Sounds like your not a Christian. lol Please don't reply with the typical response "and proud of it". Try to make your response not sound like it was copy pasted from some other Atheist on some other philosophy forum. Readers enjoy comedy and originality. — christian2017

No, I'm not a Christian, but kind of an honorary one, since I take someone to the Vineyard Church and go to their events. I don't attend the services. All posted poems are my own, and I would attribute when they aren't. Don't worry about your thinking otherwise. The denomination joke is common, though, and not mine, as a nod to churches needing money, too, to survive.

Many churches are changing, lest they keep on evaporating as the more strict believers die off. They are saying such as "It's not about religion, but community…", but change is slow and they still mostly have the silliness of the Biblical God who has poor character.

Eventually…

The stodgy elevation of doctrine over ethics
Will no longer carry the day, and there will be less
Emphasis on believing, with more on belonging.
All will become more democratic, with much singing.

The Bible will be seen to be of human construction,
A result of human instinct, frailty, fear, and no wisdom;
So people actively speaking to each other, with laughter,
Will come to replace passive readings from scripture.

(In my church, all denominations are accepted: twenties, fifties, and hundred dollar bills.)

this is definitely a cool post. Thanks. I plan on watching until my attention span wanes out. — christian2017

The OP videos are rather long, as setting the stage, but the great words, colorful art, animation, and music (even as quatrains sung) blend into a phantasmagorical experience—and there's philosophy, too.

to reinforce my atheistic beliefs — Purple Pond

Perhaps they have to lean more toward agnostic, but still unlikely toward God, but there is more to consider…

Another believer comes along, one without all the Biblical bluster of damnation from a bad Role Model type of God who had the worst character ever in literary fiction …

Hello, and good riddance to the God of religion.

Yes, what a horror made in the image of bad human nature.

Yeah, humans can be terrible, and life, it’s only in modern times that we humans have a bit of relief. Even as recent as a century ago, life was much tougher, not that it’s always a picnic.

This is God’s world, as you would have it.

Indeed, for how could I say otherwise, for the ‘fall from grace’ was but a myth based on disputes between farmers and shepherds long ago, as if there was such a great difference.

Hey, you are a good believer to talk with; no Hellfire and and that mush.

Yeah, I have a good boloney detector. It seems that our human race of life evolved from the basis of the nature of the universe, and so, in looking at ourselves we might get a big clue as to the very nature of the universe, that is, that our life could be from a Larger Life, called ‘God’.

I see that you allow that there was evolution. Also, it’s good to propose a resemblance. I’ve used that in noting our holistic versus detail alternating viewpoints.

Yes, presumably God and Existence are one and the same, eternal, as the All and/or the basis of the All, but since life arose eventually, what life is here now had to be inherent in existence all along, as a God life-full-ness principle.

Good thinking about what is here now had to be there in the beginning, or forever. It’s just that we surfers of light are but 5% of the types of matter out there. Dark energy and dark matter dominate. We appear to be an after effect.

God utilized these to create a workable area; He can only do what He can do, and so an instant creation wasn’t possible. He threw some stuff together, and then Cosmic and biological evolution had to be relied on. I’m not nutty enough to insist that God places souls in humans, plus, I don’t need any of that jazz. God is merely the highest being, and that’s that.

Well, I do have to admit that the universe has been found to be ‘unnatural’ by physicists, in that it seems fine-tuned for life to appear. Whenever and wherever we look back, we see ‘fortunate’ events; however, why did seven extinctions wiping out most all progress have to happen?

God, not being all powerful, had to resort to using this sledgehammer effect, which was the best He could do, to try to open the field for mammals to evolve, by wiping out 95% of all life, as in the last, Permian, extinction.

So, initially, God put some stuff together, namely parts of Himself, I suppose, that might lead to some kind of life that He could later steer, albeit in a clumsy way. He’s kind of a Deity, not a Theory, then.

Yes, he is kind of a great scientist who could predict somewhat, but couldn’t foresee everything down to the last detail; that’s impossible. He was creative and wanted to achieve something.

So far, I see that nature’s way and God’s way can’t be told apart, although I’m aware of the need to explain the fine-tuning some other way if there’s no God. I’m not yet convinced that an extra step of God is required, as a Person how He could be just sitting around, as First and Fundamental.

Yeah, First and Fundamental is a problem. As for fine-tuning, and playing the Devil’s advocate here, that’s something I can even help you look into, later, because I want to shore it up to be more sure of my God premise. What do you think, for now?

I still have to grant a ‘maybe’ God.

And I still have to grant a ‘maybe’ no God.

