No need to apologize, half of the boards is about people unloading their thoughts, random or not.

Is there a reason you'd rather not go there?  It might be an interesting conversation, especially if you have some common ground already, which is not always typical.

You said you believe "god" created the universe and life.  Could you try to explain exactly what "god" means to you?  It's clearly not the Christian deity, nor Allah, nor any deity of a "major" religion.

If this was a subject besides death and you sought to understand, would you not liking the answer that seemed scientific cause you to believe something else?  In other words, do you realize that simply not liking an answer doesn't make it any less true, regardless of what you believe?  Some truths aren't pleasant, unfortunately.  If it came down to it, would you prefer the truth or the answer that made you feel better?

What about people who shoot innocent people in a crowd in the name of a religion?  Are they not following their religion and trying to understand god correctly?

When you say taking a dirtnap, what precisely do you mean?  And again, understanding exactly what you mean by god would be very helpful.

Finally, how do you define evil?  Do you think evil is a tangible force?

When atheists quote those texts, they're arguing against those specific gods.  They know quite well it does nothing to "disprove" the Roman gods, the pagan gods, or the deistic "god."  However, it's typically the theists who quote the Bible/Koran/etc who try to force their view upon others.

And doing so is quite understandable, it's extremely comforting and thinking that there is a grand scheme of justice can make it easier to bear some of the horrors of the universe.  However, I must ask: if you filled in the blanks of the following statement with anything besides god, what would you think of it?

"I believe in <blank> because I want <blank> to be true."

First of all, welcome, and thank you for your refreshing honesty. I should warn you that this site is pretty brutal with its language, so understand that if you're getting a lot of trash talk, or people are being blunt to the point of bad manners, it's kind of part of the culture, here. Nothing personal.

That said, the reason I find your post refreshing in its honesty is because we get a lot of veiled "interest" in atheism that ends up being a precursor for an attack on atheism. In your case, you've said what you believe without wussing out, and that's admirable. That's not to say I'm not going to pick on you just a little, though.

That's one conclusion to reach. I also observe an elegant order to the universe. In my case, though, I don't believe it leads to what someone might call "god" or "God". The problem that I have with connecting the two things is that upon closer inspection, they're unrelated.

1) I perceive the universe as having an elegant order;

2) An elegant order means there is a god;

3) Therefore, there is a god.

doesn't follow, because 2) is very questionable, and 1) has the problem of our perception. Why would we perceive order in things? There are lots of physical reasons, and they're all seated firmly in physical reality.

To put your mind at ease, there are no credible scientists suggesting that the universe came from nothing. Furthermore, the necessity for god in creating the universe and life is questionable, given that work in abiogenesis is coming along nicely.

Fair enough, but that seems to address what you wish was true, rather than what is actually true.

It's fairly uninteresting, I'd have to agree. It seems the opportunities for grey-area interpretation are endless with religious texts. One problem, though: how else do we learn about a single god? Or even multiple gods?

I really hope you don't get attacked on this point, because (as I've said) it's an honest assessment, and I think you've been truthful with yourself.

Personally, I'm too curious not to find out what the truth of something is, and that led me to atheism. It might not do the same for you, but if you have any serious concerns, I'd be more than willing to help.

Would you be willing to examine a few things and tell me how your "afterlife" works.  You suggest that some part of you survives the death of your body.  What part is it?  Emotions can be manipulated and even disrupted by damage to the frontal lobe.  So does that part get carried over?  What happens to the person who doesn't have emotions?  Our memories can also be lost due to damage with the brain.  Or people who do a 180 after trauma to the brain.  Which person gets the afterlife? The one before the trauma or the altered one?  It all seems to be very tied to the physical and entirely to the brain.  Does a pig get into your heaven or hell?  If not what makes people so special that they do? Does a being need to meet some threshold of intelligence or emotional state that is arbitrary?

 

When/If you reply please think to yourself what do I have to support this?  How do you determine truth from wishful thinking? 

It looks to me that if you were god you would do things this way, but why do you assume the deity you believe in is anything like you and only you?

 

 

I always find it funny when someone points to some image from space and say see that is amazing.  We have the physical laws that determines why those elegant things turn out the way they do.  Those same laws also determine why a tornado can turn a tree into a killer.  These physical laws don't discriminate between death and elegance.

 

 

Thanks for the great responses. No its not obvious that there is a god to me otherwise I would probably be a member of a clergy. I believe I catch snippets of something larger at various moments in my life.

