No prompting allowed,he's still trying to figure it out.keep him quiet for a day or two.

As currently defined, the atheist does not believe God exists, and the agnostic does not know if God exists. (Thus the agnostic is actually a timid atheist.)

When the words "I ought to ..." are uttered, then the moral imperative is invoked.

The free choice to make this utterance proves the speaker is a moral person, has conscience, and hence knows the difference between right and wrong.

When the atheist and agnostic say "I ought to", they contradict themselves as claiming to be such.

The Roman Catholic Spanish philosopher named Uanmuno y Jugo said:

"Those who deny God deny Him because of their despair in not finding Him."

thank you for providing that distinction.

i think there will be those disagreeing to the reason Uanmuno y Jugo proposed about denying God.

that reasoning doesn't make sense...

i mean, even tho chlorophyll is the reason grass is green, the question "why" still applies...chlorophyll could've ended up being brown instead...lol..

yours is an example of how the world works (which science/scientific minds explain and continue to seek to explain), not why it was made to work that way...

they've delved into as well... the difference is that when a scientist ask why, they can find the answers... when a religious person asks why, they are told not to worry about and accept gods gift...

they've delved into as well... the difference is that when a scientist ask why, they can find the answers... when a religious person asks why, they are told not to worry about and accept gods gift...
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Chlorophyll

Just my own 2 cents. I read the first opening post only because I believbe everyone should be allowed to believe as they see fit.
I wrote this about a year ago on the same subject at a different site.

GOD
Was first and will be the last
Created Everything
Is in everything
Is all powerful
Is All Knowing

YUP!

The UNIVERSE
Is the first thing and will be the last
When it came to be everything that could be created is or was created
Everything ever created is part of the universe
The laws governing the Universe is absolute
Every reality, imagination and belief is the Universe trying to understand itself.

YUP!
​
You, Me and every other living thing in existence is part of the Universe. Not a separate part but the Universe itself. From the smallest quantum particle to the largest super-cluster of galaxies its all part of the Universe. Everything that happens, is thought or believed is the Universe doing so.

When someone believes there are ghosts, the Universe is believing there are ghosts. Our Dreams are the Universe dreaming. Our Songs are the Universe singing. Our Fears are the Universe fearing. Everything everywhere is the Universe experiencing existence.

Our common delusion is that we are separate from the Universe. We are somehow not "in" it. Our minds refuse to acknowledge this one simple common fact. The Universe is continuing to expand. It is expanding not only in occupied space and matter it is expanding in belief and learning. It is aware of itself because We are aware of it.

Everytime one of us has an idea, a belief or imagine something, the Universe expands to encompass it. The Universe is not just a physical conglomeration of matter, it extends into the concept of the paranormal, psychic and religious beliefs.

Mankind believes the Universe to be about 14 billion years old. We may be wrong but given the evidence so deduced and discovered I think its pretty accurate. It's also believed by observation that it is still growing. It is expanding in all directions at once filling the void that is not Universe. One of those voids is the imagination.

There are things that the Universe can not do. It can not go outside itself. Let me explain. If you try to imagine yourself outside of the Universe. Being part of the Universe the Universe has tried to imagine itself outside of itself. By doing so, the Universe has created an area beyond itself and has therefore expanded to create it.

Is the Universe alive? Well, yes, It is. Life is within the Universe so the Universe is alive. Is Death the end of the Universe? NO. When something dies, wheter it be a particle, a star, a plant or you, The energy is redirected back into the Universe. The essence of your being is reunited with the essence of the Universe.

I watched a segment of The Universe on TV that explained a theory that everything that can be imagined will happen eventually over the life of the Universe. From werewolves to space invaders. It may be billions of years in the future or billions of years in the past.

I'm not attempting to persuade anyone of a belief system. I'm not saying any specific religion or thoughts are wrong. This is my own attempt to make sense of God and Science. Unlike so many people, I can see the connection. I'm just trying to share what I see.

Thanx for reading.

i am simply asking regarding belief in God (or absence of).

why do you keep injecting religion into it?
there are a few terms i found that might help you differentiate.

