Atheism

Me!

Too, but why the question ?

I just hate that word, atheism. Hate it hate it hate it. But I suppose I have to be one.

You've got mail, dear friends!

Hello.

Am one i guess...

A closet Atheist.. :->

I am a Zeitgeist (watch the film)
if that is anything to go by Atheist i guess then.

Zoubia wrote:

I just hate that word, atheism. Hate it hate it hate it. But I suppose I have to be one.

The comedian Frank Muir expressed it well: 'At 68 Im a closet agnostic. My doubts are wavering'.

Keno, if you're a Zeitgeist person, there are so much more documentaries I can recommend you to watch.

I don't know if I'm an atheist, but I certainly don't believe in following religion blindly like most ppl do

I see Mauritius as a very religious country, very a openmindedness to the different religions, but everywhere i read it seems that its always "religion" religions, not a word about atheism. Is it okay to be a atheist in Mauritius?

Hi Jonas, its your choice what you want to believe or not believe into, and like in many other countries some will respect your choice and some will maybe see it differently... Religion plays an important role for many, for some its also deeply rooted in the family and for others its a way of life or how things should be and makes things stable, come see for yourself, its to vast to write how complex the Mauritian society is setup/built and it constantly changes and evolves. One generation back youth were different to the ones now. Some had complexes which now are already shattered. And while i write this and someone reads this in the years to come, what i have written now might completely not be valid anymore...

Dietmar :thanks for your post

Yes i am a fellow aethiest. i am moving to Mauritius in approx. 8 months. i would be very interested to meet fellow aethiests

I am mauritian and i'm atheist. I follow darwinism  !
Anyone interested in debating about how life began, the universe, space travel or any other complicated topic, please contact me !

I spent my life in the climate of fundamental physics research, and in that mental frame there is no room and no need for a God.
Yes, I am a non believer and feel sad for all those who waste their life fearing a god that doesn't exist.

Sleeping Cookie

“I don't know if I'm an atheist, but I certainly don't believe in following religion blindly like most ppl do”

I am of the same “belief” and I think that many of the members of the forum too.  Any specific name for such an approach?

Cheers

Vayid

Hey Vayid, I guess Agnostic is the right word

I suggest people to watch a great documentary series produced by History Channel called "Ancient Aliens". While I may not agree with all theories, but it certainly gives some very interesting ideas.

Vayid wrote:

Sleeping Cookie

“I don't know if I'm an atheist, but I certainly don't believe in following religion blindly like most ppl do”

I am of the same “belief” and I think that many of the members of the forum too.  Any specific name for such an approach?

Cheers

Vayid

Isn't that being a heathen?

As enticing as it would be to form an 'Atheist group', you can imagine how boring it would be. Within minutes we would all agree there is no god. If you want some fun, add some deeply religious people into the group and tell them God was an Atheist!

a·the·ist (th-st)
n.
One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.

Therefore, if you are an Atheist,it implies that you believe in Atheism. By implication you then believe in something.
Consequently,by believing you cannot be an Atheist. By default then Atheism does not exist.

Silvan0 wrote:

in that mental frame there is no room and no need for a God.
Yes, I am a non believer and feel sad for all those who waste their life fearing a god that doesn't exist.

I'm not a believer, nor religious, neither a physicist but I'm very surprised how a scientist could claim the non existence of God.  Perhaps there exists some scientific evidence that I am not aware of proving that point?

@stormers1960 
mhhh... this sounds like a cheap manipulation of predicate logic void of their semantical implication. In the Middle Ages alchemists used this kind of arguments (sillogysm) to demonstrate just about anything. The semantical interpretation of your definition of "Atheist" should be read as:

"One who disbelieves (or denies) [in] the existence of God or gods"

where "the existence of God or gods" is a necessary term complement of the verb "disbelieve"

In other words an Atheist is not someone who does not believe in anything, but only "in the existence of God or gods".

As an example, I don't believe in gods but I do believe in Science and in anything that can be proven and demonstrated.

But I "believe" yours was just a purely academical digression founded on a syntactical oversight.

@bolenti

Let me correct you. Scientists don't claim the non-existence of God, they simply do not believe in anything that cannot be seen and rigorously demonstrated with facts, not with words written in ancient books.

