David Mathews

Hello Typon,

David: Okay, Typhon. Let me ask you some questions:

1. Did you at any time in your life believe in God?

2. If you did believe in God, what caused you to doubt or change your mind?

3. Would you say that you are dogmatically devoted to atheism, so much so that it is impossible for you to change your mind?

4. Do you ever doubt atheism?

5. What sort of evidence would convince you that God existed?

6. If such evidence was presented to you, would you become a theist or would you deny, reject or ignore the evidence so that you could remain an atheist?

Sincerely,

David Mathews

Answerer

Well, although there are paradoxes in all religions, this doesn't mean there are all the same kind of paradoxes. The paradoxes in Tao de ching is definitely different from paradoxes in the bible(with different meanings and intentions)if you read properly.

Answerer

This is a big contrast to what you had said previously, please go back and have a look, you changed your speech damn fast.
Anyway, are you willing to answer some of my questions regarding the illogical aspects in the Bible, itself(I will leave out other historical and scientifical parts first)?
Ok, the first one: why is the entire future generations of mankind being condemned to live as mortals for a sin that is not commited by them ( by Adam and Eve), doesn't this apply that God is unjust?

David Mathews

Ultimately Unresolvable Disputes

The following passages are from Chuang Tzu, a Taoist whose writings have merited international acclaim for their wisdom. I encourage you to read them and contemplate their relevance to the religious/non-religious dispute:

David: Notice that it in the final analysis no one is qualified to arbitrate or resolve these types of conflicts. You will naturally assume that those who agree with you are correct, just as I assume that those who agree with me are correct.

If you wanted to objectively and empirically verify your atheistic viewpoint, how would you do so?

I don't imagine that you can. I believe that it is impossible for you to do so.

Atheism, in reality, is not objective nor is it empirical. Atheism doesn't rest upon the foundation of science or scientific rationality. Atheism is something different altogether.

If anyone would like to defend atheism scientifically or by use of logic or reason, please do so.

Sincerely,

David Mathews

Note: Quote of Chuang Tzu is from Wing-Tsit Chan's A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy.

David Mathews

Hello Answerer,

David: The paradoxes are different by the impact is the same. Paradoxes serve a purpose in all religions which is consistent and analogous across all boundaries. The mystics recognized this centuries ago, that is why they were able to become so broad-minded as to incorporate the religious concepts of their neighboring religions. Israel's prophets did not same, they were aware of the universality of the religious message even in ancient times.

Sincerely,

David Mathews

David Mathews

Hello Answerer,

[qupte] Anyway, are you willing to answer some of my questions regarding the illogical aspects in the Bible, itself(I will leave out other historical and scientifical parts first)?[/quote]

David: Yes.

David: Because mortality serves a purpose. Mortality compels us to value and use productively the little time that we have to live. If we were eternal beings, we would not want or need to do anything.

Death is not an intrinsically terrible or evil thing. Death and life are bound together as an eternal cycle. If nothing at all died, we would not be able to eat anything. If we ourselves did not die, the earth would quickly become covered with human bodies and nothing else.

I don't consider death a terribe thing. I certainly don't complain about death. I am inclined to accept death.

Sincerely,

David Mathews

HelenM

Originally posted by David Mathews:

David: I think that atheists, in the majority of cases, either still believe in God (subconsciously) or want to believe in God (consciously). The reason why atheists seek out arguments and debates with theists is not to find converts to atheism. Not at all. Atheists seek arguments and debates because they want to be converted.

Helen: I'm surprised to read that you think this.

Often conservative Christians say it, because they believe the Bible teaches it. And for them then it's true, period, and any supposed evidence to the contrary is not as true as the Bible.

David: I am not aware of any Biblical scripture which specifically speaks about atheists or claims that they want to believe in God. My statements were not inspired by any scripture, just a speculative theory regarding the motives of atheists.

Since you know it's speculative I'm surprised you stated it as strongly as 'the majority of atheists'.

David: I said it to atheists directly specifically so that they would have the opportunity to disagree.

Did you expect them to disagree? I appreciate that you gave them the opportunity to respond and agree or disagree, at any rate. Many Christians (in my experience) express opinions about atheists and don't seem interested in atheist responses to their opinions.

David: A sensed some insecurity and doubt among atheists which seemed to indicate that some atheists really do want to believe in God. I am speaking about those atheists, not all atheists.

Yes, but you said a majority; you didn't say 'a few' or 'some' but, 'a majority'.

Helen: How can you have meaningful interactions with people if your starting premise is "you are deceived about yourself or you are lying about your own desires/beliefs"? It's disrespectful, imo, to start there.

David: I didn't start there. There were about four hundred posts in the present discussion before I got to this point.

I didn't literally mean you began the thread there. I meant that this was your opinion, coming into this thread. And it was, surely, or are you seriously suggesting you changed your mind since this thread began? That seems unlikely to me; therefore you had these views all along; you just didn't share them right away.

Which I'm not criticizing as a tactic, per se. I think it's your choice how to proceed and what to share, as long as you aren't violating the rules here.

David: I am just floating a baloon, testing the waters. The responses of the atheists to this comment are very informative -- I do listen to atheists very closely.

