Asking of the Designer what we would of any other designer (The atheist delusion)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, July 31, 2011, 05:31 (4653 days ago) @ whateverist

whateverist,
> Well that's got to be enough or too much.-No problem at all... you made me feel I hadn't shared enough!-After Carlin, I stopped being able to be ambivalent towards religion or a God at all, and fell down a completely opposite path from you, where I poured all of my youthful rage and frustration--into a God I didn't believe in... Ten years ago I wouldn't have given a theist the time of day. -I don't know if I was angry at myself for "being duped" or why I cared so much about religion... but there were enough religious a$$holes on the internet that I couldn't really take any of them seriously, and I got angry easily.-I began spending time in alt.atheism, and grew disenchanted over time... I realized that faith & dogmatism were the root of evil, and NOT religion itself. When I started analyzing the statement "God does not exist" I came upon the sudden realization that theists were right--it DOES take faith to make that claim. The only thing we can safely say that is that religious texts are poor guides when it comes to the material world. There are formulations of God (Deism, especially what I term "radical" deism.) that wouldn't be challenged by a natural explanation, though I don't see the need to resort to them. -The foundational moment for me in terms of taking the mystical/mythical seriously ironically came from Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." My mother taught me novels, but Nietzsche taught me how to read. Breaking apart words into symbols, or exploring two seemingly contradictory statements in order to arrive at "reality," gave me the first insight into religious thinking that wasn't just following rules. Very shortly after that my Zen experiences began to take shape as well, so that I developed what I can only say is a powerful insight; knowing isn't something that can be contained in words; to know means you've transcended words. dhw here has described this as "internalization" and while that's not a bad word, it doesn't quite fit what I'm discussing. But I feel strongly that this subjective side of knowing is what sits at the root for most religious people.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"