[CliveG]

Please don't pretend to tell me what I think. Such arrogance is the mark of a Believer and is unbecoming to a gentleman.

Humans have evolved as particularly collaborative and social animals. You might "overcome your programming" and live a solitary, disconnected life,  but for most of us, society is fun and collaboration is more effective than adiabatic self-sufficiency. Empathy drives the social lubricant.

As Dawkins pointed out, the only thing all religions have in common is that they teach you to despise all the others.  And here we have the purest example: a theist having the unmitigated gall to tell another human what he thinks about his friends and family, simply because he doesn't share your bizarre superstition.

If you want to be taken seriously, acquire some intellectual humility and scepticism.

Oooff. You know how to hurt a guy.  I did not think you would take my comments so personally. You force me to apologize when I intended no disrespect personally. I am sorry you found my comments personally offensive.

I am not sure how to respond now, so I will leave it and give it some thought.

You are certainly intellectually formidable because you interpret my actions (incorrectly in my view) while bashing me as a believer and also bashing religion. I feel I am being forced to respond to a "Do you still beat your wife?" comment. Hmmm.

I will sleep on it and respond tomorrow.

Edited to add. Just a correction. I am very sociable and have been invited to many functions because people enjoy my interaction. Even when I was a teenager I was very popular and mixed well.

[Bored chemist]

My God is not omni- all but is limited

So, not actually God then.
Why are you cluttering up someone else's thread about God with your personal nonsensical opinions?

[CliveG]

Please don't pretend to tell me what I think. Such arrogance is the mark of a Believer and is unbecoming to a gentleman.

Humans have evolved as particularly collaborative and social animals. You might "overcome your programming" and live a solitary, disconnected life,  but for most of us, society is fun and collaboration is more effective than adiabatic self-sufficiency. Empathy drives the social lubricant.

As Dawkins pointed out, the only thing all religions have in common is that they teach you to despise all the others.  And here we have the purest example: a theist having the unmitigated gall to tell another human what he thinks about his friends and family, simply because he doesn't share your bizarre superstition.

If you want to be taken seriously, acquire some intellectual humility and scepticism.

I see what happened. I wanted to respond to this post by Alan.
Congenital syphilis is not a punishment - a fetus can do no wrong so it can't be punished. It is a burden inflicted by god's living creation (a bacterium) on an innocent child. God is despicable, and drivelling on about the sins of the father being visited on the child just makes it more so - that's how filthy old perverts persuade teenagers to kill "unbelievers".

I was in a hurry and instead of quoting I used @Alan thereby making it personal. However, the point I made was this
So my question to atheists is: Why get upset about suffering of people and children? Surely, in your view, they and you are just a collection of unfeeling molecules with no meaning to life because it is simply an accident, why get upset? God or no God, why does it bother you? You may reply that you are programmed to feel and react but why not just overcome your programming because it causes you distress?

And then I get told I am telling people what they think - followed by various remarks.

I have to take some blame for the mistake and express regret, but I stand by my remarks as they apply to people who think we are simply machines and a collection of unthinking unfeeling dumb molecules that happened by some unremarkable mistake.

Alan pointed out (as I expected) that it was evolutionary programming to assist in human cooperation. I take the point but would add the following comments.

Why then the very emotive anger in this statement:
"God is despicable, and drivelling on about the sins of the father being visited on the child just makes it more so - that's how filthy old perverts persuade teenagers to kill "unbelievers""?
How does this assist in the international and religious cooperation that I have been saying is needed to reduce GLOBAL  population without war?

There are many times at two in the morning when I feel the cold touch of death close to me. It is at such times that I feel like a machine about to be turned off. I realize I have no faith - I have a chosen belief system that I retain skepticism about. My mood is that there is no meaning in life and that everything I have achieved in life is meaningless. And it is. When I was a young atheist having adventure and fun, I did not dwell in such things except in some of those dark hours that I got even then.

