Why are you Atheist Agnsotic?

Kharakov

The christian or islamic or any other description of god put forward by
humans has no connection to the 'order that should not statistically be'.

Occam has said before that 'prove that random chance cannot result in
the complexity of reality' and u have proven there is 'direction'.
[thus he probably gave YOU the clue... lol]

But proving such 'direction' DOES NOT prove there is a heaven or hell or
an 'afterlife' or angels or holy spirits or devine omnipotence. All that is human fiction created by humans for human consumpton.

Occam

 

Im agnostic because Ive not experienced anything to make me believe theres a God, im not an atheist becasue if I cant prove there is no God then it remains a possibility. As such it remains in my best interest both spiritually and out of intellectual integrity to keep looking.

 

I'll concede that one. I didn't read closely enough and jumped to my own conclusions. will you accept my gracious defeat and sincere apologies?
Hey...i am intellectually honest if nothing else.
Demonstrating is tuff albeit I have a hard time picturing the supreme being as a ham sandwich I must admit I prefer that over a fire and brimstone cast-everyone-in-hell kind of supreme being.

 

Fat_tony

That about sums it up

Occam

 

this, of course, is precisely my feeling too.

when the bab, or gate, baha'u'llah's forrunner, said "knowledge is a single point the foolish have multiplied", i think this may be what he was refering to.

even though himself a revealer of organized belief, and i think all these persons who were believed when they claimed to be telling people what something big, friendly and nontangable told them to tell people, all the christs and mossessess and budhas and so on, EVEN THEY tried to tell people: look, whatever told me to tell this to you, all this stuff you've been making up about it, all these, as you say, angels and devils and all that, you know that has nothing to do with what any of them were actualy trying to tell anyone.

that's all stuff people have come up with as a way of looking at it.

i know if i say that people are going to point out examples to the contrary, or what they think are, and i'm not going to expend the energy trying to illustrate or argue with them, except to say that all we really know even about these people, these revealers, manifestations, avatars, christs, mohammids, whatever you want to call them, is that what they believed it was their purpose, ment so much to them that they accepted being treated like dirt for the rest of their lives, which in most cases were rather short after having done so.

=^^=
.../\...

 

Themnax

Yes occam understands this. But why did they not get a good bard to write their stories. It's all so trashy.

At the core of his reason, occam believes that reality as we percieve it
is not a product of random chance. ANd he believes that MANY have
come to the same conclusion NOT, because they were told, but because
they worked it out for themselves.

This cannot be show as fact. But indicative evidence is sometimes so
profound that it is taken for granted.
[there are many examples..one is our perception of our own galaxy]
Now..down to earth. [this 'byproduct' of stellar evolution, yet that is
where the action is]
People freely crush cockroaches yet they are the most 'perfect' biological
machines in existence as we know it. WE, could not make a cockroach
no mater how hard we tried...we are too stupid.
A cockroach is FAR more complex than a star.
As u say.. small furry critters with mighty agendas and forests that take the breath away are good evidence.
When one realises that the amount of information in a SINGLE flower is greater than the hard-drive capacity of all the worlds computers.
Then we get a [very small] glimpse of the organisation of reality.

Occam

 

If they are used as tools to maintain the statistically improbably order, isn't there a connection? I don't think I understand what you are saying.

Now I am flabbergasted...

I've often wondered about this. Whether someone would utter something they do not believe to educate another.

Yeah. You would have to experience these things, wouldn't you?

Not really. That seems to be a pretty sweeping generality.

 

I might use that quote someday...very eloquent.

 

Just a reflection:

Perhaps there is a connection with those tools, but is it not also possible that the tools are tapping into some divinity, some spirit, that transcends religious boundaries? It's difficult to see a transpersonal, transcultural, non-dual Spirit within and without the universe (If this were to be so), and thus a culture experiences it, wraps their minds around it and thus creates a way for it to understand, perhaps in an ethnocentric manner, the "Divine"?

Heaven, hell, etc . . . subjective experience does not indicate an objective reality.

 

Yet while what we could know about the flower could fill every hard drive, what we can prove we cant know is far greater still.

 

But, the all important Butt is this: Subjective experience is part of objective reality, and in our hue-mon cultures has a definite effect upon objective reality.