If I had to explain what god is, god is the what I perceive for instance when I look at the stars. I feel insignificant and yet at the same time I feel its miraculous that I can look at the stars and have that thought. So god is definitely a perception.I realize that my view is totally wishful thinking which is why I say I believe because I want it to be so. I dont let that belief cloud my judgment. I don't dismiss what science tells me. I dont let my belief in god run contrary to what I know to be true.

On my idea of the afterlife. My view is I dont know all of the details. I can only hope that something like our conscious carries on.Do animals and what not get there -- dont know and it doesnt bother me that I dont. Does god differ than me. I dont know. Yes I realize that a tornado is a random natural occurrence that is destructive, but that doesnt stop me from thinking about the natural forces that bring that tornado into existence. I'm sorry, the natural world bakes my noodle.

I could say that I see god as the sum total of all physical laws. Laws known and yet to be known. I guess I'm an agnostic theist if there is such a thing. I think it takes a lot of guts to be an atheist. I think if you could prove there is no god as easy as saying 2+2=4 there would probably be mass suicides. I think people need that cozy blanet, to say you dont need that takes courage. I think my friend realizes that it does take a lot of courage and so constantly talks about atheism to reinforce that in his mind.  I dont go there with him because arguing god is illogical and no win situation. You put forth your idea and move on. I cant prove a negative. I make the claim. I have no proof therefore I must resign that what I claim exists only within the confines of my mind. That claim gives me comfort. Its like the matrix I know the steak isnt real, but damn its tasty. My mind would rather continue on in a  belief that be thrust into a cold place where I dont have my cozy blanket. I think thats the reality for most people.

I'm sure a person could classify themselves as anything. An agnostic theist might someone who doesn't know if a god or gods exist, but still believes that a god or gods exist.

I've already done it, and thus far, the suicide rate is unaffected (as far as I know). But I understand the sentiment.

Haha! You mean he's bragging! Sometimes new atheists get all excited because they're unburdened of something that has been bothering them, and so there's a period of euphoria. We might take that out on our friends a bit. I don't think when I went through that it was because I thought I was being courageous.

There's really no reason for me to try and convince you, to be perfectly honest. I have no problem with people who acknowledge that they're engaging in a comfortable delusion. It's not like I've never done it, and I'm sure there are things that I believe right now that are false, I just haven't checked them out, so one could say that I'm suffering from a delusion in that area (whatever that happens to be).

I'm definitely in denial that I have a certification exam today. Definitely. Studying is lame.

So far be it from me to drag you through an uncomfortable process. My experience of becoming an atheist was scary at first, then a huge relief, then euphoria, and now a sort of mild discomfort with the perpetuation of myths. But many people are much more locked into their belief systems than you are, and becoming an atheist would be a huge psychological trauma. As such, I understand what you're saying.

Agreed. I've never been satisfied with religion except maybe buddhism which for the most part has no god.

I believe that god only cares if you do. My definition of care is very loose. I believe god leaves us to our own devices. God doesnt intercede. My rationale is because I have the ability to care about pondering god,  god has to care about revealing itself so that I can ponder. Thats about as far as it goes. I dont believe in prayer.

Nope.

Very interesting. I think morality can come from religion or philosophy and from the natural world. For instance lets say I'm a buddhist which teaches right action and not harming another. However I live in a country that says its ok to kill people with blue eyes. I can come to the conclusion the morality of the country I live in is in error because of my religion. If you want to extend this to christianity, you could say the 10 commandments say not to kill so therefore I can reason that the country I live in is immoral. I don't believe that morality comes from god. Prior to the 10 commandments everyone knew that murder was wrong simply because no one wanted to be murdered. Morality comes from an agreed upon ruleset of a given people. For instance in pre-British India, there were funeral pyres where the woman was burned with the deceased man. This was the norm, apart of the religion and no one questioned it. The British saw it and were appaled. So in that regard its quite relative to the folks in the agreed upon ruleset.

 

I would say yes. I would say a persons energy cannot be destroyed. I wont say soul, spirit, or life force...just energy. <covering up with my cozy blanket>

  

Thanks for provoking me to think! I need to clarify my beliefs to myself. I wouldn't consider my beliefs dangerous in that I am always willing to accept contrary evidence. I spoke with a fundamentalist christian friend today and he basically said I'm just an agnostic. I'm pretty cozy with that. I know that I dont know.

  

Pffft. I'm old internet salt. I've been around since the days of uunet flame wars over having intercourse with a certain skull. I have thick skin and if I dont like something I can move on...simple.

 

 

Nice responses, I think you will get along fine with most of the people here.  Your morality response is especially appropriate, since that is often our main gripe with theists.  You'll get challenged on the energy thing, but that is about it.  I am guessing that because you are partial to Buddhism you can even define energy as your actual physical energy, and how it can never be destroyed , so you are immortal at some level.

