boo

another deflection. fair enough.

the only one who can spell out your views is you. if you want to engage in a conversation as an equal, then you would afford me that much. Fry is funny i like him, he has said some things that would put him very much in the "bad atheist" category acccording to some people.Things I would not even say. In fact, I think it was partly thanks to him that the anti blasphemy law was finally gotten rid of in Ireland. vHe was criticizing God on a television Interview and someone reported his anti God comments to the Irish Police. The police never followed it up, presumably because the will wasn't there to enforce such a draconian law. shortly afterwards we had a referrendum to get rid of the law, just a few months ago actually. Yep. 2019, not the 1600's. 2019

oh, so you are still talking to me? whatever for, im not sure. I cant see the second video, it is blocked in my country. the first one is funny, so im a "bad" atheist am I? LOL I just gave my honest account. go ahead and explain why its bad, tell me the alternative (without lying about what i said or being unnecessarily patronizing) but i doubt you will at this point, that doesn't seem to be your goal.

LOL, sure

i know that you are trolling I told my story on the other thread, and thats the price of it. its ok i dont mind. if im wrong then tell your story and lets have a discussion.

i can't help but say this is a bit of a cop out. its very easy to say, lets keep confession, for others but not for me. You dont go to confession, neither do I. So, is there really that much difference between you and I on the subject? why is my rejection of the church considered "vinegar"? im not sure why you think this. You can reject the cult of David Koresh,, any number of cult leaders (living or non living) who were considered by someone to be a "god", or you can reject any of the thousands of religions gone by in history ,but if you reject Christianity its "vinegar". I wouldn't deny a person on their death bed, the solace of being able to hope that there may be an afterlife. I can accept that. but it is the whole infrasructure of religion which prays upon this basic human vulnerability that I reject, and all that is bundled in there with it. yes we as humans fear death (most of us anways) but because we fear X ,does it naturally mean we have to believe Y and Z ? Its the leap of faith that im not interested in. I would prefer if people were genuinely interested in what really happened and what really might happen. remember we are talking about something which has snuck its way into every aspect of human life, education, law, even war. so i think the issue has gone way beyond some harmless concept that just makes people feel comfortable. I would say that the willingness for people to believe in certain things merely because it makes them feel comfortable rather than facing the truth is a big problem today I think it creates a perfect conditions for people to be exploited

thats so freaky to think about. im glad i dont smoke marijuana anymore, i dont think i could take it LOL

wow, it never occurred to me that different people would feel differently about this are you sure you are not an android? maybe not a bad idea to check your body for serial numbers , barcodes, or prick your finger to see if white stuff comes out instead of red seriously though that is interesting, i wonder now if its only me, or only certain 'brain types' that percieve it this way while others dont. I am a visual thinker, i am an artist, so maybe this has something to do with it, not sure.

its right, you could never know. just to muse a little further on the subject, if nobody minds. i was watching a film last night called Replicas (with Keannu reeves) where he accidentaly killed his whole family, but was able to clone them a transfer their minds into the newly cloned bodies (which took two weeks to grow in special pods) - sorry about the spoiler this kind of deals with exactly this question. For Keannu's character he got his family back. but are they really the same people? or are they just different but identical people? my instinct tells me that the original family is still dead. if i were to define consciousness its this feeling that I am somewhere in here, inside my body looking out through a window. if that makes sense. I feel that there is more to me than just some meat, bone and organs. There's someone in here, looking out , pushing the buttons and driving the vehicle. so to speak. No being can see the consciousness of another , only the individual themselves could know if a new reincarnation, or a new version its really them or not. (another being would not know if the new replica really was the old one, or just thought they were) but what I'm trying to say is that, yes it does matter to me, even if the experience and knowledge from a previous live could not be carried over, because id like to be able to continue the experience of being inside looking out. that would be enough. I have to admit that idea of the consciousness being something in and of itself , and weather or not it really exists at all ,is something i really struggle to understand I guess a lot of us do.. Maybe it doesn't exist, but it sure feels like it does.

so dimreepr, as an atheist, do you go to confession in a catholic church? there is a saying in spanish that goes something like "no hay mal que por bien no venga". which more or less means, there is no evil that some good doesn't come from. you can argue that some people have felt good by going to confession, or been helped by it in some way. And i wouldnt doubt, it, perhaps people should do this in a secular way. what i am saying is that overall, the promotion of a myth as fact, or to put it another way, the selling of the lie that is Christianity to the masses, especially to children is, in my view, an evil thing. I don't believe it is good for mental health to confuse fiction with reality. this is the hallmark of mental health problems in fact then you have the old saying "practise what you preach". Im not sure the origins of this phrase, but if priests were good role models maybe my views would be different but this could not be farther from the truth. cant we appreciate it as a myth?

fair enough, then can you clarify what it is you are arguing? thanks

no, I dont believe the ideas of Hitchins, Carrier etc, out of choice. I see their ideas as being pretty robust, it doesnt require any special effort from my part to believe them. to me belief as a choice, is to say 'even though the evidence says otherwise, or even though i have no evidence at all' im going to act as though i believe something is true. I would argue that someone who does this, does NOT actually believe. if you have to choose to believe you do not truely believe. and my friend, fiction/analogy/fable/metaphor/simile are not real. they may have some value in their own right, but to confuse them with reality is to be, by definition, delusional.