Antitheism - opposition to belief in a deity (or deities)
Antireligion - opposition to organized religion
Anti-Judaism/Anti-Judaic - opposition to Judaism
Anti-Christian [sentiment (n.)] - opposition to Christianity
Anti-Islamic/Anti-Islamist - opposition to Islam

thank you for the high school biology lesson
yes, i know the whole thing involves biochemical reactions of molecules to a spectra of light resulting in molecular reactions that convert isomers/photo-isomers resuting in synthesis of carbohydrate, etc etc...
that is how things work, the question "why" still remains.



like i said in my original post:


because my question is about belief in God (or non-belief).

i like the analogy you made:

God by his very nature is absolute.
Science by its very nature is empiric.

when God is applied to life, it results in religion
when science is applied to life, it results in technology

religion can be used by man to the positive or the negative
technology can be used by man either to the positive or the negative

im sure there are many things in between, but am simply making a distinction.

I wrote that a few years ago on one of my Science Fiction and Fantasy forums.

In attempting to understand the Why of human nature I wrote the following:



IMOHO

Nihilism, Belief in Nothing

Belief in Nothing
by Vijay Prozak

Nihilism confuses people. "How can you care about anything, or strive for anything, if you believe nothing means anything?" they ask.

In return, nihilists point to the assumption of inherent meaning and question that assumption. Do we need existence to mean anything? After all, existence stays out there no matter what we think of it. We can do with it what we will. Some of us will desire more beauty, more efficiency, more function or more truth -- and others will not. Conflict results.

Nihilists who aren't of the kiddie anarchist variety tend to draw a distinction between nihilism and fatalism. Nihilism says that nothing has meaning. Fatalists say that nothing has meaning, so nothing will have meaning for them personally. It's the difference between having no authority figure to tell you what's right, and giving up on the idea of doing anything since no one will affirm that what you've done is right.
What is nihilism?

As a nihilist, I recognize that meaning does not exist. If we exterminate ourselves as a species, and vaporize our beautiful world, the universe will not cry with us (a condition called the pathetic fallacy). No gods will intervene. It will just happen and then -- and then the universe will go on. We will not be remembered. We will simply not be.

In the same way, I accept that when I die, the most likely outcome will be a cessation of being. I will at that moment cease to be the source of my thoughts and feelings. Those feelings having only existed inside of me, never did "exist" except as electro-chemical impulses, and will no longer be found when I am gone.

Even further, I recognize that there is no golden standard for life. If I note that living in a polluted wasteland is stupid and pointless, others may not see this. They may kill me when I mention it. And then they will go on, and I will not. Insensitive to their polluted wasteworld, they will keep living in it and suffering under it, oblivious to the existence of an option.

A tree falling in a forest unobserved makes a sound. The forest may not recognize this as a sound because a forest is many life forms interacting, not organized by some central principle or consciousness. They just do what they do. In the same way, playing Beethoven's Ninth to a bowl of yeast will not elicit a response. The insensate remain unobservant, much like the universe itself.

Many people "feel" marginalized when they think of this. Where is the Great Father who will hear their thoughts, validate their emotions, and tell them with certainty what is true and what is not? Where is the writing on the wall, the final proof, the word of God? How do we know for certain that anything is true, and if it is true, that it's important?

Meaning is the human attempt to mold the world in our own image. We need some meaning to our existence, but feel doubt when we try to proclaim it as a creation of ourselves. So we look for some external meaning that we can show others and have them agree that it exists. This forces us to start judging every idea we encounter as threatening or affirming of our projected external meaning.

This distanced mentality further affirms our tendency to find the world alienating to our consciousness. In our minds, cause and effect are the same; we use our will to formulate an idea and it is there, in symbolic form. When we take that idea to the world and try to implement it, however, we can estimate how the world will react but we are frequently wrong, and this causes us doubt.

As a result, we like to separate the world from our minds and live in a world created by our minds. In this humanist view, every human is important. Every human emotion is sacred. Every human preference needs to be respected. It is us against the world, trying to assert our projected reality where we can because we fear the lack of human-ness in the world at large.

