Metaphysics

God doesn't exist and it all ends when we die
*tips fedora

I'm an atheist, but not totally anti-theism. Religion can help people with life, and that's fine.

What I don't like about how religion is handled mainly is when it's forced onto people at a very young age, children don't get the chance to question what they're being told is true or untrue.

I don't believe in an afterlife, when we die, it'll be like before we were born, just nothing. That brings me peace.

Whatever religion or belief someone follows, I don't think it's anybody's business to even know it, let alone criticise. Organisations and people who kill in the name of a deity, or any cause, are just murderers, plain and simple.

Quote from Sardonic Pickle

What I don't like about how religion is handled mainly is when it's forced onto people at a very young age, children don't get the chance to question what they're being told is true or untrue.

Like everything, it comes as part of the morale the parents teach the children, what's good what's bad and why. Eventually we all get our chance to develop our own morale and question what we think is right and why. I don't think it's a big deal.

Quote from Cressel

Like everything, it comes as part of the morale the parents teach the children, what's good what's bad and why. Eventually we all get our chance to develop our own morale and question what we think is right and why. I don't think it's a big deal.

Yeah, in most cases the person grows up, thinks for themselves and let's say they don't believe in their parents' religion, and they're accepted. Which is good.

But there are the cases when the child thinks for themselves, rejects their parents' religion and are shunned from the entire family and friends. They're the cases when religion needs to disappear.

That's just discrimination at it's finest. It happens in every topic, I mean it's nothing special it's the usual human stupidity on denial of different opinions. It will always happen.

I, uh, never metaphysical I didn't like...

...>.>....

Belief... my life is full of it. I believe my future will be good, I believe I will survive until old age and that nobody will ever cut off my arms. I have no proof of this, it is simply my faith in the world.

Ethically, I believe in virtues, and I am an idealist with many beliefs about humanity, society and the environment. I believe in love and wonder and in the good in human beings. That is, there is something in us that I believe is good, and that it has the power to make more things good. I believe dogma and judgement are vices that will not create good.

Furthermore, I believe that being sentient is a fundamentally subjective experience, and that society and communication relies on vast compromise. Therefore I believe that the abilities and potential of the human mind far exceeds what we are able to express and even understand.

Herein lies a nugget of my respect for religion, because I see it as a magnificent attempt to approach a sense in existence seen through a sentient mind. A religion is humanity trying to speak a great epic about itself, words and gods that then come to life through our adherence to them. And I believe religion is a symptom of our recent cultural evolution; as we slowly moved towards a more collective state, like cells in a greater body, what used to be stories of ancestors and nature took on new roles involving power and complicated societal structures. I believe religion legitimately provides a great deal of people with subjective experiences that we once needed and received in an ancient world that no longer exists for us. I believe the "ghost" of religion is a part of humanity, which has ever been with us as an ethereal canvas on which to write who and what we are. Thus I do not believe religion is the first or necessarily the best way to paint these stories, but it is the most comprehensively wrought, and I admire it like metaphysical architecture and art.

Purely metaphysically, I believe there is sensation beyond death, whether it be the immortality of the soul or a union with the cosmos. I believe, for some reason, that I have experienced something before this life, something very different, and that I haven't been human before. Actually, these beliefs are vastly more interesting to me as reflections on my psyche, which I believe is the true and only divinity in a conscious life, than they are claims of physical facts. Even so, I believe the psyche–or subconscious–is severely limited yet hinting to a higher evolutionary stage. I believe sentient life is capable of transcending to become, in some respect, immortal gods. And I believe we might do this one day if we merge with, or are succeeded by, artificial intelligence.

Lastly, I believe that I don't get it.

Before studying what am I studying it was more or less religious, most of my family goes to church so always birth I had this education, they never asked me if I believed or not, simply is the teaching that they gave me and that my grandparents gave them. Today still believe in a God but not the way in as the Church says, many of the things in the Bible were taken from ancient beliefs, all combined gave shape to the God that the churches know. I'm not saying to not teach my son (when you have one) who is God, the free will of believe what the want to believe.

What do I believe?

Well, I’m an ordained rabbi, so that should tell you something. By most outside evaluations, I am what would be called “orthodox jewish,” or even the semi-derogatory “ultra-orthodox.” But I believe these terms are shallow, and the question “what do I believe” remains an interesting one with no simple answer.

It is both harder and easier for me to answer this question than it has been in the past. It’s harder, because distinctive beliefs that are easily delineated seem more beyond my grasp the more I learn about Judaism and particularly the mystical Chassidic teachings that are my passion. It’s easier because the answer, “I believe whatever I’m supposed to” seems more legitimate to me every day.

I once would have said simply that I believe what Maimonides lays out in his thirteen principles of faith. Now I tell myself what I tell 90% of people who say things about Judaism. “It’s not so simple…”

I believe there is a G-d. Who is G-d? By definition, impossible to answer. I once would have said He is the creator of the universe. But He is not just that; maybe not even primarily that. He is transcendent yet imminent, everything yet nothing, beyond yet within. He is at the vertex of every paradox and in both sides of every argument. He is the fulcrum; He is gravity; He is the weights.

