Showing posts with label God Stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God Stuff. Show all posts
There is no God
I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?
So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.
But, this "This I Believe" thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God."
Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.
Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, "How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do." So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.
Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.
Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
Penn Jillette
From "This I Believe" NPR, November 21, 2005
God Stuff
If this is your God, he's not very impressive. He's got so many
psychological problems; he's so insecure. He demands worship every
seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them
for his own mistakes. He's a pretty poor excuse for a supreme being.
-Captain James T. Kirk; Star Trek:
The God Thing
A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually
adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively
low order, hardly worthy of any worship.
- Martin Gardner
"Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong."
- Thomas Jefferson
"All priests dread the advance of science. They preach bigotry and fanaticism at the expense of human reason. A band of dupes and imposters, they sponser ignorance, absurdity,untruth,charlatanism, and falsification."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
-Unknown
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-C.S. Lewis
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help." But like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."
- Lazurus Long
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent---it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.
- Lazurus Long
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves." "Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."
- Lazurus Long
"The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?"
- Epicurus
"For all we know, all the main religions could be utterly wrong, and some minor deity from the bushlands of Africa could be the big cheese in the afterlife!"
- Jubal Harshaw
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
- Blaise Pascal
"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."
- H. L. Mencken
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."
- H. L. Mencken
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth."
- H. L. Mencken
"Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong."
- Thomas Jefferson
"All priests dread the advance of science. They preach bigotry and fanaticism at the expense of human reason. A band of dupes and imposters, they sponser ignorance, absurdity,untruth,charlatanism, and falsification."
-Thomas Jefferson
"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson
To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10, 000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
-Unknown
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-C.S. Lewis
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help." But like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."
- Lazurus Long
God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent---it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.
- Lazurus Long
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves." "Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."
- Lazurus Long
"The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?"
- Epicurus
"For all we know, all the main religions could be utterly wrong, and some minor deity from the bushlands of Africa could be the big cheese in the afterlife!"
- Jubal Harshaw
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
- Blaise Pascal
"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."
- H. L. Mencken
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."
- H. L. Mencken
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth."
- H. L. Mencken
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