Nihilism reverses this process. It replaces externalized meaning with two important viewpoints. The first is pragmatism; what matters are the consequences in physical reality, and if there is a spiritual realm, it must operate in parallel with physical reality. The second is preferentialism; instead of trying to "prove" meaning, we pick what appeals to us -- and acknowledge that who we are biologically determines what we seek.

In rejecting anthropomorphic pathetic fallacies such as inherent "meaning," nihilism allows us to toss out anthropomorphism. The idea of an absolute morality, or any value to human life, is discarded. What matters are consequences. Consequences are not measured by their impact on humans, but by their impact on reality as a whole. If a tree falls in a forest, it makes a sound; if I exterminate a species and no human sees it, it happened anyway.

Your dictionary will tell you that nihilism is "a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths." It's not a doctrine; it's a method, like the scientific method, which starts by crawling out of the ghetto of our own minds. It is a quieting of the parts of our minds that want to insist that our human perspective is the only real one, and the universe must adapt to us, instead of the sane alternative of adapting to our universe.

In this view, nihilism is a gateway and an underpinning to philosophy, not a philosophy in itself. It is an end to anthropomorphism, narcissism and solipsism. It is humans finally fully evolving and getting control of their own minds. As such, it is a starting point from which we can return to philosophy and re-analyze it all, knowing that our perspective is closer to that of the reality outside our minds.
Spiritual Nihilism

Although many interpret nihilism to negate spirituality, the only coherent statement of nihilism is that there is a lack of inherent meaning. This does not preclude spirituality, only a sense of calling it inherent. This means that nihilist spirituality is exclusively transcendentalist, meaning that by observing the world and finding beauty in it, we discover a spirituality emerging from it; we don't require a separate spiritual authority or lack thereof.

It is incorrect to say that nihilism is atheistic or agnostic. Atheism is incoherent: claiming an inherent meaning to the negation of God is a false objectivity just like claiming we can prove there is a God. Agnosticism makes spirituality revolve around the concept of uncertainty over the idea of God. Secular humanism replaces God with an idealized individual. These are all pointless to a nihilist.

In the nihilist view, any divine beings would exist like the wind -- a force of nature, without moral balance, without any inherent meaning to its existence. A nihilist could note the existence of a god, and then shrug and move on. Many things exist, after all. What is more important to a nihilist is not inherent meaning, but the design, patterns and interconnected elements of the universe. By observing these, we find a way to discover meaning through our interpretation.

This in turn enables us to make unforced moral choices. If we are relying on another world to reward us where we don't get rewarded here, we are not making a sacrifice. If we believe that a God outside of the world must exist in order for it to be good, we are slandering the world. Even if we think there is an inherent right way of doing things, and that we may get rewarded for it, we are not making moral choices.

Moral choices occur when we realize there is no compelling force on us to make that decision except our inclination to care about the consequences. That in turn is contingent upon us being hardwired with enough intelligence to revere nature, the cosmos and all that has brought us consciousness. Indeed, the only way we will have such respect for the world is if we view consciousness and life as a gift, and therefore choose to enhance and complement the order of nature.

In a nihilist worldview, whether we live or die as a species has no inherent value. We could stay, or blow away like a dead leaf, and the universe doesn't care a bit. Here we must separate judgment, or caring about consequences, from the consequences themselves. If I fire a gun at someone and he dies, the consequence is his death. If I have no judgment of it, that means nothing more than his permanent absence.

If the universe has the same absence of judgment, there is nothing more than his absence. No cosmic conclusions, no judging by gods (even if we choose to believe they exist), and no emotion shared by everyone. It is the event and nothing more, like a tree falling in a forest when no one is around to hear its crash.

Since there are no inherent judgments in our universe, and no absolute and objective sense of judgment, what matters is our preference regarding consequences. We may choose not to survive as a species, in which case insanity and sanity have the same value level, since survival no longer has a position of value for us. Our survival is not inherently judged to be good; it's up to us to do that.

In nihilism, as in every sufficiently advanced philosophy, the ultimate goal is to make "everything just what it is," or to decipher enough of our consciousness that we do not confuse the instrument (our minds) with its object (our world). To a nihilist, the greatest human problem is solipsism, or a confusion of the mind with the world; our solution is to point out that the human values we consider "objective" and "inherent" are only pretense.