Islam IS by far the most evil religion in the world today, because of its extremists. They are without question the most extreme and dangerous. — DingoJones

It's not much advertised, but drones this very day and everyday are assassinating terrorists, thus preventing many big and bad plans.

I didnt read any of his books, Im not even a particular fan of his but it provokes my sensibilities when people, anyone even someone like Trump, are demonised. If someone is evil or otherwise shitty, then an honest and fair treatment will bare that out. — DingoJones

His 'The God Delusion' book would apply here. Although the Biblical, fundamentalist 'God' is an easy mark, he also includes evolution science and more. With such great writing, he needn't use anger in public to bolster his case, for it drives people away to be insulted, but, as we've found from the 'free will' threads, people have to do what they do, and, lacking learning to chill out, keep on doing it.

not really my place to say how it is that a Muslim woman should dress. — thewonder

Yes, and it is also that the whole of a woman's body needs to be covered, for modesty, I suppose, which is mostly so but varies by the local Islamic law. Men need to cover up from their belly buttons down to their knees. Their religion is such to say that Allah has an interest in clothing the body.

The differences between cultures goes a long way to causing trouble, for human nature is not all that great about dealing with differences. Somehow, people think the credibility of their own culture gets diminished via the mere existence of the others (especially with differing religious beliefs).

I think I've lost something. More specifically, I've lost some of my ability to defend myself from attacks on my atheistic beliefs. — Purple Pond

OK, PurplePond, so far, we've given the believers their 'maybe', but will call them out as being dishonest for preaching the 'maybe' as if it were truth, which is a fair and decent step, and one that can be applied to any discipline touting 'perhaps' as fact.

Next, the Biblical version of 'God' was demolished, which takes a lot away, but there can still be people saying different to you than of the holy-holy religious aspect, those who have a plain old regular person God responsible for everything. For them, we'll have to access the probability of a fully intact Person being able to be First and Fundamental, but there will be no real win either way.

Dawkins — DingoJones

He's rather a grouch, but his books are great. Evidently, he doesn't realize that people have to do what they do. Yes, there can be learning, but there's still a 'maybe' to the 'God' idea, which he allows as a slim chance. Since rewards are said to await in Heaven, it's understandable that people would want it. He is one extreme and severe 'invisibility disorder' is the other.

ruby yacht — Ciceronianus the White

She, Ruby Yacht, will be a character herein, at the club. It's interesting that she was named after a yacht instead of the usual naming of the boat after her. She might look in the water and see the trustful SpongeBob bobbing.

Saying either that laws can change or that new laws from, say, another dimension will start kicking in are not different with regard to a methodology of science. — Gregory

Science results are provisional, not written in stone.

Blameless, Shameless, and Fameless

Human nature’s ranges of inclinations
Will, to no surprise, express themselves
Far and wide, as such they ought, regardless
Of that constitution being intended.

Especially if the human recipe
Was thought out, planned, designed notably,
And so implemented accordingly,
Then the results will be just as they should be.

If mistakes crept into the formulas,
Then we’re still as made, outcomes expected,
So, one’s own creation’s still respected—
No shame for all, obviating the blame.

All do as they must; there is no brain-separate 'I' with separate machinery to rule over the brain will.

The fabric of Existence is continuous, as field.

the Ground of All... I like that. — thewonder

Or the Ground of Determination (G.O.D.).

The fixed will of a scientist all the more can consistently find connections and truth; the will doesn't just get skipped over. If there's bias and it gets in the way, one can learn from this omission and thus a newer, wider fixed will can attend to more complete solutions. The fixed will is dynamic, not frozen for all time.

What direction do you think we're pointed toward, the past or the future? If it's neither, then how can you call this an orientation? — Metaphysician Undercover

What we feel may not be how it really is. In the block universe of eternalism, the future already exists and we are somehow traversing the 4D block. Or, there is presentism, with the future not yet made, although the 'now will make the next 'now' and the previous 'now' will be gone forever.

Either way, we feel as if it is always 'now' and that the series 'nows' also represents the past going to the future, since the World progresses; however, our conscious 'now' is not really as the physical 'now' but of the very recent past, since it took time to derive and paint the qualia scene, plus another slight delay from the speed of light. Of course, practically, it's all fast enough to be of use, but, technically, we live in the past.

Force-recruiting more people into an inescapable game to strive-after, deal with that "informs existence" is all that matters here. The burdens of the "thrownness" of our situation (what is already-established and cannot be changed at all or readily changed by one person certainly), is all that matters. Potential is a propaganda tool to recruit yet more people to this existential scheme. — schopenhauer1

It's basically true that existence has been a bitch for us and all creatures for the last umpteen million years.

