Do you guys believe in god?

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Wait, Star Wars fans are also just a myth?

I hate the idea of him.

I really hate the notion of an all-powerful deity - one that could stop suffering but chooses not to. Any apologetics on this topic are ludicrously insufficient - I’m most familiar with Judeo-Christian ones. If I was ever brought before such a divinity, I’d curse him and die rather than prostrate myself before such extreme wickedness.

(I probably don’t need to worry about it since I have yet to see any convincing evidence. Blasphemy is an enjoyable pastime, though…)

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 16 Jul 2022, 4:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I believe in Nature more than I believe in people.

I believe in people more than I believe in God.

I believe that people are a part of nature.

Some people are part of Nature. Others go against it.

I am both, wishing I was more of the former.

I find escape from human psychology through Nature.

But we are all, literally, a part of nature. We all have the same origin.

I think that human psychology is natural, too. It’s just an interesting product of evolution.

I think it’s pretty cool that we’ve evolved the ability to think abstractly which enables us to create deities although I’m not a huge fan of some of those deities. They can say a lot about the people who created them.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 16 Jul 2022, 5:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don’t disagree.

I sometimes separate the two in my mind, though.

Of course, humans are animals. Of course, human psychology is an interesting manifestation of evolution.

But I find it irritating sometimes…..not all of the time.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 16 Jul 2022, 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

A lot of bad things happen in nature. Chimps get involved in tribal battles. Animals hurt each other. Mothers of some species will eat their young. The elements can be dangerous. Stars smash into each other.

It’s not a harmoniously good place - the universe.

I never said it was.

The animal world is most frequently tougher than the human world.

But there are times when I seek an escape…mountains don’t fight each other.

Animals fight each other.

There can be avalanches of snow and rocks. There are mosquitoes and ticks. There is poison ivy and poison oak. There are poisonous snakes.

There is no air conditioning.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 16 Jul 2022, 5:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I just believe in Beatles.

I just like Nature sometimes. It doesn’t mean I actually dislike the trappings of civilization.

I’m not a hater of civilization. I just like to bask in a little fantasy while watching nice views. Nothing profound. Very mundane.

yes but no

best answer so far!

Oh if only...

It's risky to say this but, it really depends what you mean by 'God'.

There are tons of people with NDE's, pre-birth experiences, and it all comes back with something like a Neoplatonist emanationist structure where one great source of consciousness is individuating its experience of self into countless trillions on trillions of separate units of consciousness to learn about itself, in a way kind of 'stimming'. Donald Hoffman would talk about everything being a compilation of very small / granular conscious agents where every social connection between two conscious agents either generated or entrains a new conscious agent as a covenant between them, keep chasing that network of amalgamation upward and you have biological life, human beings, hive minds / egregores, then planets, solar systems, galaxies, the universe, and however many clicks up you have the superset of all sets which would be the same 'Source' or whatever one would want to call it.

What's really brutal about that picture is that you can do no wrong, literally, and it almost seems like you can do little 'right' either, or at least whatever's coming at you - it's the will of the cosmos, you're pretty much stuck. Reasonable theodicy for things like Auschwitz, the Russian gulags, Ukrainian famine, Unit 731, Mongol conquests, a vast history of torture, flaying, mounting people on pikes, etc. - it's answered by forms of consciousness far less 'reduced' than ourselves deciding that they want to have a human / physical experience, they go full submersion as a person cut off from any memory of their broader timeline or identity, and they come back out wonderfully glad they did it.

The reason I think most people won't touch that one with a ten foot pole is it creates really grim / nihilistic picture where we're really play things on a wire from somewhere else and that we're sort of just stuck trudging through whatever fate has been dispensed to us.

Self-evident as to why this could never be a religion, ie. it offers no basis for a social contract and if you can 'do no wrong' then why not go full psychopath and take whatever you can from whoever you can - really Darwinian game theory would encourage that as things are winner-take-all.

Why believe it? When you shake this information out enough times against itself and level the inconsistencies this is pretty much what's left over. I know people like Steven Pinker or Mick West love to categorize all things non-materialist as their 'fascination with why it is people believe strange things' (really glib). The way that happens - mounds of segregated evidence where no one looks across piles and pretends the other pile doesn't exist. As absurd as this game is I think it's almost supposed to remain that way, again not for any political peace or closure but because it's great 'learning'. I really have to hope they've got the same reality-bending capabilities with AI, synthetic biology, and all of the other wonderful x-risks coming our way to keep the 'learning' going, otherwise there's a good chance we'll be maybe a few million anarcho-primitivists naked in the woods and dying from common curable diseases and parasite loads in another few hundred years.