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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Sep 24, 2015 - 04:58pm PT
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Instead, they are going around the country giving angry speeches trying to convert the rest of society to their point of view and complaining that they don't get the same respect as religious institutions that are engaged in public service to the neediest and least lovable in society.
Examples...?
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Norton
Social climber
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Sep 24, 2015 - 05:14pm PT
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but that's not what the new atheists are doing.
The terminology "new atheists" was coined some years ago when Hitchens and Dawkins both wrote books making the case against both god and religion.
Hitch is dead now and Dawkins is not longer on tour promoting his book.
I don't really know of any other New Atheists in the media nowadays who had the attention those guys did for a couple of years.
Atheists in general are a pretty quiet group other than an occasional billboard expense, etc
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Sep 24, 2015 - 07:37pm PT
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DMT:
I like your picture. I like everything that it shows: the rock, the out-cropped trees, and I sense a tranquility in it, and in you. Cheers.
Ward.
Sure. I’m a fish. :-)
Marlow:
Yes. Things look “like” many things, don’t they? I wonder which one of them are the ones are the right ones.
How can we be so apparently wrong about so many things (maybe even everything)? Would you be seeing that also? If so, what do you make of it? (Oops, there’s another one of those “things” again.)
A man sits in front of a poster from up-close. Too close. He says he doesn’t see anything. I look in the mirror in passing and see “Mike.” But then something odd about me pulls me back, and I take a close look. Now I don’t see anything I recognize as what I thought I am. I don’t really know what I’m looking at.
Life looks unsolvable to me. Every explanation fails. (What would YOU make of that?)
Jan: What could be interesting for atheists and agnostics to contemplate, would be the creation of nature based rituals and creeds, music etc. along with community based projects to restore and support nature and the ecology.
Brilliant!
Ward:
All organizations have rituals, ceremonies, artifacts, and tools that have magical powers. Change management, strategic planning, budgeting, financial planning, succession planning, NPV calculations, performance reviews, meetings, powerpoint presentations, HR functions (performance reviews, hiring, job shows, terminations), career transitions . . . all these things are loaded with ceremony, they are for the most part ritualistic, and there are many artifacts to facilitate those things that hold meaning for people in organizations. I could say more. Without them, organizations would be lifeless . . . one mechanical transformation after another. People would be committing suicide in large numbers everywhere.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Sep 24, 2015 - 08:10pm PT
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Jesus didn't abolish rituals
Well He did. Jesus fullfilled ALL the Laws AND rituals from the Old Testament. Circumcision, the keeping of Sunday/Saturday holy, baptism, etc, etc. All complete through His name! One no longer needs ceremony to become closer to God. Although if one chooses he can perform these ceremony's to provide confirmation to the congregation, but mostly for the ones "straddling the fence". But any "saved" follower should be able to discern if one is Truely saved..
Jesus did institute one ritual; The breaking of bread. This should be the ONLY act a Christian needs to measure their personal holiness : )
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Sep 24, 2015 - 09:03pm PT
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Because Buddhism and Shinto have been non dogmatic and non crusading, educated secular people feel free to participate in these rituals in Japan whereas intellectuals in the West have a hard time with the dogma and the history of our religious equivalents. Meanwhile, I feel we have lost something psychologically and culturally as a result.
Maybe because Buddhism and Shinto are teaching's to better yourself, and to look inside yourself for the answers, and to follow yourself. Therefor the educated secular's feel like they got that wired, and just go through the motions without concern of the outcome. I don't know, do those religions provide a pathway to communication with The Creator?
As far as the west, the Christian teaching go's; if a Christian lives as a Christian should it will look different from the way the secular's are living theirs. Thus evoking to be ASKED what is different in their lives. NOT to go out and demand that secular's live as they do. For the exact reason that to contrive an idea how spiritualism works a ritual is manifested to lend as a teaching tool. And soon you have religions like Catholicism or Mormonism, etc.
The marrow in the bones that built America were people that devoted and sacrificed their lives to the family and giving all Praise to God. Alot of them turned out to be Mormons. Basically because they were asked "how'd you do it?" So one man, Joseph Smith came up with a list of "what to do to be like us". But "Do'ing" is not spirituality. It's either one or the other. And only
Jesus can teach you this lesson.
Worshipping The Creator is beyond description. It is not intellectually describable, sorry...
