A question for athiests..

[anyusername]

What if you are vegetarian? fuck, do i become a plant? please i don't want to be a plant

 

[IronWing]

You get reborn as the animal you ate the most in your previous life.

I'm coming back as a Twinkie? Cool.

 

[Newbian]

What if you are vegetarian? fuck, do i become a plant? please i don't want to be a plant

That's what you get for not eating delicious meat.

 

[Ruptga]

Ok so if your consciousness can really end, how can you even explain that? So you are self aware how does that just, end?

And yes it takes as much faith to be an atheist as it does to be any other religion. IMO it's just any other belief system. Some religions worship certain Gods, some worship animals, some worship things, others worship nothing, but at the end of the day, it's a belief system.

Oh and this is not to bash atheists, I'm legitimately curious. Not that I'm planning to switch over, just curious, is all.

It just ends. It doesn't have to be complicated.

I imagine being dead is like being asleep, since in both cases the person is (unless dreaming) totally unconscious, but that is where it ends. Maybe in the future we will be able to resuscitate people like in Star Trek, and for them it will be like waking up again. Maybe in the future we will be able to copy memories from original bodies to cloned or synthetic blank ones, and for them it will be like waking up again. But until then death is just oblivion.

 

[OCGuy]

What if you are vegetarian? fuck, do i become a plant? please i don't want to be a plant

Do you have any idea where some Zucchinis get to go?

 

[JackBurton]

It's funny you mention that. I remember reading a comment along those lines: "Children are born atheists. They have to be lied to in order to become religious."

The truth is hilarious.

 

[Ruptga]

Electronic equipment was never self aware to begin with. Even "true AI" is not really self aware, it's just a set of instructions based on a preset of conditional checks.

Biological organisms were never self aware to begin with. Even minds are not really self aware, it's just a set of instructions based on a preset of conditional checks.

Prove to me otherwise.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

So many troll threads lately...

 

[DominionSeraph]

And yes it takes as much faith to be an atheist as it does to be any other religion. IMO it's just any other belief system.

Atheism is the absence of belief in gods.

Here: Do you believe that I just turned invisible and intangible, grew fairy wings, and magically teleported to where you are right now and am flying around your head while typing this with my mind?

Probably not, eh?

So is your absence of belief in that (which you can rather easily replace with the assumption that I'm just sitting in a chair somewhere typing this on a keyboard) a religious belief?

You would be crazy to believe it. Not believing it is not a religious belief.

Believing in talking animals, witches, and invisible men who live in the sky simply because it's a written down on paper wrapped in a black cover is likewise crazy.
Not believing that horseshit is not a religion.

The system of mundane scientific explanations needs no gods to run. If you need no gods, there's no point in having any.
Once I found out my parents were bringing me the presents on Christmas I had no need for a belief in Santa. Same goes for gods.

 

[JulesMaximus]

We all go off and live in a fairy tale land with unicorns and rainbows and we sing Kumbaya with Carl Sagan for all eternity...dur.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Biological organisms were never self aware to begin with. Even minds are not really self aware, it's just a set of instructions based on a preset of conditional checks.

Prove to me otherwise.

STOP 0x7EFFFF beginning dump of physical memory...

* Red Squirrel now rebooting

 

[TridenT]

What's an athiest?

 

[IronWing]

What's an athiest?

An athiest is exactly what you want one to be, nothing more, nothing less.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Do you have any idea where some Zucchinis get to go?

I'm sold on this new theory.

Next step:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2185865

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I dunno if I'm responding to a joke thread, odds are I am, but I think this quote really sums things up so neatly:

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
-Samuel Clemens AKA Mark Twain

You've already been dead, for a very long time in-fact. How was it?

 

[lxskllr]

I don't know and no one else does either. If they tell you they do, they're fuckin' liars. When you die it'll either be pretty interesting, or it'll be nothing, but there's only one way to find out, and nobody's coming back to tell the rest of us.

