We literally lust to help others and do good the same way we lust sexually.  It’s a similar feeling, altruism makes us feel good and we crave it.  We want to make a positive difference.  Some peoples’ brains are wired the exact opposite, sadists enjoy just as much when they hurt and victimize and control people. 

I think what people call god is what they see as the best parts of themselves, their inner workings.  Love and kindness and a desire to help and a capacity for forgiveness etc are what you see as the noblest and best parts of yourself.  So like a seed you water them and watch them grow.

And if there’s any nastiness or meanness or prejudice in you, you try not to encourage it, and thus better yourself over time.

Every atheist I know has within them what you call god.  They just don’t call it that.  They call love… well, love.

The dilemma you face in your church is that there is no logical framework with which to reason with people who call something else god.  Fred phelps (guy whose church goes around with the “god hates fags” and “thank god for dead soldiers” signs) calls something else inside him god.  He calls the judgmental asshole in him the righteous anger of almighty.  And if you tried to reason with him and say no god is love he would be too afraid to seriously think about that possibility for the same reason you’d be disturbed to think about what you call god maybe not being god at all.

Because you’ve grown attached to that idea.  Maybe believing something inside you is god gives you a confidence to express that part you that otherwise you would have to find in yourself.  Maybe it makes you feel loved or safe or not alone.  You’ve had that belief for a long time and to find out it’s not true would be painful and scary, just like ending a lifelong relationship.  If you found out the person you married wasn’t who you thought they were the fact that they were being false wouldn’t make it hurt any less – faith is the same way.  The fact that phelps’ bitterness isn’t god wouldn’t make it any easier or less painful for him to let go of it.

Faith is a bit of a tangled emotional mess.  Part of why I try to avoid it, no offense.

Sorry if anything I’ve said offends or annoys you, just thinking out loud.

@xXrEMmUsXx - Any thoughts?

@xXrEMmUsXx - I understand what you mean.  What I was saying is that the trepidation you feel is exactly what others in your church feel at the thought that their fundamental assumptions about god and faith might be wrong.  It serves as an extremely effective road block to questioning these things, which is why I think it’s not good to use beliefs as an emotional means to an end – if a belief gets you through your day (or you’ve been convinced by someone that it’s what gets you through your day) then you won’t want to question that belief.  Which sometimes isn’t so bad, not all beliefs are harmful – but I think you’d agree what some people call faith is pretty toxic and their fear of questioning it severely limits them in terms of personal growth.

You seem like a nice person, I don’t think you’d actively promote denying gay people civil rights or burn a cross on someone’s lawn or something like that, but I do think that if you stood up in church and spoke out against something like opposition to gay rights, that trepidation you feel could easily be used against you by the person at the pulpit simply pointing to the anti-gay text in the bible and framing it as “either you’re wrong or god’s wrong”.  You would then be a deer in headlights, all eyes upon you, your belief system in jeopardy and everyone judging the crap out of you, and if you’re like 99% of christians you’ll just sit down and go with the crowd.  You would be in deep trouble, both in your personal beliefs and in terms of ever convincing anyone in that church of something as basic as treating people fairly and equally – a principle our entire country is founded on and that pretty much everyone agrees the rest of the time is a good thing. 

When something can be traced back to god or the bible logic and compassion go out the window because peoples’ fear of questioning is stronger.  Otherwise intelligent, skeptical people believe things completely uncritically because they don’t feel like they can do anything else.

I don’t try to believe anything, I try to understand.  To look at reality objectively.  And it turns out that reality actually isn’t that crappy.  I mean parts of it are horrific but other parts are intensely beautiful, it’s a spectrum.  And because I don’t try to believe or not believe anything and avoid getting attached to beliefs, I can’t relate at all to the fear you feel.  I can understand it intellectually and empathize with you – but I just don’t feel that ever when my views are called into question.  I remember once I was arguing with a creationist who believed dinosaurs were alive 6,000 years ago and died in the flood – he gave me a link to “man tracks” that were supposedly human footprints in rocks dating back to the time of the dinosaurs.  When I went to google it I wasn’t afraid, I was actually excited.  If that were real it would turn evolution, geology, biology, paleontology and the entire timeline of human existence completely on it’s head. 

Of course I ended up finding out after 2 seconds it was a proven fraud, and I felt disappointed.

The idea of being wrong and learning something new is fun to me.  If there were a god finding that out would be like finding out unicorns were real.  I’d be anxious to know, wouldn’t you?