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Sep 24, 2015 - 09:25pm PT
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Thinking that atheists as a group can overthrow traditional social forms and then seamlessly go about simply just mimicing what is arbitrarily considered to be the communal mechanisms and requirements of a functioning society ---is nothing less than a robotic recipe for simply establishing their own hegemony within that society. Like going through the motions but without the conviction. Merely replacing God with the state or with science, and so on.
THIS is brilliant. Or atleast true.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Sep 24, 2015 - 11:11pm PT
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It seems difficult for some people to imagine, but it is possible to love God and have a spiritual life without being beset by guilt and fear. It is possible to understand God as something more than a lawmaker and judge.
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Sep 25, 2015 - 12:06am PT
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Boxes
What's funny, sad, odd, perplexing, or disturbing to me is how we brand and stereotype each other so easily based upon our religion, atheism, agnosticism, politics, athletic ability, gender, race, sexual orientation, education, social or financial situation, age, nationality, species, or ethnic group.
I love being put in a box. Of all of my family members (mine and my parents generation) I am the only one who is considered an atheist. I sometimes think I am a minority unto myself within my community and my family. Most of my parents, siblings, and in-laws (and 99% of my friends and neighbors) either believe in some kind of spiritual being, are agnostic, undecided, keep it a private matter, or just act like they don't care about religious or philosophical matters (granted that I am a liberal minded person living in a rural conservative community).
I'm ok with it. It took me many years to come to terms with who I think I am. I don't prefer to join or associate myself with any atheist organizations. I'm a lone wolf in this respect and would prefer to keep it that way. One christian person I know who read a short story I wrote about myself and my devoutly christian deceased older brother told me this, "You came across to me in your story as if you might be angry with God for taking your brother. Would it not be better if you could find comfort in God's rewarding him by taking him into his kingdom?" I was at a loss for words. I knew the man to be a conservative and an evangelical and did not wish insult him by disclosing to him my personal views on religion at that moment so I simply replied that though I might have blamed God for the loss of my brother when I was younger, I did not feel that way any longer. He seemed satisfied with the answer and although it was an omission on my part, it seemed the easiest way to keep from ruffling a good business friendship.
There was a long period in my life when I was an agnostic and I did sometimes blame god for 'taking' my brother. There were thoughts of anger as to why he took him (the good and faithful servant) and not taking me (the delinquent youth and black sheep of the family, and yes of course thought I knew where he would be sending me). And then there was the matter of the enormity of my personal feelings of inadequacy during that period of my life. But I eventually came to terms with myself and my demons, I learned to accept myself as I was (warts and all) and the many people and ideas with which I was in conflict. And for now, I have come to terms with my mortality. I do not believe I need a god in my life to save me from sin or to preserve my soul. I simply don't believe any more that I have a soul. I believe I am just another organism with a brain, temporal and flawed, albeit my organism and my brain such as they are.
And I fear pain, loss, and death like the rest of us. Why just today I happened to be having knee surgery around nine o'clock this morning, and you know how there might be the usual anxiety for some of us in these moments. Well things were moving along rather quickly and I was initialing the usual release of liability for accidental head transplant mishaps forms and such while being poked and perforated and shaved and plugged into the various medical apparatus when the thought crossed my mind for about the hundredth time that there was a minuscule chance of my not surviving the anesthesia and the stress of the procedure. Well, moving on to zero hour as I briefly chatted the anesthesiologist about my embarrassment for having forgotten my undergarment when a silence came over me before he slipped the gas over my face and told how I would be going to sleep soon. And that I would be waking in what would only seem a few moments reeling in pain when in reality an hour had gone by.
That was when I asked myself, "What do you believe now? What do you think will happen to you if you don't survive? Are you still ok with it? I believed that the attempted cure was worth the cost. I believed that my chances were good. I believed that if things didn't go my way it was completely out of my control. I believed that if this was the end then all in all it had been a good ride and that if it was over then I would never know the difference. So I let myself go and said to myself "It's alright, just breathe." Then I woke up in really severe pain, and had to wake myself up repeatedly to breath. All in all I was very satisfied with the outcome and the medication and the prospect of leaving in a somewhat better condition than when I arrived.
So, I believe that the thing I fear the most, more than death itself, is to not be true to myself (probably many here feel the same way). My personal truth is that over the years I have earned the right to believe I am worthy of myself. I believe that regardless of whatever my personal beliefs are, that to myself, to my family, to my friends, to my neighbors, and to my community I have demonstrated integrity and worth.