I have been blessed to be able to be the beneficiary of experiences that give me hope that there is a God and is an afterlife. I can see how a true believer can be inspired to do great things and strive to make the world a better place. This is a good for society and has helped humankind in an evolutionary way.

The mistake Christian religion makes is to make God omni-powerful and the creator of everything. This leads to the logical conclusion that God created evil and that God does evil despite being only good. It is a contradiction. The Ultimate Intelligence I experienced was amoral, asexual and bored. God was it's creation and so was Satan. And the rules of the Game/Dream are much the same as the entertainment world - good versus evil.

Religion needs constant updating, and this does not mean that people should not pray to God and get the rewards of a good life. Note - good atheists can get the afterlife rewards as well although I think that bashing believers will not be seen as "good". Offering criticism and pointing out inconsistencies in a respectful way is good. There has always been an small infection of evil people in the various priesthoods, and they need to be taken to task and exposed.

I think people like Dawkins may be going too far and and misleading people. By coincidence my wife said to me last night "Why am I getting this video?"  A short clip about "The Atheist Delusion". Dawkins is depicted as saying the universe came from nothing and people laughed because he could not see the conundrum. "Nothing from nothing".

And that is the weakness of atheism. It cannot explain the emergence of intelligence from nothing. Krauss admits there must have been something but then points to various mathematical theories that are not helpful.

Does this mean that religion should be scrapped? What should take its place? No rituals, no prayer, a belief that nothingness is all-powerful. I do not see the tenets of atheism assisting society when it most needs it.

[CliveG]

My God is not omni- all but is limited

So, not actually God then.
Why are you cluttering up someone else's thread about God with your personal nonsensical opinions?

Yes - God. And as powerful as most religions see him. But not the Ultimate Creator. The Ultimate Intelligence may have allowed God to do the Creation but the purpose was set and so was the creation of Satan. For all intents and purposes it is the same God of believers and need not be diminished except for the slight caveat that I postulate.

[Bored chemist]

Yes - God

But not the Ultimate Creator.

Yeah, sure, OK.

Why get upset about suffering of people and children? Surely, in your view, they and you are just a collection of unfeeling molecules

Feeling is an emergent property.
Your failure to understand that may, in part, explain why you spout so much nonsense.

[alancalverd]

How does this assist in the international and religious cooperation that I have been saying is needed to reduce GLOBAL  population without war?

It is in the essential nature of nations and religions to despise each other!

Conflicts occur at boundaries. Nations are defined by boundaries.

Religions are about superstition outranking rational thought. Most religions give authority to old perverts who, like politicians, make their living by persuading otherwise normal people to fear difference.

War does very little to reduce population. Time was that it killed the fittest and cleverest  young men, but you don't need many males to repopulate, so the quality of the stock decreases as the numbers recover. Nowadays war is mostly about bombing those too old or poor to leave their homes, so again it has little effect on numbers but merely irritates and impoverishes the middle aged and  middle classes, who become refugees and improve the stock of their new host countries. But I digress.

And that is the weakness of atheism. It cannot explain the emergence of intelligence from nothing.

Time was that it couldn't explain thunder, microbial disease, or why the earth isn't flat. But the atheist starting position  has proved a lot more fruitful than "God did it for reasons we cannot understand, so we must sacrifice virgins to make the sun rise" or whatever anti-intellectual and dehumanising filth your local priest happened to be selling. So on the basis of proven performance to date, I suspect the atheist stance will get us a lot closer to understanding the origin of the universe than anything based on sky fairies. I don't have a problem with the principle of spontaneous ex nihilo creation but I'm not sure how to verify it.

One reason I enjoy science is that it transcends the boundaries erected by political and religious scum. The rainbow I see results from the same physics as the rainbow you see. But some old pervert tells me that the rainbow created by Allah is better than the one created by Jehova, so I have to kill you for believing otherwise and thus insulting Allah.

