Atheism

Source

Another hilarious chart.

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, passed away 25 years ago today. (Maybe yesterday by the time you see this. I'm a little late.)

Here's a clip of him explaining what is now usually called "the puddle analogy," with his trademark sense of humor.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46251814

A professor of philosophy finishes a trick four piece puzzle from the character's childhood

Professor Agneto: Ah well that was easy! Twas a trick, putting the fourth piece in, as if you put the first three pieces together, the fourth won't fit because of the topological constraints put on the system by the the initial axioms.

Smart man: Prove it!

Professor Agneto: I'm sorry?

Smart man: I outright reject your claim on the basis that if you said something you must prove it and I will not listen to you to thus continue this conversation without respecting you as a person OR any of your ideas. And I will continue it in the only manner I know how: in a pseudorespectfully hostile manner!

Professor Agneto: Oh, I've had this conversation a billion times. There are a lotta you. No, the puzzle represents an axiomatic system, and what I'm saying is a continuation of the logic of Gödel's incompleteness theorom to complete it based on orthogonal relativity.

Smart man: I don't know what those words mean. Speak English, which I say respectfully and not to evoke any feelings of inferiority in you! Prove it!

Professor Agneto: Well, I can teach you these words. But the "proof" needs to be on you because what I'm describing is what the Buddha described about the entanglement process that creates the illusion of a self and more.

Smart Man: I will make no effort to understand anything you say. I'm just going to command, demand, and expect an explanation. Prove it!

Professor Agneto: Here's a literal science experiment you can do to prove that your intention results in the procedurally generation of your reality!

Smart Man: Reeeeeee! Prove it!

Professor Agneto: Now listen here, why are you wasting my time? I mean, I am creating content for my educational (f)art project designed to provoke people who cannot control themselves (eg: pedophiles), and I honestly cannot tell if you are trolling - you're indistinguishable from each other - so when you're ready to not be a buttsniff...

Mod: R00D! Be civilized!

Smart Man: Prove it!

Mod: This is the smartest person on our side. You will respect him or I'll be forced to cultivate our echo chamber.

Professor Agneto: Ah, well. All Knowledge comes from möbiation, as we all know from the second story of the Bible, assuming you've sinned and corrected it before to know what is objectively good as you observe how the four puzzle pieces that compose your "self" manage to fit together, which no one but you can do. Assuming you've meditated to know what a jhana is.

Smart Man: Prove it!

I am an educator in gnosis. You will believe this is psychosis (prejudice/ocular logs), but I just want to open dialogue about the nature of causation.

Personally, I believe there are many planes of causality. For instance, there is retrocausality. I invented this word to describe our relationship with God: phenomequalitesselation. As a molecule is controlled by the cell it is in yet influences the cell in its nature by its animus, God reaches back through history to influence us and in setting our intention - the only thing we have direct control over - we move God with our most human of choices, and this is what gives us free will and Karma within a deterministic system.

And I can defend that to Hell and back, which is Heaven (you're going to sit with your mother at the same table at the restaurant at the end of the universe), but the direction I wish to travel is to lead into the "turtles all the way down" discussion, to mean that only idiots believe the world sits on the back of a turtle, right? Yea, the big bang is a stupid fucking theory!

Dependent causation - all "things" must have a cause, therefore all "things" are in a dependent chain of causality across time

Well...what caused the big bang?

Let there be light...

Sound came before light; the effect came before the cause. Now, the core of what I teach is not woogity woo. No. I was a hypercrendelivicious chronic masturbator, whatever that means, and I almost fucked my life up. And I think kids are cute. Y'know, kids that might be out masturbating in public today, which is why I want to teach deese dense idiots to not ruin their life, too!

Thus, to be light, you must strengthen your prefrontal cortex so the most divine part of you has complete control over the animal in you. This is a part of love, which I define as being agnetic while being kind to the tamed flesh.

Agnetic - a word God had me invent to mean always doing the supererogatory, voluntarily

Because that's what led to the agricultural revolution to have that fall of man and take us out of Eden, y'know. Also, as I have observed in the demöbiation/undefilement of my sin in the Ālaya-vijñāna, which is the Server we are all Clients to across the Holy Internet, you REALLY should think in the most ethical terms - to mean thinking in the longest possible timeline, and you WILL be reconstituted at a future date to join the telepathic Illuminati Galactic Federation, so you want to not embarrass yourself by wasting your life n dopamine, y'know?

Because the thing about independent phenomena is that they cause themselves. Causation loops. The Alpha is the Omega. The underlying pattern of the illusory physical universe grows logarithmically more complex as subpatterns come together to form superpatterns. Thus, the seven epochs of novel complexity are:

Alpha>Light

Light>Matter

Matter>Molecules

Molecules>Cells

Cells>Creatures

Creatures>Humanity

Humanity>Omega

The transcendental object at the end of time that humanity WILL create is the transcendental particle that can be at multiple places at once and communicate instantaneously with itself to form a topological matrix that acts as waves of light.

