Saturday, July 18, 2009

ZOMGitsCriss tells it like it is

From the only atheist who is almost as sexy as my wife comes a heartfelt and heartbreaking rant about the Argument from Personal Experience. I thought it was worth posting because of it's relevance to a heavily-commented recent post of mine.



Via Lynna via a comment on PZ's.

4 comments:

  1. I soooo agree. When Serena Williams won the Australian Open a few years ago she thanked god for helping her and I thought, yeah right, millions of kids are dying of malaria all over the world and god's helping YOU win a TENNIS MATCH?? The self absorbtion and stupidity of it are unfathomable.

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  2. Very well said! And on a completely unrelated note... in addition to being smart and thoughtful, she is not too hard on the eyes.

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  3. my very dear friend The Ayodhya sent me to this site. we have these type of discussions all the wondrous time because he is an atheist and i am a theist. this of course baffles him because in his estimation, a [relatively i supposes] bright being such as myself should be able to [by now] get out of religion. still here i am.

    i will agree that the one-on-one proposition of God is quite hilarious to some. me telling you that God exists because i "feel" Him every day may be seen as concern for my mental health. but i only say that. i can only say that after all this time, i can safely say that I know that God exists NOT because my life is a trip down a yellow brick road but perhaps because even though it hasn't been kosher most times, i have this peace that [to quote the Bible] passes all understanding.

    of course, i could be a cylon and thus knowing full well that "all this has happened before" affords me the ability to NOT rile up myself at life's circumstance[s].

    and i will say this - if anybody should be an atheist, it should be me and my family. i grew up with mom and grandma and my uncle heavily involved in church; i've seen hypocrisy in church goers; i've sat down and tried to rationalise certain logics to some [or no] avail... my friend Ayo knows my story so trust.... i should [and my mom too] just give up on all of it and move on [up?]. but something keeps drawing me back, not to religion - i find i'm not liking that word - but to a deep faith that God is still in charge of the affairs of my life because, how/why else i'm i still here [and still going]. God is real. and i could probably explain why there's so much crap in the world but [iChuckle] let's face it, it too would be dismissed. Have a good one

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  4. Not sure there's much to say to this... Note that whether or not religion allows a person to "have this peace that...passes all understanding" is a separate question from the truth or falsity of it.

    Also, while I don't begrudge you the choice to embrace personal experience as truth, going from there to the bald assertion that "God is real" is mighty fishy. I suppose there I things I believe/experience which I embrace regardless of any objective evaluation, e.g. my love for my family, etc. But it would seem weird to me if I tried to assert the "reality" of these experiences. They are just experiences and emotions. Their real in the trivial sense that I am experiencing them, but there's clearly no external referent, i.e. there is no object I can hold in my hand and point to it and say, "This is the love I have for my son." By the same token, it's quite a leap from saying that you experience this peace and this acceptance to the assertion that it stems from some real external force called "God".

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