Yes, but it sounds like you've had interaction with atheists previous to this thread. I can't believe you listened to them closely and yet came to this thread still thinking 'a majority of atheists...'.

So why would you listen more this time? If atheist responses prior to this thread left you still saying 'a majority of atheists...' then why would the responses on this thread have more effect on you than previous ones?

David: I am speaking to a diverse group of atheists. Some things that I say might apply to one a small percentage of atheists, even so I still need to say it.

Well, a) you don't need to say anything, actually . But b) you didn't say "a small percentage"; you said "a majority"!


David: I know a little about atheism.

Helen: If you knew more maybe you'd see they are telling the truth.

David: The truth about what?

About whether they really want to believe in God and whether they really do believe in God. I.e. the truth about themselves and their beliefs - which you cannot know better than them...because you can't read their minds.

David: I may be lying about some of you, but I certainly am not lying about all of you.

Helen: I don't think you're lying but I do think you're wrong about every atheist here except maybe one or two quiet lurkers who haven't made up their mind against theism.

David: There are more than 7000 members of the Internet Infidels discussion board. I suspect that my comments were applicable to more than one or two of that large group.

I didn't mean 'one or two' as a precise mathematical representation of how many. I meant "a few". But you said "a majority" and I'm sure that's not true!

love
Helen

sandlewood

David, you are right in saying that atheists are a diverse group. Getting back to the definition of atheism, the only thing that can be said about an atheist is that he doesn’t hold a belief in a god or gods. So of course atheists can be different in every other way. Whether this belief holds for people that subconsciously believe in a god I don’t know. But I imagine you’ll have a tough time proving which people have a subconscious belief in a god and which really don’t.

Again, what people want to believe is irrelevant to whether a god exists or not. I myself wouldn’t mind if Santa Claus were real. But it doesn’t lend credibility to the argument that he is. It depends on how you define God. But if you at least define him as having infinite power and infinite knowledge, then I can’t think of what would make me believe he exists. These two qualities are logically inconsistent. I’d go as far as to say that a being having infinite power is logically inconsistent itself. Rather then get into details, maybe just check out the thread <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=50&t=000421" target="_blank">Why are you guys so sure about Yahweh? </a> (which I’m still trying to catch up with). But briefly, I’m referring to the argument that if god knows the future then he cannot change it. This is a much-argued topic and would require another thread.

If I met god today, how would I know he was omnipotent and not just omnipotent-1? It could be a very powerful being that is not omnipotent or omniscient, but such that we couldn’t tell the difference unless we were at least as powerful or knowledgeable. Does it take an omnipotent being to create a universe? Or can an omnipotent-1 being do it? What if the being that created the universe is less than omnipotent and humans have the potential to someday evolve into something more powerful and knowledgeable than that being? Would you think of that being as god?
I know it sounds as if I’m not open-minded if I say there is nothing that would convince me that a god exists. But I think the traditional definition of god rules him out logically. You’d have to either change the definition or change the way logic works.

Typhon

Hello again David,

Ask away.

A very good question. I have to say I'm fairly certain, no. I grew up in a household that had no established beliefs about god. My parents never mentioned god or religion, we never went to church or had a circle of friends who did. My parents however never claimed to be atheists, or anything else for that matter. They were not unaware of religion, they just seemed utterly and peacefully detached from it and its concerns.

I was not without exposure however, as from kindergarten to ninth grade, I attended exclusively a fundamentalist, Protestant, non-denominational private Christian school. I was sent there by my parents because it provided a much more scholastically rigorous lower-grade education and much better student to teacher ratios than our area public schools. Again, it's strange when I think back, but they were completely indifferent to the religion of the school, even though religion was part of what was taught there. We indeed had Bible Study just like any other subject, along with all the others such as Math, History, English, etc.. Religion was a part of the curriculum and its influence touched everything at the school, from the teachers to the conduct that was and was not allowed in the students. That said, all the efforts to "convert" me, and this was pretty much constant for the 10 years I was there, never made any real impact. It simply slid off me, and I can remember even as a young, young child, wondering what all the fuss was about and how anyone could think that these stories and prayer nonsense were true, rather than just that, stories and nonsense. As a child god and the Bible were clearly stuff made up by big people, for big people reasons. As I got older, I just was able to understand the reasons why, a little better.

