The real trick is to get them after they've been baptized though. It adds a delightful burning sensation, without the addition of any spices.NO NO NO!! The whole attraction of eating babies is that they're still tender. You can do a quick pan sear while keeping the meat rare or even serve them carpaccio style. Never overcook babies, if you do you might as well be serving teenagers. Yuck.
No problems with Hell here. It's as imaginary as Heaven or Mordor.It's always boggled my mind as well. I would have trouble sleeping at night and going on with life if I had no idea whatsoever what happens after death or if I thought I just "cease to exist" or worse, living with the possibility that I am in fact going to hell. It would seem way too depressing to go on with life without constantly thinking about it.
Good and bad: We made it all up. And society constantly changes it, too, dragging religions along for the ride. You could once stone people to death. You could once burn heretics alive. You could once keep slaves. All of which was once done with the blessing, or even urging of some religion.Also if there is no God, then what *IS* evil? What is the definition of doing something bad? You can kill people if you want, it's not a sin, sin does not exist. There is no right or wrong, everything is neutral. Some people even believe that life is just a chemical reaction that is predetermined and there is no self awareness or freewill. If that was the case then we are equivalent to acid eating through something. The acid is not committing a crime by destroying something else, it's just a chemical systematically doing what science determined. Some people actually believe living things are like that. D: Sad way to look at what life is.
If there is no God, if there is nothing after death, if there is no right/wrong determined by a higher power etc. Then, to be blunt, what keeps you from ending it all right now ?
The real trick is to get them after they've been baptized though. It adds a delightful burning sensation, without the addition of any spices.
No problems with Hell here. It's as imaginary as Heaven or Mordor.
Nonexistence: You did it before you were born, and you seem to be doing just fine despite it.
As I once saw it put, paraphrased here: You'll still exist after dying. Your component atoms will simply be less orderly.
Good and bad: We made it all up. And society constantly changes it, too, dragging religions along for the ride. You could once stone people to death. You could once burn heretics alive. You could once keep slaves. All of which was once done with the blessing, or even urging of some religion.
Thankfully, we've improved beyond that, because we've determined that these behaviors are cruel or unjust. "Evil" or not - it's determined by our evolved behaviors, for a large part. We don't like to feel fear for our own survival, so society's got a bunch of rules that help mitigate these problems. We like having stable food supplies, and it's good to be able to get a drink of water without worrying that it's going to be dangerous, as it is in much of the world. So, there are strict rules about water safety, and harsh punishments if you screw with it. We're also a social species that does better in groups. Rules for a large and stable society are simply outgrowths of those ancient underpinnings.
Living things: Well, yeah. We're a big complicated bunch of atoms that work in a certain way. We don't know the initial state of the system though, so it's tough to predict the outcome.
Though interestingly, there is probability in large numbers of people. I can assume with a very high degree of probability that there will be many cars on the road right around 5:10pm on a weekday. I can also predict that this volume will fall on designated holidays, or weekends. But I can't predict with accuracy where a specific person will be at a specific time.
Same with our ideas of free will: We still have certain confines that are determined by our atoms and chemical reactions. I can predict that if you do not take in fresh oxygen for 10 minutes, I really don't care what your free will or mythical "soul" tries to think about, your body is still going to die, and it's going to take your brain and all of its stored information with it. And once your body's internal defenses have stopped working, the bacteria that surround us everywhere (and even live in us) will move to disassembling it, permanently.
So, I can predict that you're going to be breathing within a 40 second window, encompassing ± 20 seconds of right now. So is that deterministic, based on those pesky (electro)chemical reactions going on inside you on a continuous basis?
And you've also got companies doing datamining on people, able to predict behavior with rather scary accuracy at times, whether it be Target determining that your daughter is pregnant, or just a grocery store using your shopper's card data to figure out that you haven't been buying your typical quantities of an item, so it spits out a coupon for you. Then if you still don't go for it, it makes the deal more enticing the next week. Or maybe it's Walmart using the data to figure out how much of something to order so they can keep their shelves stocked, but not overfill the warehouse.
Like it or not, we're primates, and we fit in nicely as part of the cluster of life forms on this planet. We just happen to have freakishly large brains for our body size, and it's given us some interesting functionality that has evidently been lacking on this planet, including ideas of things like what we like to refer to as "free will." How free is it? I think we're still trying to figure it out.
