Monday, September 4, 2017

So where do we find ourselves

Yesterday I heard a Gretta Vosper talk that was a call for action, to follow her... more or less. But I am an atheist, not a United plus atheist; Her call is not my way.  

We are all searching for our path forward, and that becomes the issue. We start where we are, not in terms of years of atheism, but in terms of where we are at in our head space, our psyche, for the lack of a better descriptor. Some are searching for community where they can grow, and some of us have enough community, but need spiritual or conceptual growth, confidence building, or concept development to define what we now know/believe. Some of us need action, projects; works of "faith". Faith is not the right word... works of virtue, humanism, or of community development... as AA says, "faith, without works, is dead" sort of concept. Some of see our role as converting others to atheism, while others of us see our role as defining what we actually think more clearly first, and then we will decide what our "work" should be.

I am at the stage of indecision; or perhaps possibility development. After coming to understand that religions, all religions are false, just fanatics, It take a bit of time to gather up a suitable world view; there is no evidence of a god, a soul, afterlife, and for some of us, no tribe, not much like minded local community, but groups of specific interest community.

So now to a world view, where there are two logical choices, a) create my own, or b) adopt in whole or in part. There are two which are suitable for adoption: Stoicism and Buddhism. In actual fact, there is so little conflict between them, one could adopt both, but each emphasize different parts of what could be a well rounded plan, one would need to choose emphases. So where does this leave one; having abandoned the past drags and anchors, free to go into the new world unencumbered.

Much of the lifestyles and mythology of other humans is just irrelevant, as is their religions and their belief systems. It does not matter to me what they believe, even if it is wrong, it is just none of my business. But they had better not impinge on my freedoms, else look out. David Silverman explains why here.    

Along the way, I realized that my thinking quite matches some of the concept is Object Oriented Programming, all thoughts are objects (nouns), or methods (verbs). Stitches on those objects take the form of modifiers, and away we go. The mental objects reference real world objects, and if the real world object is just a concept, the mental object exist, while the real world object does not, it is just a concept. So that explains how so many people can be fooled, the mental god object is real, but the real world object does not; there is no evidence of it`s existence; in this case I speak of god. 

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