CK: Ah, you still sound angry.
It will be okay.
M: This is a form of self flattery. I have been running around cooking a beef stir fry and paying bills so I will have some time to play a game later and naturally help you see what you so far are unable to. I pop in, as it were, from the dark side of the Moon, and surprise you with fact you don't understand and the minute I announce some fact like this, I suddenly become angry. Hehehe I have long and extensive experience with this kind of anger.
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M: An atheist has on his side only his assumptions that he would know logic and evidence when he sees it.
CK: An atheist has this to a greater degree than people who have, either consciously or unconsciously, decided to toss away logic and insistence on evidence.
M: Yes, but I don't think you understand what I am saying so I think you are agreeing to something that if you properly understood my intention you would not agree with. Maybe this will become clear when I deal with your next point:
CK: Are there limits to the potential here? Of course. But in truth, not very many "assumptions" are required. Being an atheist is a default state, it's what everyone is born with before they are programmed. There are no more "assumptions" in not believing in gods than in not believing in invisible pink unicorns.
M: I understand what you are saying. I disagree with it. We are born perfect and in a state of oneness, no ego self to divide us from feeling we are everything that there is. We are born in a God state but we can have it taken away because we do not have consciousness that has separated from God and returned. We were born with an infinite potential to love and were killed. It is the programming that separated us from God, the acquisition of language and the inculcation of emotion into words, the belief there is good and evil and then that happy day when we were told we are worthless, that we are evil, etc, the day we rejected our true self. The day we recover that state of oneness is the day we remember God.
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M: He knows nothing of the conscious state in which the existence of God is obvious.
CK: On the contrary. Many atheists understand these "conscious states" full well, because many atheists are deprogrammed theists.
Yes but deprogrammed from belief in a bridge. A deprogrammed atheist is a Knower of God.
CK: Anything can be made to seem "obvious" given the right indoctrination. The value and benefit of flying airplanes into skyscrapers was "obvious" to the 9/11 hijackers. But "obvious" doesn't always mean "true".
M: No argument here.
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M: An Atheist like an uninformed believer, simply believes in his own opinion.
CK: False, assuming again we are talking about a weak atheist such as myself. This individual doesn't "believe" in anything, but rather chooses to not believe in that for which there is no evidence.
M: I understand. I am just such an atheist.
M: My "opinion" that there are no gods is exactly the same as the "opinion" that I'm guessing everyone has here that monkeys do not flap their arms and fly to the moon. Both are opinions based on the best available evidence.
CK: Yes. The issue is that the evidence we don't have we don't because we don't have it, not because such evidence doesn't exist. We can't know the boiling point of water, for example until we develop a temperature scale and a way to document it. Knowledge of God can't be had by scientific measurement but by personal participation is the science of states. I can tell you, for example, that if you hit your finger with a hammer you will feel something called pain. You may be able to show bruising or bleeding or nerve impulses etc, but that won't tell you what it feels like to experience pain. The question, again, is, could there be a state, one I call oneness, in which one knows the real meaning of God, one for which there may be electrical evidence of in brain scans, or one that releases this or that chemical, but which can be know as an experience only by having it?
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M: What an atheist sees is the foolish logic of believers who try to use logic to explain and justify what they believe.
CK: You're either deliberately misrepresenting atheism here, or you don't actually understand very much about it.
M: Would you prefer, "One thing atheists can see is......"???
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M: The skill and accuracy with which they do this fosters the arrogance that they themselves are free from logical error and that thus they arrive at the real truth.
CK: Again, another mischaracterization. Most atheists do not ever claim to be "free from logical error". They are open to reassessing their views based on emergent evidence and reasoning.
M: I've noticed.
CK: And that's as good as it gets for human beings.
M: I do not like to say I'm as good as it gets.
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M: But the real truth can't be entered by logic and arrogance, but by humility, grace, and self surrender.
CK: You just claimed to have the formula for finding "real truth" in the same breath that called for "humility" and denigrated "arrogance".
It's self-parodying.
M: No I told you what you need and instead of thinking about it you tried to turn it back on me. You, in your arrogance simply spit on the advise. I told you that you lack humility and you say I am arrogant to tell you. But all I told you was a fact one that would profit you to see, in my opinion. Your ego gets involved. If what I do is arrogance, the only person who will suffer is me.
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M: Perhaps a believer fears death or fears going to hell. He will resist the loss of belief that protects him from these things.
DC: I've always found it interesting that, generally speaking, the ones who claim to be most sure that they'll be reunited with God and Jesus and their dead loved ones after they die are the ones most afraid of death.
M: I try to see how like them I am.
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M: The non-believer may fear deception and the fear of ridicule at being accused of being naive.
CK: I've never met a non-believer with any of these fears, so I find your claim unconvincing.
M: But you easily saw the truth of the other claim.
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M: He will not want to let go of his non-belief opinion having gained such pride in his attainment.
CK: Again, a mischaracterization, a claim of belief I have not witnessed in other atheists.
That does, however, describe religious people quite well.
M: Then it should apply because both are religious. The Knower believes in one less god than the Atheist doesn't or the Theist does believe in. The God of religion does not exist and so the Atheist does not believe in a God that doesn't exist and the Theist believes in a God that doesn't. The Knower knows God. What he believes is not in error.
Have you fallen asleep yet?
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M: The Knower, well, he lives in a dimension we can't see. From him we can get only what we can take.
CK: Most "knowers" know only what they've been told to know, or what they imagine they've figured out themselves. But while personal intuition has value, it is not necessarily truth. The world is full of crazy people who claim to have figured everything out.
M: That is not the problem. The problem is comes when you are what you describe and think you are not. Certainty accompanied by the absence of self knowledge is the issue for me.
CK: Give me the man who honestly says "I don't know" over the man who deceives himself into thinking he "knows" something based on nothing, any day.
M: Give me a man who does not assume he knows nothing from something so that he will not deceive himself into thinking he will recognize somebody who knows something from one who knows nothing.
There are many truths that are of great value and that we can recognize as valuable truths. But knowing when to apply them, to whom they apply, and the required conditions in which to apply them are a different matter entirely.
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