Alaric Snell-Pym via Silklist wrote on 5/1/24 9:22 AM:
On 01/05/2024 12:33, Manar Hussain via Silklist wrote:
About the existence of a God. I'm an atheist.
What would count as "sufficient evidence" for you in this context?
[...]
I suppose if I define God as an agent with the power to perform magic,
then I could be convinced of His (or Her or Their) existence, but that
might fall well short of a desire to offer worship.
What convinces you to be an atheist as opposed to agnostic?
Well, if I may butt in...
As a dedicated fence-sitter and avoider of strong beliefs about
anything, I am indeed agnostic: sure, there could be some kind of god
out there, nobody can prove otherwise.
Or there may, as I once read on an explanatory plaque at an ancient
Hawaiian heiau that now lies under lava, be an infinite number of gods.
I didn't really understand the belief in gods until I saw Kilauea erupt.
After that, I understood the belief in Madam Pele at a gut level, and
came to see the whole notion of gods as convenient mental shorthands for
forces beyond human ken.
For the Hawaiians, caught between the volcano and the open ocean, seeing
their world as existing as a battle between Madam Pele and her sister Na
Maka made a huge amount of sense.
I don't believe there are literal, concrete gods anywhere, but I feel
free to use the metaphorical gods any time they are convenient. If I'm
in San Francisco traffic looking for a parking place, the "Hail Hypatia,
full of grace, help me find a parking space" prayer might not do
actually do any good, but it does calm me down.
I find it useful to view the Sun, the Moon, major hurricanes, and
earthquakes as gods and address them in poetry and song.
If gods are a creation of the human brain, I can posit as many as I need
to work with the god-shaped hole in the human psyche. They might not do
a single thing about the objective world out there, but millennia of
culture have given them a huge amount of psychological power in the
human animal.
--
Heather Madrone ([email protected])
Blog: http://www.knitfitter.com/category/personal/
http://sheltershock.thecomicseries.com
The Goddess moves mountains -- bring a shovel.
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