Nihilism conditions us instead to actualize ourselves. It denies nothing of the lack of inherent meaning to existence, and does not create a false "objective" reality based on our perceptions of what we wish did exist. Instead, it charges us to choose what we wish existed, and to work toward making it occur in reality.

The fully actualized human is able to say: I studied how the world works; I know how to predict its responses with resonable success; I know what cause will create what effect. As a result, we can say, I am going to pick a certain effect I desire that is coherent with the organization of our world, so it will succeed.

This returns us to the question of whether beauty is discovered, or invented; some suggest that beauty is inherent to certain approaches to organization of form, while others think we can invent it of our own accord. A nihilist would say that the patterns that define beauty are not arbitrary, therefore have a precedent in the extra-human cosmos, and that our artists create beauty by perceiving the organization of our world and then transposing it to a new, human form.

Through the embrace of "ultimate reality" -- or physical reality and the abstractions that directly describe its organization, in contrast to opinions and judgments -- as the only inherent constant to life, nihilism forces humans to make the ultimate moral decision. In a world that requires both good and bad for survival, do we choose to strive for what's good, even knowing that it may require us to use bad methods and face bad consequences?

The ultimate test of spirituality in nature is not whether we can proclaim universal love for all human beings, or declare ourselves pacifists. It is whether we can do what is necessary for survival and improvement of ourselves, as this is the only way to approach our world with a truly reverent attitude: to adopt its methods, and through an unforced moral preference, choose to rise and not descend.

We must make the leap of faith and choose to believe not in the existence of the divine, but in its possibility through the merging of our imagination with our knowledge of reality. Finding divinity in the venal and material world requires an epic transcendental viewpoint that finds in the working of an order a holiness, because that order provides the grounding that grants us our own consciousness. If we love life, we find it to be holy and become reverent to it, and thus as nihilists can rapidly discover transcendental mysticism and transcendental idealism.

From this viewpoint, it's easy to see how nihilism can be compatible with any faith, including Christianity. As long as we do not confuse our interpretation of reality ("God") with reality itself, we are transcendentalists who find our source of spiritualism in the organization of the physical world around us and our mental state, which we can see as having parallel and similar function. When people talk about God, a nihilist thinks of the patterns of trees.
Practical Nihilism

How does a nihilist, or one who is beyond morality and the sanctity of human life and illusions, apply these principles in everyday life? The short answer is "very carefully." Human history provides one story after another of how a few smart people started something good, then parasites encrusted it, and eventually formed a political movement to murder those who knew better, thus plunging that something good into disrepair.

The essence of nihilism is transcendence through eliminating a false "inherent" meaning that is a projection of our minds. When we have cleared away the illusion, and can look at reality as a continuum of cause and effect relationships, we can know how to adapt to that reality. This gets us over the fear of reality that causes us to retreat into our own minds, a condition known as solipsism.

This in turn leads to a kind of primal realism that rejects everything but the methods of nature. These are inherent to not only biology, but physics and the patterns of our own thoughts. We need no inherent meaning; we need only to adapt to our world and, from the palette of options offered, choose what we desire. Do we want to live in mud huts, or like the ancient Greeks and Romans strive for a society of advanced learning?

Most people confuse fatalism with nihilism. Fatalism, or the idea that things are as they are and will not change, relies on an inherent "meaning" being denied for its emotional power. Fatalism is a shrug and a wish that things could be different, but since they are not, we will ignore them. Nihilism is the opposite principle: a reverent acceptance of nature as functional and in fact genius, and a determination to master it.

This is not a philosophy for the weak of heart, mind or body. It demands that we look clear-eyed at truths that most find upsetting, and then force ourselves past them as a means of disciplining ourselves toward self-actualization. Much as nihilism removes false inherent meaning, self-actualization removes the drama of the externalized self and replaces it with a sense of purpose: what quest makes meaning out of my life?

