This is primarily a response to the rant feillyne has posted on his profile page. If you are going to read this, read that first. Warning, though, crazy strong language on his post.
Your post, feillyne, sums up all the reasons I disagree with you and all the reasons I can never agree with you. I have exactly the same problem with you I have with all conspiricy theorists; you think that you don't have biases just because your biases are different from the mainstream. People think, you think, that you are questioning authority and establishment with your beliefs. I got news for you, buddy.
You aren't questioning anything.
Your worldview is very familiar to me, because I held one similar to it not long ago. Not only was I religious, but I also believed that the reason the world was the way it was, all the horrible elements, was just because people did bad things and maybe, just maybe, we could teach them to not do bad things. I simplified every problem as "we're not trying hard enough" and "people are scum". It was a stupid, ignorant line of thinking, and it's a perfect illustration of the difference between wisdom and cynicism. It's exactly not the way to fix things, and when your convinced life would be all fluffy and nice if only it wasn't for malice then every problem becomes an ancient conspiricy designed to destroy lives for the sake of it.
No wonder you believe in gods and devils, then.
You ready for the real reason that everything sucks?
Things suck because life is a struggle.
The universe is not a device that has "life" or "people" as an end output. Life is
something that just sort of happened during the progression of the long,
complex mathematical dance that is the universe from the Big Bang
onward. It's a few protein chains that arranged in self-replicating
patterns and gained complexity through random chance, kept it through
selection pressure, and manifested as increasingly complex life.
Throughout the history of life, it has been defined by struggle;
creatures pitted against on another for limited resources from the days of single cells to the time when pre-humans were building their mental abilities by plotting to stab one another in the back. It's how things have always been, and it's how things are today. It doesn't have to be our future, but not for the reasons you think.
The universe is hostile to life. It's plain and evident. We age, decompose, die off, get horrifying sicknesses and parasites and so forth. Even when living comfortably our bodies are fighting off a constant attack by microbs and environmental hazards. Life is fighting a constant battle against the universe that it's fated to lose in both the short and long term.
When early humans were confronted with the sheer horror of the universe, watching other people like them die and knowing that death was coming for them, too, and there was nothing they could do about it, they created religion to save themselves from it. They invented a mental crutch to help them bear the wieght of oncoming oblivion; "no, it's alright! I'll be reborn as a spirit/go to heaven/reincarnate/whatever!" Satan and God are just anthropomorphizations of a hostile world and the good things in it, respectively. It didn't take too long for people to start believing their story strongly enough that it became more of a concern that day-to-day life; after all, which is more important, the short, brutish experience on Earth or the eternity that comes after?
That is one of my main problems with religion; it takes our collective eye off the ball. Every second we worry about what comes after is one second we're not spending thinking about how to fix the here and now. Because we can do that, you know. As intelligent, thinking, compassionate beings, we are always moving forward, always fixing problems, always advancing. We make mistakes, as a collective, mistakes so large that calling them mistakes seems amiss; war, genocide, environmental destruction. But for every mistake we make, we do a lot right, too. Even in the poorest and most messed up places on the planet, the standard of living rises, problems are fixed. As fast as they could? Well, no, but the idea that everything is always getting worse, that we are in decline, is patently insane.
So that is why I can never agree with you. Because we don't need gods or daemons or out of body experiences. We don't need to cast down our systems or have revolutions or destroy what we have made. All we need is the drive to improve, to escape the shadows of our past, to move up and on.
And that is something humans have in abundance.
As someone with religious beliefs, I can't really relate to your atheistic world view: but I will say that your response is much less jumbled and easier to understand than Feillyne's.
*post this on his profile but it fits here to*
religion .. gives hope ...a reason to live even.
It gives some basic morals on how everyone wants to be treated.
The truth being that every atheist wants to be wrong when they say god is not real. becasue just how hallow life feels without a reason to it.
Just like when your learned santa claus was not real. Alittle more magic fades from your life and you see just how boring and grey the world realy is.
Random quote from somewere "alittle sceince will make a man and atheist study will make him a believer"
But at the same time is not to be taken to seriously or blindly followed.
It's true it does get in the way of many things (being pretty good at science myself)
when religion gets in the way of science (unless science is trying to do something stuiped)its wrong religion should never stop improvement becasue again what boring world that would be. Isnt it in human nature to be curious to build to invent to live. if god made us would he be
happy that we use these skills he give us?
In my opinon its best to keep a open mind.
Remember the answer is aways the one you dissmiss.