Here’s a quote from one of my favorite philosophers, Alan Watts, a buddhist, about faith vs belief.  By his definition of faith most atheists I know actually have more faith than any fundamentalist.

“Now, as you know, I’m not being fair to and
very kind to modern theology, but there is this strange persistence of
insisting that “our group is the best group,” and I feel that there is
in this something peculiarly irreligious. And furthermore it exhibits a
very strange lack of faith, because I believe there is a strong
distinction between faith on the one hand and belief on the other—that
belief is as a matter of fact quite contrary to faith. Because belief is
really wishing. It’s from the Anglo-Saxon root “lief”—to wish; and
belief, stated, say, in the Creed, is a fervent hope, that the Universe
will turn out to be thus, and so.  And in this sense, therefore, belief
precludes the possibility of faith, because faith is openness to truth,
to reality, … whatever it may turn out to be, “I want to know the
truth”, that is the attitude of faith. And therefore to use ideas about
the Universe and about God as something to hang onto, in the sense of
“Rock of Ages cleft for me”[...] And there’s something very rigid about a
rock. And we are finding our rock getting rather worn out in an age
where it becomes more and more obvious that our world is a floating
world. It’s a world floating in space, where all positions are relative
and any point may be regarded as the center. … a world which doesn’t
float on anything, and therefore the religious attitude appropriate to
our time is not one of clinging to rocks, but of learning to swim.  And
you know that if you get in the water and you have nothing to hold onto
and you try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown. But if,
on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will
float, and this is exactly the situation of faith.”

@xXrEMmUsXx -

“its really taking me a minute to take in that quote. wow.”

It’s a good one.  Alan Watts described himself as a “spiritual entertainer”.  You’d like his stuff.  Here’s a mishmash of clips of his lectures that is very good if you are bored sometime.  You don’t have to understand eastern philosophy to get most of it.  Very beautiful ideas in there, and very funny. 

“As
far as what would happen if I stood up for gay rights etc. at the
pulpit… that is exactly what would happen. Would I still do it, HELL
YES.”

I’d hope so, but to be fair we can’t really know until we’re in the situation.  Most don’t though, unfortunately.  So gay people won’t get equal rights under the law for another 50 to a hundred years not because most christians are malicious or cruel, but because they’re ignorant or afraid.

“I do like to understand what I’m saying though and its something
I’m still studying. I’m pretty fearless about facing the crap in my
faith. I only want the truth – period.”

That’s very important in life.  To quote winston churchill, “True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.”

“I’ve always been driven to find
out what that is, no matter what it does to what I believe. Some times I
do experience fear though. I’m a very ‘feeling’ person. I think my
logic is balanced pretty well with my feelings, but I naturally tend to
feel first because, that is what relates to people… and i love knowing
and relating to people. I like to feel what they feel.”

Well I’m not exactly a robot myself, everyone’s got feelings.  I honestly didn’t question faith or the bible out of courage, it just never occurred to me losing faith could hurt.  I had a very vague idea about what god was, I didn’t believe god was watching over or protecting me etc.  I wasn’t attached to the idea, I just assumed it was all true.  So when I started questioning I tested the water with both feet and became an atheist.

“I have been wondering, what do you think about the spirit world. is there one? etc…”

To me spirituality is just what we call abstract things inside us, like love.  If you mean do I believe in a life after death or ghosts or demons or heaven etc, no.  I think that either what you see is what you get or if there’s something invisible and undetectable then by definition we can’t know anything about it. 

I also don’t see how someone’s intellect, memories, ability to feel emotions, five senses etc can be damaged or altered by destroying parts of the brain while they’re alive but then when they die it’s all suddenly back the way it was. 

It’s not bad though, life and love and the universe is just as amazing whether there is a god or not – it’s still the same world, the same people, the same everything.  The only thing god-like I see is the universe itself – it is vast beyond comprehension, unbelievably powerful, omnipotent, incredibly intelligent (we’re part of it, all our intellect and whatever other life there could be is an extension of the universe, and processes like natural selection are even smarter than we are), it’s billions of years old and still in it’s infancy, etc.

Anyway, sorry for rambling and burying you in links and quotes.  You’ve got two babies to tend to : /

@xXrEMmUsXx - Never seen it – googled it and apparently it’s from the history channel – they’re a bit hit and miss. 

And don’t worry about not responding right away, you’re busy.

I sometimes never get around to replying to people.