Unlike Christianity and Buddhism which seek to destroy the ego, nihilism seeks to remove the groundwork that makes the ego seem like all we have. It negates both materialism, or living for physical comfort, and dualism, or living for a moral god in another world that does not parallel our own in function. Any spiritual realm will parallel this one, because since matter, energy and thoughts show parallel mechanisms in their patterning, any other force would do the same.

Further, ego-negation is a false form of inherent meaning. A meaning defined in negative terms flatters the object as much as its positive counterpart; to say I'm anti-vole is to affirm the need for voles. The only true freedom from the ego consists in finding a replacement object, or ur-consciousnessness to reality, to replace the voice of personality which we often mistake for the world.

Our human problems on earth do not distill to simplifications like the narratives offered by the press because they are popular: we the people are exceptional, except when oppressed by kings, government, corporations or the beautiful people. Our human problems begin and end in our inability to recognize reality and enforce it upon ourselves; we instead opt for pleasant illusions, and generate the negative consequences one might expect.

If we do not get rid of our fears, they rule us. If we have created a false antidote to our fears, like a false sense of inherent meaning, we have doubly enslaved ourselves to those fears: first, the fears persist because we have no logical answer to them, and second, we are now indebted to the dogma that supposedly dispels them. This is why human problems have remained relatively unchanged for centuries.

As a philosophical groundwork, nihilism gives us a tool with which to approach all parts of life and make sense of them. Unlike merely political or religious solutions, it underlies all of our thinking, and by removing false hope, gives us a hope in the work of our own two hands. Where others rage against the world, we rage for it -- and in doing so, provide a saner future.

Love and Nihilism: A Parallelism Primer

As social animals, we get our information from others. This includes morality, or a group behavior code based on a sense of value and purpose inherent to humanity.

In contrast, nihilism denies value and purpose and in turn, denies any special role to humanity. Like emotions, value and purpose are human judgments which do not exist in the outside world.

By denying value and purpose, nihilism forces us see physical reality as a mechanical process in which our part is small. When we are walking in winter, falling snow appears to be coming toward us, but in reality we are moving forward as it falls.

Where morality deals with how things appear to us, nihilism addresses reality as a design and encourages us to learn how to adapt to it. Morality is withdrawl from natural selection; nihilism embraces it, and describes the world as a complex machine.
I. NIHILISM

We frequently talk about "human nature." It's more sensible to talk about the challenges facing any animal with higher intelligence. Any smart animal will face the same challenges using roughly the same methods.

While having a big brain is an asset, it is also a liability, in that if a big brain has to re-analyze its surroundings, it will move very slowly. Instead, big brained animals analyze once, create a mental "map" of their world, and update as needed.

In theory, we update our maps when new data comes about. But if this data is incorrect, our knowledge of the world gets corrupted. We act expecting certain outcomes and are stunned when things do not go as planned.

What corrupts our minds is when we reverse the causal process of understanding. Instead of looking to the world, making conclusions and updating our maps, we update our maps based on what we wish were happening -- or what others tell us.

If we withdraw into our own maps, and change those instead of reality, we can no longer predict reality. This is a problem because we are responsible for our fate. If we screw it up, no one else is going to bail us out.
CORRUPTION

Values and purpose are human inventions designed to be shared between us. Like language, values and purpose only work if we all know and agree on what they mean. They are easily manipulated by changing meaning without changing the symbol for it.

The world around us is consistent and non-judgmental. It functions and leaves thinking to us. If we do not make sense of it, the response will be bad. If we adapt to it, the response will be good.

Individuals using goodwill as a cover story have re-defined our values and purpose. They do this to benefit themselves, but as a result, corrupt the realistic outlook of society around them. This process takes centuries to fully show itself.

We cannot see evidence of our corruption in a single fact, but can measure it from multiple points of view and find what they have in common, like we triangulate to find radio signals. Our measurements are:

* Ecocide. Our inability to constrain our numbers and our desires has resulted in human expansion which eliminates natural habitats, and both pollutes the environment and takes resources from it beyond what it can replenish.
* Boredom. Society and jobs cater to the lowest common denominator, and so lapse into a utilitarian modernism that produces ugly architecture, mind-numbingly micromanaged tasks, disorder and dysfunction.
* Selfishness. A culture based on individual desires makes it easy to manipulate one another, but produces no great art, and leaves us with commerce and political dogma that constrain not liberate us.
* Neurosis. Value and purpose, when used to convince others that we are altruistic, good people, create a social reality that steadily drifts farther from the many factors of reality into a single, social or commercial factor. Our minds split between social reality and physical reality.
* Depression. We compensate for a failing civilization through surrogate activities. These are ineffectual symbolic acts that we do not expect to make change, but they "uplift" us for a few moments so we feel better about ourselves.