Science never denies anything a priori, but calculates a certain probability of it being true. A couple of months ago, my colleagues at CERN demonstrated the existence of the "Higgs Boson" at 99.7%. More extensive lab testing over the next 6 months will lead us to ascertain its existence at 100%.

I am prepared to believe that donkeys fly, when you show me one that does, but until then, yours is just a hypothesis.

Well at least we now have some discussion going.

Silvan0 wrote:

@bolenti
Let me correct you. Scientists don't claim the non-existence of God

I didn't wrote "scientists", I wrote "a scientist" that was explicitly referring to you who in turn certainly wrote "a god that doesn't exist."  You are the one making the hypothesis here, not me sorry

Science never denies anything a priori, but calculates a certain probability of it being true.

I'm sorry I couldn't less agree, because to me it's as if you're simply saying: science is about measurement & probability.

You caught me there. I should have said "a god that may not exist" (mea culpa). The truth is, every scientist is also a person, and as a person he/she may have their own personal convictions. I have met a lot of physicists, including Nobel winners, who are true believers. They will never admit the existence of God, or even discuss it, during a scientific exchange, however they do go to church on Sunday. They cannot explain why, perhaps because of habit, of cultural background, because they need comfort in a supreme being, because they fear death, whatever the reason, they are believers while everything in their daily research points to the randomness of Nature.

As a man, I am a non believer, but as a scientist I could never state that God/gods do not exist, unless I had proof with a factor of confidence of 99.95%.

And yes, science is all about measurement & statistics. Google "scientific method" and you will find that all over. Here is an easy pick:
www.experiment-resources.com/what-is-th … ethod.html

@stormers1960

"a·the·ist (th-st)
n.
One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.

Therefore, if you are an Atheist,it implies that you believe in Atheism. By implication you then believe in something."

Though Mr Sylvan0 has explained this logic already i'll put it in simpler terms. I never said I don't believe in 'something'.. only in a "non-existent form, being, energy or force" frequently and commonly referred to by the letters G-O-D. On the other hand, turn these letters round to spell'D-O-G' and I will say yes indeed... i do believe in the existence of Dog.

And incidentally, the most PEACEFUL war-free countries on this planet Earth happen to be the countries with LARGE percentage of Atheists.

So here's another piece of logic for you... eliminate religion and you'll have PEACE on this Earth.

And while i'm on this subject I so happen to live above a "Pasteur" of the Harvest Church. His name is Pasteur Rico. By day he leads a congregation, by night he is known as 'Le Roi Du Nord' to all police stations in the North of Mauritius. He is a thief who targets tourists and has already been in prison multiple times.

It's true that religion is the source of most wars. A bunch of people fighting who's god is better, while trying to impose their beliefs on you.

And what is even senseless is that they are fighting about the same god. Christians, Muslims, Jewish all share to the same religious roots, the Ancient Testament. Yet they are killing each other on differences about prophets and rites.

Why can't they all just worship Nature, which is there, omnipresent and eternal, mother of all life, and doesn't need prophets, lies and rituals.

Stormtrooper wrote:

If you want some fun, add some deeply religious people into the group and tell them God was an Atheist!

I love your concept of an atheist god. It makes perfect sense! Who is God's god? himself of course. Now being oneself's god is a central element of the Lotus Sutra, in Buddhism. So if a God exists, then he/she is not an Atheist but a Buddhist.

@Silvan0

"may not exist" is what I was more expecting from a scientist. 

No, science is not *all* about measurement & stats. In the link  you sent here it sums it all: observation and measurement.  Not stats!

Funnily, reference to God has become more and more present in the domain of physics: God particle & "pure" randomness being lately the most common two terms suggesting some divine missing link in the theories

A lot of scientific measurements are done through probability calculations, often called "Montecarlo" or stocastic methods. In particular in particle physics, where you cannot tell really where a particle is exactly, but you assume where it is with a certain percentage of probability. Even when you detect it, you have to consider a probability that your measurement was wrong (bias), due to signal background noise. This is why you use statistical analysis to assert results.

