Atheism

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Recovering From Religion (www.recoveringfromreligion.org)
submitted 2 years ago by RotatingParts@lemmy.ml to c/atheism@lemmy.ml
 
 

If you are looking for help on your journey out of religion, check out the free help that Recovering From Religion provides. You can also find communities of like minded people there.

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We need to stand up and be counted.

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I've been interested in physics since I was a kid, and read many books on the topic. The thought experiments of Einstein that led to his theories of relativity were some of the earliest topics I encountered. If you have not read of that, do so . . . I will wait.

So we come to the EPR paradox. The new field of quantum mechanics in the 1920s presented this conundrum - that particles could have entangled properties but that those properties would not become determined until a measurement event, at least according to Bohr. But upon one measurement, both particles states would be determined even if they were separated, and this determination would be instantaneous - faster than light.

The EPR paradox received further attention in the 1950s and led to the Bell's Inequalities - describing the paradox in some detail. Bell proposed solutions to the paradox which are each a bitter pill in their own way. Some have received greater press, but there is nothing yet known to choose among them. Two that are most conspicuous are 1) a multiverse - all the outcomes exist in separate parallel universes, and 2) hard determinism - the paradox arises from quantum mechanics being predictive, but spacetime is complete and only one outcome actually exists - always has and always will.

The more I have thought on these options, the less possibility I can grasp for matters spiritual. The multiverse scenario seems ridiculously uneconomical to my admittedly-Calvinist upbringing, but if all outcomes exist, what judgement can there be for how a person lives (i.e. we live in ALL the ways we can). The hard determinism scenario is crystalline. We do not actually have any free will whatsoever - not even the free will to take advantage of being completely inculpable for our actions.

I think there may be a more mystical way of thinking of hard determinism though - a koan, if you will. We are agents of causality within a complete four-dimensional spacetime. We bring the crystalline structure of the universe into existence by virtue of our own existence in some way.

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Sadly, this doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know.

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I always have been an atheist, but when i was younger, I felt really angry against religions. This is because of my ancestry, I was denied the right to be an atheist. This video helped me to better live this feeling. I hope it could help someone.

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Last year, a friend of mine died in Washington state. Instead of being buried or cremated, he opted to have his remains composted in a process sometimes called terramation. It's an environmentally friendly option to normal burial, and legal in several states including Washington. Illinois had House Bill 3158 on the docket this session to make it legal here as well.

The bill passed the house, but never made it out of the state senate committee, so it's dead for now (no pun intended). I decided to look up how my state representative voted, and because I live in the red part of a blue state, I was unsurprised to see they voted against it.

I wondered why that might be -- could it be a simple partisan thing? Of course, that's part of it, but another part is the opposition. A little research shows that two groups opposing it are funeral directors (less $$$ for them), and <gasp!> the Catholic Church.

Why? Human dignity, they say -- Daniel Welter, retired from the Archdiocese of Chicago, said turning humans into compost "degrades the human person and dishonors the life" that person lived. He compared it to composting vegetable trimmings and egg shells. Funeral directors also commented on the lack of dignity for the dead.

Thoughts? Mine are simple -- I am built from the dust of stars, as is everything else on this planet. It's my birthright to return to it. Anything that prevents that is anathema to me.

I also find it supremely ironic that, at "traditional" funerals, the priest says "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" as they lower a preservative filled body in a lacquered box into the ground which is encased in sealed vault, completely separated from the earth and ashes and dust to which the dead is supposed to return.

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Since I've abandoned Reddit, I find myself looking for content similar to what I was subscribed to on there.

This looks to be the most active of the Lemmy transplants, so it looks like I'll do my lurking here instead on some other Lemmy community.

As much as a shitshow it's turning out to be over there, I am thankful for Reddit and for having had /r/atheism as a default sub, otherwise it would have taken me a little longer to become atheist

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This site is a great resource for people who insist that there's no harm in letting people believe what they want. While everyone has the right to make that choice for themselves, that's different from claiming there's no harm in believing things that can't be proven true, and sometimes can be demonstrably proven to be not true.

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Religious rationalizers twist phrases and modify translations to prove they are honoring the Bible's words.


An oldie but a goodie...

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Rationality Rules takes on the table again

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Sense of Betrayal (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 years ago by Fredselfish@lemmy.ml to c/atheism@lemmy.ml
 
 

How are they surprised. Elect a Muslim majority to your city council and first they do is start banning things based on their religion. No different then the GOP and their christian agenda.

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Hhffggshn@lemmy.click to c/atheism@lemmy.ml
 
 

What are some of your favorite quotes about atheism?