But I don't see myself as elevated above any other person or organism. Yes, I may feel compelled to squash or eat other organisms to survive, but do I feel morally superior to another species? No, I just don't think that way. But like many my personal battle to regain self worth stems from the things that happened to me while growing up and how I reacted badly to those things, how I blamed the people themselves and their institutions instead of the actions of those organizations and individuals, and how I grew mentally and emotionally enough to sort out my part, to know where my amends were due, to restore my psychological center, and to figure out and embark upon my mission.
My mission, which has been to learn to be of service to some, to be good to myself, to understand that everything I ever needed I probably already had in the first place. My mission also has been to embark on a four year science mission to boldly go where no man...no wait, wrong mission, oh yeah, it's to remember that I don't actually know anything for certain at all, and to know that my beliefs are a work in progress. It's to know that the idea that I might have needed god once to get to where I am now, but that I finally have outgrown the idea of god altogether is possibly a flawed and ironic philosophy. It's similar to the concept that ancient man for thousands of years needed god to make sense of the world but within the last few hundred years modern man has attempted to figure out the origin, scope, and nature of the universe without the use of a god whatsoever. And like my own philosophy, although I consider myself squarely in the atheist camp for now, the results are not conclusive.
So I suppose I don't know so much after all. But, back to the question of why we so readily label ourselves with differences, or join different schools of thought, or why we persecute opposing schools of thought? Is it all in the spirit of competition or in the name of good clean fun? Well, I like being put in a box. Heck, we must all like being put in boxes. Why else on earth would we be posting about our opinions and lives in these little boxes here?
-bushman
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Lollie
Social climber
I'm Lolli.
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Sep 25, 2015 - 06:17am PT
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I laughed out loud reading the former page, couldn't help it.
The thought that religious is the norm and non-believers secretely or unknowingly believes in a god, is, to put it nicely, amusing. The belief that religion is the norm is a result of growing up in the culture you now belong to. That one has to confess to a god to be spiritual, or have strong morals etc, is a fantasy. To each her own. Who cares what someone else believes?
I love churches. Especially the Catholic ones or those from the first millenia. They're beautiful buildings. I say grace when I visit a christian family, or pay tribute to Oden, it's a matter of courtesy. If courtesy demands me to cover my head or take off my shoes, I do so. I kiss cheeks, shake hands, rub my nose, whatever. When in Rome, do as Romans do. That includes religion. And I keep my beliefs of the world and beyond to myself.
I do believe in ghosts. I admit that much. :-D
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Sep 25, 2015 - 11:03am PT
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The result of my first click on an item in that HUGE list:
Weekly Meetings: Meetings are DISCONTINUED
United States Atheists is now defunct, we no longer exist as an organization, sorry!
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Sep 25, 2015 - 12:12pm PT
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Regarding atheism. My experience with zen is that it is a-theist in that it just doesn't talk about god, creator etc. it is really only concerned with what is going on right now; what are you doing and why are you doing it. It doesn't say anything good or bad about theist's and there is no problem if theist's practice zen. But zen practice will lead you to the question of what are beliefs? where do they come from? This may make some theist's uncomfortable , but it didn't make Thomas Merton (catholic monk and buddhist meditator mentioned by the pope yesterday)uncomfortable. It seemed he relished in holding the big questions.
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Norton
Social climber
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Sep 25, 2015 - 12:21pm PT
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H,
Did you click on any other links?
The list was a quick Google search in response to the comment
that there really are few atheist groups.
I suppose getting atheists together is like herding cats
but there does appear to be lots of web sites.
Perhaps most atheists, like myself, mostly keep it to themselves.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Sep 26, 2015 - 11:36am PT
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Just to clear things up a little. I just brought up the subject of a single origin of life with an evolution professor (who lives next door and is also in the boxed set of The Matrix series).
Anyway, all life shares a universal genetic code. That was the phrase that he used. Of course this does not mean that other origins haven't happened, it just means that if a separate genetic tree is out there, we haven't seen it.
Recently a genetic tree of life was published with 2.4 million species, according to their genetic code (he preferred to use "code" instead of genome).
Anyway, the data, and there is a shitload of it, indicates that all extant life is descendent from a common ancestor. I find this interesting. The fact that life began so soon after the planet had cooled down enough, and the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment had ended around 4 billion years ago. It is like conditions were good and then BANG, life began. Then why has life not originated many times since?