2400 years ago Socrates recognized that individuals prefer how things appear -- or can be made to appear -- to their intelligible form, which requires knowledge of their context and consequences. Appearance is tangible and public.

Civilizations have a life cycle from birth to death. Each stage in this cycle has a distinct philosophy and psychology which corresponds to the type of government people in that time believes is best. These united patterns are "designs."

From the day a civilization is founded, it drifts farther from reality and further into the world of appearance. People manipulate each other to get ahead, and the side effect is a corrupted image of reality.

People use wishful thinking to manipulate each other. Wishful thinking pretends that humans are omniscient and not part of nature. It avoids all mention of death, conflict, unequal abilities or eventually, reality itself.

Nihilism can restart the life cycle by removing wishful thinking. Seeing reality more accurately changes our assumptions, and from that like a row of falling dominoes our institutions and values change to be more realistic.
II. MODERNISM

The opposite of nihilism is modernism, which is our name for the later stages of a civilization if it also has advanced technology. Modernism is defined by the use of linear logic and the belief in technological progress overcoming nature.

The last thousand years of Western civilization have been defined by a steadily-increasing modernism, and the previous thousand were expended on conflict allowing that modernism to happen.
RATIONALISM

The philosophy that came to be called rationalism emerged from our use of tools. Where previously we had to seek out a situation that matched our needs, now we needed only a single factor: the tool.

For example, instead of finding a location where fruit trees grew, one hauled out the plough and made a field, then planted the trees and later harvested the fruit.

When someone does a new task for the first time, they work from cause to effect, and figure out how the process works. Another person seeing them sees the result first, and only later figures out the steps involved -- or uses a tool instead.

This linear logic, that lets us work backward from desired result through our tools, convinced us that we had conquered nature, which we saw as an external thing independent of us. It also simplified our thought process.

Modernism would not exist without linear logic. Linear logic is the idea that in a complex situation, a single factor can be extracted and manipulated, achieving a desired result. All other factors become ignored details.

Instead of killing a creature for food, and taking the skin for clothing, we would kill a creature for its skin -- and write the rest off as details.
EXTERNALIZATION

This thought process became an underlying assumption of all of our logic. In politics, we assumed that whatever most people thought was good was right. In economics, whatever made profit. In social situations, whatever was popular.

More importantly, we externalized ourselves by making ourselves dependent on what others agreed was the truth. This meant that appearance took precedence over reality, because if enough people were fooled, others would act as if it were truth.

In every situation, linear logic was used to extract an "essence" or "truth," and all other factors are denied as details. This is convenient since some people can read those details and see imminent disaster others cannot, causing conflict.
SOCIALIZATION

As part of the process of specialization of labor, we must make others understand why our needs are important, so they can help us. In order to convince them, we use externalized social pressures to make ourselves look good.

Rationalism tells us to pick a single factor with which to measure a situation. In social situations, we choose self-preservation, and in order to achieve it for ourselves, we demand it for all people equally.

We demand the same rights for others just as ourselves because of the specialization of labor. When you must convince others that you ought to be helped, you need to first show them that you have goodwill toward them -- without judging them.

The best way to do this is to suggest that the human form, and not the unique abilities of the human, makes this person entitled to being treated well. This way, no matter what they think of you, they will feel good for helping you.

We achieve this false goodwill through altruism, or the belief in helping all others universally and without judgment. We call this an absolute context, because it is the rationalistic single factor we choose in all situations.

