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A suggestion that there are things you haven't heard of doesn't equate to infinite things. Let's say there are 10 arguments for God's existence, but the only one you are familiar with is "a thing exists, but there is no evidence for it", isn't my statement accurate?

In turn, your statement suggests that all possible ideas about religion for the past thousands of years of human history can be boiled down to a single sentence. You have assumed that everything you don't know about religion is exactly the same as the very little you do know about it. Which one of us is supposed to be close-minded again?

I am willing to consider anything and listen to what anybody has to say. As I said in my post above I went through an atheist period of my own, after all.

I already replied to your comment below, but this one is interesting too.

The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that they don't prove anything even worth refuting. Almost all of them simply attempt to prove the existence of a deistic God that does not meaningfully interact with the world (beyond creating it or sustaining it).

I don't think any good philosopher would admit to the embarrassment of actually having "proved" something!

Jokes aside, you wouldn't consider "sustaining the world" to be a fairly meaningful ongoing interaction?

Believing that there was a creator doesn't provide any useful information

Very pragmatic! Assume there is a God - what kind of things would he consider "useful"?

Well it depends on the nature of God's interaction, doesn't it? There are no big hands coming out of the sky and moving things around, I'll give you that. The theologist Paul Tillich argued that God is not a being-in-the-world, but exists outside of time and space. Given that, atheist expectations of an empirical proof of God tend to miss the mark.

On the contrary, I think that tons of other things were inspired by God. As Walt Whitman wrote, "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars". A healthy dose of relativism is not incompatible with religious belief - see the Trappist monk Thomas Merton who famously took a pretty serious spiritual interest in both Zen Buddhism and Islam.

Isn't it right there in the name? a - theism?

You don't believe that we can access meaningful knowledge about the world through logic? If not, then what the heck are you doing on a forum about computers?

Atheism is a recognition that there is zero evidence for the existence of any gods.

You're bemoaning a lack of empirical evidence when the problem is actually a philosophical one.

there is nothing to refute

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like your stance is that God doesn't exist because God doesn't exist? Circular argument much? Atheism is a positive statement, too.

It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions.

Of course it's not your "job". But I'd rather talk to someone who can actually explain why they think what they think.

It either exists or it doesn't.

We are not omnipotent beings. We must strive to gain knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in. How do you know whether or not it exists?

None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.

Disagree completely, they all presented interesting arguments.

Why ignore the main point of my comment? I directly addressed one reason why a random turtle god and an actual religion are very different.

I was talking about traditions, yes, but to write it off as simply an "appeal to tradition" falls very short

Why not?

I think you betray your lack of understanding by categorizing any religious belief aside from fundamentalism as "cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible...". There is a 2,000 year old tradition of hermeneutic interpretation of the bible, resulting in dozens of different, more nuanced approaches to reading and thinking about the book. But you've brushed all that aside as "cherry picking" so that your criticism can still be coherent without having to make any effort to learn more than you already know. You must maintain a narrow, simplistic definition of religion in order to retain confidence in your belief system. Isn't that a bit backwards?

One individual making up a story about a turtle is not a religion. Religions emerge from thousands of years of collective human consciousness. The stories are told and retold from millions of mouths to millions of ears. You understand that input to a human's cognitive system can shape their perception, consciousness, behavior, of course? These stories and characters have accompanied us through every technological revolution from agriculture to smartphones. Repeated through countless generations, they have literally shaped us as a species. With that suggestion in mind, can you really confront the idea that God is "The Word", and that we are "made in his image", without even a tiny amount of awe and wonder?

People tend to participate in online communities that affirm their sense of identity. Maybe people who get really involved are those who see atheism as a more important aspect of their identity?

I was definitely turned on to atheism on the internet, but I never really stuck around those forums. I grew up in a fairly liberal Catholic church, so I didn't really relate to all the vehemence against fundamentalism. Even though I grew up in a church, I didn't even know about "young earth creationism" until I learned about it from atheists on the internet. In my science class in Catholic school, we learned all about evolution. We used the same textbooks as the public schools. I don't remember hearing anything bad about LGBT, though I'm sure people talked about it since it was the early 2000's and gay marriage was still a real widespread controversy, as incredibly dumb as that seems now.

