I was born an atheist. I can say that because one must be taught and then adopt a belief system. No one is born with an inherant belief in supreme beings.

Like many others, I was guided through the teachings of several religions, most intensively the Christian religion.

Now most people who walk away from that experience simply shrug their shoulders and in a somewhat disbelieving, confused state, consider themselves agnostic.

I did not. When I walked away I did so after I have spent many years doing my own research and asking a million questions.

When I walked away, I did so with a belief that the Christian religion has been proven to have harmful side effects upon all of society.

Recently, in about the last 8 to 10 years, I realized I have an agenda.

That agenda is to show all those who question the status of their monotheistic beliefs EXACTLY what those beliefs are and what they entail.

All too often those who are suffering are considered by these religions to be just so much fodder for their god, even another feather in the cap of one who NEEDS others to believe as they do.

NOW mind you, this is just my opinion, but I still feel that EVERYONE is entitled to a complete understanding of what others might be trying to lead them into.

So there you have it that's my agenda.

What about you - tell us yours. Chirstians, Jews, muslims (if you're there)agnostics, other atheists, wiccans, pagens, anyone.

WHAT'S YOUR AGENDA when writiging in the religious forum?

I like to see what peoples reactions are to different concepts.

Why? I don't think you answered the question exactly.

I will have to think about mine. Hummmmm. I'll get back to you on that.

It helps me to judge my own reactions.

Sorry to shatter your agenda, but most people need to believe in something. That is why they exsist. Me? I am none of the above including atheist. I don't believe in religion cause I feel that since it's manmade, it was and is a form of controlling people. I also do not condem them for believing something that they feel they need. Just MPO.

I really like religion, I always have and I have developed a tendency to lean toward the more radical concepts. I dont have a problem with it, but seeing other peoples reactions helps to reign me in somewhat. Keeps me from going too far off of the deep end.

Religion is a natural trait of the human mind. I dont know why some people have a difficult time understanding that. why do you think there have been religions in every culture there ever was even thought they were isolated, It happened before and it will happen again and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Its natural.

Religion is natural to humans. Its an advancement not a control organization. Thats called government.Why is that hard to understand?

Hi Red!

I do seek deeper knowledge and understanding for personal gain only. I am a agnostic and like you was never raised religously. Actually I didn't go to a church until I was about 25 years old and I just went in because it was the main attraction of this particular small town in Germany.

In the long run, I enjoy converting religion into fantasy stories for entertainment purposes

I see clearly now how CS Lewis created his stories based on Christianity on the books and movie "Narnia".

My main interest is Norse, Celtic, Sumerian, Egyptian Mythology. Of course there are still some who believe in Norse Mythology. Actually for them it is a religion. If you study Iceland you will be surprised to know that some of the inhabitants still worship Odin and Thor.

I am surprised that many of the stories the bible shows have similiar stories from those religions that existed before Jesus walked the Earth.

I do respect everyones belief system as long as it doesn't harm others in the process. I mean I even knew a person online who worshipped cabbage and he was really offended when he saw that my minestrone included shredded cabbage in it.

In the long run, I enjoy the different views various people write in this forum and sometimes it can be even educational.

Like what Professor Joseph Campbell always said when it came to religion:

" follow your bliss"

WOW, Red!

Just before I opened this up, I thought to myself... I'd like to be able to convey why I'm here.

I've started participating in this forum because I seek to connect with God / Higher Self / What ever you wish to call IT. I've shyed away from Religion for many reasons (reasons I won't go into right now). Yet, I still seek. I love hearing all different perspectives.

My agenda isn't well defined, but I can honestly say that I believe this forum provides me samples of everyone's truth and from this I gain more understanding of my own. I find it hard staying away while I'm at work. I feel an affinity w/ the people here and want to know what's happening. I don't often worry too much about how I'm being perceived. It isn't what's important. I don't know what I'll gain by being here other than expanding insight (and outsight ). I s'pose I'll just have to see.

Your exactly right Smiles. The reason so many religions have similar features is because we as humans have similar features. You take a group of people and put them on an isolated island for a couple hundred years and they will develop a religion. Its a natural part of being human. Just like art and and the written word.

