Why atheists compare God to santa

[Reflex]

How many conceptual models are there of God?

As many as there are people on the planet.

See? That is another point where God is different from Santa. Santa comes in only one model. God comes in a variety of them.

This shows how little you know about even the contingent (finite) Santa.

Also, if a pantheist and a panentheist meet at a bar, do they bitch about parentheses?

Is this an admission of willful ignorance?

[sthitapragya]

How many conceptual models are there of God?

As many as there are people on the planet.

See? That is another point where God is different from Santa. Santa comes in only one model. God comes in a variety of them.

This shows how little you know about even the contingent (finite) Santa.

Also, if a pantheist and a panentheist meet at a bar, do they bitch about parentheses?

Is this an admission of willful ignorance?

See what I mean? You have the ability to know God. Do you how few people have it? And here you are wasting your precious talent in bitching and petty arguments with guys like us who know no better. What a waste. Sad. Tragic.

[Reflex]

I think you are a category error. There was no answer there as usual. Do you really actually believe that you have some special powers and abilities which transcend science which alow you to "know" things other mortals cannot?

You don’t? What an odd creature you must be.

If you do, don't you think you should be using your abilities to do some good for humanity instead of bitching and pettily insulting other mortals who don't have your abilities and wasting your special time on a forum, talking?

You are wasting God given abilities by doing essentially nothing other than jabbering and bitching. It's a pity. You are sinking to our level when you are so much better than this. Sad and tragic waste of ability. Do you think God is happy with this crap you are wasting your abilities on?

Don’t worry about me. I have plenty of time on my hands. I can't do much more than sit here due to a hole in my belly a golf ball could get lost in.

Pray for a quick recovery so my bothering you will go away.

[sthitapragya]

I think you are a category error. There was no answer there as usual. Do you really actually believe that you have some special powers and abilities which transcend science which alow you to "know" things other mortals cannot?

You don’t? What an odd creature you must be.

If you do, don't you think you should be using your abilities to do some good for humanity instead of bitching and pettily insulting other mortals who don't have your abilities and wasting your special time on a forum, talking?

You are wasting God given abilities by doing essentially nothing other than jabbering and bitching. It's a pity. You are sinking to our level when you are so much better than this. Sad and tragic waste of ability. Do you think God is happy with this crap you are wasting your abilities on?

Don’t worry about me. I have plenty of time on my hands. I can't do much more than sit here due to a hole in my belly a golf ball could get lost in.

Pray for a quick recovery so my bothering you will go away.

Sorry about that. And you aren't bothering me at all. I suppose insulting atheists is good therapy and God's work in some way. You go Glen Coco.

[Reflex]

You have the ability to know God.

So do you; so does everyone. But you need the desire.

[sthitapragya]

You have the ability to know God.

So do you; so does everyone. But you need the desire.

If that is all it needs, I will pass on that. I might have considered it if I hadn't had conversations with some of you Theists and seen what knowing God does to them. The more I hear, the more I appreciate my Atheism. So thanks for affirming my disbelief every day.

[uwot]

Any possible argument I could make would be like a finger pointing to the moon. It is up to the listener to take his or her eyes off the finger and look to the moon.

The analogy only works if you are prepared to point to the moon in the first place.

A fish doesn't come the realization of the water in which it swims through sound argument because argument has the nature of a reef.

I still don't get it.

Some things can only be intuited.

Well, all we can be certain of is that some people have ideas that they lack either the will, or the skill to communicate.

That is, we have to get out of our head in order to see the ocean in which we swim. As Einstein said, "The only real valuable thing is intuition" and, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” I tend to agree with Al.

I too tend to agree with Einstein. I can do that because he took the trouble to express the intuitions for which he is most famous in terms that not only described the phenomena that had been observed, but predicted phenomena which, when they were looked for, were discovered. He could communicate. If you are bored, with a hole in your belly, you might like to look at my attempt to communicate one of Einstein's intuitions; the fact that time slows down the faster you go (Time dilation due to special relativity, for the geeks): http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/2014 ... ou-go.html

[sthitapragya]

Einstein also forgot to mention that intuition can be irrational. The rational mind weeds out the irrational intuition from the rational. For example, you might intuit an invisible man in the sky. The rational mind is supposed to weed it out as irrational.

[Reflex]

You have the ability to know God.

So do you; so does everyone. But you need the desire.

If that is all it needs, I will pass on that. I might have considered it if I hadn't had conversations with some of you Theists and seen what knowing God does to them. The more I hear, the more I appreciate my Atheism. So thanks for affirming my disbelief every day.

You're welcome. I wouldn't want your desire to be based on feel-good claptrap.