The heart, like tapers, takes at beauty’s eyes 
A flame, and lives by that whereby it dies; 
And beauty is a flame where hearts, like moths, 
Offer themselves a burning sacrifice. 

Take heart! Long in the weary tomb you’ll lie,
While stars keep countless watches in the sky,
And see your ashes molded into bricks,
To build another’s house and turrets high.

For me, heaven’s sphere no music ever made,
Nor yet with soothing voice my fears allayed;
If e’er I found brief respite from my woes,
Back to woe’s thrall I was at once betrayed.

Thrust into life, we seek the depths to know
The plots beyond the curtains of the show,
Learning naught but a whisper from the waste:
‘We came as water and to dust we blow.’

The bowl of life will drain you from your soul,
And hence you’ll part the veil or be as coal,
So, you might as well drink the wine of life;
One knows not what’s writ, or if, on Fate’s scroll.

What shall be, remedy or pain, or mix?
No contest, for we’re wise to change’s tricks,
So, can expect sorrow and joy alike;
But who cares! They’ll pass; we all go to bricks.

From birth we can look forward to being host
To woe, and then to giving up the ghost.
Happy are they who quickly burn to toast,
And blessed are they who ne’er came to the roast.

Creation’s smoke burns evermore thy meat,
E’en ‘fore you cinder from the deeper heat.
Ah, shun what bane you may of the kitchen;
Take no stock in trade; all sweet profits eat.

(These quatrains above are only half mine, or less, for they were retransmogrified into English from Omar's Persian/Arabic originals.)

Everything is energy. — thewonder

I’m the All and the One, omnipresent,
For I’m eternal and can neither be
Created nor destroyed, being my own cause
And the Ground of All—I am Energy.

More specifically, I've lost some of my ability to defend myself from attacks on my atheistic beliefs. — Purple Pond

Well, as noted, each side has to give a little, in that invisibles can neither be shown nor not shown, and thus there remains a 'maybe' either way, no matter how unlikely one has it.

There is the outside chance of self contradiction, as well as logical and natural impossibility, but it will probably get down to probability winning the day, for that's about all we have to work with on invisible realms.

The religious advocate returns…

You again!

Yes, we're supposed to try to convert non-believers into followers.

OK, I'm a philosopher, and thus well able to counter your claims. Come on in.

God grants us free will.

Absolutely free; we can do whatever we want?

Yes.

Truly free; our will doesn't have to match God's will?

Yes, free, God is all love.

Unconditional; no strings attached?

Would you like to be saved?

From what?

From not being with God.

What's so bad about that? I'm free.

It would be Hell. Would you like to be saved?

No, for your supposed God through you as his follower just reneged on the 'free'. That's bad character.

Jesus rectified that mistake. Would you like to be saved?

Oh, so there was a mistake that had to be fixed. So much for the Perfect Being. God remains as a problem, as supposedly Jesus' father. Plus, we are still thrown out Eden from the taint God designed into us, that of our human nature being able to sway from good to bad and all in-between, just as we see it does, as fact, to no one's surprise.

Would you like to be saved?

What do I have to do to avoid burning in Hell?

All you have to do is merely accept God with all your heart. OK?

No, for to accept is to approve, and thus I wouldn't have integrity. God broke his own commandment in the Great flood, and more that I could list. I don't make deals with controllers and coercers. Your God is easily out thought, plus He is not all love, but ugly, even.

You're going to the smoking section.

Good joke. Do you recall that all of this supposing is but a 'maybe' and so is not necessarily true?

Blah, blah, blah. We were put on Earth to worship God.

God needs this? There's the door.

Well, at first it seemed say that higher beings would be in the future, which higher complexity there is more logical and natural than they being in the past where all gets simpler and simpler and less and less and smaller and smaller, but then this seemed to reverse back to the religious standard of the greatest complexity being First.

Where in the Woe is Purgatory’s bane?
Purgatory’s on Venus, where sulfurs rain.
Where in the Heck is that deep Hell of pain?
Hell’s found in the sun’s heart, oh hot burning pain!

Where in the name of Heaven is Paradisea?
Of Heaven’s site no one has any idea—
Really now, where’s Heaven one and the same?
It’s the world’s best kept secret: Earth is its name!

Yes, that’s said, but truly, where is the stead…
I must tell of them that they’re only read;
…Of those places spent after we are dead?
It’s written of words that language bred.

‘Twas hope-word that invented All that was said?
‘Twas these that were signed for anything Divine ‘said’.

My mind wants more, as well as a reward beyond.