Yes, confession is an acceptance of ones failings. but i always found it creepy to have to tell private things to a priest. especially considering their own track record. I don't trust them, they have failed us. I would prefer to face my own failings rather than talk about them to someone who has such a dubious track record as a catholic priest.. yes, Myths can have important messages, but it is important not to confuse fiction with reality, i think that is where the danger is. im sure there is a very useful message in the story of little red riding hood, but if there was a concerted effort to convince people that the story was true, i think this would be an offence to humanity, a great act of fraud.

interesting but i dont think the atheist is 'betting' on anything. i think they are just being honest with themselves. I for example, dont think belief is a choice. I could try to believe ,but then i will have these constant voices nagging at me with questions like "but what about this? and what about that?". you just cant believe in something which doesn't hold up.

yeah, since my last post i have started to think about it in another way. perhaps the only way for it to really be "me" or "you" is if it happened in literally exactly the same place at the same time. so if you could look at the universe from a point of view independently of time itself, then our lives could be depicted as replaying over and over again infinite times, from a point of view independent of time itself we are immortal. however the reality we live in as humans, we only get to see it going forward in one direction at one speed and therefore we only get to see it once. maybe thats it....

i think as a child i took a kind of pascals wager stance on it as in "i might as well go along with it because it doesn't hurt and if I'm right then good, if I'm wrong then it doesn't matter then there was this one pivotal moment for me when some catholic cardonal spoke out against heavy metal music, and my mother innocently read the article in the newspaper, and following that she went to my room and took all of my heavy metal tapes and threw them out. I never forgave the church for this LOL I think if you could trace it all back to one point that might be it. I went to a catholic school and we used to have confessions in the school chapel once per month on a Friday morning. This was always a pleasant surprise to hear we had Mass this morning ,because i would get to miss mathematics or Irish class which i invariably had not done my homework for anyways. always nice to dodge a bullet ! but i never played along with it. i was the only kid in my year who sat at the back of the church and refused to go into the confession box like the other kids. they used to look at me strange as though i was the one being ridiculous. When i was about 13 I also remember asking the school principal if i could be allowed to not attend religion class and instead go to the study hall to study like another kid (Jehovas witness) was allowed to do, i was refused. that was in the 1990s when a lot of scandals about clerical abuse in my country were suddenly made public for the first time. from this moment on i lost ALL trust in the church but since the story of god had been instilled in me as a young child i still found it hard to let go. its as though there is a slight feeling of guilt attached to it that i could not explain. I finally wrote the whole thing off once i discovered Christopher Hitchins, read his books, listened to his debates, and I feel the process was completed when i discovered the work of Dr. Richard Carrier who has effectively proven that Jesus was also a mythical character. I identify a lot with what these guys say, it resonates a lot with the thoughts i had growing up. Believing in god or Jesus is , to me the same as believing in Zeus or any other obscure god, or indeed believing that David Koresh was a god, I don't see any difference between them.

indeed, but that is to assume that the life of the universe itself is finite and that it can only happen this one time. We know the universe had a beginning, and therefore we can say that it will have an end too. That really paints a finite picture. however , before the big bang there must have been certain conditions, probably some kind of highly unstable conditions that gave rise to it otherwise it wouldn't have happened. so in order for another big bang to happen all that would be needed is for those conditions to be restored. I don't think we would be correct to rule that out, since we know it happened once, and if it can happen once it can happen again and therefore can happen infinite times. The chances of the universe being "born" through a big bang scenario, and the chances of life on earth evolving and so on were just as unlikely the "first" time as they would be the second, but yet know that given enough time, these things do happen. for all we know the existence of you and me could be as common as once per universe , given that the universe is also infinitely broad (in terms of space), that wouldn't be impossible, however improbable it was. thanks for engaging with me on the conversation

im not religious or spiritual or any of those things. Im an atheist. im also not a scientist, but i love science. i was listening to a podcast with some scientists/cosmologists/physicists talking about the universe today. and i heard them mention the theory that in the infinite universe, in infinite time, anything that can happen basically WILL happen. this led me to a question. does that mean that you or i could be born again? i mean even if the universe itself had to go on for ever, or even be born and die itself an enormous number of times in order to achieve this , if the number truely was infinity, then by the law of probability, it has to eventually happen right? and given the fact that you or i will have been dead in the meantime ,we might not have percieved any passing of time at all in between. slightly optimisic view i guess. another problem it poses is what does it really mean to be "you", as a child your body was made up of completely different molecules than it is now, so, arguably you are not even the same person you were then, you just think you were. and in some future universe, even if your life were to be repeated verbatim , would you even be you then? or just a different you, while the current you would remain dead. i dont know. but its food for thought. part of me thinks that this is just way too outlandish to be possible even in an infinite universe, in infinite time. but on the other hand, perhaps that is because my brain cannot truely grasp infinity. I mean. a truely infinite universe just has to keep on trying until it happens, right? it can keep rolling the dice until the numbers come up! im sure there must be a mathematical way to demonstrate that even in an infinite universe it would be impossible to repeat even one person because it it is just infinitely unlikely to happen. i would be really interested to hear feedback from someone more knowledgable than me on the subject.

im not a scientist, but i came here because there is a question bugging me. here goes... the universe is approx 13.8 billion years old, it has been expanding since its beginnings, so it was much smaller at one time than it is now. and we can see galaxys which are over 13 billion light years away, therefore what we see when we look at them is how they looked when the universe was very young and therefore a lot smaller than it is now. . but here are my questions if the further out we look, we are looking at a smaller and smaller universe, then why don't these galaxies appear bigger and bigger the farther away they are? or why dont they appear closer than they really are since the universe was very small back then? i can partly answer my own question but im not sure if im right. im assuming these galaxies are not 13 billion light years away from us now, but in fact ,they were 13 billion light years from us 13 billion years ago, (what a coincidence!) but now, they are probably much further away, long past the cosmic horizon, we are basically looking at a snapshot of something that is no longer there. am i right i saying all this? but that still doesnt explain why they dont look bigger than the closer galaxies since their universe was much smaller. (then again maybe they do look bigger than they should look LOL.). id appreciate some feedback on this. thanks