[hamdani yusuf]

No name I know of for any of the gods/devils or angels/demons. Just know that is it highly likely they exist and can be dealt with. It may be that a Hindu has a separate reality to a Christian but I doubt it. Some small aspects could differ but when compared there will be not differences.

If one prays for war and destruction then Satan by any name is similar to Shiva. No need for names except to direct a prayer or to discuss a common element. I prefer addressing God directly as "God". Not my lord or any other title. Hardly ever address Jesus directly but have on the odd occasion.

Some people who see spirit see different ones. Gabriel might be one. I do not see spirits (only one when I was a teenager but I accept I might have seen shadows in the middle of the night).

When I was a teenager a man got run over and killed at about midnight. His spirit came down the passage with heavy thumping feet and then heavy breathing into my bedroom. Excited at first, I chickened out and closed my eyes and stopped breathing while under the sheets. I had heard of a bloody apparition visiting my mother's sick friend.

How do you determine that your god is the correct one?
How do you determine that many other gods are the wrong ones?

[CliveG]

Yes - God

But not the Ultimate Creator.

Yeah, sure, OK.

Why get upset about suffering of people and children? Surely, in your view, they and you are just a collection of unfeeling molecules

Feeling is an emergent property.
Your failure to understand that may, in part, explain why you spout so much nonsense.

Okay, you got it. Finally!
Emergent property. Groan. To me this was such an easy one that I decided to search for a simple explanation from others who also understand what you are trying to do. And I got one which is wordy but gives a full explanation so we can end with my comment of "Emergent - sounds nice but says nothing".

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence (slightly shortened)

I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, “Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!” as if that explained intelligence. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is “emergent”? You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before.

It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don’t anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed. The hypothesis has no moving parts—there’s no detailed internal model to manipulate. Those who proffer the hypothesis of “emergence” confess their ignorance of the internals, and take pride in it; they contrast the science of “emergence” to other sciences merely mundane.

And even after the answer of “Why? Emergence!” is given, the phenomenon is still a mystery and possesses the same sacred impenetrability it had at the start.

A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective “emergent” from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different:

    Before:Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing.
    After:Human intelligence is a product of neurons firing.
    Before:The behavior of the ant colony is the emergent outcome of the interactions of many individual ants.
    After:The behavior of the ant colony is the outcome of the interactions of many individual ants.
    Even better:A colony is made of ants. We can successfully predict some aspects of colony behavior using models that include only individual ants, without any global colony variables, showing that we understand how those colony behaviors arise from ant behaviors.

Another fun exercise is to replace the word “emergent” with the old word, the explanation that people had to use before emergence was invented:

    Before: Life is an emergent phenomenon.
    After: Life is a magical phenomenon.
    Before: Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing.
    After: Human intelligence is a magical product of neurons firing.

Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon’s behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?

“Emergence” has become very popular, just as saying “magic” used to be very popular. “Emergence” has the same deep appeal to human psychology, for the same reason. “Emergence” is such a wonderfully easy explanation, and it feels good to say it; it gives you a sacred mystery to worship. Emergence is popular because it is the junk food of curiosity. You can explain anything using emergence, and so people do just that; for it feels so wonderful to explain things.

Humans are still humans, even if they’ve taken a few science classes in college. Once they find a way to escape the shackles of settled science, they get up to the same shenanigans as their ancestors—dressed up in the literary genre of “science,” but humans are still humans, and human psychology is still human psychology.

Comprende amigo?

[CliveG]

No name I know of for any of the gods/devils or angels/demons. Just know that is it highly likely they exist and can be dealt with. It may be that a Hindu has a separate reality to a Christian but I doubt it. Some small aspects could differ but when compared there will be not differences.

If one prays for war and destruction then Satan by any name is similar to Shiva. No need for names except to direct a prayer or to discuss a common element. I prefer addressing God directly as "God". Not my lord or any other title. Hardly ever address Jesus directly but have on the odd occasion.

