Neil deGrasse Tyson: Earth Is Bad for Life

Suppose there was a God

A stream of thought from Oct 1999: 

Suppose there was God. What does it mean for me as an atheist? Then is there hell? Am I going there when I die? Did I do something so horribly wrong by nor believing in God that I deserve to burn for an eternity just for having the wrong mindset, the wrong thoughts, even though in deed I have been basically good?

Or am I going to paradise? Did I do something so incredibly good that I deserve eternal blessing? This concept of good and evil, heaven and hell, eternal reward and eternal  punishment sounds too much like a story parents tell their kids about what would happen if they didn't behave. “A monster will come and take you away” is good enough to keep a kid in shape, but an adult needs a picture of more severe consequences and the simple and clear idea of burning forever seems to have done the job for a lot of people.

Singularity of God – easily conceptualized. But why one, not two?

On Being an Atheist

Here's a little piece I wrote way back in April 1998. Fits nicely into this blog:

Being an Atheist

"Religion" and "god." You hear the two words every day on television, radio, in conversations, and read them in the newspapers. Religious groups receive publicity and recognition. However there is one growing group of the population that has not received enough recognition, and that group is atheists. As a member of this group, I want to elaborate on what the group is like and what it means for me personally to belong to this group. Also there are some misconceptions and stereotypes about atheists I would like to clarify.

An atheist, by definition is someone who does not believe in god, and before we begin any discussion about god, we need to define what god is. So here is my personal definition of god:

            God is a supreme being which has the ability and does interfere in people's lives (in some way - good or bad) to a perceptible degree. Let this be the starting point for the whole discussion.

Therefore, for me personally, an atheist is someone who disbelieves in god under the above definition. Although there is no specific place that atheists congregate (like a church), we all share similar value system and a common disbelief in a supreme being. There are different ways to disbelieve, just as there are different ways to believe (different religions/ sects/ denominations). But generally atheists can be subdivided into 3 groups:

1)                              "I hate the world" atheists.

2)                              "I don't care" atheists

3)                              Scientific atheists

The first group consists of people who at some point believed in god, but who, through some unfortunate event in their lives became disappointed with the power up above which was supposed to prevent the unfortunate event from happening and failed to do so. As a consequence, these people reject their religious heritage altogether and proceed to become atheists. Their type is very bitter, pessimistic and sarcastic. This is what most religious people imagine atheists to be. However it is hard to say whether these people truly disbelieve, because even though they may have lost their faith in the positive attributes of god, they may actually still believe in a supreme being, however negative they perceive it to be. Also some of the people with a pessimistic outlook on the world belong to this category. From them you may often here that life is unfair, and if god existed things would have been much better than they are now. People in this group usually stand out as unpleasant pessimists and very often serve as prototypes of atheists in general, which they are not (just like Catholics cannot be considered representatives of Christianity as a whole).

            People in the second group usually come from a weakly religious or non-religious background. They may or may not claim to believe in god, but the existence of god is not something that's on their minds very often. At some point in my life I belonged to this category. I wasn't sure whether god existed or not, but the answer to that question was not particularly significant to me at that point. Many  people in the second category believe in god and the clockwork universe; that is the world is a clock, which god created ("wound") and forgot about. He never came back to interfere again. From this standpoint, it really doesn't matter if god exists, for it will have no affect on us in our lifetime. Even if some of the people in this category may say they believe in god or say they are agnostic (unsure of god's existence), I still call them atheists, since the existence of god has no relevance to them on an everyday basis.

            The third group is the one I currently belong to. Being a scientific atheist means having a scientific basis for your disbelief. People come into this category after thinking about the issue for a long time and realizing that there are no facts to support god's existence "beyond reasonable doubt." There is no hard-core evidence in favor of god that cannot be explained otherwise. And if at any time something cannot be explained by conventional means, it does not imply that this something has supernatural causes. Granted there is no hard-core evidence in opposition to the existence of god either, but here we have to consider the nature of the human mind. The mind tends to attribute events to supernatural causes whenever it runs out of natural explanations, therefore the scientific atheists say that in all probability god does not exist.

            One thing in common about all three groups of atheists is that all of us tend to have liberal standing on moral and often political issues. Being an atheist involves reevaluating traditional ways of thinking about everything in life, not just the existence of god alone. It involves questioning authority, and evaluating the world in new terms. Since we have no source that helps us tell right from wrong (like the Bible or Koran), our conceptions of right and wrong are far from standard. Before we say what’s right and what’s wrong, we ask ourselves “What does it mean for something to be right?” Instead of seeing the world as being black-and-white, we perceive it as consisting of infinitely many shades of gray. Atheists are not the only ones with that kind of perception of the world, but being an atheist most surely suggests more than disbelief in god. It involves a whole set of moral and political values. Also it usually means being more open to new and unconventional ideas, questioning well established concepts, etc.

            One of the good things about being an atheist is that I do not have to participate in any religious activities, unless I find them fulfilling in ways other than religious (e.g. being part of a traditional celebration). Also, not believing in god makes me feel like the vast majority of things in life is logically consistent, since I never look for supernatural explanations.

            I came from a non-religious family, and originally I went back and forth between believing and disbelieving. After a while, I settled into the second category, at which point the existence of god did not matter to me. In high school, I took a psychology class, and after finding out more about how the human mind operated, I came to the conclusion that the only place god existed was in people’s heads, and not as an independent external power.

Incompetent people too ignorant to know it

Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It | LifesLittleMysteries.com