If you are an atheist...

[Pruni]

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actually scietnfically i believe int he big bang theory non-scientifically i also believe in a circularity that eveyrthing comes to an end - and then it will statrt over agin - and i believe in jonahton livingstone seagul.

i don't believe in millenia of male interpretations of a book which could be base din fact becoming dogma and the 'word' of an omniprescnet being. i think that man invented tat kind of god

caligula, i'm not suggesting that your atheism is based on faith (too loaded a concept in this discussion), rather that it is similarly structured, & so available for the same sort of questioning or analysis. that, as far as i can see, isn't up for dispute, nor as a fact should it cause irritation - not in itself at least.

pruni, just to clarify my loose use of emotive terms i don't experience anxiety or panic at the idea of a yawning infinity of, um...nothingness (?) because i am a christian, rather i'm a christian BECAUSE that exact notion fills me with panic etc, & because nothing other than the idea of a creator-god satisfies my curiosity abt said yawning gulf of space-time. putting the 'panic' aside for a moment, in a way it's blindingly simple & feeling-free really: nothing else makes sense.

perhaps that's where my sense of atheism as a kind of denial comes from. faith is, if you have it, so very simple at base level. you'd have to be deluding yourself, or plain stupid (with apologies), NOT to 'get' it. am i making sense? or has my loose & emotive tone kicked this off again?!

Roosmum, either you are misquoting me on purpose or you don't seem to get what I am saying at all.
I never said anything about pleasure (thought I'm all for it)
and I said we (meaning many atheists and certainly humanists) do what we can to make LIFE beautiful because it (ie LIFE) is all there is.
Not some kind of heaven/elysian fields/crossing the River Styx or all the many forms of eternity that human beings have clung to out of fear of the void.
How can atheism be born out of fear of the void? It's quite the opposite. Throughout human history people have come up with wildly different ideas of heavens to avoid this very notion. It doesn't scare me at all. Certainly far less all eternity with the Pope, Mary WHitehouse and Ian Paisley, that's for sure!
And Roosmum, you said "I don;t get it. 'I don't believe in god because she/he is so horrible'. Nobody has said that. I specifically said I did not believe in God because, personally, I think it's stupid. There is zero evidence for it and I don't believe in things that are just made up. I still think the God of the Bible is a hideous creature. And as others have said, either the Bible is wrong or God is evil. If the God of the OT is completely wrong, then why doesn't the Christian church disavow it?

Atheism isn't 'structured' any more than not belieiving in magic or fairies is!
I think the Christian God is as real as Zeus or Hera or Aphrodite or Wodin or Thor. Nobody says that not believing in Zeus is perverse or strange, do they?

And it stuns me that people say, "Well, I don't understand X or Y therefore God must have created it".
I don't know how this computer works, but I don't assume God made it.

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And I probably wouldn't have used the word stupid if someone hadn't got there first. I usually say 'irrational'.

I always stay with the fact that I presume Christians would have believed in Wodin or Zeus.

ok aloha, i think you're confused here (or confusing me with someone else). i'd be v. careful not to misquote, or take out of context. scroll down the page, you'll find your own comments right there!!

for example:
"I never said anything about pleasure"

YOU DID ACTUALLY - aloha on pleasure:
"By aloha on Friday, 18 November, 2005 11:02:31 PM
What is remotely arrogant about enjoying your life as much as you can and finding beauty in it?"

& again aloha - "How can atheism be born out of fear of the void?". actually i personally said the opposite, ie my faith in large part came about through exactly this idea...

sorry, but i hope that clears things up a little.

i don't think roos mum was calling anyone stupid ! I thought she was saying if one has that faith, one would be either denying it or being stupid not to listen to it. that's not the same thing. It like saying, if you feel happy, and then you say to yourself I CAN'T be happy, there is no evidence that happiness exists, you'd be whatever roosmum said. But if you don't feel that faith, then of course you are not stupid or denying it. It is a very erratic, personal thing.

Well, as you see, I never said pleasure at all. And I certainly never said pleasure was all important.
And you said that I stated that Beauty was all there was, which is untrue.

And above all, I am still baffled about what is so awful about trying to enjoy life and find beauty in it.

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pruni, that's exactly why i put it with apologies to those that would read it - & have exactly that hands off response.

no, of course i don't seriously thing you're deluded or stupid. for me, however, the notion of faith is amazingly uncomplicated. yes, there are complications & difficulties - but they come a little later than the idea of faith per se.

i don't think i would believe in wodan or zeus aloha, because as i have said before, i am a
Christian agnostic - my Faith in God wavers, but i always believe that christ's teachings are the way to live [not that i always follow them well obviously!] It seems athiests are very protective of what they believe - but christians have been called here and elsewhere 'needy' and 'deluded'. i think that is a very simplistic idea of Faith. Faith is extremely hard - it doesn't protect you from everything life throws at you, and sometimes it is much easier to think, well thats it then, God doesn't exist. To keep that inner debate going within you is quite a challenge. i don't resent anyone not believing in God, but i find it strange when other people tell me what i believe in and then that i am being irrational or needy or whatever. Athiests on the whole [NOT ALL] seem to have a rather over simplified view of the bible, and have more in common with fundamentalist christians than i thought.

but to answer aloha (from way down the thread) - um, YOU said beauty was all actually. i never quote people back at themselves because it sounds smug & trite, but it'll be better than paraphrasing in this case i think: "We do what we can to make life beautiful because that is all there is" (aloha).

I said LIFE is all there is, actually.
Blimey, what kind of idiot would think that there is nothing but beauty in life. I do read the papers, you know!

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i agree with you aloha, that life is what we should focus on. Christ talked about us creating a kingdom of heaven on EARTH. [Metaphor!] shame none of us do it, christians or muslims or athiests.

and i'm falling for it pruni!Time and time again! at the expense of my poor ds! i should have taken him out to the swings this afternoon but by the time we got out the sun was setting!

Nobody has told you what you believe in. However the Christian faith is based on the Bible. The Bible tells us over and over again that God is wrathful, vengeful and kills people (sometimes just for complaining). I totally agree the Bible (OT and NT together) is deeply flawed, contradictory and confusing. Which makes it even more absurd IMO that believers are supposed to use it to live their lives by and to make decisions that will determine their eternal fate. If God was real and Jesus was his messenger, I honestly think they should have got their stories straight and been a little less euphemistic about what you are supposed to do to be 'saved' - whatever that means, as very few Christians these days seem to beleive in heaven and hell.

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yes i get that you think 'life' is all there is, no afterlife, heaven, underworld - zero. so then making that life beautiful is the ultimate point, because there's nothing else...is how i read it at least. beauty the ultimate goals for your energies, however you understand that beauty. apologies if not so.

btw i think that 'enjoying yourself' constitutes a description of pleasure...but i might be wrong on that i suppose...

Also to damn people for all eternity for not believing and then making it impossible for many, many people to believe also seems, um, a tad unreasonable.

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pruni, it's just the starting point i was talking about..after that...sigh, so hard, so complicated!!! so human...