As for the "God particle" this horrible term was coined by some journalist seeking sensationalism, and is totally inappropriate. the Higgs mechanism is what gives mass to particles, and therefore operates the Energy to Mass transformation which is at the basis of General Relativity and the Standard Model. It is a mechanism, not a superior intelligent being that "creates" the Universe. So nothing to do with religion, unless you believe some cheap press.

Feeding the troll here :
Afterlife exists says top brain surgeon

telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9597345/Afterlife-exists-says-top-brain-surgeon.html

All like Alien encounters, post coma stories have an astonishing similarity. Most witnesses claim to have seen and experienced more of less the same things. This of course reinforces their foundation. But when 1000 people say they have seen donkeys fly, do you believe donkeys fly? I mean, you may believe they have seen a donkey fly but that is not enough to scientifically assess that donkeys fly. There is such a thing as collective illusion. Houdini could make the whole audience believe that their watch was showing a totally different time than it was. Hypnosis can take you in a state of consciousness impossible to distinguish from reality.

I myself experienced a collective illusion a couple of years ago, when I observed three UFOs flying over Geneva from East to West, and disappearing behind the Jura mountains. At a closer look with my telescope they looked like galaxy clusters with a comet style trail. I posted the sight on an astronomy forum and found that I was not the only one to have seen them. More than 50 astronomers in Europe had that sighting. A couple of hours later a member of the forum explained it as the three stages of the Arianne rocket, which had been launched earlier on from Kourou, and was now separating over Europe. So did we see UFOs? YES!  were they really UFOs? NO!

Whether Dr. Alexander saw real "angels" or he was under an allucination induced by low oxygenation of his brain caused by a comatose state, he should know better than me, however his statement: "something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death." makes no scientific sense. No matter how profound his conviction, no state of mind can ever be taken as scientific evidence. Otherwise we should also believe in the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds realities that LSD druggies experience also very profoundly.

As a physicist I can tell you that there is serious mathematical evidence for the existence of extra dimensions and parallel universes, where most of the matter and energy created by the big-bang hides. These exotic worlds actually exist within our space-time and not elsewhere, but we cannot see them or detect them so far. Some phylosophers have  hinted that perhaps this "Dark Energy" could somehow be related to a spiritual world, where our souls exist before and after death, but again, this is a conjecture with no solid foudation. Besides, even if someone was to prove the existence of an after-life, that would still not necessarily imply a God.

If Gotama (Buddha) saw right, there is such a place where souls come and go from, in between reincarnations, but still, no god there. Just us, changing form, from human/animal to spiritual. So Dr. Alexander joins the army of witnesses of the afterlife of which Tibetan and Burmese temples are full, and the fact that he is a scientist does not add any scientific weight to his story.

On the other hand, as a mortal, I can only wish he was right.

Me... I am an atheist. Why??

I got sent to Bible lessons by my mother in lieu of the piano lessons I'd asked for. She was like that, believing spirituality was better for the soul than musicality. An accomplished pianist herself I felt not a little peeved. But a few accounts of Jesus' parables couldn't be so hard, could they? Not at all, save what I got was the history of the Jews, the Mosaic law, how it applied to Christian principles and of course the compulsory reading. Yes there were questions afterwards.

Four years of that and I concluded that if God had inspired a book that was to guide mankind then would it not have been much clearer? 'Thou shalt not kill' is pretty clear yet there was always some other reference to justify going against it. Last I looked there were something like 200 different 'christian' groups all claiming to know the 'right way'. That's 200 groups all saying 'My Jesus is better than your Jesus'. Looking at the other faiths I cant say I see much different.

I would not expect any works by God to describe in technical detail how the universe was created. 'In the beginning God created' is enough. Even today would we actually understand? Just how big, in every sense, would God have to be to pull off the creation alone? As one comedian put it: 'Its much like an amoeba trying to understand a man'.

The fact of conflict in same-religions is evidence enough for me to dismiss them. Any written works by God would not be 'nearly right' or 'for the wise to interpret'. It would be clear to all from street-sweep to brain-surgeon and they are not.

And could we cope with the kind of mind that did understand? I wonder how that amoeba would cope if it could think as we do.

My view is that is God is out there or with us or among us or whatever, then God is also hidden. We honour the giver by using the gift so make the most of the short time we have. If there is anything afterwards then all the better.

Nope, I am Catholic and probably the only one in my family to go to church