 

Another similar trippy thought is that since all of your matter is a part of the universe, including your brain/thoughts/emotions, you know, *you*, that sort of makes the universe an intelligent, sentient construct.  After all, there is nothing different on a molecular level between you and any other matter...and outside matter will eventually be inside you, and your inside matter will eventually be outside of you, the universe can be considered alive, and you can be considered one with the universe.  That is one way to consider yourself immortal...imagine, in a few billion years "you" might be at the heart of a sun, or part of an interstellar mass hurtling through the galaxy.  If the universe ever constricts again your matter will be spread through the whole universe with the next big bang!

Hello, Belzebozo!
I hope you'll have fun here. You seem like a fine guy and I've got no negative remarks. Is there anything that you found out and want to tell us?

It's a metaphorical description of a phenomenon. Energy uses the matter as a vehicle. But if a matter is really unusual, a ghost-like matter, (belonging to a person) for example, then people tend to forget about the matter and describe it only as an "energy". It really feels and behaves differently than a normal matter, so it's very tempting to call it just "energy". It's similarly "material" as light, which is perceived as almost immaterial and the purest form of energy. But I have to admit, this term serves very well for those who have felt it on their own skin, we just know that it's the best word for it, until scientists will find out something official.

According to Paul Kammerer's laws, energy of a lesser system does not vanish, but it integrates into the greater system, which actually strengthtens it. This may apply also to a person. (Das Gesetz der Serie - The Law of Seriality) The official science at first rejected this, but then the development went through things like fractal mathemathics or chaos theory, and it eventually got to Kammerer's theory "from the other end", but forgetting Kammerer in the process. I just had read it, I'd have to read about it more... Or just copy and paste the whole book here.

 

 

Hi guys im new here i signed up just to reply to this (dont worry im sticking around)

My friend time does not exist. it only exist in the mind

when they say first 10 to the -34 seconds  they mean that when the big bang happened time and space was created at the same time so asking what happened before is like asking what happened before nothing, the ans nothing

oh and nothin cant exist have you ever heard of vacuum fluctuations look it up before posting like that

 

Thanks for the welcome but absolute nothing cant exist because something exist

example: could you have a cup in your right hand while at the same time dont have a cup in your right hand.

Again thanks for the welcome

Time and space are just dimensions of the same thing, so having something "before" space-time is nonsensical. "Before" can only happen when you have space (and thus time). So without space, there's nothing "before" or "after".

Most likely out of exasperation. Note that claiming to not know what happened is not the same as being sure that the universe "came from nowhere". The topic is complex enough so that it's silly to conclude that either the universe "came from something" or "came from nothing". The nature of space-time near the singularity is the kind of thing that people do physics PhDs on, so all I can do is suggest further study.

Except that the singularity is just a theoretical point in a mathematical model. So saying that anyone is claiming that the singularity "exists" is misleading. A singularity is a mathematical construct, and sometimes the popular explanations have to do some translating from math. That can lead to people believing that they have an understanding of the current model without ever looking at the math. I'm not sure that's possible.

Now you're just getting carried away. It's a mathematical model. Relativity is also math, so talking about it like it can be translated into a philosophical understanding is being hasty. In fact, a hasty generalization.

Any physicist can tell you what the current model is. That's what we've got. If someone comes up with a part of the model that better fits the evidence, then it gets used instead. It's a work in progress, so it's not like "Oh no! We totally screwed this up! We're completely wrong about everything!" It's just an update to the mathematical model.

Thanks hiswillingness for explaining it to him

Get this in your head justanotherbeliever the big bang created time and space at the same time so saying wat happened before makes no sense

its simple logic but then again believe transends logic

my point with relativity was if you are sitting on a photon, you are everywhere in the universe at once and all clocks have stopped. All lengths have contracted to 0. So photons arent moving at all as far as they are concerned. Light is omni present. Thats kinda interesting.

If you are looking forward from the big bang we now are not 14 Gyrs away due to relativity...depending on what constant you use we are much less time than that....these were my points that remain unchanged...

We say age since the big bang because it makes us sound more definite about knowing what happened...although we are relatively sure about some kind of big bang event, that is far from being able to extrapolate to this supposed singularity in space-time that started it all...

but thanks for your guys inputs...this was in wikipedia under age of universe..at least they admit its not totally reasonable.