 

[darkswordsman17]

I don't know and no one else does either. If they tell you they do, they're fuckin' liars. When you die it'll either be pretty interesting, or it'll be nothing, but there's only one way to find out, and nobody's coming back to tell the rest of us.

What about people that die and get resuscitated? Seems that if you're lucky its both. Your mind trips balls and then you die.

 

[sportage]

Saying there are athiests is like calling people pro-abortion.
No one is "pro abortion". No one says "hell yeah, kill that unborn sucker...please!".
There are pro women reproductive rights people, and those against women rights.
No one is pro or in support or wants abortion to happen.

And there are no athiests. A true athiest doesnt believe in anything.
Athiests believe in something... not believeing. So they do believe in something.
So they are not athiests.
Athiests organize, hold meetings, raise money. True athiests would never do that.
True athiests would not even know one another. You would only find a true athiests sitting at home on a Sunday morning. Not on some athiests retreat organized gathering.

 

[anxi80]

Peter Griffin: (in Sunday School with several children during story time) And when you die, you go to a wonderful place called heaven.

[children gasp in delight, Peter starts laughing]

Peter Griffin: Nah, I'm just jackin' ya, you all rot in the ground.

[children look on horrified]

 

[lxskllr]

What about people that die and get resuscitated? Seems that if you're lucky its both. Your mind trips balls and then you die.

Not enough time to see what really happens. You get the chemical cascade failure which some people take as a religious experience, but assuming it was religious, they never made it to the destination.

 

[DrPizza]

I don't know about you guys, but I'm going to enjoy the stripper factory & beer volcano. R'amen. And, if I get there and the beer is cheap beer, I'm coming back to be one of those mischievous ghosts.

 

[Leros]

Let's talk about what defines "me" and my consciousness.

I can lose a part of my body and still be "me". The part of my body that got was lost doesn't mean I lose a part of "me" or my consciousness. What defines "me" is obviously not my physical body.

I'll stop being "me" when my brain stop functioning. That is, when the electrical signals in my brain stop. What defines "me" is those electrical signals. When I die, those signals will stop, and what defined "me" will cease to exist. It doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't become something else, it just stops existing.

Its kind of an unpleasant thought. I am really just a colony of cells with a system of electrical signals throughout the colony. The concept of "me" is kind of an abstract or meta concept. In some sense, "I" don't really exist.

 

[xSauronx]

learn2science.

that would require him to read, comprehend and subsequently remember things. thats never going to happen. he reminds me of a guy i work with: technically competent, but useless (which also reminds me of what I was like (slightly)...when I was 18 (which was a decade ago)).

the guy at work (who is 24) tries this, that and the other as thought experiments, assumes things without any good reason or evidence to back up the assumption, and despite my protests, will not read the fucking manual, ever (we work in IT for a large hospital). the co-worker will even go so far as to ignore specific documentation and continue to work on an issue as he sees fit, even when the documentation or results of his "testing" stand in stark contrast to his assumptions and methodology

 

[DominionSeraph]

And there are no athiests. A true athiest doesnt believe in anything.
Athiests believe in something... not believeing. So they do believe in something.
So they are not athiests.
Athiests organize, hold meetings, raise money. True athiests would never do that.
True athiests would not even know one another. You would only find a true athiests sitting at home on a Sunday morning. Not on some athiests retreat organized gathering.

You're not very bright, are you.

When there are groups of people who wish to tyrannically impose their beliefs on others, it is rather natural for the oppressed to have an issue with it. Religious people are quite capable of singling out the nonreligious, so the nonreligious are quite capable of being a singular oppressed group.

If no one was religious there would be no grouping under that heading, just like how nobody groups by property of "not eating antimatter."

 

[Jeff7]

Consciousness and self-awareness are simply the result of continuously processing new information, arriving both from the senses and from accessed memories stored in your brain.
When you die, your brain stops processing, and then begins to decay. Consciousness and self-awareness stop, and the memories are lost as the neurons decay. Not much to it, really.