Why theism doesn't work for everybody

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Theism doesn't work for me because I love the idea of infinity. So having a god would be a break in infinity.

Aren't you trying to bring your concept of God into human cognizance. I doubt if humanity can have a true concept of infinity.

Elaborate.

Let's see:
1) I don't buy "The truth is that there is no one explanation that fits everybody." The statement taken on its face collapses very quickly into relativism. Maybe all that is meant is that explanations exist to fill holes within the gaps of currently existing ideas a person has, which is not relativist. However, it suggests instead "People have their private, independent, and valid truth concepts". Even further though, even if there is some variation, I don't think variation is the driving factor, as the epistemic concerns really should be equally valid for all parties, simply because of the nature of truth.

2) "In their minds, there actually is something immense behind it, but it feels almost sinful to ascribe human-like qualities to it. Your human-like image of God is just another "golden calf," really. What is going on "out there" is more incredible and more important than the entire human race, and it is an incredible privilege that we are being given a chance to just...watch it for a while. "

Only describes the more mystical atheists. A lot of atheists are not mystical, and lack some sense of the transcendent, de-emphasize it, or even have a reversed out sense of it. You did admit this was only your mind, but I get the feeling that the community does include a lot of the less mystical and more cynical minds.

I tend towards a de-emphasization of mystical tendencies, due to a certain desire for "realism". I also don't have strongly aesthetic tendencies in the first place, so avoiding the artistic interpretation of reality isn't a struggle for me. It's basic. Atheism is simply the result when you cut into the world and examine the broad trends in a sensible manner.

However, I also have a perspective that is the reverse of happy transcendence also bustling around in my head. My more aesthetic and "spiritual" feeling isn't that there is "something immense behind it", and that any of the traditional holy terms apply to it. Instead, I see a universe created by blind idiocy, where all of life spawned from the vicious calculus of evolution, an evolution that cared nothing for truth, an evolution that cared nothing for beauty, but rather one that only was governed by differential reproductive success, and as a result of this, I see a world full of lies, and one with thousands of uncurable uglinesses even going down to the very heart our perceptions, actions, and emotions. The truth that no god would be foolish enough to create such a world isn't a matter of "golden calves", it's a matter of humanity's long progress in understanding the world. Failure to grasp the non-existence of a being like god isn't a "sin", it's a failure, and one that results from the glitchy hardware we were born with. The aesthetic of this world isn't "awe", but rather cold examination, and even some degree of horror. It's less loving mysticism, and more HP Lovecraft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmicism

3) I am not sure there is anything to consider this true: "this mindset makes it very easy to come to grips with your mortality". The issue I really think, is that our reactions to death are emotionally driven, with rationalizations after the fact. Everybody will eventually come to grips with their mortality, and the reason is simply because it's too stressful NOT TO. However, honestly, there is no real solution to the problems of dying. I mean, even an afterlife has a tawdriness to it. Ok, so everything goes on eternally. We still have to wonder about boredom. We have to wonder whether that life after life will extend into anything meaningful, or whether it's just that "the wonder of the divine can keep us endlessly satisfied". Duration is simply a fact. Change is simply a fact. Etc.

Hey Awesome, do you think one person or even a group of people can know the whole truth. It seems clear from what you have written here that you do not. I am not a Hindu but Maya may have something to say to us. I can only think of one way to know the truth.

I mean that the idea of a god implies some kind of overseer, or creator, or instigator. I prefer the notion of infinity which I think means there is no initialising of the universe. There is no end or beginning to space and time. Having a god would indicate there is some external controller or entity that infinity would not allow.

To me, infinty means everything, and also is something that cannot be measured. Humans are too preoccupied with boxing things, categorising things, and measuring things. Infinity is like a refeshing freedom of that.

Rob, are you defining God as finite?

"Know the whole truth"? I don't know what you mean. If you mean every single fact in existence, then probably not. If you mean have true beliefs then I definitely believe people can have true beliefs.

As sure as I didn't throw in that caveat, some moron would have stomped in and shouted, "hey, I'm not like that!" leading to people thoroughly missing the point of the OP.

That was the point of me stating, "there is no one explanation that fits everybody," before I tried to postulate an explanation, to theists, for why (some) atheists simply aren't suited to theism. If I hadn't stated that caveat, a lot more people would have made the idiotic and pointless remark, "that doesn't fit everybody," missing the point that I wasn't trying to explain everybody's thoughts in exact detail.

However, I also had to take into account my intended audience. Theists often have difficulty holding in their minds the concept of a "universe without a god," so I had to demonstrate how atheists have an essentially parallel concept of the universe that simply takes on a different form. My own private beliefs are actually a little bit less "mystical" than I suggested in the OP, but I could not have communicated what I meant as well if I had tried to postulate a more precise concept of how I and many other atheists tend to look at the universe. Sometimes it's necessary to sacrifice some precision for the sake of improving transmissibility.