On a lighter note /topic lol
"The truth being that every atheist wants to be wrong when they say god is not real. becasue just how hallow life feels without a reason to it."
Thanks so much for telling me what I feel. Because, you know, it's impossible to feel awe over the state of the universe or hope for our place in it without involving a bronze-age tribal belief in there.
I'm surprised you believers don't find it restricting and a little horrifying to know your entire future is pre-ordained by an omnipresent bystander more concerned with sexual preference than human suffering when he is deciding who to torture for all enternity.
I'm surprised atheists don't find it restricting and a little horrifying that they can only believe what is measurable and quantifiable and that belief in anything outside the box is grounds to be sent to a mental institution?
I guess I'm a little late to the party, but I guess I was worried about a flame war starting as they so often do. Didn't this start as a rant debunking conspiracy theories? Because not all religious folk are conspiracy theorists. Or insane. Or even necessarily agree on what they all believe in. Sorta like a lot of atheists. Hey wait, I think I see a pattern here... Wherever there is stupidity... there are people...
feillyne is a combination of religious and political fanatic and a conspiricy theorist. I'm not a fan of religion, but I'm not actually hostile to people of quiet faith; people can believe whatever they want.
What I don't like is when people try to push their religion on people as part of politics, and when people tell me what I believe. That tends to get me all challenge-y and bring out the debate tactics.
Are you prejudiced against me?
I'm anti-religious. I rejected both pagan and occult rituals, and know a great deal of curses, sigils, and other occultism stuff - I went through that, I know the pain and the real agenda behind it - materialistic goals or senseless upkeeping of traditions.
I'm against conspiracies in a way... in a way, mhhh. Well, let's explain it first: a CONSPIRACY is any DEAL that is done hidden from others.
So pretty much you conspire to make a mod if you don't reveal anything to anybody except those in your team.
You have this site, ModDB, and you pretty much have talented people at your disposal - modellers, texture artists, and so on.
Same with bankers, politicians and businessmen that are friends with each other.
What you or anybody else could call a "conspiracy" they simply call their "undertaking", and their meetings are less secret than anyone can suppose.
I was using the common meaning of conspiricy theorist, which is to say, a person that attributes to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but within international events.
@ Phoenix:
Whats even the point in religion if you don't really believe in it?
If it is how things should be and is the truth, it is how things should be.
If it isn't, its meaningless.
There isn't a middle ground between believing in a religion and atheism.
"There isn't a middle ground between believing in a religion and atheism"
says who?
Says me. You have supersitious beliefs, or you do not. Even an agnostic is fundamentally an athiest (as he still does not believe)
sorry did you just call me a believer? XD
i just posted both sides to a story
my final opinion was it was best to keep a open mind.
whats a agnostic?
bweh, i keep to atheism, but if i die and find myself in heaven, i'll go to god and say: "you win dude, you sure had me there."
Sketch, I rarely comment on matters non-Paradox related to you, mostly because I'm in many ways your dark counterpart (or is it the other way around?) and would only lead to mistrust. I do have to ask though, is it really worth it to get riled up about a guy who has a video titled "Bill Gates wants depopulation through vaccines" proudly displayed?
There is this concept that we shouldn't bother confronting people with extreme views because you assume it doesn't warrent argument. The problem is, if you take they approach, the other guy is the only guy talking!
Besides, you don't debate against people to change their minds. You do it for the people who are on the fence.
Vaccines are used to improve one's health. While Bill Gates used in the context of decreasing the number of population. Learn a bit of psychology. Mainstream propagandae, like Hitler's, was quite afloat for a tiny bit of time.
But there are lies that endured for ages. And now they're going to destroy those who still hold them as the truth.
It is a commonly seen trend that, the shorter the life expectancy in a society, the more children those people have and the greater strain is placed on resources. In the poorest places of the world, society strains against the local population threashold and resource limit. In these places where success is measured merely by the number of children that reach adulthood, there is no incentive against having as many children as you can. Compare first world nations, where the population is naturally in decline in many of these places.
In places like Africa or the poorer parts of Southeast Asia, it's impossible to build infastructure because people there are sick or dying too fast for education to take, for work to be done, or for social change to be enacted. The first step to improving quality of life is to provide stability and give people reason to plan for the future. It's hard to tell somebody "It'll be an improvement in ten years" when the guy will, statistically, be dead within 8.
THAT is all Bill Gates is talking about.
And for your pleasure, Building What by engineers and architects:
Buildingwhat.org
(Will you call them conspiracy theorists, too?)
