Knowing There's No God Vs. Believing There's No God

Not quite. I'm saying most people have that problem. Some handle it by religion; others by sex, drugs, rock n'roll, or power trips, chasing the dollars, etc. False gods. Or by secular religions like Communism, nationalism, or Ayn Rand's objectivism. Relatively speaking, I think those are more destructive.I don't want to imply that atheists and agnostics live meaningless lives. I take fellowship regularly with a group of them. One posts on his webpage: "atheist tells you what I don't believe, humanist tells you what I do believe." That seems to be the general attitude of the group. I think a person who makes a sincere, conscientious effort to seek truth and lead a moral life is on the right path regardless of what they happen to believe about God.

More spiritual? Maybe. Spirituality is a sense of the sacred, and they certainly had that to a greater degree than is common in secular circles today. But they were also religious--in a much more informal sense than we think of in modern society, but still religious, in the sense I've previously discussed (creed, code, cultus, community).

 

knowing not what there is or is not, but that what has yet to be imagined, is as likely or more, then anything that already has.

 

I like to keep my options open....lol



I also hate labels...............

Mzzls

 

i do not know what is not. only that what is not known is not known.

 

This reminds me of the terminology used by some when they ask " do you believe in God? ", "do you believe in Satan?" "do you believe in ghosts?" etc.
My query is why should we even be asking that question using the verb "believe" ? The correct question should be "do you think God etc exists?"

 

Maybe you mean faith, which is NOT simply belief

 

Anyone who insists that they know with absolute certainty either way is deluding themselves.

 

I find it much easier to believe than to have faith. I once asked a theologian what the meaning of faith is and he didn't answer.

 

believe, well i believe what is not known is not known. and why would anything unknown owe anything to what people tell each other to pretend, no matter how many are doing so.
none of which stops anything known or unknown from existing, if it, not us, chooses to.
far more likely is an unknown so completely unlike what any belief that has a name claims to know about it.

 

its not about that anything can't exists
its that everything does so in ways so different, unrecognizably different, from the ways in which people tell each other to expect them to.
(that's the best way i know how to describe it. how well that gets the immage accross, i expect milage to vary)

the opposite of religion isn't science, the opposite of both is the unwillingness of the human ego to accept its ignorance,
to accept that nothing has to be known to it in order to exist, to owe nothing to what it thinks it knows,
to just accept that things can and do exist without its even imagining that it might.

all of the words about thing that remain unknown are examples of that,
all of beliefs have a part which is true, the wanting people to not want to cause harm part,
but all the discriptions of things unknown, that's just the ego refusing to accept what it doesn't know.

and the thing is, if we just stop doing that, there's a whole panarama of strange wonderful beauty, beyond the barririer we errect,
at the edge of what we keep wanting to pretend we know.

i wish there were a way i could just hand this to people, but i'm not a god, nor one of those who have been chosen by gods to channel them,
just an ordinary sapient who refuses to blind themselves by a really unjustified aversion to strangeness.

i don't believe 'gods' who are characteristics of ourselves are anything like what real gods are at all,
but rather the very thing, is that whatever gods might be real, the whole things is that they are not.

we live in a universe that except for tiny pockets of it here and there, on the one or so planets per solar system that harbor life,
is so almost completely mineral, that we'd never know life was a thing that existed if it were not for our life forms being an even tinier part of it.

we don't know anything about gods. only that they may or may not exist, as they, not we, see fit.

we can see things in our dreams, and all i can say about that, is that what i see in mine, is just nothing like what any of the beliefs say,
but more like what our world would look like, if every historical decision point had been made on the basis of logic in the service of consideration.

and the role of gods or a god, is just as hidden as it is in our waking world if not more so, though of course you might meet anything there too.

 

Well, everybody is free to define terms as they choose, so long as they make clear how they are using them. But really, this definition simply sets up a meaningless distinction as a straw man to be easily knocked down. Faith is , by this definition, irrational. This is not a standard usage by any means. I do agree that faith is not the same as belief. Too often we confuse it with believing the unbelievable, as in the Apostle's creed or the Nicene creed. Marcus Borg defined faith as trust. Luther defined it, as I do, as a "joyful bet". Faith, in that sense, is unavoidable--in science, religion, and everyday life--since nothing is certain, not even that. Santayana talks about "animal faith"--a minimal in intuitive confidence that the material world and its inhabitants exist. I'm reasonably confident right now that there are real people out there reading this post, and that MeAgain is also a real person. He could be a hallucination, and I could be a brain in a jar in a science lab, but I'm willing to take the leap of faith. Or more accurately, "hop of faith", since I make educated bets based on reason, available evidence, experience, and intuition. In other words, it's a judgment call. And that's my problem with the definition of faith in Ethics Defined. It's really talking about Blind faith.

