LIVING ON HOPE NOT PIPE-DREAMS



Hope gets all but the most troubled of us out of bed every day.

It involves the hope that we can avoid some terrible harm.

It involves the hope that we can gain some good.

There are two sides then.

Neither side can be hoped for or attained without discernment. Evil sometimes wears a beautiful mask. The good can be the enemy of the best. You need to discern carefully and you need to call evil what it is. Don't pretend it is anything less or less threatening than what it is.

Hope is your right and that right is why you need to do the deep questioning you are about to do.

Atheism for the purposes of this page means choosing not to accept or believe in God so that you can be God for yourself and others.

It does not matter how love is produced whether it is something you create out of nothing or something you make from already exists. For that reason God is over-rated. God is a denial of that truth.

Reason tells me that. Believers say that you cannot prove from reason that your brain works right so reason depends on assumptions. If trust in reason is based on making assumptions those assumptions are not like any other kind. They are assumptions we have to make and we are programmed to make them whether we like it or not. Assuming reason works is not the same as guessing that an apple has fallen from a tree. It is about getting a start not creating a circular argument. Reason when done carefully is always valid and nothing can take away its validity and value. The notion that you can only trust reason if you think a trustworthy and trusting God (God can't give it to you if you will only abuse it!) is out. It denies why we reason and why we need reason. It is really about making religion and God the custodian of reason. Reason that needs a custodian is not reason at all - it is not trusted. God is not God - of supreme importance when reason just is about giving us a start and does not need him.

Reason helps you to relate and learn from facts. Facts don’t, can’t and should not care about your feelings. That is why you must accept that in order to be able to hope.

Truth is just whatever is real. It is that simple. Truth is true and is not about us. Nothing can make truth untrue or just an opinion. God cannot do it either. What if hypothetically God could do it? Then we should defy him for at least if truth remains truth then we know we have to work with it for it cannot change. The idea that God should alone matter and get total love is incoherent. If you say, "I will not let you change truth even if you can and it is good of you to" you are saying, "I matter more than you. I make myself the priority." Or you might prefer to say, "We humans need fixed truth and I make humanity my priority then not you!"

Some tend to let reason be silenced for they think we are all biased. But bias is our problem not reasons. Bias is a problem but many people are prone to it but less prone than others. No person is biased in everything. One person can be biased in politics but not biased at all in religion. Another may be biased in some political or religious matters but not others. For example, the Roman Catholic can be terribly biased as a historian and try to make out the bishop of Rome was always functionally the head of the Church but do a good hatchet job on the credibility of the resurrection of Jesus claims. Sometimes what looks like bias is in fact the person lying and living on the to hope that if a lie is promoted enough it will be taken for the truth or as good as the truth.

The danger is you can think you are not biased and be biased so you should welcome those who make you think and explain the reasons why you believe and why you think your beliefs are correct. The bias problem requires, no hesitation, that you choose testable beliefs and ideas. Non-testable beliefs are bias in its fully developed and most dangerous and irremediable form. God is one such belief for nobody can prove that the hope God supposedly gives personally to each person will happen tomorrow so it is quite a cruel belief.

An argument by default asks the other person to believe that you are avoiding hidden assumptions. An argument is pointless if you can just assume instead and if a guess is as good as an argument. God and belief in him are mere assumptions to us all. Even if there is a God that does not mean you are not assuming God.


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