheist.

Religion can give hope as well as destroy lives. I'm not totally anti-religion as most seem to be. But I'm in the same situation as you up to a point, my father having post-polio syndrome so his time is running out, gradually. Why should I fuck it up with stupid shit like whether or not I believe in a god?

Hear hear, my mother also has post-polio syndrome (she got caught in the 1950 epidemic) and for her religion gives her hope of a better life when she passes away. On the other hand I have seen religion destroy plenty of lives.

I'm saying that if God exists, he IS the infinity, and not created. Thus the whole idea of God: not constrained by our logic, rules, physics, time, space, etc.

And there's a difference between understanding what infinity means by definition, and really trying to picture in your head the infinite in time and space (which is not the same as numbers).

Right, I undstood that earlier, but since you're dismissing logic, you can't then say it's somehow reasonable that God exists as you did before:



It becomes mere speculation, no matter how interesting / mind boggling it is to think about. Once it's outside the realm of human logic and observation, there is no grounds for thinking some such infinity does in fact exist. So it comes back to the age old question - Does God exist? Which is back where we started

I hope I'm making sense and don't sound like I'm being critical of the concept just for the sake of it..

.

In my opinion, that is (part of) what religion thrives upon, and if you grant a person that (that God is inconceivable by a human being), you've given them far, far more leverage than you might have intended. You might as well set yourself to trying to imagine a round square at that point, because you've rejected reason. It's a trap to get you to doubt yourself.

-Tyrion

Exactly. That's what I'm saying. It is so far out of our observation and logic, and perhaps ability, that how can we know? How can we know there is a God? But at the same time, how can we know that there is not?

Christian. A Presbetyrian to be exact. Go me.

I know what you're saying. Re-read my last paragraph of my previous post if you like. Nevertheless, you've already conceded that it's no longer even a relevant question. If it's outside our senses and reasoning, its "possible existence" is irrelevant and pointless to consider.

-Tyrion

Obviously most people are agnostic here. I do agree with what most of you guys said, we just can not know that there is a supreme being. But in that sense ruling out the chance that there might be a god sounds stupid to me.

I would like to hear a religious persons side of the story though. Why do billions of people keep believing in God? Do they have no logic? They must have. Then what is it that makes them believe in something so blindly?

i don't think it's right to say one lacks logic for choosing to believe in god.

they may find comfort in an afterlife (i think if there's a god, there's an afterlife), or to simply believe that there's more to life than what they can see. or when one has nothing left at least there is faith and a promise of something better to come to keep the person going.

I think the actual problem is here:



Many people don't choose to believe. They never even ask themselves the forbidden question(s). If you have chosen to believe in whatever after deep spiritual and rational consideration it is the right thing to do, but if you simply follow everybody else and accept the norms of other people without independent thought it is stupid. Many people have that illogical sheep-mentality. Others just choose to deceive themselves to feel better, which is just as stupid.