Mind is the ultimate of all there is;
It is the universe: billions of years
Of primordial material, complex;
So, then, what more could human beings want?

Morning at the Omar Khayyam Club of America — The Living Book

As I knock on the oaken door of the OKCA, the winds are brisk and the leaves of yesterday are swirling on down, during this part of autumn known as the ‘fall’ (of the leaves).

Autumn falls as summer leaves,
Harvesting its sum of days,
Seconding the rose of spring.

Warmth emanates from the parlor, from its chestnut paneled bookcases to the lush carpet that sinks under step like grass on a putting green. I deeply inhale the scented air installed here from Omar’s Persia-fumed grave that never fails to overwhelm.

I am at the Club early today, for an American breakfast of steak (medium-rare) and eggs (unfertilized, Swiss cheese omelet) with fruit and an apple cinnamon muffin (toasted, with butter). For dinner, later, I’ll try the leg of mutton (Persian style).

The saki pours my Iranian cranberry wine and an Arabian coffee (with french-vanilla).

Coffee plants are in the desert first seen,
By a starving outcast, who eats the bean
And finds it bitter, so he boils some, tart,
Finding that the water is the better part.

Such from asylum he returns home, quaint,
And for his coffee is declared a saint,
But its drinkers are despised by clerics—
The partakers dally over their cups!

There are many ladies about, whose presence would have perhaps dismayed the Club’s 57 originals, but that there are none of them left alive to complain.

I light up a smoke.

I note a loving couple coming in from a night in the Persian Garden of Paradise wherein the sands meet the sown.

Who knew that the twin-born Peri was bred
From lower flesh and higher spirit bled,
Where the Hellish desert meets the greensward,
When the hot sands and the luscious turf wed.

The sheer glass protective dome would be over the garden now, unnoticeable. I’ll be in there with Janice and her seven veils later this afternoon. The rose trees grafted upon from Naishapur bloom all year round.

I wave up a holographic copy of a private Rubaiyat that has only a single instance, the one illustrated by Edward Taylor Jewett, retained in the San Diego Library rare book room behind iron grates.

Jewett’s paintings in the book begin to move! It's a living book! Now perhaps you think I’m making things up about this Club’s fabulous features, in and of a hookah pipe dream, but, see more…

It's so hot everywhere due to global warming that the business man Trump finally gave in to the fact and was going to corner the market on ice, he to do this by buying Greenland; however, when he went there, the ice saw was all melted, with the land now really green.

they think that somehow their consciousness is just "occupying" or "driving" their body while not being identical to it, and so on — Terrapin Station

Or that we pick up brain waves from other people or beings. 'Fixed will' is immune to all these notions, for they would just be another input, Yes, the more good inputs the better for widening the range of the will, but as fixed the will still wills an output based on all that it has in it to consider, aside from playing dice harming the mechanism.

Close the courtrooms — TheMadFool

We want the judge to protect society by taking the offender out of circulation.

what type of knowledge allows us to say that there is a difference between future and past — Metaphysician Undercover

.
There is currently no way to tell presentism apart from eternalism.

Youth's smiles and tears may betoken nought
Until life's path has its values wrought. — fresco

The whole poem is excellent, both as to the forest nature description and to the winding refinement of values upon human nature.

We're all machines — TheMadFool

Hello, fellow robot. We're free of fame and blame and shame. That there are so many differing kinds of robots out there obscures the fact that the will is fixed to what it must do in the instant of its use. At least there is consistency. If I were the opposite, as an arbitrary air-head, I'd be long dead now.

Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam stunned Victorian England soon after Darwin’s The Origin of the Species had shocked their sensibilities, but soon they and the world came to embrace what came to be known as the greatest poem in history, as well as one of the most often illustrated.

One of the quatrains from FitzGerald’s notes doesn’t have the Rubaiyat rhyming scheme or any:

Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science,
Has fallen in grief’s furnace and been suddenly burned;
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!

So, here is my version of his tent of science/philosophy, per the three Fates implied:

Fate Lachesis threaded Khayyam’s life long,
And Omar stitched his tent’s reasoning strong,
Clotho e’er spinning his essence along;
Atropos then sheared his rope for a song.

Some of Omar's Big Questions and Paradoxes still haven’t been answered but there has been much progress therein, as well as with many revisited/revised myth-takes.

It would take forever to reach absolute zero and stop all energy/movement:

https://www.sciencealert.com/after-a-century-of-debate-cooling-to-absolute-zero-has-been-declared-mathematically-impossible

hidden in our psyche, there's a part of us that wants God to exist. The times when we're distracted by the many pleasures of worldly life we don't get to see that part of us but it does surface when we're in mortal danger. — TheMadFool

Plus also a wish to carry on beyond our expiration date, which can turn religious or zen…

NOW AND ZEN

Everything that is part of us—
Our cells, tissues, organs and organ systems—
Has come about over billions of years
Because it proved successful
In the great survival stakes
During our perilous evolutionary
Descent (ascent) with modification.

