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There's probably no god ...
... so stop worrying and enjoy your life.
About the best advice I've heard in a while ...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090121/wl_uk_afp/britainreligionroadadvertiseoffbeat_20090121180400
About the best advice I've heard in a while ...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090121/wl_uk_afp/britainreligionroadadvertiseoffbeat_20090121180400
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Comments
Some of us, however, object to the pusillanimous wording. Probably? Why can't the Secular Society be honest about their views and opinions?
Palzang
Palzang
Oh yeah, live for today, and give no thought to the future! It's only the present moment that counts, so why be concerned about what tomorrow may bring?
If people worrying about God and morality produces decent people in a given religion, I don't see the big deal. They aren't bothering anyone.
Nice message. Millions of us need to be told that every day. "You, Sir, have Not the Answer." Some even need to be reminded, "You are not the Answer."
And the world would be a much better place if we took that thought with us into deep slumber and into our quiet breathing, or as Rilke said:
tief mit den Dingen -: o wie käme er leicht,
anders zum anderen Tag, aus der gemeinsamen Tiefe.
If one would take things (without assigning meanings and outcomes and values to them beforehand) into his deepest sleep and commune with them there, Oh how he would come out so light and unburdened (of the heavy meanings we weigh things down with) a changèd man to a changèd, other day, out of a common depth...
I hope the main currents of tomorrow's religions will be towards seeking truth rather than towards shoring up narrow views of things.
"There's probably no God, so lighten up?" Sounds right pleasant to me. I'm glad that another new day is dawning again.
Greetings, Kind Pilgrim!
The occasions are rare when I fail to see some of the ground from where you are speaking. This is, I think, one of the first, Sir!
Not making definitive, absolutist statements is not a thing to be eschewed. Why turn potential target audiences off with an absolute when you may potentially get to them by a back door?
Make an unusual statement or take a slightly different approach. Unloose the fetters!
The whole thing just tickles me. Religionists have messed up so many people. They have helped breed minds that cannot question and striven to mold minds with knees that bow to all sorts of silly propositions —wrong ideas that crowd out sounder ones.
So many wasted opportunities...
for REAL good...
I allowed myself to be seduced by the word "pusillanimous".
Yes.
They were turned down.
The London 'bus posters were in response to 'Christian' propaganda posters, specifically for the Alpha Course.
Despite silly protests, our general opinion is that people should be free to express such opinions in public.
"There are probably many gods so stop worrying and enjoy your life."
And so on, and so on, and so on...
Your right. Its silly protest.
How about this ad:
"Atheism is dead. Atheists killed it." ?
And not.
_/\_
I know for a fact that Louie is God. They can't break me of that. Its true you know.
I should know, I followed you here.
I believe you, don't ask me why, I can't help it. Gassho, dear friend.
See Pascal's Wager:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
To an extent, that's a good thing. But there's also the fact of consequences. I live in a dorm and I feel puritanical compared to people here. I don't do drugs, drink, or have sex. I just sit back with my history books and puff away at my pipe (which attracts throngs of unwanted potheads). I might as well have 3 heads.
I have found the very religious people to be the most well-adjusted folks here and the most likely to resist all the bad things on campus.
Fortunately, even though there is still no known method of immunization, and very little by way of a cure, humanity is beginning to free itself from the crippling diseases of superstition and religious dogma.
http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/wager.html
Replacing them with the terminal illnesses of lack of introspection and scientific dogma.
As a 'fan' of the Enlightenment and the Philosophes, I notice that philosophy ceased to be the search for the better life to live and become a sort of academic mind-grinder. What modern philosopher would dare to make the claims of a Spinoza:
But at the same time, it has been good, religious dogma that has served as the best bulwark against statism and tyranny in the past century. The fiercest opponents of eugenics in the 20s and 30s were not secular progressives (they supported eugenics!), but libertarians and Catholics.
The biggest tragedy of atheism is that it does not have anything to replace religion or spirituality with. All too often, when people stop believing in God, the new god becomes the state.