It actually requires a more imaginative mind to comprehend a universe that was not created by a powerful "father figure," and this is one of the inherent limitations of our animal minds. It is actually normal for a person to superimpose anthropomorphic or, at best, zoomorphic interpretations onto reality. You are really not much different from your pet dog in how you put your thoughts together, at the most basic level.

When we forget this, we tend to make some stupid mistakes in interpreting human behavior. For example, I once had somebody point out that the use of the atlatl was evidence that our primitive ancestors thought in a cold-blooded, methodical manner about capturing larger game for the sake of feeding larger numbers of people. The most probable reason that they enjoyed using the weapon in real life, though, was that it was a cool toy they could play with, and their motivation for pursuing large game was most likely that it made them feel impressed with themselves to see that they could overpower a much larger animal. It is unnatural for human beings to think in a cold-blooded, methodical manner. We are at heart creatures of passion and impulse...including those of us who consider ourselves to be rationalists.

You chimp. You pry into superficial experience to dig out how it works for the same reason that you would cut into the hide of an animal to dig out the sweet-tasting organ meat. You are the same brute animal we have always been.

You are inclined to respond to this very post in an agonistic manner because, when you and I interact, your posterior pituitary gland starts releasing vasopressin, along with other hormones. It gives you a sense of social gratification to challenge someone. You would want to debate with me even if you and I could not find a single topic that we actually disagreed on substantially. We could spend hours shouting the same exact arguments at each other, just with irrelevant syntactical and semantic differences, and it would give you the same buzz.

As the ground shook, the beast rose up, wreathed in flame. Its maw descended over the sky and cast it into darkness. Forests withered under its footstep, and its very breath poisoned and befouled the water.

You would do better if you were to learn how to comprehend the shorthand version of things. It saves a lot of trouble.

Hang on. I thought that what most atheists usually mean by this, when they say such a thing, is not so much a mystical significance of it all, but rather claiming that understanding of the cosmos enhances its beauty in some sense rather than destroys it. This is usually in opposition to theists who argue that the reductionist approach used by science reduces everything to "nothing but", eg "we are nothing but a collection of atoms", "the universe is nothing but energy and matter" etc.

Famous people who have had this view include Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan. As an atheist, Richard Dawkins also has this view, which he describes in his book "Unweaving the Rainbow", yet I would describe him as anything but "mystical":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unweaving_the_Rainbow

I am taking the opinion that a god would be seperate from the universe, as seems to be the implication when listening to people talk about gods. If a god were to create the universe, then it implies this god is a seperate entity from the universe.

Most people are bound by cultural differences and their own frame of reference. We know about the case of Australian aborignals who were forced to be westernised. Those people felt lost and couldn't cope. There may be some instances which can be looked at from differing viewpoints. I find it difficult to define truth without getting all religious on you. I suppose absolute, universal truth is free from the requirements of culture and any individual frameset, but I already seem to have made the case to be against that in practical terms. You must know that Maya means all is illusion. I don't take that to mean in the stage performers sense, rather reality is shaped by individual perceptions. Believers will say that God is outside of any human frame of reference.

You seem to imply that God had something like a hammer and chisel to create the universe. I do not believe that God is separate from the universe. It seems danerously close to pantheism to say something like God is the mind of the universe, and I am aware that Fundamental Christians would be against that idea. To be honest the whole things gets a bit too hard for me to grasp on.

I meant mystical in perspective, NOT mystical in ontology. And yeah... proper terminology gets complicated, but I was using the label "mystical" to point out(rightly) that this kind of mentality shares something in common with mysticism, and some people's minds really are or can be crasser than that, or simply not carry the same notion of the transcendent that is natural for our more mystically oriented cognitive hardware.

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I don't know how you've actually made the case against ANYTHING in practical terms though. You've made a case that truths are difficult to arrive at, but you have not made the case that all factual claims are indeterminate. You have not made the case that there are no intersubjectively verifiable claims. I mean, Grebels, your assumption that truth is inherently related to religious transcendence is odd.

For one "truth does not exist" makes no possible sense, because if truth did not exist, then the set of claims that would fall under truth, would include truth's non-existence, which is why most Western thinkers consider the existence of truth a basic fact about existence.

Secondly, atheism and materialism are both claims about certain facts being true about reality. I can't both deny a truth and affirm it in the same breath, and there is no reason for me to do this. Frankly, there are a lot of claims that we naively will declare to be true, such as "If you jump off of a cliff, you will suffer extreme injury and possibly death". If you told a random person this, my strong suspicion is that they will uphold this as true.

Thirdly, the experiences of marginal groups really isn't taken as a practical undercutter to anything we'd know as truth. In practice, "truth" is related to the epistemic community that we are in. That epistemic community has rules and regulations that exist on the set of things that could ever be called "true". Aboriginals and schizophrenics are outsiders ANYWAY, so in practice, we still will have definite things we can call truth. (Not only that, but in all honesty, I am not sure that cultural constructivism goes as far as the outright postmodern sense anyway, simply because human learning is based upon a lot of pre-built and instinctual cognitive mechanisms that function across cultures, and that it would be, because anybody who jumps off of a cliff will stop breeding, etc)