are you an atheist?

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.

God = Good is a nice approach, but if he were shut out of the bad then he really wouldn't be an infinite being/concept. Not that the idea of a finite God doesn't work (and indeed it's tremendously popular) but to me that is describing more a demigod or some kind of super being rather than an eternal process of creation and destruction.

don't see why an eternal process of creation and destruction has to have anything to do with a god.

or with us

'It's not you, it's Me.'

I need some poetry and some mystery, you know?

one argument i've had with religious-minded friends is whether the word "mystery" is sort of inherently religious, in that it implies some kind of larger or hidden truth. my take on it is no, i think the universe is plenty full of mystery without in any way needing to drag a deity into it. to me, in a way, any kind of theism really actually reduces the appreciation of mystery, because it proposes a structure and an order for things that we don't actually know. a universe without a "god" is a lot more mysterious than one with one.

^ agree 100% with all of that.

'God did it' is the opposite of mystery/wonder, from a Catholic background. It's the equivalent of 'stfu' for most lines of questioning.

For me it's more that there ARE mysteries in the universe, and a common human way of dealing with those mysteries has been making up stories and gods to explain them. Those stories tho were rarely ever just about explaining those mysteries, but also about a host of other things -- how people should act to each other, what are the myths we tell ourselves to constitute communities, who am I in the world, etc. And they also happen to be about God who created the world in 7 days, or Jesus who turned water into wine, or whatever have you. The myths are potent even if you don't fully buy into them (which is how I set up all my beliefs -- take what is useful and shrug at what isn't).

Definitely, transcendent feelings of wonder and mystery do not in anyway require belief in a supernatural god.

Yes, I should have said from the beginning: I am 100% great with religion as mythology. In any other way, not so much.

But you know there are people who can't get their heads around that: for them, religion is meaningless unless it is literally true. I'm not sure exactly what kind of thinking that is a sign of, or where it fits historically but they are there.

But not just mythology, because (unless you're using the word differently than I use it) mythology feels very remote and removed. Like I wrote above, I'm rarely moved by Antigone, or Odysseus, but I am moved by my religious tradition. Not just because it may or may not say more than mythologies, but because my great-grandparents found use in it for creating a life and learning how to live, and even if my grandparents were atheists, they still found use from those stories, and my parents (who came back to religion) certainly found use in those stories, so they are really well worn and lived in in ways that mythologies tend not to be -- they don't feel distant and removed by very personal and present.

But not just mythology, because (unless you're using the word differently than I use it) mythology feels very remote and removed

A religion's just a mythology that hasn't died yet, maybe.