May I suggest, KoB, that you add a history of the Spanish Civil War, its aftermath and the Franco regime to your reading list? And look at the inaction of Pius XII. And all Calvinist regimes.
And then tell us that 'religious dogma' is "the best bulwark against tyranny".
Hear! Hear!
Well said, Pilgrim!
Dogmas cannot and do not circumscribe Truth. They can only obfuscate.
What we need are direction-pointers only, and enquiring minds and willing hearts.
Jesus and Buddha left no dogmas behind. It was their followers who did that. Buddha left teachings, open to investigation and experiment. Jesus left teachings on love and spiritual discipline.
Truth is on the inside of things and when you make a dogma, you bind up that truth, that beauty, and much of it is lies all covered up, imprisoned in chains of bondage. Keats was right. One thing I know, that Truth is Beauty, beauty truth. Truth/Beauty neither binds nor destroys, but sets free.
KoB, what I like about religious people is their determination for right living, but sometimes some go too far. Atheism does not pose any threat to those truly secure in their paths towards godliness, IMO. But a thorough-going theocentrism does impinge on the lives of all it touches. Religion is capable of great evil and is often guilty of messing with people's heads and doing them irreparable harm.
Banish playfulness from this would-be theocentric kingdom, and I'll want out. This world belongs to everybody, whether they believe in God or Captain Kangaroo or Nothing. Too many silly rules are just gonna spoil the game for those not disposed to nonsense.
Live and let live, for tomorrow we die.
It's true that the Church in Spain (and a good deal elsewhere) fully backed Franco. I can't blame them a whole lot though, considering the kind of persecutions faced from the Republican side and the more radical leftist groups during the Civil War.
But Pius XII has been unfairly branded as a do-nothing pope. He denounced Hitler strongly and stated emphatically that anti-semitism was incompatible with Christianity. And he ordered for thousands of Jews to be hidden in Rome during the Holocaust.
And does the same argument obtain for the Church's support for the Anschluss? Or the silence of the churches, recognised by the German Confessing Churches, in the face of the Holocaust?
What would you want them to say? If they'd said 'certainly' they'd just get a shrill chorus of "See, atheists are dogmatic!"
However, as I understand it, the word 'probably' was injected by the bus company, not the secular society. Richard Dawkins has said he would've preferred it to be 'ALMOST certainly'. But very few would use the word 'certainly' by itself (without the 'almost'), because very few pretend to absolute certainty; we don't know everything. Far from being dishonest, talking in terms of probability (or 'ALMOST certainty') is the only intellectually honest thing to do.
Peace:)
Oh, I do agree, Prometheus. I think I apologised for flippancy and for having been seduced by the beauty of the word "pusillanimous".
Oops, that'll teach me for being too lazy to read all the comments!
Peace:)
Hello, IndianInk:
Isn't this precisely why some people claim that theists are, in the end, only worshipping themselves, since they identify too much with their deity?
To the degree that this may be true, would this not represent more of a diversion (I'm thinking, "diversionary apparatus or tactic.") than something that leads to truth and enlightenment?
As I said above, I think this ad-campaign is the cat's meow. Though a bit provocative, I do not find it in any way insensitive or dogmatic. Also, peoples' ways of lazy thinking need constantly to be critically examined. It is my firm hope that a little bit of good-natured provocation may be just what the good doctor ordered.
With good intentions only,
Nirvy
I have no problem with the advertisement per se. People should be able to put up whatever they want with few exceptions. I can't say for sure, but I have the suspicion that the very strident part of the anti-theist crowd think they are somehow bold or courageous for these sorts of confrontational ads. The same is true to the [much nicer] crowd that puts those "COEXIST" stickers on their bumpers with all the different religious symbols making the letters.
The truth is, neither of these groups are courageous or bold in the slightest. Nobody achieves anything by putting these signs and stickers up in the Western world. There already is religious tolerance in the West unimaginable in most places of the world. Atheists are not a persecuted minority, nor do religions have any problems coexisting.