In this, we have applied our backward logic to getting ahead in life: we must convince others through appearance that we are good, and that like a tool will achieve the results we desire. We convince others by pretending wishful thinking is reality:

* Equality of all humans
* Ability for anyone to do whatever they want
* Peace, nonviolence, tolerance are good
* Freedom from criticism on the basis of reality

In a rationalistic outlook, if social instability is bad, then social stability must be achieved -- and we do not consider any secondary consequences. As a result, we make aggressive behavior taboo and reward those who avoid conflict.

To avoid conflict, we must compromise any idea where others will object to it. We ignore the consequences of our actions and focus instead of showing goodwill, which eliminates conflict, but causes us to compromise.

Since these compromises must avoid that which will cause conflict to any one person, we create a lowest common denominator response to reality of the inoffensive, benevolent-sounding, and easy, and ignore reality.
INDIVIDUALISM

Since linear logic convinces us to pick one factor of many in our thinking, when approaching the question of life itself we pick a single factor: ourselves.

In order to make ourselves more powerful, we act so we appear altruistic, but we also act to appear independent and unique so we attract others to our personalities. This causes us to act entirely through social thinking.

Through this method, individualism creates a "social reality" or a conspiracy between people to manage reality with social factors. Since we need others, thanks to specialization of labor, we use this more than reality itself.

This has two effects: first, we become neurotic because we see reality in the details but are encouraged to ignore it; second, since social reality ignores secondary effects, disorder spreads and the cost is passed on to us.

This in turn encourages us to try to break away from social obligation, since we feel it is parasitic to us, and so we break away using more individualism. This does not work, so we turn to our leaders and ask for more control.

Control is the external imposition of what some people agree is true. Unlike an organic order, or one arriving from agreement and cooperation among people, it requires force and small rewards to function.

In this way, we can see how individualism leads to disorder which requires more control, in a process and cycle that gains intensity over time, causing civilization to collapse.
UTILITARIANISM

The public display of altruism became a powerful tool. It could get you elected, or make others follow you as a leader, or make them work for less money. It could get you ahead at the expense of others.

Civilization through its wealth makes it possible for us to be far enough removed from nature that we pretend there is no reality except human reality. We withdraw, and we do so in a group which defends itself against critique.

When illusion is rewarded and realistic ideas punished, the bad guys always win. The crowds, accustomed to being manipulated, run between one abuser and another, always believing the promises but then forgetting conveniently so the lie is not revealed.

This triumph of unreality brings consequences but because it is anti-social to mention them, those who bring them up are ostracized and kept out of jobs, relationships, friendships and public favor. The dogma overrides reality.

Since the dogma reaches deeply, to the level of our assumptions, children grow up brainwashed in this ideal and are afraid to consider any other possibilities. Those who tell the truth become "bad" and the lies become "good."

At this point, the tail wags the dog. We no longer do things because they are realistic actions. We do them to make ourselves look good, so that we can leverage services out of others with our perceived altruism.

This is how civilization destroys itself. Modernism is this self-destruction process, couched as "freedom" and "justice," but really a slow decay while those few cynical enough to know it's a lie and still lie make record profits.

Because the civilization is based on the idea of individualism, or each person being able to do whatever they think is right, it soon becomes utilitarian. "What most people think is best is best" defines utilitarianism.

The social institutions designed to implement our grand plans are always failing because the plans are unrealistic, so we blame them. A perpetual struggle between people, markets and governments manifests itself in increasingly rare consensus.

Like a society of drunks, civilization gets ugly but it is not permitted to notice. Behavior is disorganized, and the only plan is one based on linear logic, or removing the "bad" and assuming what's left is the good.

The only things people can agree on are that they want to be able to earn money, and that they do not want other people interrupting them. They call these agreements "freedom","equality" and "justice" and crush any who oppose them.
TOTALITARIANISM

We are all acquainted with centralized authoritarianism. More scary is the tendency of crowds, through constant rebellions for more "freedom" which cause negative social consequences, requiring more control, to create totalitarian states.

The first part of this process is "distributed" totalitarianism, or the tendency of crowds to enforce dogma by ostracizing those who do not repeat the dogma and depriving them of the benefits of specialized labor.

In this stage, individuals gain power by pandering to the desire of the crowd to see appearance triumph over reality. Individuals can find others lacking in altruism, point it out, and be rewarded with higher social status.