7 facts about WTC7:
Buildingwhat.org
The truth about WTC7 will surface sooner or later, but it may be too late to do anything. Just like the fire of Reichstag.
You simply don't know anything about history, admit it. :-)
Quick question; if 43% of Americans aren't even aware Building 7 went down, what would be the point of controlled demolition there? It would be a pretty ****** fire in the Reichstag if people didn't know about it, and a pretty pointless one next to the much bigger one of airplanes crashing into the main towers.
I do agree it's odd Building 7 went down the way it did and I plan on doing some research about it. However, the link you provided has already featuered some dishonest or poorly researched content that disagrees with readily availiable photographic evidence (including the assertion that WTC7 was brought down exclusively by fire when every picture of the event clearly shows massive damage from falling debris as well) so I'll do my research elsewhere.
Videos:
Youtube.com
Well, the rest of the blog post I'll leave uncommented for a couple of moments.
To escape the shadows of our past?
Yes, the shadows that are the political, religious, economical, ecological systems of lies, reckless consumption, destruction of the natural environment, ******* at everybody who disagrees, besmirching those who question the validity of evidence or popular beliefs (popularity doesn't equal accuracy at all), and so on and on.
You still don't see that we are in our OWN Dark Ages where scientific paradigms, abusive economical systems and false religious dogmas rule.
Show me statistics of poverty in every country, the number of those poor, and show me the comparison between previous years. The last 10 years by country. Show me an increase or an decrease in the number of poor.
First you need to get realistic about the current situation.
Know something interesting? We're ALWAYS in a Dark Age. It's never as good as it could be. But the idea that things are not improving is a serious bias of your own.
You know that nut that went crazy and shot up that congresswoman and her supporters? At lot of people point to that as evidence the system is falling apart. A person with greater context, however, notices that this is the first such incident in a long while; compare back to the sixties and seventies, when in the United States, violence and assassination was practically a part of the political language, with events such as the Kennedy Assassinations. It's now a statistically unlikely event.
Now, war is uncommon, frightening, and between two equal powers it tends to last for days or weeks before both sides decide to stop before it escalates. When a big nation invades a small one, there is a surprising lack of enslavement or colonization compared to historical norms. A half century ago, we tore each other apart, millions dead, over race and politics and sense of entitlement. A hundred years ago, we did the same because our ruling class was having a family feud.
Even the people at the very lowest of poverty levels do better now than those same people did a century ago, if simply because of a greater application of charity and the onset of international aid.
A hundred years ago, we didn't know relativity. Two hundred before that, we didn't even know why things fell to the ground. We are always learning, pushing onward and upward. The idea that somehow we are regressing, sliding backward into the darkness, is absurd. Humans will always strive to do better and to make things better.
And you're right... right there.
Yet the question of equality, a physical tangible equality, and the question of people's needs, and the question of ownership remains.
The public domain versus private ownership.
Who has given the people authorisation to steal from the nature and the environment without any pre-planning of what should be done or what shouldn't be done, for the sake of ecosystems and the Earth?
The nature is ripped apart by unregulated greed, in rich countries by laws favourable to huge corporations, in poor countries by various thugs.
The poor may do better, but the change is needed. A real one.
Isn't it better to prevent than to treat? Isn't it one of motto's of modern medicine?
So why must we be silent and allow private companies create poverty, create wars, create tragedies and breach laws?
You really think it's so far-fetched or a ******* "conspiracy"?
Isn't Shell in Nigeria poisoning water and lobbying Nigerian government? Perhaps you could do your research, and then tell me. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afL0N191IFI for a starter? If these leaked info/docs can be considered reliable at all.)
Who are death dealers that sell arms to Black Africans and other groups, including extremists? Who sell weapons to third/fourth world countries?
Or maybe you think they materialise out of nowhere, somebody had constructed AKs in a cave? What about the black market?
Maybe the aliens did it :P
Yes, we need to fix all that ****. You think I advocate the status quo? Holy ****, we need to do something about these things. We should crack down on arms dealers, better regulate industry, do more peacekeeping missions in places that need it, put in place policies to slow outsourcing and reduce the abuses of third world workers, shut down sweatshops, destroy the patriarchy, topple dictatorships, fight poverty, stop giving weapons to Israel, stop turning a blind eye terrorists in Palestien, debate fundamentalists, disprove pseudoscience, cure diseases, better regulate political entities, redestribute wealth more evenly, and aim to improve, rather than merely conserve, the environment.
