Posted on 11/27/2005 6:32:15 AM PST by machman
Morning Edition, November 21, 2005 ·
I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond Atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?
So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The Atheism part is easy.
But, this "This I Believe" thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God."
Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.
Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, "How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do." So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.
Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.
Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
Gee, he makes such a detailed, objective, persuasive argument. Unlike that hack C.S. Lewis and his "Mere Christianity" pablum.
I have no way of knowing about Penn but being diagnosed with cancer didn't change my beliefs at all. Though I consider myself agnostic rather than athiest.
That is, I have no way of knowing for sure if there is a God or not. I just tend to doubt it.
Isn't that cute. The anti-church holds its own altar call.
One often-heard justification for "state radio" was that classical music (as well as other genres) wasn't available outside the big cities. A paucity of Vivaldi out on the prairie or deep in the piney woods of the South. Well, it's available now. Sirius and XM are examples, and they're far better than NPR ever was, in terms of the size of their musical libraries, and in terms of their on-screen identification of the composer, title, and performer of what is being played at any moment. And there are other options for receiving classical music (and countless other forms of music, news, and information). Of course, it is no coincidence that classical music is now a rarity on public radio.
The time for defunding NPR has long since come. Of course, it is unlikely to happen, in large part because Republicans fear being called anti-art, anti-diversity, anti-intellectual stone-age fundamentalists.
The irony of this... NO WAY will NPR give a beliver this same 'soapbox' to refute Mr. Jillette. AND... #1 he's lying! HE is God, by default, because without God, all that is left is ego... that's why so many of these folks are "look at me, I matter" types... again, without God all that's left is ego. This is proved over and over.
"Prove" that there is "love." You can't see it. It therefore does not exist.
And "logic" -- prove that too.
I don't agree with your posting. There are three levels that statements such as yours can be made on: the philosophical and the practical and the meta-physical.
In philosophical terms it is a falacy that there can be no morality without god. In fact philosophers have created such for many years. Confucious created a moral system that governed China that was essentially agnostic. You may not like or be familiar with such systems but to claim that they don't or can't exist is simply wrong.
On the practical level the existence of God does not prevent people from smashing other peoples face in. It happens every day. The god of this universe continues to allow all sorts of misbehavior.
The last level is the meta-physical. This allows us to look at horrible evil and say "there is a final price to be paid". I agree this adds sense of fairness and symetry to life that is otherwise lacking.
"We are mindful of their suggestion (made only at the argument, and perhaps not intended) that anything which serves to amplify the personal history of the defendant and by doing so furnishes clues to the causality of the crime for which he has been sentenced to death makes such a sentence less likely to be imposed. Causality is mitigation, the lawyer argued. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. It is not an absurd argument. It exploits the tension between belief in determinism and belief in free will. If the defendant's crime can be seen as the effect of a chain of causes for which the defendant cannot be thought responsible-his genes, his upbringing, his character as shaped by both, accidents of circumstance, and so forth-then a judge or jury is less likely to think it appropriate that he should receive a punishment designed to express society's condemnation of an evil person. We consider a rattlesnake dangerous but not evil. Maybe if we learned enough about Walter Stewart we would consider him a person who had no more control over his actions than a rattlesnake has over its actions."
Judge Posner in Stewart v. Gramely, 74 F.3d 132, 136 (7th Cir. 1996).
I like Jilette. I don't always agree with him, but he has the grapes to say what he thinks.
That probably explains why they don't build a lot of hospitals out of all that built-up altruism that non-belief grants them.
I once read a book where a guy turned himself into a dragon. I wonder if Penn could do that too...
Not at all.
Consider how much money the guy has made and been forced to give the government: if he's getting anything at all from NPR, it amounts to a tiny refund.
How do you figure? No matter what or who they said endowed these unalienable rights, it was still the old dead white guys that created the document in question. Or are you claiming their hand was directly manipulated by god?
They do, but it is mostly in the form of shooters (it's hard to get the stuff to "gell" there).
It's a childish, shallow, and transient understanding of life.
The poet W.B. Yeats captured it well. Atheists are stuck here:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees--
Those dying generations -- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
The spiritually sensate are here:
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
What shaman specifically?
This is what happens when the mind is out of balance with the spirit.
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