Atheists and Atheism (Little Upsilon)

Hi,

I am wondering how many people on this board/game would consider themselves atheist.

I have seen some other threads (such as 'Islam'), and I also wonder how many people here consider themselves believers in a given religion.

If you feel like it, reply with the name of your religion, or a few words that help to describe your beliefs (or lack thereof).

I, for instance, am a rational materialist atheist.

I am a believer in something, what that something is I dont have a clue. I know I exist now and hope forever in some shape or form. Wishful thinking maybe, but the more science I learn the more wonderful this universe becomes in my eyes. A big bang and evolution just doesn't seem to cut it. Although I believe in evolution I think the dice are loaded.

I can tell you this much.

Personally I consider atheism as any other theism.

As a side note: someone said that asking man about his God is like asking him about his woman.

ism's are the virtue's of your ways.

I guess I'd say that I'm agnostic atheist.

No one can prove that there is no God.

However, no one has proven that there is one.

Therefore I assume that there is not one.

Pour vous:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Agnostics are the most frustrating, they will believe anything that you can prove to them, but you can not "prove," that god exists, other than the overwhelming wonder of creation... and the "force of the universe," for lack of a better way to express that.

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" so to believe in God, you have to believe something that you can't prove, by definition.

Atheists, although they often claim to be logical in their approach, are often as passionate about their beliefs as a religious fanatic. And as such, many Atheists have converted to religion, after many frustrating attempts to disprove God, in general, and the Christian God in particular. C. S. Lewis is prime example of this.

You can probably tell from the above, that i'm of the christian faith. Although, not a very good example of a Christian, i must admit.

Many times the idea of 'faith' is misunderstood. What actually is faith? Is it some kind of 'feeling' that you have on a particular thing or idea? To have faith, is it a 'leap'? For example, I own a construction business and in my business it is common for a contractor to hire ppl and not pay them. If you started working for a contractor, no doubt you would be aware of this horrible practice and you would be cautious. You would no doubt wonder if the check you just received for your labor is gonna bounce. So you head to the bank to cash it ASAP. The money is there. Next paycheck, you still are skeptical, so you do the same thing. The money is there. You do this for a number of weeks each time your skepticisim diminishes, because the money is always there. Finally you get to the point where you no longer worry at all about the check being good, in fact you may wait a few days to even cash it. Why? Because you know that after 75-100 checks and after getting to know the contractor, he has never missed a payment to you. THAT IS FAITH. You have no 'funny feeling', no doubt. To others you may have a hard time explaining this phenomenom to, but you know it to be true. You of course know this because of experience and knowledge of who you work for.

The same is true of religion. Regardless of your professed 'faith' you first must have knowledge of it. All to often ppl have opinions about what they really do not know or understand. And many times they are so frustrated with what those who do 'claim' to have faith do and say.
Knowledge is the key.

I, a sim-citizen, am a sim-atheist. I deny that any sim-gods, such as the oft-mentioned "Jozi," exist. If "Jozi" really existed, why would he allow such suffering among us? To what end would he have created seals and attack boats? How could he have been so malicious as to have purposely tantalized us with remote depots? Why create a security council and then give it no real powers? It's all a cosmic joke. These things and more are simply evolutionary dead ends, not the products of a creative intelligence! Who does "Jozi" root for in a war?! It is simply irrational and childish to believe in any "Jozi."

Further, I deny that there is any special significance or divinity to his so-called messenger among us, Mr. Tom Willard. If he had any real channel to "Jozi," wouldn't he use his connection to make his countries the most powerful in every simworld? I say Tom is just another player, who knows a few tricks, and likes to string us all along!

Can anyone prove elsewise, without appealing to some imaginary world outside of the realm of our sim-senses?

Blasphemer!

The Pinktator set us on the path of true rightousness.

The sacrifice of the non-believer to please Jozi our sim-creator.

May he strike you with earthquakes, a poor economy and worker shortages for your lack of faith.

Let us pray.

Oh mighty Tom bringer of the word. We humbly beseech your intercession to protect us from the wrath of the Sim God.


1001 1010 0001 1110 1011 1100 1111 0000 0100

Hah, I'm still here! No earthquakes, no worker shortages. Your little black magic has no effect--just superstition and mumbo jumbo. There is no "jozi." The simworlds were not created, they have always been.

i am a Christian existentialist. i believe that God is the "ground of our being"; that which we put our faith. God in a broader sense is "the way things are".

I try to avoid haggling about semantics but a thread titled Atheists and Atheism is asking for it.

Serpent,

What you described is "belief". You believe that the check won't bounce next week. I believe the sun will set in a few minutes. Wikipedia does a good job with the definitions:

"Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true."

"Faith is a belief in the truth of or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing, that is characteristically held without proof."

I have often heard American Christians use the terms interchangeably. In some cases that is confusion. Among evangelical and fundamentalist it often seams deliberate. All traditional Christian dogma, Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist agrees with Wikipedia. I have heard Americans acknowledge the different meanings and then claim that both are important.

There are at least five definitions of Atheism.
-Faith that there is no god.
-No faith in god.
-Belief that there is no god.
-No reason to believe there is a god.
-No concept of god (babies, my cat, etc)

People who have faith that there is no god are somewhat rare. People who have no reason to believe there is a god often call themselves agnostic. True agnostics have faith that that the truth about god cannot be determined.

good clarifying points PS

Mr. Pathetic Sheep

Of course you 'believe' that the sun will set. Why? It always has. There is no reason to believe that it wont.

But the definition of faith that you provided by wikipedia proves my point.
"Faith is a belief in the truth of or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing, that is characteristically held without proof."