I think non-rational belief can be justified if there is no available evidence to go on, reason and experience aren't able to get a handle on the problem, and a decision happens to be made. But irrational belief, believing contrary to reason, the evidence, and experience, can't be justified. Oxford professor Nick Bostrom thinks we're living in a matrix-style virtual reality. Mathematical physicist FrankTipler equates God with the Omega Point singularity and tells us this can be proved by the laws of physics. I have faith that they're both wrong, although they hold chairs on the faculties of prestigious universities and get paid more than I do. I also have faith that Tucker Carlson is a jerk, Fox news is a menace to society, and Trump is a narcissistic sociopath, even though lots of people seem to think he'll make 'Merca great. Of course, I could be the one who's wrong. But I place my bets and takes my chances--Okie existentialism in action!

 

There was once a man, he went to the pet shop and got himself a dog, he was very happy with his new dog. In the morning he took his dog for a walk, throwing the ball and the dog would fetch it back, he came across a river and thought I wonder, so he threw the ball into the water, to his surprise the dog walk on top of the water, got the ball and came back, the man could not believe his eyes so he did it again and sure enough the dog walked on the water and fetched the ball. So the man set off to get his friend thinking he would be so surprised at this, so they were walking the dog fetching the ball, when they came to the river, the man threw the ball into the water, the dog walked on the water and got the ball, there was no reaction from the friend, so he did it again, the dog walked on top of the water and got the ball, still no reaction from the friend, so the man asked him “did you not notice something odd about the dog “ and his friend answered “YES YOUR STUPID DOG CANT SWIM.

 

you can never KNOW what doesn't exist, because nothing needs to be known in order to. not just gods, but anything and everything.
you can know that some things exist, and you can not know that some things exist, but you can never know that anything doesn't or can't.

oh and people are so full of both. just because their ego doesn't want to accept its not knowing.

 

The person who thinks they know everything will just stay stagnant, the 3 words , I don’t know, will open up a world of new knowledge.

 

The person who embarks on a quest for new knowledge is likely to have some sense that the quest has a chance of being successful--in other words, faith. If (s)he says: I can't prove that this will get me anywhere so I'd better stay put--the logical positivist approach--(s)he'll be stuck. But even A.J. Ayer, inventor of logical positivism, acknowledged he couldn't verify it empirically. Atheism rests on the faith that the non-believer won't be struck down by a big ol' lightening bolt when (s)he says (s)he doesn't believe--a willingness to think or act in the face of uncertainty and risk.

 

its not that anything can't or don't exist, its just that we live in a universe that owes nothing to the unwillingness of our egos to accept that anything can exist without our knowing about it.

faith that odds are somewhere around where an average of other people think they are? or perhaps simply faith in reasonableness.
not that people always are, but minerals, which make almost the entire universe, generally seem to be.

well as i suspected, i had already said much the same, and nooka seems to have said it best this time.
that's why i don't call myself an athiest as such, because i 'have faith' as it were, that the unknown being unknown, prevents nothing.

i am more interested in other speculations then those we hear most often. even walking half a mile in the woods has more diversity then those we do.
no need to vilify diversity with the pejorative of chaos, or the uncanny valley, these are manipulative preconceptions.
to which again the universe we can observe owes nothing.

 

i believe in everything anyone has ever imagined and ten times as many things as anyone has yet to,
but in entirely different ways, in they're all being entirely different from, what anyone has ever told anyone imagine they know about any and all of them.

mostly though, i see a world of rocks and trees and landscapes more then being about personalities, those of humans or gods or the whole universe would would have to be from self awareness. i mean i believe self aware beings that are neither physical nor imaginary are certainly possible, even probable, but for everything to begin and end with them is a narrower perspective then makes any kind of sense, even of what an ordinary person can casually see, without any great effort, by merely not filtering what they see, through the assumptions they've been told or taught.

 

Bertrand Russell spoke of a hypothetical teapot that orbits the sun, and made the point that your inability to prove it isn't there is no reason to think it is.