Some people who see spirit see different ones. Gabriel might be one. I do not see spirits (only one when I was a teenager but I accept I might have seen shadows in the middle of the night).

When I was a teenager a man got run over and killed at about midnight. His spirit came down the passage with heavy thumping feet and then heavy breathing into my bedroom. Excited at first, I chickened out and closed my eyes and stopped breathing while under the sheets. I had heard of a bloody apparition visiting my mother's sick friend.

How do you determine that your god is the correct one?
How do you determine that many other gods are the wrong ones?

Nice question.

There is only one God who is good and does good. If one listens to the prophets and wise men whose teachings have endured you will find the common thread of Do Right and Do Good with the added Respect God. If you pray to any God (defined as a Higher Power) your prayer will get listened to. Whether it gets action is not predictable because we cannot know where the Game is taking us and are not privy to a full set of the rules.

There is however an Evil force with names such as Satan, the Devil and so on. If you have bad intentions and evil in your mind your prayers will be heard by both God and Satan and God may allow Satan to answer your prayer. But it comes at a price. There are many movies dealing with this theme. It is not just entertainment, it is a truism.

You may get someone you hate to be plagued by a curse and God may allow it because that person needs a lesson of some sort. Or God could just let it happen to a person who should not be harmed, but I do not think that happens. I take risks that others are fearful of, and I confront evil when I can. I do so because I take the position that God will protect me. Why me? Because I try to be good and spread good and help spread some of the concepts I am espousing here. I am also fatalistic saying that it I am wrong, well, so be it. It gives me confidence, but I am not reckless.

Just how many Gods are there? Not many, once one eliminates the gods of mythology. The Hindu and Buddhist gods one sees in literature and the temple have attributes so praying to a God of Fertility is generally a good thing and it means that the One God will hear the prayer. A Hindu professor told me that Hinduism has One God only, and the various minor gods are just aspects of the One God. See how one can update a religion so as to be consistent with others?

If one prays to Jesus or a Saint they are intermediaries and ultimately the One God hears.

When I do the Tarot I make sure my intentions and the questions are in line with good outcomes.

[CliveG]

I will do more posting in response but I want to deal with something that has been in the back of my mind.

Proof of God. I have said that one should look for instances where the laws of physics are violated. There are two that I think are relevant.

One is the flagellum.

 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13663-evolution-myths-the-bacterial-flagellum-is-irreducibly-complex/

Evolution myths: The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex

Actually, flagella vary widely from one species to another, and some of the components can perform useful functions by themselves. They are anything but irreducibly complex

It is a highly complex molecular machine. Protruding from many bacteria are long spiral propellers attached to motors that drive their rotation. The only way the flagellum could have arisen, some claim, is by design.

...It has been proposed that the flagellum originated from a protein export system. Over time, this system might have been adapted to attach a bacterium to a surface by extruding an adhesive filament. An ion-powered pump for expelling substances from the cell might then have mutated to form the basis of a rotary motor. Rotating any asymmetrical filament would propel a cell and give it a huge advantage over non-motile bacteria even before more spiral filaments evolved.

Finally, in some bacteria flagella became linked to an existing system for directing movement in response to the environment. In E. coli, it works by changing flagella rotation from anticlockwise to clockwise and back again, causing a cell to tumble and then head off in a new direction.

Without a time machine it may never be possible to prove that this is how the flagellum evolved. However, what has been discovered so far – that flagella vary greatly and that at least some of the components and proteins of which they are made can carry out other useful functions in the cells – show that they are not “irreducibly complex”.

More generally, the fact that today’s biologists cannot provide a definitive account of how every single structure or organism evolved proves nothing about design versus evolution. Biology is still in its infancy, and even when our understanding of life and its history is far more complete, our ability to reconstruct what happened billions of years ago will still be limited.

Guessing at the complexity of the evolution. Here we have an assumption that it HAD to be evolution so there must be a series of steps because it CANNOT be God's design.