 

Yes! Exactly, but that experience of it does not imply it to be unfiltered, unbiased; just a piece of divinity wrapped in imagination. Or, should I say that it is divinity taken in, interpreted according to our expectations? Just as we filter objective reality and create our subjective experience (The 5 senses as we encounter them), we may also filter divinity and create a subjective experience according to our preconceived notions about it.

 

And these preconceived notions come from where? I'd be supposing, simple man that I am, that these notions arise from our previous experience of the divine, however limited that may be.

So perhaps, if we aren't running away from the truth because some cocksucker tries to scare us with their own afformentioned preconceived fucking notions, and likewise, our own preconceived fucking notions might be dropped, or displaced for a moment or two of ignorance, or given up for the sake of something new to be tried, we might have another glimpse of the puzzle with which to make new notions, of which, through our previous preconceptions, we had nary a whiff because of the shit on our own lips?

 

"You simply are everything arising moment to moment. You do not see the sky, you are the sky. You do not touch the earth, you are the earth. You do not hear the rain, you are the rain. You and the universe are what the mystics call "One Taste."

This is not poetry. This is a direct realization, as direct as a glass of cold water in the face." - Ken Wilber

Is there need to complicate? What is, is in its suchness, and that is you. Everyone is, and everyone can experience 'that', how could they not? How they understand it varies on if they are ready to. Not in terms of authority, but in maturity.

 

I like Edison's answer when a reporter asked his view on how amazing modern technology had become by that time. 'I'll be impressed when we can make a blade of grass.' was his reply.
We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, but spiritual beings on a human journey.
'We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.' Anais Nin
'It takes a smart man to know how stupid he is.' Barney Rubble, to Fred
I agree with Occam and fat tony, especially if this fat tony is the same fat tony from the simpsons.

 

I feel that the first answer is yes they would, they do, often, and without any concern about it. In my experience, it seems that many of the numerous sincere, good intentioned, learned, interested, frontline, institutionally trained and deemed as being qualified in their specific subject, regularly peer-reviewed, societally acceptable, critically and rationally competent, and extensively knowledgeable people who are chosen and prepared by the educational hierarchy to be the voice of authority on all matters intellectual, routinely repeat dogma they have been conditioned to divulge, which, if it is specifically challenged, they cannot defend as valid. They can merely point to the texts, and authors as being the last word on the subject, since, after all, they are the experts, besides everyone else believes and teaches it.
It was both to my great benefit, and extreme annoyance that I always asked teachers 'why?'. More often than I would have thought, I did not get an answer I could critically, analytically, rationally, accept. What I often, and to this day in some cases, found, was that the conclusion my study led me to make was quite different than the one I was taught to accept.
So, I have always noticed a number of 'expert' views, taught in schools, and universities, which I found unlikely to be correct, rationally speaking. The new thing that I just recently accepted is that I have come to believe in the reality of the inexplicable, and unacceptable things which are taught as not existing, and are deemed not real, but instead, just individual mental constructs which didn't really, and cannot really occur. I don't agree that they can't be real. I must agree with Kharakov, in my case anyway, they had to be experienced by me, personally, (over and over, for decades...), for me to finally acknowledge what I was observing, and disagreeing with what I have always been taught to be the case.

 

Bg13

Lol
Barney was the modern socrates.

Occam

 

Kharakov

U are a politician..all that could be said with 2 words 'ignor preconceptions'

Occam

 

i believe as i do because i witness diversity, my own improbable existence, and the complete lack of any final and absolute proof, of any thing.

=^^=
.../\...

 

drugs open eyes, drugs open minds...
up until i started smoking pot i was a christian, really believed in god, really thought he existed.
when i started smoking pot i realized my consiousness as a being, as something ACTUALLY here, that has to live this.. this.. "glorious" life we have, when people are starving on the other side of the world. there is no way that one guy created himself, just to make others and have a shitty earth. even so, it says he just made earth, how did the others get there? they just magicly appear? or did he create them too? the bible is just vague enough to decieve people into thinking that it is true. and people back then would believe anything. but today, more and more people are realizing... wait... there is no chance in hell some spirit just made a ton of shit, and got lazy for some odd years... if there was a god, there would be no "third-world countries" we would all be equal in equity, equal in everything. he would keep us all in line. i cant really even begin to explain why i know he does not exist. this is just a brief little summary.