The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too

[svirk]

Addressing your second point is a much more interesting topic for me, and it's for a rather personal reason. I was brought up in religion, and for an extended part of my youth, I was deep in it. The deeper I went, the stronger my doubt became. I made a point to educate myself on matters concerning religion and mythology in general, and it allowed me to debunk the absolute truths they were attempting to offer. However, I had only labeled myself an agnostic at that point, for there was the matter of understanding the worship of a metaphysical being that made it feel like it was still possible. How was I able to reconcile this?

When I was in China, I was in the town of Jingshan, a village of roughly 600,000 rural Chinese in the Hubei province. In the center of town, there was a work of art depicting some Greek mythology tales (statues to be exact), and its presence struck me. When I began asking some of the English speaking locals about it, each conversation reached the same end result. These people had a rather difficult time understanding the concept of a god. How could this be? Why does it seem like such an easy concept for me and others who have grown up in the West? The key difference was the banning of the major religions. Granted religions still exist in China, but the people I was talking to had the distinct advantage of not having been brought up in any of those religions.

What's the point of my tale? It's that what I had believed as a natural human condition to believe in gods, instead turned out to be the product of impressionable children. Those of us brought up in the system have it imprinted on our psyche, as tends to happen with everything as children. If only you were fortunate enough to have never been instructed to believe these mythologies as a kid, you wouldn't have any difficulty rejecting them.

Therefore, I refute the notion of worship of a higher being as something genetically programmed. It was also this realization that allowed me to stop pussy footing the agnostic banner and admit to being a full-on atheist.

Your claim that a particular group of Chinese did not have a concept of God since no one taught it to them fails on two fronts;

1. The fact that there are faiths and religions all over the world from the earliest human civilizations to the present suggests that people who had no concept of God acquired it rather easily and that worship is ingrained in people. Where did all these religions come from if, as you claim, those brought up in a system without religion have no difficulty rejecting them? Some crazy lunatic calling himself a prophet comes to a people with no religion and starts telling them lies about God and the community accepts him as a wise leader? Or is it the arrogance of those atheists living in the present that leads them to believe that those living in the past were ignorant dupes who easily accepted all sorts of nonsense about a Creator?

2. Most Chinese practice a mix of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. They may not directly acknowledge God in the form of a Zeus like being or in the same sense as Christianity and Islam but they are feeding their innate desire to worship. Some Buddhists will go so far as claim atheism while at the same time having raised Buddha to an object of worship on par with God. In Confucianism and Taoism we have concepts of Heaven, with a capital "H", i.e. the Dictates of Heaven. This is not that far from the Will of God in Islam. We have concepts like Nirvana in Chinese culture which the West would call Salvation.

[svirk]

The "Laws" of science always existed even before someone thought to name them.

Name them whatever you like but they did not exist before they existed. Right?

[megabyteme]

The "Laws" of science always existed even before someone thought to name them.

Name them whatever you like but they did not exist before they existed. Right?

Phenomena exist without being identified by man. Scientists are often only describers, not creators.

Example: A pile of rocks existed in the same amount/quantity even before man devised a system for weighing and counting.

[svirk]

Name them whatever you like but they did not exist before they existed. Right?

Phenomena exist without being identified by man. Scientists are often only describers, not creators.

Example: A pile of rocks existed in the same amount/quantity even before man devised a system for weighing and counting.

You're missing the point. The pile of rocks didn't exist before they existed. The Universe didn't exist before it existed. The laws of the Universe didn't exist before the Universe came into existence. My point was that, if you want to argue the Universe has always existed it is a philosophical discussion that science cannot address.

[megabyteme]

You're missing the point. The pile of rocks didn't exist before they existed. The Universe didn't exist before it existed. The laws of the Universe didn't exist before the Universe came into existence. My point was that, if you want to argue the Universe has always existed it is a philosophical discussion that science cannot address.

And you wish to argue that out of absolutely nothing came a being that was the all-wise creator of everything else? If so, that seems to be a MUCH bigger expectation than building up of things from basic matter.