Free will and chemical reactions, and predeterminism: You've still got that issue with that deity that knows everything. If the deity that you're saying created everything also knows absolutely everything that is knowable, then free will only exists within our own narrow spectrum of reality - but whatever we do would then in fact be following a predetermined script that god made for everything right from the start. We just aren't aware of it then. So is that free will? It depends entirely on the scope of observation. And of course, if god doesn't know everything, well, that's going against the grain that the religions tend to teach.
Free will on the chemical scale: If it was possible to know the initial states of absolutely every last subatomic particle on the planet, as well as of all particles and photons that would interact with it, then you could have a chance of predicting everything that would happen from that point on.
Doing that is of course, at least as far as we know, entirely impossible.
So, no, I don't find it at all "sad." It's rather quite fascinating and interesting. Paraphrasing Carl Sagan, he said that we are a way for the Universe to understand itself. (Look at our chemical composition: We're made up of what the Universe is made of, in roughly the right proportions. We're just little somewhat-orderly pockets of its material, trying to figure things out now.) We came from a long line of life forms that were good at keeping themselves alive on a harsh planet, in an uncaringly indifferent Universe, getting a feel for just how incredibly immense this spacetime bubble of ours is. There's a lot of stuff out there to look at, and it's afforded to us simply because this little planet happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right ingredients. The only "sad" part is to look at all that history, and to look at where we are today, and to then say that it's all entirely meaningless without a god.
NO NO NO!! The whole attraction of eating babies is that they're still tender. You can do a quick pan sear while keeping the meat rare or even serve them carpaccio style. Never overcook babies, if you do you might as well be serving teenagers. Yuck.
It's always boggled my mind as well. I would have trouble sleeping at night and going on with life if I had no idea whatsoever what happens after death or if I thought I just "cease to exist" or worse, living with the possibility that I am in fact going to hell. It would seem way too depressing to go on with life without constantly thinking about it.
Also if there is no God, then what *IS* evil? What is the definition of doing something bad? You can kill people if you want, it's not a sin, sin does not exist. There is no right or wrong, everything is neutral. Some people even believe that life is just a chemical reaction that is predetermined and there is no self awareness or freewill. If that was the case then we are equivalent to acid eating through something. The acid is not committing a crime by destroying something else, it's just a chemical systematically doing what science determined. Some people actually believe living things are like that. D: Sad way to look at what life is.
Our beloved Lord and Prophet Richard Dawkins has said that rare baby meat is an abomination. All who partake of the undercooked flesh shall not evolve for all eternity.
Our beloved Lord and Prophet Richard Dawkins has said that rare baby meat is an abomination. All who partake of the undercooked flesh shall not evolve for all eternity.
Fetus is best served Fresh from the Bearded Clamshell. Anything above or below typical Human Body Temperature totally ruins it!
Go on and be with your Gods.So if the after life is your grand rewards, and that this life on earth is suffering, what's keeping you here?
BTW, I am honestly not trying to start any kind of argument, I legitimately want to know what it is that you look forward to by staying here on Earth. It's not worthy of your cause. Wink, wink.
If you're already guaranteed salvation, because you have given yourselves into your Gods, which means you're accepted into the version of the afterlife that your Gods have painted - be it floating on the clouds or chilling with 72 virgins - why not just leave this pathetic Earth now and enjoy your rewards for eternity? Just end it.
Some of you may say that "well, my religion forbids me from taking my own life", I'm sure you're smart enough to come up with ways where you're not doing your own life taking. Go on, reap your rewards, be with your Gods! Just do it!
Atheists believe there is no god.
Agnostics believe
Unfortunately, my other legitimate thread was locked due to extreme mod bias, but fret not, here's the question I want to ask you religious type:
Go on and be with your Gods.
Fair is fair, right? At least in my thread, I advocate people to reap their due rewards. This thread is just asking people to kill themselves because of perceived "hopelessness".Vying for another lock?
Fair is fair, right? At least in my thread, I advocate people to reap their due rewards. This thread is just asking people to kill themselves because of perceived "hopelessness".
I'm assuming you consider humans as 'animals' then ? Let's get that out of the way first.
I define success for our species as controlling multiple star systems in 500 or 1000 years!
Unfortunately I feel we have allowed political correctness to blind us to realities which, will ensure this does not happen. Hope I'm wrong.
OP is clearly depressed and needs help. If you're the least bit the secular humanist, you should have some pity for him.
Of course, the Believers hate the pity of nonbelievers almost as much as they despise nonbelievers.
Atheists believe there is no god. And the more irritating members of that group will act like fundies of established religions by trying to convert you to their point of view.
I was leaning Atheist for awhile but its honestly pretty stupid to believe in no God.