"The Lambda-CDM concordance model describes the evolution of the universe from a very uniform, hot, dense primordial state to its present state over a span of about 13.75 billion years of cosmological time. This model is well understood theoretically and strongly supported by recent high-precision astronomical observations such as WMAP. In contrast, theories of the origin of the primordial state remain very speculative. If one extrapolates the Lambda-CDM model backward from the earliest well-understood state, it quickly (within a small fraction of a second) reaches a singularity called the "Big Bang singularity." This singularity is not considered to have any physical significance, but it is convenient to quote times measured "since the Big Bang," even though they do not correspond to a physically measurable time. For example, "10⁻⁶ second after the Big Bang" is a well-defined era in the universe's evolution. In one sense it would be more meaningful to refer to the same era as "13.7 billion years minus 10⁻⁶ seconds ago," but this is unworkable since the latter time interval is swamped by uncertainty in the former.

Though the universe might in theory have a longer history, cosmologists presently use "age of the universe" to mean the duration of the Lambda-CDM expansion, or equivalently the elapsed time since the Big Bang."

This is where our philosphies differ. It seems perfectly right for you to have a math model that breaks down. And for me it isnt. Yes, all models break down. But thats what Im talking about. For me the age of the universe is 14Gyr + UNKNOWN POSSIBLY VERY LARGE QUANTITY. Thats one point.  There is a big difference in saying hey I have to explain this with some really complicated math but it works, trust me. As compared to I have this mostly figured out and can explain this with some very complicated math that breaks down at some point, but its ok, trust me, its mostly right. Those are quite different statements. I will get a reference for that looking forwards from the beginning, being a different amount of time calculation too.

And ok I get singularities as a math model. But what you do is bound yourself away from the singularities when you are solving them. You dont try to say heres what happened 10 to the -43 seconds after the singularity and stating it as fact. Now if they posed it as a hypothetical singularity with a big IF, I would be fine with the whole thing. (AGAIN YES, KNOW ITS A MATH MODEL). There might not have been any singularity at all. Maybe just finite and dense. By saying 10 to the -43 seconds they are implying practically a singularity.  If you dont believe me about the photon I'll have to get a reference.

http://www.geraldschroeder.com/AgeUniverse.aspx 15 billion or six days? Today, we look back in time and we see approximately 15 billion years of history. Looking forward from when the universe is very small - billions of times smaller - the Torah says six days. In truth, they both may be correct. What's exciting about the last few years in cosmology is we now have quantified the data to know the relationship of the "view of time" from the beginning of stable matter, the threshold energy of protons and neutrons (their nucleosynthesis), relative to the "view of time" today. It's not science fiction any longer. A dozen physics textbooks all bring the same number. The general relationship between time near the beginning and time today is a million million. That's a 1 with 12 zeros after it. So when a view from the beginning looking forward says "I'm sending you a pulse every second," would we see it every second? No. We'd see it every million million seconds. Because that's the stretching effect of the expansion of the universe. The Talmud tells us that the soul of Adam was created at five and a half days after the beginning of the calendar. That is a half day before the termination of the sixth day. At that moment the cosmic calendar ceases and an earth based calendar starts. . How would we see those days stretched by a million million? The million million expansion of five and a half days gives an age of the universe as 15 billion years. NASA gives a value of about 14 billion years. Considering the many approximations, and that the Bible works with only six periods of time, the agreement to within a few percent is in my opinion extraordinary. The five and a half days of Genesis are not of equal duration. Each time the universe doubles in size, the perception of time halves as we project that time back toward the beginning of the universe. The rate of doubling, that is the fractional rate of change, is very rapid at the beginning and decreases with time simply because as the universe gets larger and larger, even though the actual expansion rate is approximately constant, it takes longer and longer for the overall size to double. Because of this, the earliest of the six days have most of the15 billion years sequestered with them. For the duration of each day and the details of how that matches with the measured history of the universe and the earth, see The Science of God. (Obviously there are some complaints about his use of a million million to get the number he wants in the end...but my point was much simpler...age of the universe depends on relativity...thats all I was saying....)

The Genesis story is violently inconsistent with pretty much all well-established science. Anyone trying to justify it as corresponding to any sort of correspondence with reality is displaying either extreme ignorance, naiveté, or dishonesty.

Whatever the 'actual' time duration of whatever preceded the earliest time after the hypothetical singularity that we have some confidence in, there is zero justification for assuming that anything other than an incredibly condensed, unstructured mass-energy concentration existed for that 'time', and that virtually no details of whatever may have preceded that state can have had any influence on the history of the Universe after it - that is one of the intrinsic properties of a singularity.

Of course a 'true' singularity is not likely as it conflicts with Quantum Mechanics, but it would have to be a state which approximates a singularity, but the extrapolation of our known physical laws into such an incredibly dense state is extremely problematic..