are you an atheist?

there is no overarching consciousness controlling it all.

To me, this is like denying your own role in the perception & creation of this quantum dance of energy we call reality.

― Adam Bruneau, Monday, 7 June 2010 16:39 (54 minutes ago) Bookmark

I don't see that- it's a denial that the dance is being directed. It's a moshpit, not a waltz.

You can't have either a waltz or a moshpit without music. The music in this case being your own consciousness, combinations of materialist subjectivity, ages-old cell-embedded psychological history, the effects of planetary/solar/astronomical gravity & radiation, and the constant influence of unseen dark matter, particles & waves that are too extreme to be detected by current scientific instruments.

I think the idea that YOU are the one directing the dance is not incompatible with the idea of an infinite and eternal consciousness creating the universe. In fact they are both, on some level, the same thing.

"ditching this long historically embedded way of interacting with each other and the world (through spirituality/religion/etc)"
but atheism is a part of this tradition, too. if you re-read chronicles of jesus with jesus-as-atheist in mind, it makes for a richer reading.

bruneau u crazy

Even if you can somehow create a secret history of atheist-Jesus, the fact still remains that much of human history involves participation in religion, religious experience/sentiment/affect etc. Even if there's members of human history who never really bought into it.

I can never, ever dig the "you create your own reality" scene. Part of this is just having known too many ultra-jerks who were into Seth Speaks/Jane Roberts, including that most formative of people, the high school boyfriend.

It's so solipsistic.

re: secret agent jesus, You don't have to construct a secret atheist backstory -- just reread the gospels with the idea that these are the actions of an atheist seeking to break apart orthodoxy.

I believe there are ways to deal with the world even if you've jettisoned ritual, but there's nothing that more details the feelings of loneliness and sadness than covering up your mirrors, taking off your shoes, and sitting on the ground when a loved one dies. Tearing your shirt when you first find out. Having all your friends and family visit you for a week to share with you about the dead and talk about life and remember things with you. Like that completely captures the experience of dealing with this horrifying and frightening experience of dying that I don't know how I'd understand if I didn't have that ritual to grab onto. Or every Saturday having friends come to a table together to sit down and eat bread and talk about the world and the things that are bothering us and tell over stories that we heard from our parents and grandparents -- these traditions are really important to me, and often the presence of God never even matters in light of the presence of the other human beings.

Seth Speaks/Jane Roberts

? never heard of this. off to google I guess...

my only real problem with the "you create your own reality scene" is just that, damn, pretty sure I could come up with a better, less depressing reality than this one. like, it's true on some levels and def. a trip to think about, but on the crude material plane you still have to deal with shit like gravity and other people and death and the passage of time and stuff like that.

xp to Philip about atheist jesus -- I don't know the Gospels as well as I know the Old Testament/Prophets, but it seems pretty clear to me that a simple reading of them requires God-believing Jesus. If for nothing else than comments like, "No one comes to the father but through me," and historically situating him requires putting him in an era where true atheism would be an anachronism.

One of my problems with it is they* say you literally choose everything, like if you got raped, you 'chose' for that to happen on an unconscious level, or if an earthquake kills 8,000 in Guatemala, all 8,000 of those Guatemalans simultaneously 'chose' to die. Not that I'm saying anyone here is espousing that.

*they = say, Jane Roberts again, or the people in the "What the Bleep movie," those type of hardline New Agers

(sorry for interrupting this other secret Jesus conversation)

Magical thinking is totally bogus imo. Not just intellectually, but emotionally it feels very false to me. The world doesn't feel like I can just choose to have whatever happen happen. And a lot of my experience in life is figuring out how I can make things work, and get things done, using the limited power and influence I have. Why would I abandon a way of looking at the world that gets things done for me, and that gibes with my gut feelings about how things are, for a system that promises much more but ultimately feels much emptier of meaning? I want a world where tragedies are capricious and mysterious and where I can't always control everything. I don't want a world where I ask the Universe for a cadillac and then try to figure out why my asking wasn't powerful enough to get it (or how I might be secretly undermining myself). Just too utilitarian an approach (and then on top of that, it kinda seems intellectually insane).

Okay maybe I mis-used the term. The world doesn't feel like I can just choose to have whatever happen happen. is not at all what I meant by "magical thinking." And congratulations for making me look it up, because I didn't know it was a specific "thing" and I will now have to stop using it at all, ever.

I just meant the idea that there are things beyond one's ken, a sense of fitness in the existent Universe, that there is a way things should work together that is more than cold logic. I need some poetry and some mystery, you know?

Oh yeah. I agree with that. The world is a confusing, mysterious place!

(Laurel = Bruneau, I'm assuming?)

How dare you.

Laurel's not saying "you create your own reality"!

afaik

Oh, sorry. Didn't see that you were continuing something you were discussing an hour ago. My bad!

"pretty clear to me that a simple reading of them requires God-believing Jesus."
It's not "unreliable narrator" that I'm suggesting, but something close to it, like sloppy journalism? Where you can see that a quoted person has a different agenda that what the reporter thinks -- like when that fake yoyo guy punked those TV morning shows, or when Dishwasher Pete sent his friend posing as him to the Letterman show.
If you read it that way, things like "No one comes to the father but through me" can be read as a rejection of the rituals and dogma of prior religions with an emphasis on fairly religion-neutral set of desired behavior and ethics.