Overall I guess my experience was very different from someone who grew up conservative protestant and found atheism. As a result I never hated religion, just didn't believe in it for a while.

You don't have any reason that you have considered. Which is totally fine. The problem comes when atheists believe a priori that any argument for God's existence would be automatically false, even the ones they have never heard or considered.

There are many different ways to read the bible. Mainly, the bible is not a literal instructional manual unless you are a fundamentalist. And fundamentalists suck. For others, it's a written record of humanity's relationship with God. It's also a collection of writings from a number of different authors and genres - it has history, poetry, letters, and so on. The old testament was written by people thousands of years ago who had an imperfect understanding of God, nature, humans, society, etc.

In large part, the story of Jesus demonstrates how we should reject those archaic rules of our ancestors and act according to very simple principles; nonviolence, love for God, and love for all humans.

I became an atheist/agnostic as a teenager and now in my late 20's I have slowly come back to religion. So I am really interested in this topic.

My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment.

These online atheists communities can be very unfortunate. Your noble search for the truth leads you to question religion - but then you get caught in an echo chamber spending a lot of energy hating on others for their beliefs. A noble pursuit devolved into hatred and groupthink. On the other hand, fundamentalists took a religion which preaches love and acceptance and twisted it into something bitter and hateful. I think it's kind of poetic how much those two communities mirror each other.

The fixation on fundamentalism is a combination of two things. First, there are people from those fundamentalist churches who were damaged in some way and have now swung way to the opposite extreme of hating all religion. They grew up learning to see the world through rigid dogma, and online atheist communities tend to be fairly dogmatic themselves. Not hard to see the appeal there. Second, and probably more common, are atheists who never had any close contact with fundamentalism but they justify their beliefs by taking on the low-hanging fruit. It is very easy to pick on young-earth creationists, vehement anti-gay groups, prosperity gospel, etc. Those groups' thinking really does rely on fear and hate, things that the bible actually tells us to reject.

What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.

As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? They think that all Christians are anti-science when Christian monks were pivotal in the discovery of genetics and the big bang theory, among other scientific achievements. They ignore that some giants of Enlightenment philosophy, like Descartes and Spinoza, were attempting to use new rational methods to affirm the existence of God in their major works.

The problem is, when you are an atheist engaging in the really complex arguments posed by the most intelligent and eloquent religious people of history, the waters become very muddy. You might even have to concede, just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith, too. It's much easier to feel good about bashing the usual suspects - Joel Osteen, the 700 Club, Westboro Baptist and friends. And so a lot of people get sucked into that low-level discourse, and never get a chance to make the exhilarating journey back to religion. I don't really care if someone stays an atheist, many good people are atheists. But I do care if they never get a chance to see the promise of religion because of toxic echo chambers and groupthink.

As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.

In some senses, it's just a rehashing of the old "bread and circuses" line. Except this time it's iphones and a starbucks latte.

I don't think I agree. Things only become symbols when read as symbols

art should not be ephemeral

Why not?

Baudrillard's insistence on reading everything as a symbol gets him in trouble. There are a lot of intellectual fireworks in his writing, but I think he lacks depth and appreciation for the vibrancy and diversity of life. It's another example of cultural criticism failing because it overly textualizes things. Did he ever ask the owners of the bodies he so eloquently critiques, the "bodybuilder", or the "skateboarder", or the "Bronx breakdancer", what they think about all this business? Those aren't real people, they are just archetypes who serve to add color to his writing. Who wants to listen to a humanist who seems to hate actual humans?

Interesting. Maybe the new rule should be "Eat red meat if you want, just don't let it make you fat".

