for atheists/agnostics (page 4)

nicolaou

Saki' I feel for you. I wanted those things too, for me and my children. To live forever in paradise, who wouldn't choose that?! Unfortunately reality isn't affected by what we want. I want all children to go to bed at night feeling loved and with enough food in their bellies. I want cancer to stop blighting men and women and I want a world without prejudice. Sometimes we just don't get what we want.

Reality may suck in comparison to the dream but at least it is real and you can affect it for the better if you try hard enough.

BizzyBee

Just looking up into the sky on a dark night, showing my kids the absolute beauty of the heavens... real beauty...

Saki, that's when I feel closest to God.................or feeling the pounding of the ocean, or seeing the majesty of mountains, or the breathtaking giant redwoods...............nature is awesome........................but I don't feel anything about God sitting in a Kingdom Hall except.........."This is how God wants to communicate with us? Through little books and magazines? This is how He wants us to know Him? This is how He wants us to spend our time? This is why Jesus died for our sins - so we could spend our lives sitting in a hall, underlining paragraphs?"

Bizzy Bee of the "I don't think so!"class

saki2fifty

Hi Swan, I understood your point, I'm not saying that Athiest's dont want a better life for their kids or hope for a better world. Isn't hope something great that you have yet to attain for the future? After ones short 70 or 80 years of life, a mere speck on the scale of time, what hope can there be after that with no God? If theres even a slight chance that there is a God, and he has a reward for us for the future... then I want to be a part of it, for that is the hope I have.

Have a great day/night...

saki2fifty

Saki, that's when I feel closest to God.................or feeling the pounding of the ocean, or seeing the majesty of mountains, or the breathtaking giant redwoods...............nature is awesome........................

Absolutely... nature is awesome. The earth itself is a work of art... Majestic, Breathtaking, and awesome...

searcher

I have always been an Atheist, I never signed up to any religion.

Why?

Because I cannot bring myself to subscribe to the arrogance of some humans who believe that a 'creator' made an entire universe just to give them a place to scurry about on.

Swan

Hi Swan, I understood your point, I'm not saying that Athiest's dont want a better life for their kids or hope for a better world. Isn't hope something great that you have yet to attain for the future? After ones short 70 or 80 years of life, a mere speck on the scale of time, what hope can there be after that with no God If theres even a slight chance that there is a God, and he has a reward for us for the future... then I want to be a part of it, for that is the hope I have.

That's a great hope, Saki, and I understand it perfectly. I wouldn't disillusion you of it. But my hope is to play a small part in the growth of humankind. I hope that I am making the world a better place in the here and now.

And if it turns out there is a God with a great reward for the future, I would be most pleasantly surprised and happy to learn of Him. I think He would be a far more amazing being than the Bible portrays Him. I think He would certainly understand the skeptical nature of those of us who cannot believe in him any more.

Tammy

Carmel

Having gone through a long period as an agnostic, I can look back and see how logical it was to question the whole nature of God/notGod thinking and end up hands in the air in frustration. The only honest position was to "not know". Any belief system based on the JW biblical paradigm would certainly lead one to doubt the existence of "God" once one woke up to the silliness of it all. For me, I had to abandon the whole biblethink to see religion and the deity in a completely different light to be able to "believe" again.

carmel

ringo5

Absolutely... nature is awesome. The earth itself is a work of art... Majestic, Breathtaking, and awesome...

Nature is awesome in many ways. Here's a Pic of a beautiful sunset..

This is a sample of some spectacular sunsets that occurred for many months after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, that killed nearly 40000 people from pryoclastic flows and huge tsunamis (some est. at 100ft high). You can read more about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa#The_1883_eruption

Another "natural" force, bacteria , was responsible for an est. 234 million deaths in the 14th century alone ( I really can't picture in my mind that # of people) known as the "Black Death".

The naturally occuring forces all around us can inspire or terrify us, and rightly so, because they are out of our control for the most part. However, it is much easier for the athiest to comprehend these forces because he doesn't need to perform any kind of mental gymnastics to counter the incongruity of an onnipotent creator with devastating natural forces and bioorganisms. For instance, who created that bacteria? Or, are the forces of plate tectonics somehow initiated or accellerated by "sinful" mankind?

We are very fortunate to be able to understand these kind of forces better than any other time in history, and at least demystify them. Unfortunately for many of our predecessors, they had very little scientific knowledge to work with. In the case of Black Death, this, combined with the inability of religion to explain or cure this disease, made for a very dark period in our history.

Without science, we would be able to do little but pray over the bodies our diseased loved ones, or offer sacrifices to the god of the volcanos, among many other scenarios that presented themselves in the past as hopeless.

God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.
Douglas Adams

Ringo5
"preferring reality over fantasy" class P.S. would like a scientific explanation why can't paste a #@$%! picture...

aoxo

i hear ya lonely sheep. as a child growing up in the J-dubs i always told people that i believed in god. the truth is that i never believed in god. i was just trying to believe because i thought it was the right thing to do and i wanted to be a good person. also, i thought that no one would love me if they knew i didn't believe. when i was in my early 20's i was at a door by myself and a man asked me why i was preaching and why i believed in god in the first place. i was upset with myself that i couldn't answer him thruthfully. realizing that i had been atheist all my life is what made me eventualy dissasociate myself. it wasn't until about 6 months after that that i realized via this web sight all the other juicy stuff there was to know about the JWs.

donkey

Hitler was just like the Biblical God.

You did what he wanted or you died. He had an ego as large as the god in the bible and demanded exclusive devotion. He decided to punish the Jews for their past transgressions - just like God kept doing everytime the nation did not follow him. On the other hand he promised you that you would rule the world if you followed him.

Does everyone else perceive God as a sociopath too? Or will he kill you if you think about it?

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