The brain, being no exception,
Evolved in part
To allow a creature to learn
From what happens in its life,
To retain key elements that
Could influence future actions.

We are geared for self-preservation;
We will do anything to avoid facing the possibility
That who we are now cannot continue.

We ourselves are mainly the cause
That we are interested in.
The self is preoccupied with staying alive,
Which is why our species is still around today.

It is a prime biological function to be afraid of death,
And so the self as thus contrived
Is able to fully play its crucial survival role.

We want to equip our brain with a soul
That offers us an escape when the brain dies
Since the self cannot come to terms
With its own extinction.

From a subjective standpoint,
We are all born equal and undifferentiated
(Before that, ‘we’ were dead),
But as mature selves we make a distinction
Between the individual and the surroundings.

Still the brain keeps changing throughout life
In a pattern of the shifting flux of its neurons;
We gain and lose memories and feelings,
Essentially creating a new person over and over again.

The self is thus not so rock solid as it seems.
These moment-to-moment changes differ from death
Only in degree. In essence, they are identical,
Although at the opposite ends of the spectrum.

So, we are not static things.
Other neural networks will come to be in other,
Future people, albeit with an “amnesia”
Of what went on before in
The brains of the previous others.

Why should we be happy about this?

We never can be because the ‘I’ cannot operate
Outside of its own boundaries.
The only viable alternative is to think of a way
In which it is possible to ever continue on.

What will it be like to be a part
Of someone else after we die,
With our own particular
Narrative of life cast aside?

That is the ‘zen’
Of now and then and when.

I don't know what I think about this problem. — TogetherTurtle

Well, there is no "duration-less" because time is an interval; also, the hare beats the Together Turtle in another paradox.

'old-fashioned atheists' — Purple Pond

Proclaiming 'no God' as true for sure fails just as much as proclaiming 'God' as true for sure because neither can be shown to be fact; so, the full-blown "old-fashioned atheist" is just as doomed as the religious preacher saying things as if they were true.

Dawkins admits that 'God' has a one in a quadrillion chance of being; so, I guess he is 'new-fashioned', as honest. He weighs the probabilities.

Can I plagiarize this as is or will I have to ruin the symmetry with my own wording. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Sure, you can use it and anything I put; all for the cause.

Human religious prophets say they can be trusted.

God speaks through them.

So you say, as a human. 'Just saying' isn't enough.

The Bible is the Word of God. It's all there, straight out.

Then how come the Geneses, both of them, are so wrong as to be the polar opposite of what we've found through evolutionary science? And also wrong that the Earth is fixed in space and that the animal line was created separately?

Humans were made in modern form, as is, by God only a few thousand years ago. God let the Earth go loose later. Animals are for our domination.

We have seen the geological strata and have inspected the layers.

Don't you note that they aren't straight up, but titled, with some even upside down?

Oh, so all the little microbes are really at the top, as the more recent?

Hubba, hubbada, hubba.

We have several other ways of measuring.

Carbon 14 dating doesn't work.

I see that you are a young earth follower of creation science. Can you show God directly, such that we would have no doubt and so then we'd all have to become believers?

God and his realm are invisible, but it's all true.

Does not even your own religious definition of 'faith' honestly indicate that it is of hopes and wishes for the unknown unshown being a God?

Well, I suppose.

So, all you have is a 'maybe'!

Yes.

So, then, you can't honestly preach and teach it as truth and fact, such as even now in trying to convert me, not to mention getting it into public schools.

Good-bye.

Get lost!

Stillness is impossible, at least so far, since hasn't happened. Ask me again at the end of the universe.

Blah, blah, blah. It says in the Bible ….

Humans wrote the Bible.

But they were divinely inspired by God.

Humans say they were inspired by God.

Religious prophets can be trusted.

…

(More another time.)

Myth’s performance is now over its tasks;
The artists have taken off their masks.
The illusion is fading; it couldn’t last;
The science behind is appearing fast.

They tried to undo evolution’s pace of snails,
But the stratified fossils ever told the tales
Of no special humans at once unveiled,
But of only natural selection’s weathered sails.

I am still wondering why it would matter that the choice first happens subconsciously, given that it still originates in the same brain. — Echarmion

It only matters for those thinking that decisions/thoughts are made in/by consciousness, for that's how it seems.