Is this like imagining Ferris Bueller's Day Off happened only in Cameron's mind?

Nope I'm not Laurel.

One of my problems with it is they* say you literally choose everything, like if you got raped, you 'chose' for that to happen on an unconscious level, or if an earthquake kills 8,000 in Guatemala, all 8,000 of those Guatemalans simultaneously 'chose' to die. Not that I'm saying anyone here is espousing that.

I don't see how any of those things listed above are impossible. Also instead of saying 8,000 Guatemalans 'chose' to die, what if you simply 'chose' to see a news report on it.

Ok, I'm not going to have a conversation about this. I'll just end up saying shit I regret.

Is this like imagining Ferris Bueller's Day Off happened only in Cameron's mind?

^This is really funny tho!

They both seem like things that are fun to talk about after a few drinks, but I don't think either interpretation (Christ as atheist, Cameron as saddo hallicnator) holds up in context.

hallucinator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAB-1M1ZeYE

I'm w/ Abbott on this, tho even after a few drinks (or lol, other conversation enhancing devices) I'd rather to talk about something else :P

for real

I do believe that we all constitute the universe 'participating in itself' and I do believe in some kind of all-mind but i also believe in solids i.e. a rock is a fukkin rock.

(my answer to thread q is 'no'.)

xp Adam, I agree with you that reality is a slippery creature, and each of us constucts his or her version of reality according to a complex stew of (internal) cultural/psychological factors and (external) physical/chemical stimuli. But it's wrong IMO to make the jump into assuming that all reality is formed by individual, or even collective "choice" - ie those Guatemalans did not choose to die, on any fucking level.

There is the Spinozian pantheism, where everything in the Universe is all a part of God, and then this Chassidic/Kabbalistic panantheism, where God is both everything and above everything. According to some Chassidic explanations, the highest level of the human soul is Yichud, which is this level of total unity where difference/exception doesn't exist, and comes from a high level of Godliness. So there have been historical interpretations that a human being is actually God being played out in this world, but is just an extension of this higher form -- the analogy is that we're all monopoly pieces being moved around by one player, but we all think that we are moving ourselves. (But the better analogy is that the monopoly pieces move themselves around the board and simultaneously the player moves them around the board, because they are both moving with the same consciousness and will.) This is also, secretly (lol), the Chassidic way of dealing with free-will and determinism.

Wasn't Einstein saying he believed in Spinoza's god a polite way of saying he was an atheist?

There's a lot of scholarship on what Spinoza believed exactly, but I think it seems clear Einstein believed in some form of the divine, just not a personal god.

jeez I really need to read Spinoza, don't know how I've gone this long avoiding it

Einstein was definitely not an atheist

Spinoza is super important, and next to Abraham Joshua Heschel (and Shneur Zalman of Liadi), is the most formative theologian in terms of creating my own feelings about God + Judaism.

I'm aware of him, read plenty of stuff that references him, but for some reason never gone to the source. To the library!

"Einstein was definitely not an atheist"

I will trade you Bill Maher for Einstein. Well, basically you can have Bill Maher for free. But we are very interested in Einstein playing for our team.

Who in their right mind would want Bill Maher on their team?

Wow so it sounds like I might be a Spinozian Pantheist!!!

I don't personally think that anyone's scientific accomplishments should qualify their religious opinions. And I've read Einstein's "The World As I See It." Unfortunately being a genius in one area didn't make him super insightful about other conditions of being alive, writing literature, etc. Even if he was an atheist I'd be really eye-rolly.

Who in their right mind would want Bill Maher on their team?

yeah seriously - you can shoot this guy into the sun afaic

I'm not saying Einstein's not without shortcomings. I'm just saying he's a better rep for atheists than Bill Maher.
I'd also trade Bill Maher for Dick Dale.

But Einstein definitely did NOT belive in a personal god who hears prayers, created the universe, and directs earthly events. I belive he was, more or less, agnostic.

"My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a lawgiver who works on the basis of reward and punishment."--Einstein, 1950

"The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive."--E in 1952

I believe he was, more or less, agnostic.

no. he believed the universe had a rational, fundamental design underpinning it, he made this clear constantly (and most famously with that "He does not throw dice" line). Just because someone is knot a bonkers fundie /= they do not believe in God. wide spectrum of beliefs, ya know.

a God with personality, who gives laws = these are not requirements for a concept of God.

a God with personality, who gives laws = these are not requirements for a concept of God.

― in my day we had to walk 10 miles in the snow for VU bootleg (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, June 7, 2010 8:11 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

But they are definitely requirments for belief in the belief of god in the judeo-christian sense.

"I have never imputed to nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in nature is a magnificant strucutre that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism."--circa 1955

"I have repetedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose ferveor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intelletual undersanding of nature and of our own being."--1949

First encountered something like pantheism through my (c of e) Sunday School teacher: "Do you believe in Good? Excellent, then you already believe in God, because, God is Good" , then pointed at a blackboard on which was written "GOD = GOOD", to really stress these two words were equal, identical and interchangeable. I still do believe in God as shorthand for goodness, I think, and I do very occasionally "pray to God". I guess I could also call the same activity "meditating on goodness", or even just "thinking about what might be the right thing to do", but the Religious tool of prayer does help to provide a nice framework for enquiring how to be better... Anyway, to answer the OP, as regards the story of the beardy bloke in the sky, nah.