Life, death and awareness.

[Lamonte]

I have several beliefs about human existence. I am old now so my perspective is different. I think the reason we have so many religions is the result of a brain that wants to survive. Being aware of our mortality the only possible survival was by creating a hereafter. Religion provides that and fortuitously each religion had similar mores to those of the culture that created them. I am agnostic, I cannot do as believers and atheists do, thinking they know the unknowable. With life for an aware being I think it better to not have intelligent life. Our existence has one purpose, produce more victims into this dilemma. There is, however a heaven. It is where we go after our death and loss of this cursed awareness. Strange, we reach this blessed state no longer aware and not aware of it.

[Warpy]

1. You've got atheists all wrong, but you've got lots of company

We don't claim to know the unknowable. We just haven't seen any evidence of or for deities.

[Huin]

8. Atheism 101

This thread and your post made me look up meanings of agnosticism and atheism to see the differences. It seems that agnostics still keep options open while atheists have made up their minds already. But are our minds so perfect that we can say for sure there is nothing beyond that what our minds can comprehend? Think about it.

[Warpy]

10. You'll find few atheists who are that certain.

We've just given up hope a deity will pop up.

[kairos12]

14. These days I have converted to

Misotheism.

[canetoad]

13. Agnosticism and atheism

Are Positions. Trying to prove which is the more valid is as useful as tits on a bull.

[yallerdawg]

2. If you start as a 'tabula rasa' what religion makes any sense?

Do we look back at where we came from with trepidation and fear?

Each and everyone of us can gaze into the unknown we came from and expect that is exactly where we are going, just like our observation of all life that we know of.

Look at a book. Everything is between the covers. Nothing before it, nothing after.

The story we write between the covers is all that matters.

Can religion and 'a leap of faith' make that a "better" story? Absolutely!

[JustFiveMoreMinutes]

4. if there is nothing more... intelligence and self-awareness...

... were the biggest jokes on a mortal species. 2 cents as well.

[Esperanto.Mark]

5. Matter, Energy, Complexity, and Entropy

These are my own thoughts take from them what you will.

Space time is not consistent, these inconsistencies are what we call forces. These forces manipulate matter and energy into more complex arrangements within space time. Entropy returns complexity to simplicity. Energy and matter are never destroyed, they change forms. The time scale in which this transformation occurs is relative to the viewer.

We are nothing more than a complex coupling of matter and energy.

It took a "really long time" for something as complex as us to form, so we feel pretty special. We've also been pretty good at figuring out whats going on around us (as compared to anything else on our planet), so something as emotionally jarring and all reaching as the concept of death really needed a good explanation. Predating the now commonplace (lol!) acceptance that universal facts matter, religion stepped in to give an unquestionable answer.

Science asks why? Religion teaches you not to.

[gopiscrap]

6. welcome to DU

[Esperanto.Mark]

7. Thanks

I'm excited to be here.

[Huin]

11. I studied your signature line.

I understand that Jesus and his disciples lived as a communist entity. And the three musketeers, didn't they have that slogan "One for all and all for one", something like that. And did you know that the Amana colonies in Iowa started out as a communist settlement. They abandoned the concept because it did not work. Communism has never worked for long anywhere.

[Huin]

9. Seeking to understand but not quite getting there.

I have often wondered how and where I should be classified. I too am getting up in age. As I told my daughter just today. When I compare my life to one of those wooden yardsticks, though we don't know for sure where we are at any particular time on that scale, statistically I may already be somewhere past the 35 inch mark. Maybe not yet.

My theory why there are so many religions is quite simple. Someone has a need for power and is a fast talker. That person starts a religion and convinces people that his way is the way to eternal life hereafter. To keep his followers the founder of that religion teaches that his way is the only way and if you don't belong you will end up in hell. Eventually that founder passes on to whatever there is hereafter but the religion remains because of what the founder instilled in his or her followers and they, in turn, instill in their offspring.

Of course with freedom of religion guaranteed by our Constitution, there was room for lots of those founders over the years.

What I don't understand in your discussion is the sentence: "With life for an aware being I think it better to not have intelligent life."

What are you saying by that. Should we, being aware of life ending in death be better off being morons?

If that is what you are saying I need to respectfully disagree with your thought.

[Dworkin]

12. My own confusion

Huin,

I like your post. When someone says to me that their way 'is the only way' they've stone cold lost me. I'm an agnostic but couldn't say with honesty that agnosticism is the only way. Guess that puts me with Jack Kerouac, in his famous words "All I have to offer the world is my own confusion."

D.