Some people understand religion better than others. Its a natural aptitude the same way some people are better at math or art, etc. than others. This is why most people have to rely on the guidance of others. The people who understand religion and the way it influences the human mind are the same people who create religions. There are many reasons for doing this.Sometimes its control, sometime its money,fame, etc. but most of the time it is an attempt to explain the "truth" as a person sees it, and expressing it the best way they know how.

Very true Mirror on both posts!

I don't know what my agenda is.

My best guess is to find some like minded individuals and a few good friends.

I also enjoy engaging in thoughtful discussion as I sort out my own conclusions thus far and glean any new information I might come across.

I see myself in other people and I want to love them in spite of our different opinions. I look for a reason. We walk different paths all headed to the same destination.

We search for God and for truth and the long path we walk always leads back to self.

JB

120557


You might want to open your eyes just a bit wider. You, my friend are luckier than you think. It's apparent thay you have never felt the pain of religious dogma ruling your life. You think the practice is innocent enough. It is not.

So condemn away, in many cases it would be well deserved.

share information about my beliefs.
convert or lead others to the right path?
such a waste of time.

Oh Di, I wish I would give you a short answer. But your OP has really touched on so much.

Let me first answer your question about agenda right off the bat. My agenda has always been perfectly clear to me, although I'm sure it's not perfectly clear to all others.

My Agenda is Simple

I offer Food for Thought for anyone who interested in hearing it, and I ruthlessly use those who argue against my thoughts as nothing more than more posts to bounce off to enhance my own points.

I'm not here to convince any particular individual of anything. I post for everyone because I love you all.

Why do I have my agenda? For the same reason that most other people have theirs. I believe in it.

I believe that it's detrimental to humanity as a whole to continue to cling to ancient superstitions that have clearly caused division among civilizations, was well as pitting man against man within societies. These ancient superstitions have caused unnecessary grief for so many men and women over the ages, including civilization like the Native American Indians who were wiped out by a people who claim to believe in a God yet they have absolutely no ability to get along with the fellow man. If all the religion taught them is that it's ok to drive out 'savage heathens' then the religion is clearly the work of a devil (or just plain sick human beings)

IMHO the rational evidence that the Bible cannot be the word of God is overwhelming and unmistakable.

The evidence to support it is nonexistent. None, zip, zilch. And those who argue that because certain cities and events that are mentioned in the Bible clearly support it, I say hogwash. There were real events behind all mythologies including Greek Mythology. Just because the authors wrote about real events does not give any credibility to their claims of divine intervention, etc.

There is absolutely no support whatsoever that the Bible has any divine origins, and the reasons for believing that it can't be of divine origin are overwhelming. Why anyone still believes in these myths is totally beyond me.

Like someone else said, some people are just desperate to believe in something, and so they cling to whatever the can find that appears to "float". The only thing that keeps the religion "floating" is because so many people are arguing to keep it afloat. Even though their arguments are absurd and devoid of meaning. They don't seem to care about that at all. Just keep it afloat at all cost. It's an act of pure desperation to believe in something "meaningful".

And this brings me to my next concern Di. A concern that I fully understand.

I post it in my next post:

On Innate Beliefs of Spirituality



This has not been my experience Di. On the contrary my extreme early childhood was the most spiritual time of my life. I most certainly did have a very innate 'sense' of spirituality. And that included a 'belief' in a 'god' of sorts. But my notion of 'god' at that time was one of complete unconditional love. There was nothing required of me to know 'god'. I had not fallen from grace of 'god', and 'god' was not expecting me to repent. My innate notion of 'god' was complete and unadulterated unconditional love.

But there was more to it than just that. It wasn't just an innate notion of 'god', it was an innate knowledge of my own spiritual immortality. Looking back I can only say that life would have been absolutely wonderful if my parents had believed in the 'god' that I knew as a child. It was truly a notion of complete absolute love and acceptance. Not at all a notion of blame, guilt, and a need to repent for evil ways. That baloney didn't come from an innate spiritual experience. That baloney came from adults who taught me those sick ideas from a book that says that God tells people to throw stones at each other.

