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Thank you for the message and I appreciate the follow up reply. It shows a lot of honesty to be able to say you have no proof for why you’re right. I have to ask though, does that mean you also consider the fact that you could be wrong? Does it make you consider the fact that you’ve plucked a contention out of ideas you’ve gathered from others who also had no proof to base it off of? If you can’t know that you’re right, wouldn’t a bit of healthy skepticism be the obvious choice?
I still have a hard time understanding why people will attribute personal experiences to intervention from some form of higher power. Believers aren’t notably more lucky, successful, or healthy than non-believers. Non-believers never credit a higher power with any good fortune they receive, yet believer jump to it nearly immediately. I do think there is a psychological root to that tendency but even if there is a psychological explanation as to why people want to credit other worldly dealings with their ebb and flow of “luck”, it is still an illogical jump.
If you praise a higher power for allowing you to survive dangerous situations do you also scold it for putting you in that situation to begin with? If you attribute some other force to your success in a particular situation, why is it not also in some way responsible for your failures? If you don’t look at it that way, why not? Surely if this power, whatever it may be, can effortlessly intervene in your favor why would you have any hardships at all?
Your belief is well founded to you because you are able to stylize the events and feelings of your life in a way that fit your predetermined conclusion. When you’ve already decided that a higher power is available and capable of intervening it becomes easy to credit otherwise incidental happenings to that power. When you’ve decided that ghosts and spirits are real it is easier to say that a small flash out of the corner of your eye must have been some type of spirit. As far as possession…well, I don’t want to make any assumptions so it is likely better we don’t get in to that.
Personal experience is powerful but it makes any type of misinterpretation of the cause all that more powerful as well. Instead of attributing a random event to simple chance and giving it divine importance makes it much more powerful. It makes it more meaningful and memorable, but in the end it was only a random event. The laws of time and space were not bent for your favor.
I do have to disagree though that the only way to know is to die. Not least of which is the fact that we really can’t know anything when we die if our consciousness ceases to exist when we are no longer physically alive, as all indications currently point to. Even if I can not prove that you’re wrong science can certainly continue to progress to show more and more reason that your view point is extremely unlikely if not entirely impossible. That progression is how we come to know what is and is not real, that is how we further explore what reality is and what limitations reality has. We will likely never know everything but with all we do know, we’ve never found any higher power, any spirits, and any karma, how much more do we have to know before we can say these aren’t ideas worth entertaining any more?
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For the anon that wanted me to post my icon picture. It’s Ricky Gervais for anyone that doesn’t know.
Also the news was floating around a lot yesterday, apparently Ricky Gervais is teaming up with the producer from “Dexter” on a new show called “Afterlife”. It is going to be about an Atheist that dies and goes to heaven. Sounds like a weird idea but if it involves Ricky it will almost certainly be entertaining.
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Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity.
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Majority in U.S. say Bin Laden in hell →
Yet, we would like the rest of the world to believe we’re a country full of reasonable, logical, and responsible adults, we just insist on hoping that people are tortured for eternity after their death. Just because people would like to believe some sort of justice system outside of this life exists does not mean it’s true. They write off a large percent of people who say “I don’t know” as being part of people who don’t believe in hell. Personally if asked I would of said no, there is absolutely no reason for me to think that such a place even exists. People have a hard time letting go of their wishful thinking, even when it is macabre. It is honestly embarrassing that a majority of our country believes such things.
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