When I was in 3rd grade, I can remember being caught by my teacher during Bible Study, reading a miniature Spiderman comic book, behind my Bible. I had read the Bible more times than I rightly cared to count, and the comic was, well, a comic and new. Alas, the book was confiscated and I received a severe dressing down, complete with gloom and doom and explanations how the devil was hard at work, seeking to snare the souls of children just like me. Furthermore, the head teacher and even the principle got involved, when they discovered one of the comics had a guest appearance by a character named Doctor Strange, a magician-hero who was "Master of the Mystic Forces." This was clear and blatant witchcraft, with a bit of demon worship thrown in to boot. As I result I can vividly remember being forced to go into the principle's office, along with her and my teacher, and at their prompting but with assurances that I was doing so out of my own will (which I was I suppose, as I wanted my comic book back) to loudly and formally proclaim that "I was asking Jesus into my heart, as Lord and Savior, to deliver me from damnation and wash me clean with the blood of the Lamb, amen." I was then assured in an equally grave manner that I was now saved, if I wasn't before, and to go out and "not sin again." I can remember clear as if it was today mouthing the words and thinking how silly it was. I wasn't interested in salvation, nor did I think that god even existed, let alone this Jesus fellow. Any teacher however will tell you that 3rd graders are if anything, pragmatists. I nodded my head, promised to steer clear of witchcraft and all that, and made some cock and bull little person's story up about having to bring the comic back home because it was my cousin's and my mom would tan my hide if I lost it or didn't bring it back. This brought definite frowns to the two previously happy ladies who grimly seemed to find some measure of success in breaking another sinner on the wheel of Christ if you would, but they seemed to buy the story and my earnest face, and so gave me back my book upon promising to hide in my backpack and take it home right after class. I did, and from then on was much more careful about reading the comics that I still regularly snuck into Bible Class.

This to the best of my knowledge, is as close as I ever got to believing in god, it certainly was the closest I got to any sort of salvation.

All through my elementary school years I just remained immune to religion and its magic lure. A lot of my classmates didn't, and even the bad ones often seemed convinced some magic guy lived up in the sky, watching what they did and sure to bring down hellfire on "all the fags in San Francisco and other perverts and commies and you know, people like that..." I merely shrugged and enjoyed the war and descriptive stories in the big ol' Black Book. I also loved science, history, and learning, so didn't have a hard time figuring out that religion had its roots in both, stories made up by historical people for reasons that were explainable by science and made a lot of sense if you saw it from the outside.

I kept this attitude all through high school and at university, and honesty never looked back or had reason to think otherwise. All my experience over my life has failed to show any credible evidence or need for a god or gods, and so I've never been able to believe in any.
na.
Oh goodness no. I'm an atheist because I don't have any reasons to believe in gods. I find our naturalistic explanations for the origins of life and the cosmos to be more than sufficient and to be backed up by credible, peer-reviewed, repeatable evidence that lots of folks are willing to write about, study, and even show me. I've found religion and theism to have a big fat zero in way of evidence or support, so it seems only natural (no pun intended) to go with the side that is best able to provide logical support of its claims. That said, I always keep an open mind, and depend on the best logical examination of the evidence, new or old, to keep my worldview updated and on track with what I hope is the truth. I would say it's not impossible at all to change my mind, but judging by religion and theism's past track record and abysmal failures, unlikely. The reason why it appears the world is a naturalistic universe is mostly likely because it is a naturalistic universe.
I would say no, for a number of reasons. Intellectually at least, I've pretty carefully and thoroughly weighed the many and varied theists alternatives and the arguments for them. Emotionally I'm fond of stories and myths, so there is definitely a part of me that likes to toy with the idea that magic and magical creatures might exist. However, I've never found any evidence that they do, and a lot of evidence that they don't need to. I also find the world very beautiful, mysterious, and meaningful without the existence of any supernatural metaphysics being involved. Does this open mindedness constitute doubt? I'm not sure. An example would be evolution. Evolution is an understandable, verifiable, testable fact of biology. I believe in evolution as the best explanation we have, however, I would discard it if we discovered that we had good evidence and reason to believe that things worked differently. But the major reason I am not able to doubt atheism is because atheism isn't a belief or a dogma, it certainly isn't for me. I can't really "doubt" that I lack belief in god or gods. I simply have no belief that they are real. Therefore I can't doubt my atheism, which is really, just a lack of belief not a belief in and of itself.
I would need some very convincing evidence, that was up to the extraordinary claims made by such a being. It really depends on the god as it would define itself. Regardless, I would think that it would need to be credible, verifiably, repeatable, able to be shown to others, independently tested, and able to manifest in a way that was perceivable for all those reasons. I would also need to be fairly sure that I was not insane, or being deliberately fooled, or for example, that this "god" wasn't just something more powerful than me, like a highly evolved alien or time traveler or such sci-fi stables. Arthur C. Clarke once wrote: "A sufficiently high level of technology is indistinguishable from magic" so as you can see, proving the miraculous as being from god is inherently tricky. I honestly don't have a good answer for you here. I can certainly say that I haven't seen any evidence that even gets me to this thorny problem however. Everything that has ever been put forth has fallen so short of any of these most basic criteria that I'm a long ways from having to worry about superior time traveling aliens attempting to pull one over on me.
This is a nonsensical question. I'm an atheist because I have no belief in god or gods. I don't believe in god or gods because there is no evidence for them. If there was evidence, I wouldn't lack a belief in them, and would no longer be an atheist by the very definition of the term. If I had evidence which convinced me that god or gods existed I would of course be a theist.

.T.

[ July 08, 2002: Message edited by: Typhon ]</p>

Answerer

Well, this is not true, Taosim never incorporated any doctrines(maybe in Buddhism) in Judaism or Christinity. Furthermore, the effect of impact of paradoxes in Taoism on its followers was to help them in the understanding the 'hidden' nature of reality which was different from the paradoxes which only contradicted logical thinking. I will show you this in my questions.