Apply that to the illustration of the contractor with his employee's. I agree that belief and faith are not the same. But they are closely related. In fact faith most often comes from what you believe. And you believe things because you have knowledge of them. That is my arguement. Faith is not mysterious or magical. It comes from your knowledge and experience.

One religious book defines faith in a good way. It says that "faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities, though not beheld."

To me it would be ignorant for anybody, God, person, or whatever to expect you to put belief in them without any proof or explanation. However after there has been sufficent proof and experience, now then there is a basis for faith. Faith does not spring from nothing!

Joziism

1. In the beginning Jozi was alone. And it was not good.

2. On the first day Jozi turned on the holy server and there was sim-life. And he was pleased.

3. On the second day it pleased Jozi to create Tom the Messenger to bring forth his word to the sim-world.

Convert to Joziism and repent of your sim-sins.

Death to the nonbelievers!

"The deity enters into philosophy through the perdurance of which we think at first as the approach to the active nature of the difference between Bring and beings. The difference constitutes the ground plan in the structure of the essence of metaphysics. The perdurance results in and gives Being as the generative ground. This ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter - and that is the cause as casua sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god.

"The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit."

-Martin Heidegger, The Onto-Theo-Logic Constitution of Metaphysics

"An old proverb pertaining to the outward and visible world says: 'Only one who works gets bread.' Oddly enough, the saying doesn't apply in the world to which it most properly belongs, for the outward world is subject to the law of imperfection; there it happens time and again that one who gets bread is one who does not work, that one who sleeps gets it in greater abundance than one who labours. In the outward world everything belongs to whoever has it, the outward world is subject to the law of indifference and the genie of the ring obeys the one who wears it, whether he be a Noureddin or an Aladdin, and whoever holds the world's treasures does so however he came by them. It is otherwise in the world of the spirit. Here there prevails and eternal divine order, here it does not rain on the just and the unjust alike, here the sun does not shine on both good and evil, here only one who works gets bread, and only one who knows anguish finds rest, only one who descends to the underworld saves the loved one, only one who draws the knife gets Isaac. He who will not work does not get bread, but will be deluded, as the gods deluded Orpheus with an airy figure in place of the beloved, deluded him because he was tender-hearted, not courageous, deluded him because he was a lyre-player, not a man."

-Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

"By religion, therefore, let me stipulate, I mean something simple, open-ended, and old-fashioned, namely, the love of God. But the expression 'love of God' needs some work. Of itself it tends to be a little vacuous and even slightly sanctimonious. To put it technically, it lacks teeth. So the question we need to ask ourselves is the one Augustine put to himself in the Confessions, 'what do I love when I love God?,' or 'what do I love when I love You, my God?,' as he also put it, or running these two Augustinian formulations together, 'what do I love when I love my God?'. . . .

"I love this question in no small part because it assumes that anybody worth their salt loves God. If you do not love God, what good are you? You are too caught up in the meanness of self-love and self-gratification to be worth a tinker's damn. Your soul soars only with a spike in the Dow-Jones Industrial average; your heart leaps only at the prospect of a new tax break. The devil take you. He already has. Religion is for lovers, for men and women of passion, for real people with a passion for something other than taking profits, people who believe in something, who hope like mad in something, who love something with a love that surpasses understanding. Faith, hope, and love, and of the three the best is love, according to a famous apostle (I Cor. 13:13). But what do they love? What do I love when I love my God? That is their question. That is my question.

"The opposite of a religious person is a loveless person . . . Notice that I am not saying a 'secular' person. That is because I am out to waylay the usual distinction between religious and secular in the name of what I shall call the 'post-secular' or a 'religion without religion.' I include a lot of supposedly secular people in religion . . . even as I think a lot of supposedly religious people should look around for another line of work. A lot of supposedly secular people love something madly, while a lot of supposedly religious people love nothing more than getting their own way and bending others to their own will ('in the name of God'). Some people can be deeply and abidingly 'religious' with or without theology, with or without the religions. Religion may be found with or without religion. That is my thesis."

-John D. Caupto, On Religion

Also, there is but One Jozi and Tom is his Messenger.

Joziism! Death to the nonbelievers!

I'm an atheist and quite happy with it.

Heidegger! Page after page of the same stuff! It's like trying to learn a language by immersion, without a translating dictionary. Now Kierkegaard, a saint. Caputo seems interesting...is it stupid to ask whether he ever answers his question?

Btw you Joziites are just repeating your slogans because you can't prove his existence. He was made up by man to give comfort to the weak minded. There is no sim-good or sim-evil. Sim-behavior just is. Sim-morality is made by man in order to control the strong. The ubersimensch is coming and will relieve us of all this nonsense about "jozi," Tom, and so on.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

Tom Willard (Little Upsilon)
Friday, March 6, 2009 - 09:59 am Click here to edit this post We received a payment into our PO box recently and it does not include an account email address.<!-/Quote-!>

Behold the word.

Include your email address in a cash payment.

We thank Tom the Messenger for bringing us this pearl of wisdom.

"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and gazing up at the dark sky spangled with it's signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still."

Albert Camus--The Stranger

so, how does one embrace the benign indifference of the universe? How does one use their alloted time on this earth? Does one deny, live the superficial temporal life, grab hold of dogmas and creeds, or struggle to find significance in something lasting and transcendent? for some of us it's embracing the unknown and unknowable as an affirmation of both our courage to be, as well as our frailty but also the mystery of creation and all its possible realities. there are many ways that we do this--through loving relationships, through realizing that we are not the center of the universe, and that even in our smallness our lives are a gift to be experienced both in its joy and pain and that it can be shared with others.

Meursault is an existential failure. He never crosses the either/or.