Examine the complexity. Bearings, rotor, stator, energy driven, and a control system. For dumb molecules to craft such an entity is remarkable (magic - and not an emergent property - wink wink).

My hypothesis is that God knew that he would creating a biological entity so complex it could be used to argue Intelligent Design. Not absolute proof but a strong hint.

The only argument against it is - No, No, No - and why - because I said so.

The other is the built-in programming in various brains. Example - a deer is born and can run and avoid a tree and run away from a predator.

Tell me you can find the genetic sequence and alter it so that the deer runs into the tree because it thinks it is an escape route. I say the soul does the fine tweaking of the neural programming. What about the ability of humans to look at numbers and just do the math in their head. Change the sequence to make get the math wrong for any numbers with a zeros at the end.

[CliveG]

(snip)
It is in the essential nature of nations and religions to despise each other!
(snip)
One reason I enjoy science is that it transcends the boundaries erected by political and religious scum. The rainbow I see results from the same physics as the rainbow you see. But some old pervert tells me that the rainbow created by Allah is better than the one created by Jehova, so I have to kill you for believing otherwise and thus insulting Allah.

This needs more time than I have at the moment to address. You are emoting based on false facts and fake news.

I will respond tomorrow.

(And possibly fears introduced at childhood if you attended religious ceremonies in the Jewish faith - but you would have to give some personal information about this. Instead of being insulted, you might learn something. My motivation is not malicious.)

[Bored chemist]

You are emoting based on false facts

Says the man who posted this earlier

Why get upset about suffering of people and children? Surely, in your view, they and you are just a collection of unfeeling molecules with no meaning to life

[Bored chemist]

Tell me you can find the genetic sequence and alter it so that the deer runs into the tree because it thinks it is an escape route.

OK, how about altering the brain chemistry of mice so that they are no longer repelled by the smell of cat urine (which is normally an innate response)?

Is that close enough to the idea of getting deer to run into trees?

If not, please explain the essential difference.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130918181110.htm

[Kryptid]

Why get upset about suffering of people and children? Surely, in your view, they and you are just a collection of unfeeling molecules with no meaning to life because it is simply an accident, why get upset?

This is a bizarre argument. Assuming that atheists are not p-zombies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie), they would be well aware that they have the capacity to suffer. As such, they should assume that other humans can suffer too. Even if individual molecules can't feel, human beings obviously can.

[CliveG]

You are emoting based on false facts

Says the man who posted this earlier

Why get upset about suffering of people and children? Surely, in your view, they and you are just a collection of unfeeling molecules with no meaning to life

No contradiction in my statements. I am pointing out a contradiction in those who claim that we are machines made up of unfeeling molecules and yet having some serious emotions about believers and evil. Would it not be logical for them to look at the world as just machines misoperating? Suffering is just electronic impulses. I can get into that state of mind even though I am of the opinion I have a soul. So I wonder why non-believers are so irrationally emotional.

I am given the answer that all of us are human and all of us are programmed by evolution and that evolution promotes empathy. I am okay with that. I just wonder where the innate programming comes from, and why an atheists belief system does not moderate their views. If I were to view the answer from the perspective of humans just being machines is that they are damaged goods. I suppose I could get mechanically emotional about the damage to society that they cause.

From the point of view of a believer I take the view that they would benefit from the better aspects of religion. Love they neighbor and so use cooperation to solve the worlds problems. There are organizations that solve human problems such as alcoholism, and the one I worked with my late wife where the methodology rehabilitated murderers and criminal. They ask people to rely on a Higher Power for help. The success rate is far better than if there were no spiritual aspect. One could argue that it is human psychology to use religion as a crutch. Well, the answer to that is that if religion works to heal and to bring cooperation then why abandon religion? Why not improve it as I am trying to do? One could retain their skepticism (as I do) and yet choose to believe and follow the good and pray for good and do good.

[CliveG]

Why get upset about suffering of people and children? Surely, in your view, they and you are just a collection of unfeeling molecules with no meaning to life because it is simply an accident, why get upset?