The 'god' that I knew as a child would never tell anyone to throw stones at another person for any reason whatsoever, not even for reasons of self defense! The 'god' I knew would rather I ran and hid from them than to throw stones at them. The 'god' I knew would provide me with a place to run to that was safe. All I needed to do is what 'god' wanted me to do. And 'god' only wanted me to do what was best for me. It wasn't like a 'command' it was more like a good friend saying, "I help you any way I can".

So even though I did have a deeply innate spiritual experience as a child, it in no way conforms with any manmade religions other than possibly pantheism (which isn't really a religion in its most philosophical sense, at least certainly not a dogmatic one).

I'm convinced of the spiritual nature of our essence Di. I'm convinced both intellectually, and intuitively. I will gladly argue intellectual reasons for why our true essence must be spiritual using bother logic (technical science) was well as pure reason (pure philosophical reasons why it must be the case).

I can't claim to prove it. All I can do is offer reasons based on what I feel is compelling evidence.

But does this send me running off to support the Bible? Absolutely not.

Yes, it's true that if we ignore about 99% of what the Bible actually says we can pretend that it's talking about the 'god' I knew as a child. But that's precisely what we'd need to do. We'd need to toss out about 99% of what the Bible actually says in order to make it compatible with my childhood vision of 'god'

Was my childhood 'god' nothing more than my own wild untamed imagination? It very well could have been Di. I'm not claiming that it was anything other than my own imagination. I'm only claiming that it was a very profound experience, and it did indeed happen to me as a very young child. This flies in the face of what you have just claimed that no one is born with an innate belief in supreme beings.

However, I will confess, that the very fact that you did not experience what I experienced loans credence to the idea that my experience was indeed nothing more than my own fertile imagination. I most certainly won't argue with that. I do not hold my childhood experience up as any sort of 'proof' or even indication of the existence of anything other than my own imagination. But it was an imagination of a spiritual being "other than myself" although, I almost hesitate to say that, because there was truly nothing in my experience that caused me to believe that 'god' was in any way separate from me, or that I was separate from 'god'. Perhaps I was merely in touch with my very own true spiritual essence. I'll grant that possibility, especially in light of the pantheistic philosophy.

So the point to this long-winded post is simply that some people are indeed born with an innate sense of deep spirituality. This has indeed been my own personal experience as a young child.

On the concept of Atheism.

Atheism might seem logical to you, but it holds no logic for me. In fact, it's totally illogical for me.

Atheism basically states that our very existence is some sort of freak accident. We came out of nowhere and just accidentally happened. Well unless you believe that it's 'logical' for a magician to pull a rabbit out of thin air then why would you believe that it's possible for an entire universe to pop out of thin nothingness for no reason whatsoever? Moreover, for that universe to be made of stuff that just accidentally happens to coagulate into living conscious beings who can become sentient enough to ask, "Where the hell did we come from?"

That's one hell of a freak accident Di.

There are other problems with it as well.

Let's accept that it all did happen just by accident. We gain consciousness when we are born. We lose consciousness when we die, and that's that. End of story.

What meaning would life have?

You may ask, "Why does it need to have meaning? It has whatever meaning we give it an nothing more."

Well that sounds good on the surface. But would life have any value at all?

Think about it.

If when you die, it's just "lights out" and that's that. Then, at that point in time you may as well have never existed at all. Once you die, if you no longer have any existence, then at that point in time for you it won't matter whether you had died at birth or lived for a hundred years.

It won't matter what you're life had been like, because you no longer exist.

In other words, if I were to kill you right this moment, it would be no skin off your nose.

Because once you're dead, you'll never even know that you had missed out on a longer life.

Once your dead it no longer matters. For that very reason it doesn't matter when you die.

After you're dead you're not going to exist to complain about it.

I realize that this may be hard to take, but think about it for a while. Think about it long and hard. If when you die it's just 'lights out'. Then it doesn't matter when you die because you aren't going to even know that you had ever lived.

So what? You may say, "I've left things behind. I've made an impact on the bigger picture. I've affected other lives. Hell, maybe I was even responsible for bring someone else into this cosmic accident so they too could have a meaningless life that they won't even remember having had once they are dead"



Sorry, but this truly is funny. If death is meaningless after we die, and we are no longer around to even remember that we had ever lived at all. Then life is just as meaningless. It doesn't matter when you die because you can't "lose" anything. You have nothing to "lose". You won't know that you had been 'cheated' out of a longer life.