"Christianity is the religion of love the same way Islam is the religion of peace." - Richard Dawkins

I added a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi for fun.

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This has been reposted so many times, but this is a new site and there's no telling who might have missed it. Uncle George at his best, talking about how the religion scam works (Christian specific).

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This is the Atheist Fortune Cookie file. The writings of the ancients, a massive collection of quotes, both silly and profound, criticizing religion from the dawn of the online era and earlier. They should not be forgotten.

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An oldie but a goodie

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Hhffggshn@lemmy.click to c/atheism@lemmy.ml
 
 

Any interest in one thread where we post bizarre religious art and comics?

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For some reason this site isn’t friendly to mobile users, so I linked directly to the image. Here’s the link to the source: https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/dread2/

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Dave Warnock is a former evangelical preacher who was diagnosed with a terminal case of ALS (aka "Lou Gehrig's Disease") in 2019. He was given three to five years to live, and he's chosen to spend that time focusing on life rather than ruminating about his impending death. Based on a web search, he's been actively speaking about his experience as recently as April of this year.

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by spaceghoti@lemmy.one to c/atheism@lemmy.ml
 
 

Everyone has a different definition of the god(s) they believe in and this creates a moving target for the atheist expressing skepticism regarding those beliefs. There are at last count something on the order of over three thousand different gods that humans have worshiped; here's a non-canonical list of them. In addition, there are thousands of sects within various religions all claiming to worship the same god but attributing different personalities to them effectively creating new gods in the process. Then there are Deist gods who are undefined but nevertheless divine by nature and pantheism which holds that the universe and everything in it is some sort of manifestation of godhood. It's exhausting. So here I will go through a top-level list of gods I don't believe are real.


  1. I don't believe in any gods that are responsible for the creation or function of the universe.

If you have evidence to demonstrate that your god is the author of all and that nothing can exist without your god then show me the evidence. Your personal conviction is not evidence of anything except that you're convinced. I need more than words to believe, I need independently verified peer reviewed observation. That then brings me to my next point:


  1. I don't believe in any of the gods that must be argued into existence.

Philosophical arguments from Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways through to the modern modal ontological argument are not evidence, they're speculation. Speculation only ceases to be speculation when you can present evidence that can be independently reproduced and does not depend on a desire to believe before it can be observed. Claiming that life is dark and ugly without your god doesn't show me your god is real, it shows me you have no imagination. Invoking love and beauty doesn't prove your god is real, it proves you view life through a very narrow lens and I have no reason to limit myself like that. Threatening me with dire consequences doesn't convince me of anything except that you have no argument. Arguing for your god doesn't impress me, evidence does.


  1. I don't believe in any gods that are interested or interceding in our lives.

Gods have been depicted as everything from humans or familiar animals with super powers to single omnimax entity greater than the whole of our universe. I could see how people might think the super-powered gods might take an interest in our affairs but the omnimax god doesn't make much sense. It would be like us focusing on a small batch of mitochondria within our bodies and declaring that everything revolves around them. But regardless of power level, I just don't see any reason to believe there are gods intervening in our lives. I get the same results praying to Zeus, Wotan, Jesus and Ganesh as I do to a jug of milk. Repeated studies find no effective change in outcomes from prayer except those corresponding with the placebo effect and you can replicate that result just by letting people know you're wishing them well.


  1. I don't believe in any gods that have the power to suspend natural laws to perform miracles.

Miracles are tricky things. They never happen when anyone can test or verify them. A discouraging number of them have been debunked, even the "official" ones. They're always held up by the faithful as evidence of their gods' power but they're rarely convincing to anyone else. I rarely hear of devout Hindus experiencing a miracle from the Christian god or devout Christians experiencing miracles performed by the Muslim god. But let's assume for the sake of argument that these miracles really did happen as claimed; where's the evidence? Even an ethereal, extra-temporal omnimax god would necessarily leave traces when interacting with our universe, also known as "evidence." The evidence presented for these miracles is always subjective and typically anecdotal. There's never any evidence that skeptical researchers can point to and say "that must be of supernatural origin, because it violates causality."


  1. I don't believe in any of the gods that have been presented to me because I've not been given convincing evidence that any of them exist.

I've said it before and I'll continue to say it as long as it continues to be applicable: I'll believe anything you tell me as long as you show me evidence appropriate to the claim. Nothing else will do, and you're only wasting your time if you think you've come up with a new argument or example for why I should believe. If your evidence wouldn't win you the Randi Foundation Million Dollar Prize then it won't move me, either.

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Jonathan Pearce examines the philosophical problems of substitutionary atonement and the consequences for victims when believers claim that their god has forgiven them.

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