This is a bizarre argument. Assuming that atheists are not p-zombies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie), they would be well aware that they have the capacity to suffer. As such, they should assume that other humans can suffer too. Even if individual molecules can't feel, human beings obviously can.

I was trying to show that a logical machine (which I once was) would view life as mechanical and therefore meaningless. If there is no meaning to life then killing it just switching off another machine. Which it how I viewed killing the cat when I was a teenager. I was still moral in that I did it to relieve the suffering. I could just as easily have let it die slowly on the basis that suffering is just electronic impulses. I am pointing out that if one takes atheism with a mechanical belief to its logical conclusion then morality and doing good are meaningless. If meaningless, why get emotional?

The response I get it that it helps society and is a survival trait. But this it just one step up from individuals. Why worry about survival and society if termination is just the non-functioning of machines? My feeling is that we have souls and God and Satan can decide to send us in a different direction.

When I was about 60 years old and much more emotional (I now cry and hurt emotionally very easily - although I can turn it off) I was faced with having to put some dying sheep out of their misery. A dog had savaged their rear ends and they were sitting and bleeding to death. I did not have a gun or a knife so I used a rock and crushed their skulls. Here I went into mechanical mode but I also felt I was releasing their souls. Same as when I had to stop the suffering of a cow dying from a horrendously bad birthing process. I cut its throat.

Somehow I had a built-in morality. I hated being embarrassed by doing something that others disapproved of. No doubt my parents and teachers had a role to play. I got a lot of spankings and be caned, but they did not really bother me after a while. In some, I had a choice mostly - do my homework or get beaten. I chose to get beaten - daily. It was over and done with in a few minutes as opposed to homework (which I did not need) taking hours.

[CliveG]

Tell me you can find the genetic sequence and alter it so that the deer runs into the tree because it thinks it is an escape route.

OK, how about altering the brain chemistry of mice so that they are no longer repelled by the smell of cat urine (which is normally an innate response)?

Is that close enough to the idea of getting deer to run into trees?

If not, please explain the essential difference.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130918181110.htm

Surely you can see the essential difference without me having to explain. But I will help you:

One process damages a brain (cat's fear center damaged) and one involves changing the programming of a brain that started out as a single fertilized cell.

100 billion brain cells and 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. If we were deers, figure out how the information to construct the image of a tree is programmed in their genome.

You would have done better to cite the zombie fungus that affects the behavior of an ant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis
Of course, that example shows how a collection of spores is acting cooperatively to achieve a remarkable result. Do they have souls that communicate? That leads me to mental telepathy. I have lots of personal proof of that phenomenon.

[Bored chemist]

cat's fear center

That's essentially the same as a "don't run into trees" centre.

[Bored chemist]

. I have lots of personal proof

i.e. not "proof".

[hamdani yusuf]

There is only one God who is good and does good. If one listens to the prophets and wise men whose teachings have endured you will find the common thread of Do Right and Do Good with the added Respect God. If you pray to any God (defined as a Higher Power) your prayer will get listened to. Whether it gets action is not predictable because we cannot know where the Game is taking us and are not privy to a full set of the rules.

How do we know that when something good happens to an Indian citizen, it's the work of the same god as when something good happens to a Pakistani citizen?
How do we know if something is good or bad? What if a good thing for us is a bad thing for someone else?

Just how many Gods are there? Not many, once one eliminates the gods of mythology. The Hindu and Buddhist gods one sees in literature and the temple have attributes so praying to a God of Fertility is generally a good thing and it means that the One God will hear the prayer. A Hindu professor told me that Hinduism has One God only, and the various minor gods are just aspects of the One God. See how one can update a religion so as to be consistent with others?

Many people think that Yahweh is a god of mythology.

If one prays to Jesus or a Saint they are intermediaries and ultimately the One God hears.

Can't a real god listen to the prayer directly?