Yer a knot, Neo!

And the purpose of life is to learn how to perceive and undo the karmic fetters that bind you to the existence-illusion complex, which Buddhism and the Bibles II+ (occult just means "hidden") teach.

How superpatterns emerge from subpatterns coming together can be visualized:

https://youtu.be/C2vgICfQawE

Poem and stuff:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cultofcrazycrackheads/s/vRFjbZgZoP

But what do you think? Because I am Knowledgeable of the occult, I know different encapsulations of language beget alternative frameworks of reality which change behavior and thus has benefits to survival, which is the memetic benefit of a pantheon, obviously. Thus, I respect atheism as it makes sense, sorta.

In “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” the New York Times columnist tries to reverse the trend of a more secular society. But his reasoning just doesn’t add up.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45251190

By dying, on August 21 Dr. James Dobson, evangelical thought leader, anti-gay activist, and staunch defender of child abuse, did the only good thing he ever did with his life.

[...]

His most famous work, 1970’s Dare To Discipline, stands as both his entry into the  public consciousness and as an early salvo of his views. It endorses hitting toddlers as young as two and three years old (pg. 40 & 41, et al)*. It praises trauma bonding–which is classified as a form of abuse by many actual practicing psychologists, for the record–as a genuine expression of parental love (ch.1 p.2,  pg. 23), bemoans the lack of stick-beatings in the classroom (ch. 3, pg.81) and spends a good deal of a book on raising children decrying the ACLU (pg. 87), the  agency of women (pg. 39 & 40, et al), birth control (pg. 146), and most if not all  expressions of human sexuality (ch. 5). 

A follow-up, 1978’s The Strong Willed Child, begins by recounting a time he beat the shit out of his dog (p. 11-14)  and goes on to extol the virtues of doing the same to children.

It's honestly fucking disgusting how they'll swarm people going through their lowest points in life as an opportunity to "convert" someone

I have considered myself an atheist since high school but I feel like I have been forming my own beliefs about how the universe works and I'm curious about if there are others who think like me.

I have started thinking about free will a lot and how I don't believe we actually have it (depending on what you want to define free will as.) This has caused me to think about how in reality we are not much different than a rock. We have just as much agency in our decisions as a rock does when it is pushed down a river. I've thought about our perspectives and why we see life like we do. What if we are just appendages of some greater energy based being kind of like cells are a part of us. We have cells in our body that are a part of us and perform tasks, but we cannot really manipulate them freely. What if life is like that but the other way around. Energy cannot be created or destroyed and it powers everything. The neurons in your brain are powered by energy it gets from glucose. I feel like everything sort of works like a puppet to this greater energy and when we die maybe we just realize we are a part of it. It feels like I have almost stumbled on my own relgion, but I am willing to accept that it probably isnt really like this and I am not intellegent enough to truly understand how everything works. Its just what I like to believe

Hi, I come from a very Catholic family but never really believed in God. I slowly took distance from religion and now I'm exploring atheism.

Recently found a video about how the "fine tuning" argument was one of the more difficult for atheists to answer.

But thinking about it the argument is the same theists apply when they don't know the origin of something. Since the origins of humankind, we always filled the gaps of the unexplained with the supernatural, specially when there's an apparent order or improbability in this case.

Science might not know why the universe is like it is, but the improbability of it doesn't prove intelligent design.

Edit: Thanks for all the answers, very good points in the comments, and sorry I'm replying so late and didn't explain what the argument is:

The fine-tuned universe is the hypothesis that, because "life as we know it" could not exist if the constants of nature – such as the electron charge, the gravitational constant and others – had been even slightly different, the universe must be tuned specifically for life.[1][2][3][4] In practice, this hypothesis is formulated in terms of dimensionless physical constants.[5]

Taken from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe

Some more context - in the 1970s the Watchtower, which is the organization in charge of Jehovah’s Witnesses, made it official policy that married people couldn’t do oral or anal. However - those acts also didn’t count as sex, so if your husband fucked another woman in the ass, or had sex with an animal, it wasn’t “adultery” and you couldn’t get divorced, until they changed that policy later.

Keep in mind too that “disfellowshipping” means that no other Jehovah’s Witnesses could talk with you - no contact with family or JW friends, who are probably your only friends because you aren’t supposed to really socialize out of the religion. They just changed that policy (and now they say people are “removed” and you can talk long enough to invite someone to church) because it’s so fucked up that the Australian government took away benefits over it.

Just imagine though. You’re raised in a culture where you’re so sexually repressed that giving your husband a blowjob would put your salvation at stake, you walk in on him fucking an animal and absolutely everyone you’ve ever known and been close to turns on you!

This is from Raymond Franz’s Crisis of Conscious which is free/easy to find online. Written by a guy who was on the “Governing Body” of the cult.