patrick.net

Michael Cooke says

Atheists live in a state of denial toward God. They shake their fist at the sky, proclaiming God doesn't exist.

I think your fundamental misunderstanding about atheists is you imagine them as some strawman OPPOSITE of a religious person, much in the way people mistake hate as the opposite of love.

Love AND hate are both high states of emotional arousal and attention. They are similar and complementary to one another, not opposite. The opposite of BOTH love and hate is INDIFFERENCE, a condition of little to no emotional arousal or attention.

By the same principle, atheists aren't necessarily a complementary opposite of religious people in the manner they're often assumed to be vehement devil worshipers. The actual opposite of the ENTIRE pantheon from God to Devil and every other supernatural entity ever imagined, is a chill indifference toward the entire concept.

Left to my own devices, I do not HATE the concept of god, or worship/fear the devil instead, I just don't CARE. The misbehavior and intrusions of religious people, on the other hand, give plenty to become rightfully angry over. But neither is this to say I dislike people of faith just BECAUSE they believe. I actually respect people who take their faith seriously and do their honest ethical best to walk the walk. Because I KNOW that a lot of people who just talk the talk actually do whatever, rules and standards be damned, when it is expedient. I also recognize that atheists can be assholes about it, but not-believing isn't an affinity group or positive commonality like believing. Therefore, atheists can be more difficult to accurately suss out as to what they're actually like wrt morals, ethics etc. therefore are most accurately judged on their individual merits, because they are NOT a group.

Automan Empire says

I think your fundamental misunderstanding about atheists is you imagine them as some strawman OPPOSITE of a religious person, much in the way people mistake hate as the opposite of love.

Love AND hate are both high states of emotional arousal and attention. They are similar and complementary to one another, not opposite. The opposite of BOTH love and hate is INDIFFERENCE, a condition of little to no emotional arousal or attention.

To Michael Cooke: This ^^^^^^

I do not hate the concept of god, and I may come to accept a concept of god, but it's (very) unlikely to be your concept of god. The more I learn the more I am amazed. I started off in hard sciences, and now I've moved on to what is impossible to be answered by classical scientific methods but I'm not going to go off into the weeds either.

We're all an experiment of one.

I have absolute no animosity toward your religious beliefs although at one point, I confess, I certainly did. I was wrong about that. Fred Phelps railings were crazy and insane, and his nutzo predictions about the future were insane - but he was at least partially right. You no doubt ascribe that to the inerrancy of the Bible - perhaps you're correct. I ascribe it to thousands of years of people relearning the lessons of the past over and over again. Cut out all the religious stuff from the Bible, and yeah, I think it's a useful insight into history, but a very blurry history. It doesn't tell you what happened like when king X ruled over people Y - I think it instead tells you "this shit happened! Don't let this shit happen again! It will be a bad outcome!" and it's wrapped in allegory because it's actually a compilation of tales retold over and over and over again - at least for the old Testament.

I think Fred Phelps was right but kind of for the wrong reasons. He was right about ONE thing maybe more. See? I can learn. I'll listen to the most vile and disgusting people and the best and most celebrated people - everybody has their own genius, and it's incredibly rare I run into somebody who is actually stupid. I have to respect anybody that stands up to the establishment and has conviction, even when I'm certain they are entirely wrong, or even evil. Even Hitler had some good ideas. I think even Pol Pot and Stalin did. Disastrous, entirely inhumane systems can be created, but life is all about trial and error. Our responsibility is to record error. What works, that's WELL recorded. Nobody wants to talk about their fuckups. As a result, we're redoing communism in the US now. There's not enough of a record of what a disaster that was.

richwicks says

The problem I see is that in a hierarchical system, men are always in charge.

If you step back from the situation and examine it from a distance, you have already come to the conclusion that human governments will all have at least some level of corruption. Judas is the prime example, even in Jesus’ small inner circle there was a thief who sold Jesus to the even more corrupt authorities for a bag of silver which apparently he loved more than God. So every evil is evidence of a human choosing something other than God and God’s will.

Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants.

richwicks says

I think Fred Phelps was right but kind of for the wrong reasons.

Fred Phelps was running a scam.

He would get towns/counties to shut him down at Military Funerals, and then sue under the 1st Amendment, and profit.