You can make some pretty attractive layouts with Adobe InDesign. Although I could never imagine managing an 800 page report like this in InDesign

This article comes across as very "inside baseball" i.e. the crowd who are intimately familiar with the ongoing melodrama in journalism, the history of the NY Times, etc. See his reference to his "until now anonymous comments in an internal Times report", for example

Unfortunately that's just about par for the course by Forbes standards

Is there something wrong with Lithuania and Portugal that it is so bad to be next to them in some world ranking? I get tired of the thinking that if the USA is not "#1 best in the entire history of the world" in these global rankings then we're some kind of abysmal losers.

Based on my experience, full-time positions just specializing in GIS are probably extremely rare for this type of organization - hence the desperate need for someone who is good at it. Nobody in those places has time to learn/maintain skills in something like that.

A small-to-medium sized nonprofit does not have the time/money resources to hire very many specialists at all - everyone is wearing multiple hats and learning to do things on the fly that they have never done before. As an example, in my role within the span of 2-3 weeks I went from graphic design invitations/menu for $250-a-plate dinner party, to literally running food and filling drinks at that same party while also taking pictures for social media and washing silverware for the chef, to patching together a transition to a new donation payment platform, then the next week I was designing a social media marketing campaign. It's a constant "all-hands-on-deck" at all times, and nobody has time to specialize in anything.

In the case of GIS needs, an organization like this might rely on an "advocate" (whose main job is to lobby elected officials) to do some of this work because they did one project with it in one class of their Public Administration grad program. In my experience, even our semi-retired secretary who did mostly bookkeeping was "punching above her weight" in job responsibilities.

That's why I suggested it as mostly a volunteer-type gig if one is truly passionate about using tech skills to help the environmental movement. If you want to work for one of those places you need to be more of a generalist, and accept that your passion of GIS might involve doing what should be a full-time job in 25% of your time at work.

I spent a few years working for a small environmental advocacy group in small-town USA. One thing you could do is branch out your skills and learn GIS, then offer that to small groups who are doing environmental advocacy.

These groups are crazy desperate for more people who know how to use GIS software, because there are needs for good mapping in almost every single aspect of the work they do. The issue is that anyone who is good enough at GIS to be useful can get a job elsewhere making 2-3x more money. Maybe they don't get to go help release a rehabbed sea turtle back into the ocean during their lunch break at that other job, but cash is king I guess. At my org we had an ex-high school history teacher working part time learning to use ArcGIS from youtube so we could present results of a bicycle infrastructure plan to local city councilpeople. For another project we paid a shit ton of money (like, more money than was responsible to spend for an org. of our size) for an architectural firm to basically come in with their intern who knows GIS and create maps with overlays of how much money the city would save with new stormwater infrastructure in key places.

I'm not sure it's fair to say that I'm gatekeeping what people read. It's more about the spirit behind the reading.

Anyway, if it's gatekeeping to suggest that people should pursue personal growth through their own authentic interests rather than reading as a chore to be "more efficient", then call me president of the gatekeeping club for all I care.

Ah! You quoted me but you put a very convenient [...] in place of learning about "yourself". I think the reason you did that is because your criticism is only coherent if you zero in on learning about "the world" and leave out that messy other business of self-discovery. But learning about yourself is pretty important for personal growth, too, in my opinion so important that I even listed it first when writing that sentence ;)

Understandable to disagree, you're not gonna learn to drive a car or do calculus or speak another language from the head of a pin. Nevertheless, I think there's a valuable philosophical perspective in it.

Just to be clear, I agree with you 100% that accessing other people's best thoughts through reading is very valuable and very awesome.

On the other hand, you don't need a thousand other lives to live one good one. As Thoreau wrote, "It takes more than one day to extract the wealth of a day." And as a Buddhist saying goes, "You can learn everything about the entire universe from the head of a pin".

Even if you cheat, is reading 15 short, bad books better or worse than reading 0?

If it's done as a chore to hit a certain number, or in a performative spirit to show others how much one has read, I think that person would get more value spending those hours doing something in which they have an authentic interest.

Also, it's not an all-or-nothing prospect. A better question might be, "Is it better to read 15 short, bad books or 3 longer, more challenging books that one may not even fully understand on the first reading?"