Well, if life is meaningless for an individual, then trying to give life meaning by appealing to those who remain behind is just as meaningless. If life is meaningless for an individual, then it's meaningless for a whole bunch of individuals. And all of humanity collectively is nothing more than a whole bunch of individuals.

So if life is meaningless for an individual, then it's meaningless for all of humanity.

Well, we could get into long drawn-out debates of "What does it mean for something to be meaningful?"

However if we already started with the assumption that the universe is nothing but a random 'meaningless' accident in the first place, wouldn't such debates about the meaning of life be pretty much moot?

If we assume that the universe is nothing but an accident then that pretty much says it all. We are nothing but an accident too and therefore nothing has any meaning. Worrying about killing something that was just an accident to begin with surely can't be a meaningful concept?

So, for me personally, atheism is nothing more than the acceptance that life has absolutely no meaning whatsoever.

From my point of view this is no less absurd that the idea that some external godhead is raising us as pets to worship its every thought.

Both of those ideas, for me personally, are just as absurd as each other.

Where Did We Come From? What Are We?

I'm currently reading a book by Alan Guth on the Inflation Theory of the Big Bang.

Alan Guth is a very intelligent man. He has also hung around with quite a few very intellect men who have been pondering the physics of the universe. Alan Guth is one of the leaders of Inflation Theory. With the help of others, he was able to put together a workable scientific explanation of how the universe was able to come into being from 'nothing' without violating the laws of physics.

As an atheist you might be inclined to say, "See, I told you that Sh't happens!"

Well, that's all fine and dandy. However, there's still a little problem. You seem, even Alan Guth's theory depends upon the laws of physics. But what are those laws? And where did they come from?

Ultimately, even the Inflation Theory requires the existence of a quantum fluctuation. These are of course, described mathematically in detail by Quantum Mechanics and they have been observationally verified to agree with the behavior of quantum fields in every known experiment that has ever been conducted in a particle accelerator. That's billions upon billions upon billion of experiment. Nary a one disagrees or behaves differently than the mathematical laws of Quantum Mechanics describe.

So, given that a quantum field exists. And that its natural tendency is to fluctuate, Alan Guth can show how one of these random natural fluctuations can rapidly expand to create a universe just like what we see around us without violating conservation of matter or energy.

Wow! That's one hell of a scientific achievement. Give Alan Guth a big pat on the back!

But does this help the atheistic point of view? I think not.

All it says is that given a quantum field that already has all of the precisely properties that obey the laws of Quantum Mechanics to a 'T' we can explain how a universe can randomly pop out of it.

But wait a minute! Is that an 'accident' that pop out of 'nothing'? Hardly. Clearly there was a preexisting quantum field (or fabric) with specific properties that already existed before the so-called 'accident' occurred.

Well, was the quantum field just an 'accident' too?

Without going any deeper into it, let me give you my conclusions.

The 'quantum field' is the true essence of 'spiritual' existence.

If you want to put that another way you could say that the 'quantum field' is the body of 'god'.

Everything that exists in this universe came from the 'quantum field'.

In fact, to be more precise,... everything that exists in this universe is indeed nothing more than the 'quantum field' vibrating.

We are nothing more (and nothing less) than vibrations of the quantum field. We are the quantum field vibrating. We are the thing that became this universe. We are this universe.

You're not the physical body that you think you are. Sure, Di is the name of your current body. Di will die. Poor gal. And that will be a tragic loss for everyone, because everyone loves Di.

But you will not Di when Di dies.

Neither will you be judged by a godhead who's trying to raise an ant farm to get the ants to worship it.

You will simply revert back to your true essences and say to yourself, "Wow! What a rush! I really enjoyed being Di, she was really cool! I liked being her!"

Well, hey, if you enjoy being Di in this life you'll probably be Di again in some other life, and I'm looking forward to meeting you there, because I'll be there too, and don't be surprised if I show up as Abra, cus I'm taking him with me when I go into the next life too.

So owl see you in the next 'accident' Di. And if you're still an atheist, I'm going to have to give you another scolding!