The real bold and courageous thing to do would be to put these signs and stickers up in Saudi Arabia or Iran. We'll see how long your car stays on the road there. Or try doing something as innocent as having a Bible in the Kingdom. In the West, such action is simply redundant and meaningless.
Posing questions in the clear light of day in obvious good humour is humane, civilized, urbane, egalitarian, just, often brave, in this case evidently courteous, and —above all in no way "redundant and meaningless," as you claim.
I am, therefore, reposting part of what I said in #10 above, but am leaving out the poetry by Rilke that most moves me:
Questioning —real probing— of the foundations of one's belief is prerequisite to comprehension of the whole picture.
The tyranny of those religionists who believe they have all the answers is insidiously spreading beyond reasonable confines. They divide up Truth as if she were a Slave to their purposes, and therefore cut her up into disjointed wedges that can never mingle with Life again —but only with market-prices of the properly churched.
Oscar Wilde's famous dictum comes to mind, watching them quarter up the joy in the lives of all around them: They know the price of everything but the value of nothing. They break things down into such elementary particles that the magic evaporates, these simple-philes.
Now, oversimplification of Truth is a falsification, pure and simply. Some things can be simplified, but not the mystery of "The Force."
Surely there is more harm done by spreading falsification than by questioning ultimate truth.
The funny thing is the Religionists want it both ways: Both All the Answers and All the Questions have to be prefabricated in a pre-approved way.
Pax Vis Magnae Tecum Semper.
Although I love doing it ......... oh I do
That is quite nice too
Hope you're well, Knitwitch. Blessings.
The rest is ego projection of our higher hopes, feelings & wishes.
Love is love, liberation is liberation, peace is peace, exaltedness is exaltedness, powers are powers. None are 'god'. God is a mere inaccurate label.
When California meditation teacher Jack Kornfield asked her why she returned to development work and to helping the hungry and homeless, she replied, "Sir, I am a lover of life, and as a lover of life, I cannot keep out of any activity of life. If people are hungry for food, my response is to help feed them. If people are hungry for truth, my response is to help them discover it. I make no distinction between serving people who are starving and have no dignity in their physical lives and serving people who are fearful and closed and have no dignity in their mental lives. I love all life."
"Sir, do not let God be a concept and theory to be imprisoned in the pages of the books and in the images and idols of temples and churches. Let him become the reality of life. He is the substance. The invisible, the unmanifest is the substance, the visible and the known is only the shadow. This is the conceptualisation and ideation of the reality that has made man fight...", she said in one of her books.
Vimla Thakar
_/|\_
Put that on a London Bus. I have no problem with that, although it's a bit long.
Everyone hath some handle on Truth. However, let's not forget this bus campaign is in response to destructive religious activity on the part of some fundamentalist "Evangelicals" participating. In that sense, the campaign is a very good thing.
Some things just cannot be reduced to simple platitudes and one of those things is the Christian religion, which is supposed to be about love and not about thought control. A more spiritual approach, I've always thought, would be to focus on the religion that Jesus preached rather than on the religion about Jesus. However, they spend so much time just building up the body of the church (by any means) that a lot of that gets left behind.
Ultimate Reality is what it is and is not in any way predicated on our thoughts about it. The only genuine reason people have to be upset about the beliefs of others is the threat these beliefs might possibly pose the particular privileges they enjoy from their exclusivistic stances. Hey, if you're secure enough in your beliefs you've got nothing to fear. We need to poke gentle fun at ourselves and even some of our beliefs sometimes. They're hard to live up to and if we can't laugh we probably aren't very comfortable with examining the truth of our lives' spiritual progress, either.
This stuff in London is so un-Iranian. Is that why it's so objected to?
The Supreme Leader wouldn't like it; therefore, in the West, regardless of any theistic beliefs I may have, I'll take it up!