However, I think you give humans too little credit! People DO care about these things, and where they don't, it is because they are uninformed, misinforced, or delusional!
People have taken to recycling. They protest wars, even if their country isn't even involved! They buy green cars, call to eliminate blood diamonds, and vote for equality and progressive causes.
The world does want to stop these things! Every year countries pass new laws and regulations to do something. They have protests, write letters, vote in elections where they can and scream for the right to where they can't. They're governments fund medical research and creative green solutions, and give billions in internation aid.
But what are you saying we should do about it? Everything you say is glazed in the language of desperation, malice, and hopelessness; that it's too late, the evil reptilians that make up the top 1% have already won, the world will end within a few years, it's all pointless, the only hope is revolution, overthrow, to tear down all our achievements because the system that created them isn't perfect.
Nonsense.
Most people care, except for nihlists and libertarians, maybe. The solution doesn't lie in revolution but evolution; in steering the system towards doing the right thing. Revolution begets nothing but political transistion by violence and the sort of instability that makes people less able and inclinded to help others.
Telling people their government is run by incomprehensible monsters in human form, colluding with extraterrestrials to end the world in a few years, is REALLY not the way to get people to care.
Elohim, Pleiadians and Andromedans and intelligent/benevolent others keep themselves from revealing to humans because of these reasons. It's not about scaring somebody out at all. It's about taking responsibility.
And they pretty much think that if they reveal themselves, and fix our problems for us, give a fish to the hungry, instead of pushing us to fix our own problems for ourselves, giving a fishing rod to the hungry and teaching them how to use it, we'd learn nothing and we'd be as retarded as we could possibly be.
That's why we can forget about them. They can do their work - behind the scenes.
But it's us who must fix all this crap.
And after that, you'll see that they do exist - if we ever manage to cope. Now it may be pretty much the next economic crash/crisis, whatever you call it - that one should be on the lookout for.
And you know - riots of people who have no idea how to organise themselves can turn pretty ugly.
Especially food riots.
How did these aliens get here, by the way? Is relativity wrong (in which case we need a new explination for Mercury's orbit, amoung other observable effects of relativity) did they send a STL ship to warp space and reduce relative distance between their planets and ours, or have they found a way to jump over the lightspeed barrier and thus travel back in time every time they come to visit?
Remember the rule; Relativity, Casuality, Faster than Light. Pick any two.
To be sincere, don't quite know about their exact method. Seems they all travel in hyperspace, i.e. back in time (faster than light), because it takes e.g. Pleiadians only 7 hours to get here from Pleiades (if they have a reason to).
This is only one race of many out there, among all these stars and planet systems.
I'm not going to go anywhere near conspiracy theories in this comment...
But for those who want a middle ground between atheism and belief-in-God-through-religion, I am an example of that.
I have been attending a catholic school for quite some time now, and I have to say, religion doesn't work for me.
BUT I do believe in God. COMPLETELY. Like, you COULD NOT convince me otherwise. Why? Sorry, that's not something I'm going to post to the internet.
So here I am, I believe in God, but not in religion... and it feels pretty good!
(I was tempted to make this political after reading Sketch, but now I have something else to talk about.)
What do you mean by believing in God and not religion?
I ask because I can think of several things it could mean.
Do you not see God at work in the routine some churches can fall into?
Do you disagree with some teachings of the religion you refer to, but believe in the existence of God?
Aetheism means rejecting that God exists: there is no middle ground there.
Anyway, as a Christian I think it is healthy to question your faith, your beliefs, and those you have been brought up with: it can make you ask yourself serious questions which can refine and strengthen faith and understanding of God.
(I am not a Catholic myself, but I can name at least two things I disagree with the church I was brought up in over- albeit there are others attending it that also do.)
I have also been raised Christian.
When I say that I believe in God and not religion, I'm not sure how much simpler I can make that.
You see, right now I am going through a somewhat transitional, I suppose skeptical phase of my life. All the old reasons for why things were are pealing off and I am reevaluating a lot of things, one of which is how I understand God. Right now it is a simple as this:
I believe that God exists and I have no reason to disbelieve that God is all that Christians say He is, (all knowing, all powerful, all good, etc.)
I have my own reasons for not practicing the faith which I have been raised in, which I may or may not go into at a later time. By no means do I have any intention of "leaving" my religion, but like I said; I'm finding new answers to old questions.
It sounds more like you are questioning the beliefs you have been brought up with than removing religion, then.
Its a sign of maturity to question your beliefs and what you have been raised to believe- albeit I'm not trying to say that nothing can be learned from others.