Anyway, there are certain things that the data cannot absolutely address. We can't work genetics on fossils. The actual organism has been replaced with minerals. That is what a fossil is. So we limit ourselves to extant life. We can't do much with all of that extinct life, and there is a lot.
So, it is possible that life had more than one origin, but for whatever reason, only one genetic line of heritage exists today, and not for lack of looking.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Sep 26, 2015 - 12:26pm PT
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Do you guys experience time dilation while meditating? I tried hypnosis once, and when I came out of it, he asked me how much time had passed. I felt like it had been maybe five minutes, but according to my watch, an hour had passed.
The intense "rush" that you get on your first BASE jump, or rather your first BIG BASE jump (meaning tall enough to get to terminal velocity, around 10 seconds, is really mind bending. It is so intense that time feels like it slows down. Everything is happening in slow motion. You are so overwhelmed by the experience that awareness goes through the roof, although it might only be 10 seconds, as I said. Well, until you get used to it, it is the longest 10 seconds of your life.
Little shorty jumps, with 3 seconds or less of freefall, aren't as interesting from my POV. I really like the big ones. Now all of those big objects are wingsuit exits, and I can't imagine how time dilates during the duration of the flight. I would guess that it is incredible.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 26, 2015 - 01:14pm PT
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Base, you got me to google
"feeling that time slows down"
You might want to look. I saw a photo of a test in which they drop people different distances.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Sep 26, 2015 - 04:08pm PT
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MH2,
Yep. I googled it and it has is own wiki page. I can tell you that your first BASE jump, especially if it is a big one, like El Cap, you are so afraid that you want to puke. It feels like you are committing suicide or something.
Then...the SECOND you step off, your brain opens up into this fantastic feeling of total awareness. Every physical thing that happens is cataloged in a part of your brain that you will never forget. I can vividly remember the first time I had jumped off of El Cap, having done only a few skydives to get ready, and boy was I scared. I mean, stand at the edge of El Cap some time and imagine falling off. It is like that, although you know that you are doing it on purpose.
It is interesting that the wiki page had this to say about the phenomenon:
It is possible to manage tachypsychia still occurring after the event, and it is common for soldiers and martial artists to use tachypsychia in order to increase their performance during stressful situations
I can say that with more BASE jumps, the effect becomes less noticeable, but it never totally went away, with me anyway.
I can also tell you, from all of the years of constant skydiving that I later did, that some people can handle this effect, and others can't. You see it in first jump students often. A lot of them hit the ground, and they can't remember a thing about it. It is like their brains overload and the shut down. Heaven forbid if anything had gone wrong, because they are too out of it to pull their reserves. For most folks, however, or at least the ones who keep coming back, the feeling goes away, or somehow becomes routine and manageable.
I'm curious if the Zen dudes feel time dilation. I can without reservation say that out of every moment of my life, the most alive I ever was was after my feet left the edge on that first El Cap jump.
Then you can't get enough..you do it all the time, you fear cops more than jumping, and yada, yada, yada. You still need the experience; almost like a drug. You just don't feel right if you aren't jumping. When I quit, it took a while to get over that.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Sep 26, 2015 - 04:50pm PT
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I've experienced that sensation only once, when I was doing the speed limit in a little Japanese minicar at 60 k. an hour and a guy in a big van rammed into the back of me doing 120. He flew off the road and crashed into a concrete pole and I instinctively hit the brakes and did three 360 degree turns down the road nearly hitting the fence on one side or going into the ditch on the other but miraculously coming to a stop facing backwards on the wide shoulder of an almost 90 degree bend in the road.
During the time I was going round and round, I was in the deepest, calmest meditation of my life and everything seemed in slow motion. The colors were brilliant and everything crisp and clear even though my glasses had been thrown off by the impact and my vision is -400.
The only thought that crossed my mind as it all happened was not in words but a picture inside my mind that I had two huge angels standing on the roof of the car flapping their wings like crazy to keep me on the road. When I came to a stop and put my glasses on, I was all wet above the waist. It turns out a small bottle of holy water I had in my car had flown out from the dashboard, broken the lid off on the steering wheel and doused me with the water as I went round and round.
Unlike base, it was not an experience I ever need to repeat. For one thing, I had so much adrenaline in my system I couldn't sleep for more than 24 hours afterward.
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