I believe in Torah, that G-d revealed and reveals His will and wisdom to mortal man. What does the Torah say? Everything, in some context or other. There are few statements that could authoritatively be said to be in contradiction to Torah, and the threads of its net seem to sweep up every corner, ever trailing edge of human existence. The Torah is like a wedge driven through history, a system of rules whose emergent properties are little-understood even after thousands of geniuses’ lifetime study, a mind virus whose propagation has altered the world in ways immeasurable and will continue to do so.

I believe in Judaism. What is Judaism? Judaism is a way that is ultimately not rationally explainable. It is a religion, but it is also decidedly not a religion. At times it seems to be all about following rules and living a moral life. At other times it seems to run black like nihilism in dark veins, to embrace wild chaotic beauty. It is the custom of a small tribe that has survived against all odds, a family that has never sought out new members yet has utterly transformed the world just by existing, and being a family.

These few ephemeral, ill-defined things are the only things I believe in without qualification. Everything else is a discussion, an exploration of shades. I believe in human evil and human good, in systematic imperatives and personal authenticity, in meaning and meaninglessness, in great sages in simple peasants, in heaven and in death, in happiness and in angst, in the soul and in the body…

The one thing I can say is that I trust in my family, in our traditions, in the age-old story of my people and all we have learned in our travails. My ultimate faith is in the process, in the idea that our tribe is not here for nothing but for a purpose. But I am willing to follow this way and this system wherever it leads, and where it has led is to wild jungles of antinomianism, chaos, and other areas not considered to normal stomping grounds of religion.

Believe it or not, that's actually a relatively easy thing to explain, compared to most of what I wrote >.> It can indeed be answered even according to the classical conception of G-d, without resorting to more mystical, paradoxical realities. Your question is answered quite thoroughly by the classical Jewish philosopher Maimonides over the course of many chapters of his "Guide for the Perplexed," which I will summarize (very) briefly here, probably causing more confusion than I'm helping, but whatever:

The simple fact is that, given that there is a first or primary cause, that first cause need be simple (rather than comprised of parts), since if the first cause is comprised of parts there is clearly some sort of prior reality that unites those parts, and that would really be the first/prime cause. Once one fully thinks about what it means that the first cause is simple, one begins to realize that there is very little indeed that can be said about it. As famously explored by classical philosophers such as the Christian Thomas Aquinas and, from a different perspective, the Jewish Maimonides, it becomes problematic to say things such as "G-d knows" or "G-d loves" or "G-d hates," since all of these things are by definition actions or states that are extrinsic to being, and are thus dividing the creator into parts - there is Him and His Love, or Him and His knowledge. (parenthetically, it is fascinating the lengths to which Maimonides feels his must go to explain this regarding thought. His conception of knowledge was awfully similar to a being's complete unity with something else, which would mean it may be possible to say G-d knows. This had a profound effect on Jewish thought throughout the centuries, as our obsession with education and Torah study is founded on the idea that it is one of the only ways to truly unite with G-d.)

Maimonides thus concludes that "positive" statements about G-d are impossible to make. One cannot say "G-d is omnipotent." Only negative knowledge ought to be allowed, i.e. G-d doesn't not know anything. What He is or does in the affirmative is impossible to define or put into words, and can only be assumed to be wrapped up in the mystery of His unity.

Maimonides then goes on to point out that the first and most important thing that it is impossible to say about G-d is that He exists. This is under the usual definition of existence which applies to everything other than G-d - that to exist is to instantiate a universal (I can't get into the whole discussion about universals here; I hope your philosophical training will help.) That is, everything exists as something. This furry thing next to my foot exists as a dog, is an example of dogness, and has defining features as part of its form that tell me it's a dog and not something else. Maimonides points out that this means an existence in the classical sense cannot be simple, as the dog, for example, is a composite of it and its own instantiation. The recipe for this dog is (things that make a dog a dog) plus (a specific instantiation in space and time) = this dog. As previously mentioned, to say a similar thing about G-d would require that there is some higher reality that unites Him and His instantiation, Him and His existence.

Therefore, says the philosopher, the most we can say about Him is that He doesn't not exist. But He certainly does not exist by any definition of "existence" available to us.

There are other, deeper, more mystical ways of answering your question, but believe it or not, this is probably the most easily understandable and certainly the most easily acceptable to an atheist, I imagine.

Perhaps what you were asking was really a different question, from more of an emotional than an intellectual perspective, i.e. what does is mean for the human heart that G-d has an aspect or modality of expression in which he does not exist?

To which I'd answer the obvious answer that many atheists would be glad to proffer - Atheism has its benefits. Religious people can get so wrapped up in what they think is their service of G-d that they forget to be human. They forget human needs, kindness, understanding, empathy. Thus the famous Chassidic master known as the Baal Shem Tov once said that a religious Jew has much to learn from the heretic; when another person is in need, a Jew must become an atheist, must forget his religious needs, standards, etc. and be given over entirely to helping another.

Thus even to great rabbis there was what you might call an "atheistic imperative."

Another aphorism that is a bit subtler that also shows the impact of G-d's non-existence on the Jewish heart is the words of the famous Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who once told the village atheist that "The G-d you don't believe in, I don't believe in either." In my personal journey, these words have always been an encouragement to me, spurring me to deeper understanding and a broader perspective...