sugarbeth

Hi, I'm Beth...I'm new here.

This one of the few places I can talk about my viewpoint. Maybe a similar one has been brought up here before, and if so, maybe someone can point me to those threads.

I'm a molecular biologist, and very non-theist. I guess playing with the stuff of life on a day-to-day basis clears things up for me pretty well.

Anyhoo...

I have an almost obsessive reverence for life. I even appreciate all the sucky parts because I know you can't experience the good without some bad once in a while. The downside, however, is the complementary, obsessive sense of self-preservation, but oh well! - ha ha ha!

With this love of life in mind, it occurs to me that anyone trying to sucker me out of my life is evil. If someone promised me a better life behind door #2, that person can only be a demon. This is how I see organized religion. A complex con by the perfect devil. And he is very good at what he does.

Most religious folks have said to me, "this CAN'T be all there is!" when explaining why they believe in heaven. This flabbergasts me. Life is the most precious gift one could ever have. The god I would believe in (if I ever were to do such a thing, which I'm not), would get very pissed at people who didn't appreciate this gift and were awaiting something "better", damn ingrates.

That's my intro. Take a look at my cute family if you like.
http://home.attbi.com/~martin-family

beth

lpetrich

If the existence of a next world could be verified the same way that one can verify the existence of something in this world, I would accept it.

But until that happens, I think it most reasonable to act as if it does not exist.

There is also the serious question of how much of a "consolation" that belief really is. Where are those whose last words are "See you in Heaven"? Where are those who turn funerals into celebrations?

Also, if one seriously believes that one will be very happy in the next world, then why not try to send oneself there?

Volker.Doormann

What is life? The atoms of your body are stolen from other plants and animals, and are very much older than you. Your life is only to be proved by atoms. Some ten years and its gone. Grass is growing on a tomb supplying grass by this atoms. You cannot say, why you was born. You have not born yourself. Your body of atoms was born. It was not your job. You cannot prove that you are more as atoms created from a biological machine similar to that what Kary B. Mullis has developed. Life only can exist, if other life will die. Plants and animals do die, that you can live. Your brain is a biological machine to live longer, than 30 years and if there were no eternal natural laws valid longer than 30 or 90 years there were no eternal order in the universe prior to your biological life and after your biological life. You neither can say which kind of existence is a proof of you, next to atoms, nor what is conscious next to ancient atoms. Without any eternal spiritual order a fleshly body is no more as food for dogs. Thomas reports from Jesus: "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty." There is no justice in the process of life, and no peace ever, because live depends on other life. There is never an order in life without an eternal spiritual soul, who is aware on it's eternal existence as a part of god, which is love and truth, never to be found in atoms, coming and going into a body and leaving a body, called mortal life. To be known the own soul next to stupid atoms of a physical body illusion as a biological life machine is some different, because it is a knowledge beyond mortal physical life.

Volker

BioBeing

Hi Beth! I'm a protein scientist/structural genomics type of person, and I do lots of molecular biology to get to the proteins I'm interested in.

Life is amazing. The complexity of the genome is, to me, awe inspiring. The simplicity of it too - the similarity of some proteins from bacteria to humans, and yet the difference of others that perform the same function. To see a pile-up of gene or protein sequences, and to know where the active site of the protein must (might!) be located... which other residues are not so important and have drifted over time... (ahhh - the power of the theory of evolution - it allows predictions: verifiable, testable, honest to goodness predictions!!! Where do you get that in ID or creationism???).

I find it amusing to think that earlier Biologists - even Charles Darwin, when he started out - studied biology to try and get a glimpse of the creator. To study beetles was to study God. Nowadays, many of us study life just to study life. We do not see a need to invoke a mystical creator - in fact, he complicates the picture needlessly (Where is the soul? What is it made from? Are there genes for a soul? Where did God come from? Did He evolve? Does God have DNA? What was Jesus' genome like?)

How do we get from recycled atoms to walking talking functioning humans? How even is a bacteria "made". A plant? A dog? What makes us different, while at the same time keeping us all the same... life is fascinating! Enjoy it while you got it. [Because you will end up dog food, or worm food...]

sugarbeth

Lpetrich~ yeah, if heaven is so great, why don't all these people just go there right now. Must be all those nagging doubts they have. Or maybe life is better than they think it is.

Volker... that was a very long, rambly paragraph, but I think the jist of it is that you are an atheist in the usual sense but still with some spiritual leanings, yeah? We would differ in that aspect, then. You see "food for dogs" and I see renewal and growth; you see "stupid atoms", I see a beautiful dance that is life behaving as the self-perpetuating entity that it is.

BioBeing - yay! Another scientist! I totally agree with you on how God just brings up more questions than would be answered. And it amazes me everytime I come to this board and see evolution being debated. Hello people! Why are we still talking about it? If people could see what I see every day, they wouldn't be questioning the evolution thing - it's right in front of my face and undeniable.

Bree

If you don't mind, I'm going to move this to the Lounge, where your introduction will get a bit more coverage.

Welcome to IIDB!

Volker.Doormann

Don't care about me. Care about my questions. I do not think, that I am a subject of your life.
You do claim that 'god is a perfect devil', without any scientific prove on the subject. That, what you see, and that, what you state, is fantasy and religion, as long as you cannot prove it by your profession. Who has proved in biological science a 'dance'? What is the difference in your worshipping of 'life' to the worshipping of a (minor) God of life and creation (YHWH) in Judaism? No biological scientist can create one atom with eternal properties out of nothing, that has hidden properties to be part of dynamical life. To claim some strange belief as an individual does not impress the order of nature, neither in it's physical order, nor in it's spiritual order; it is a self created idol of no worth. There is a dimension of justice in nature, or a dimension of false/true in nature, not of any physical existance. The truth of nature is more than dance and unproved scientific claims about perfection and devils. Who has analysed and published the DNA of a devil? There are people who can see a spiritual order containing love, truth and ethic, and who has been descredited because they do respect these order and cannot give a (physical) prove of these immaterial spiritual 'things'. The claim, there is a god (with the properties of perfection and devil) is as well senseless as a claim, there is no god, if there is no knowledge about the subject.
The other point is, that it is true, that you do not have answered the question.

Volker

(some weeks offline)

lpetrich

Volker.Doormann's remarks don't make much sense to me, which is why I won't comment further on them.

However, there is more to be said about this whole business of trying to get to Heaven. Suicide is commonly considered a sin, though exactly why is obscure. Could this prohibition have been invented so as to keep followers from offing themselves? We don't hear much from Heaven's Gate these days because all its members are now dead.

Also, though I'm nowhere near a professional biologist, I've long been interested in evolutionary biology, especially in the family tree of life and the origins of new features.

beth

Hi Beth!

I like your original post. I tend to agree with much of it. Liked your site. I need to do something like that with my wedding. Anyway, hi, from another Beth.

Ensign Steve

My family does this, and we are atheists! Last February we celebrated the life of my great-grandmother (a 95-year life, at that), and she was an atheist. In January, I had the opportunity to talk to her in depth about her life and her impending death, and I got some amazing insight from her. I felt I learned more about her in that short time than I had learned in my entire life up to that point. No death-bed conversion, either. Man, sorry to drag down the tone of this thread, but I was going somewhere with this...

Oh yeah! After she passed, there was a huge party for her friends and family, and everybody had a great time. There were a few tears, but many more laughs. She was quite loved.

Anyway, sugarbeth, welcome here too!