[uwot]

Well, I don't think Einstein was thinking about aimless imagination. Nothing wrong with that, but it is silly to believe the products: right now I'm imagining a gorilla called Stan, riding a motorbike and smoking a pipe in fluent Urdu.
An example of the sort of intuition that Einstein was talking about is when he was faced with the assumption that if you were travelling at the speed of light, and you were holding a mirror in front of you, your image would disappear. The logic is straightforward: if you are travelling as fast as light, the light from your face cannot reach the mirror to be reflected. Einstein's intuition was that the image would not disappear, so all sorts of weird stuff had to happen to accommodate this, which is one version of how he came up with special relativity.

[Reflex]

Any possible argument I could make would be like a finger pointing to the moon. It is up to the listener to take his or her eyes off the finger and look to the moon.

The analogy only works if you are prepared to point to the moon in the first place.

The ways of pointing to the moon are many, varied and of greater and lesser value. But whatever the method, it is up to the student to ignore the finger and turn their gaze to the moon. There's no other way.

Well, all we can be certain of is that some people have ideas that they lack either the will, or the skill to communicate.

No doubt about that. But the fish analogy has been around for centuries so there must be something to it. I am not the first or only person to 'get it.'

I too tend to agree with Einstein. I can do that because he took the trouble to express the intuitions for which he is most famous in terms that not only described the phenomena that had been observed, but predicted phenomena which, when they were looked for, were discovered. He could communicate. If you are bored, with a hole in your belly, you might like to look at my attempt to communicate one of Einstein's intuitions; the fact that time slows down the faster you go (Time dilation due to special relativity, for the geeks): http://willibouwman.blogspot.co.uk/2014 ... ou-go.html

I love contemplating that kind of stuff, as well as quantum weirdness.

[Greta]

Why do you label the basis of your peak experiences to be "God"? If you'd not been taught about deities how might you have interpreted the peak experiences that believers claim to be God? I've had peak experiences that a believer would definitely interpret as God. Yet couldn't our conceptions of God be superficial anthropomorphised notions of noumena that is far deeper again?

'Peak experiences' are mind candy.

Nothing is definite until perception (measurement, observation) makes it so: the set of classical laws is the average.

Peak experiences are a valuable part of life for many, a long way from "mind candy".

Not sure of the relevance of your "nothing is definite" statement.

[Dontaskme]

I think the anonymous author of The Cloud said it best.

Beautiful book, authored by the unwritten, read by no one.

No argument from me, but do you think my critics can grasp what you're saying here?

It's rare for people to see the intangible invisible as who they are. Their preoccupation with the visible is most they can process.

It's not even something to be grasped or get, we are already that what we are trying to get.

The problem seems to be in the idea that if I exist as this body mind mechanism then some thing must have made me. So they say God did it.

But God is just another name for everything or nothing which are the same thing.

[Reflex]

Well, I don't think Einstein was thinking about aimless imagination. Nothing wrong with that, but it is silly to believe the products: right now I'm imagining a gorilla called Stan, riding a motorbike and smoking a pipe in fluent Urdu.
An example of the sort of intuition that Einstein was talking about is when he was faced with the assumption that if you were travelling at the speed of light, and you were holding a mirror in front of you, your image would disappear. The logic is straightforward: if you are travelling as fast as light, the light from your face cannot reach the mirror to be reflected. Einstein's intuition was that the image would not disappear, so all sorts of weird stuff had to happen to accommodate this, which is one version of how he came up with special relativity.

He was talking about the need to be open, or what some philosophies call 'not-knowing':
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” -- A.E.

Scientistism, represented by the likes of Krauss and Dawkins, limits scientists to the the already known.

[uwot]

..it is up to the student to ignore the finger and turn their gaze to the moon.

Maybe, but if no one is pointing their fingers, they are very easy to ignore.

the fish analogy has been around for centuries so there must be something to it. I am not the first or only person to 'get it.'

I love contemplating that kind of stuff, as well as quantum weirdness.

The fish analogy is new to me, but funnily enough, some people, in fact most professional physicists, use a version of it to understand quantum mechanics.* The idea is that the universe is made of some substance, the 'ether' that Laughlin refers to, and that fundamental particles are 'condensations' of it, knots, eddies, strings, dependending on the version, and that force carrying 'particles' are waves in it. In a sense, we might all be fish in this ethereal 'water' and in fact are made of it.
However, it it only the phenomena that are intrerpreted as condensations or waves that we can detect, so the medium which is hypothetically carrying them is literally metaphysical, because we cannot directly detect it. Whatever this stuff is, it has some of the qualities of a god, in that it is everywhere and creates everything, but there is no compelling evidence that it is either good or bad, much less that it is conscious or caring. Whatever the truth, it certainly works in mysterious ways.

*"It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum…The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo." Nobel prize winner Robert Laughlin.