Atheists, if I told you....

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Preacher califor can't find a choir so he just keeps thumping his empty head on the old rugged Atheist Martyr post.

this conversation has no basis in fact, and therefore we have no way of determining what is right and what is wrong. The whole thing is conjecture. You're making bets, without the benefit of statistics. You're throwing darts at an invisible board, hoping that you'll hit the bullseye and win eternal life; because you desperately want eternal life.

That is certainly true of some theists and some Christians, but it is too large a generalization to cover all religious/spiritual people.

What you are attacking is not God-experience (regardless of what is claimed and who is claiming it), but rather "Faith" in its narrowest and most uncritical, popular connotation. "Faith-in" and/or "Faith-about" can be based on blind adherence to a tradition or a scripture or a set of scriptures. However, as the cliche goes, experience trumps faith - just as it trumps conjecture and speculation.

In the West, God-experience certainly trumped faith in the numerous "Gnostic" groups which valued direct, intuitive, unitive/communitive experience of the divine (God, the Spirit, the Holy, the Absolute, the Eternal Light - etc.) over any faith-proposition. This is why the Church condemned them as heretics, because if you don't need faith in "the invisible board", in its scriptures and in its earthly representatives - because you know your self to be immersed in a living divine reality - then you are dangerous to organized religion's "invisible board", its so-called inspired books, and its ecclesiastical authorities. You don't need the God of religion/faith; the scriptures are only helps along the way, not inerrant; and you don't need pope, bishop, priest, pastor, or minister...because you're "There" already without needing recourse to outside, and mostly ignorant, "assistance".

The same applies to philosophy as a path to or away from God. The God accepted or rejected by intellection will always remain nothing but the god of the mind, a concept, an abstraction, a chimera, a phantasm.

The late atheist writer, Gore Vidal, put it well when he said:

"God - or what have you - is not to be found on the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased."

The God gained or lost through syllogistic inquiry is in the same boat as is the God of faith-in/faith-about, and of theological speculation. It is only the experiential God - the God of "Gnosis" or spiritual "Knowing"/"Knowledge" Who/Which matters - because He/She/It trumps faith, intellection, and speculation.

Thus for spirituality - not "religion" - it is not faith or philosophy which is central, but rather the experience of divine union/divine communion. And that trumps all the other God-frames. Of course this doesn't mean that all claimed God-experiences are valid, but that question goes beyond the point that I am making, namely that the God-experience of hands-on spiritual practice is not about conjecture or throwing darts at and invisible board. That model is probably better phrased as exchanging "the invisible board" with the direct experience of a very living, loving Presence, a being and a state of egoless wisdom and compassion. This means that there is no need to throw darts ... because you have realized that thrower, dart, and board are "One".

The difference between atheists and theists is simple: Atheists don't give a damn about the board.

So? That just means they won't have the opportunity to play darts, much less the opportunity of discovering that player, dart, and board are really, already, One. That's their, not the theists', loss. No one is forcing atheists to play.

If I, a man, told you that you could live an eternal life, in a glorious heaven, if all you had to was accept Enrico Fermi as your lord and master, would you accept that?

You people don't understand that all these tactics were just forms of brilliant marketing to help a new religion get converts.

That cliched notion deliberately bypasses the role of immediate spiritual experience or Gnosis within religions. Originally, it was not a case of someone marketing a belief. It was about direct experience of God, the Spirit, the risen Christ, etc., and thus not a matter of belief, but of personal experiential validation. The same holds true today. Beyond the "marketing" there is still experiential Gnosis of spiritual reality that happens in nearly every religion, whether "organized" or not.

Good answer for those who still DON'T GET IT.

Another answer I liked was, "If I told you there really was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, would you go look for it?"
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Well, some do, and from what I've read it's normally because they can't cope with some life alternating event. Religion looks really promising when you're struggling and they say everything you want to hear like some shyster traveling salesman selling snake oil




Panzer vor!

If one creates something in the mind, a story or a character, it is quite really difficult to just dismiss it, don't you think? After we've imagined something, it sticks to the mind. We're not like computer where program or documents that we created can be deleted and "forgotten by the computer". Perhaps we exist because GOD has us in his mind. His creation, his memory of us and like any memory, it lingers and like a belief cannot simply be on or off. Perhaps it is this case that non existence may not be a possibility just because we're all in GOD's mind and an eternal and powerful GOD remembers everything.