ex-apologist: On One of the Main Reasons Why I Think Christianit...

ex-apologist: On One of the Main Reasons Why I Think Christianit...: An Inference to the Best Explanation: Jesus as a Failed Eschatological Prophet ( Re-posted ) I agree with mainstream scholarship on the ...

Why Agnosticism Should Lead to Atheism

Let's set aside the debate as to whether agnosticism is implicit atheism (it is. ;) ) Let's say an agnostic is someone who, given the balance of evidence, isn't persuaded one way or the other with regards to God's existence (or non-existence). Presuming some sort of Christian theism, a terrible fate await all those who deny God and his offer of salvation. You're going to be stuck in Hell for a very long time. Forever, in fact. So the stakes are incredibly high. Now here's the kicker--how could a competent, all-loving God allow the evidential status of things to become so ambiguous? How could he reasonably justify damning billions of people to Hell for reasonable dissent or skepticism? This is why agnosticism should lead to atheism--if the evidence isn't strong enough to persuade one to believe in God, and if we're going to be punished eternally for not believing, he probably doesn't exist.

A Common Doom

"United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need, of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good or evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that where they have suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but that wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed."

-Bertrand Russell

Pretty much

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2012/07/quote-of-day-by-thom-stark-you-broke-it.html

Cartesian doubt

Imagine a neurosurgeon whose expertise on the human brain and whose knowledge of daily events are such that he can, with probes, dictate a subject’s experiences. after he has implanted electrodes in the brain of a certain male volunteer, the surgeon causes him to experience the removal of the probes, although they are still in place; then to experience going home through the rain, spending the night with his wife, receiving a call from the surgeon in the morning asking him to return to the laboratory, and returning—all this while he is, in fact, still on the operating table.
The next day, the surgeon does actually remove the electrodes and sends the subject home, whereupon his wife inquires indignantly, “where were you last night?” “Right here with you,” the man replies. “Oh, no, you weren’t,” she rejoins, “and I can prove it. I had the whole neighborhood out searching for you.”
Then the enlightened husband smiles and says, “ah, now I see. that surgeon fooled me. He made me think I came home. but I was on the operating table the whole time.” His smile quickly fades, however, never to return, because from that point forward the poor fellow can never be certain he is still not on the operating table.

—Charles L. Stevenson

The mind is a factory of delusion

Guard yourself.

W.K Clifford--The Ethics of Belief

If atheism is true, then God help us all

First off: I think atheism is probably true. My philosophy teacher actually polled the class and I said that my confidence level that there is no God is 70%.  According to atheists like Richard Dawkins that would probably make me an atheist. Yet I consider myself an agnostic mainly because I recognize the fallibility of human reason, particularly my own. All it takes is subtle prejudice or one unexamined premise for things to fall apart. Moreover, the Universe is a mysterious place full of unanswered questions, and that's not a pronouncement I am prepared to make.

I digress. According to atheists like Dawkins and others, atheism is something to be happy about. It is to be embraced. I think the complete human autonomy implied by atheism is appealing--to be able to do absolutely anything you want without having to worry about divine retribution. But I think the negatives outweigh it considerably:

1. If atheism is true, everything and everyone you know and love will perish and die. Hawaiian sunsets, the Louvre, your Grandmother, your friends, your children, are transient, and will be snuffed out of existence. They''ll be no more. They may as well have never existed. The sun is going to explode and the Universe will collapse in on itself. Not exactly a pleasant outlook.

2. Atheism robs our lives of any real, objective, transcendent meaning. We are accidents. Natural selection did not have us in mind. Purpose can only be given by the conscious action of intelligent agents. A watch has a purpose. Art has a purpose. What purpose could milk splattered across the kitchen table have, or a river rock forged over millions of years by hydraulic and geological processes? None of course, and we came about by the same natural processes. Everything is meaningless and pointless.

This? This is what you want?