The second, when disorder rises enough at the same time the civilization becomes more disorganized, is where the oligarchs who have profited from its decline choose a tyrant to enforce a brutal, simplistic and effective order.

This is how freedom, equality and justice create tyranny through control. Because they are imposed orders, derived from linear logic which picks one factor of many to be absolute, they conflict with reality and require more not less power.
III. PARALLELISM

Reversing this process of decay is surprisingly easy. We need to change our assumptions and method of thinking. Nihilism will change our unrealistic thinking and lead us to another philosophy called parallelism.

Parallelism replaces linear logic. Where linear logic says to pick one factor of many, parallelism says we consider all factors at once and look at their impact.

In parallelism, instead of killing a buffalo for clothing, we determine how many buffalo we can take without destroying the herd, and figure out how to use and store their products so we are efficient.
HOLISM

Most political control structures create a partial truth of reality, define obedience to it as good/evil, and rapidly control people using that. The dogma of equality, freedom, peace, tolerance and nonviolence is no different.

Parallelism reverses this pattern by forcing a description of reality as a whole, and then pointing out what actions will bring negative consequences from reality itself -- with no need for the evil/not-evil artificial reality of control.

Unlike idealistic and utopian systems, parallelism recognizes that there is no way to avoid tragedy, conflict, horror and decay, but that they can be limited if people are vigilant toward keeping each other on track toward reality.

Where most political systems define what is bad, and assume the rest to be good, parallelism defines a goal and works toward it through whatever methods work. We call it a "whole" philosophy since it does not divide the world into bad and good.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

Parallelism recognizes that bad and good do not exist, but are our judgments of outcomes. It also recognizes that the ultimate outcome of life, its perpetuation, requires both good and evil, so we call it "meta-good."

Once we see reality as meta-good, we do not need false positivity and false inherency as offered by other "worlds" created through human judgment. Whether secular (social reality) or religious (heaven), these other worlds corrupt us.

Denying inherent value and purpose removes this false positivity and with it the means of mental control of individuals that in turn empowers the control of the state. When the good symbol appears, people rush toward it, into their doom.

When the thought process of justification is reversed, people stop looking for inherent or social reality proof, and instead turn to the scientific method -- observing reality, and testing their knowledge of it, to see what patterns emerge.
IMMANENT

By denying the inherent, nihilism orients itself toward patterns that emerge from situations. This moves away from universal or absolute truths. Patterns do not exist, but every time certain conditions are met, "emerge" in different forms.

Emergent conditions require an entirely different type of logic. While we could call it non-linear, it more accurately resembles many linear logics -- for all factors of a situation -- considered simultaneously. We call it parallelism.

One aspect of parallelism is noting that patterns occur in parallel between the forms of matter, energy and thought. Patterns are a type of design or organization which can appear in all three of those forms.

Where linear logic and control structures demand a single absolute path, in parallelism, nothing is absolute. Objects and situations do not have inherent, fixed properties. What makes patterns appear is the organization of many factors.

Parallelism arises from nihilism because in order to deny value and purpose, one must have a logical basis for doing so, and in order to show they are not part of reality, we must know how reality assembles itself and what its parts are.

Philosophers describe emergent properties as "immanent," or distilling out of a situation rather than being inherent to one of its parts. While inherent properties are products of judgment that must be absolute, immanent properties are neither.

We can describe immanent properties as "organic," because like life itself, they grow from a few conditions into a diversity of objects formed from similar patterns under slightly different circumstances. Control, on the other hand, must be imposed.
TRANSCENDENT

Because nihilists believe neither in religious other worlds (heaven) or secular other worlds (morality), we are independent from the principle of absolute and universal dogma that denies the importance and beauty of reality.

As a result, nihilism can be said to be a transcendent philosophy. Values and purpose are things we impose based on our observations of what will succeed in adapting to reality, and yet also give us a sense of "meaning."

Meaning is interpreted by the individual but derived from reality, so realistic individuals have similar ideas of what is importance. Meaning reverses withdrawl by connecting us with the world around us.

Philosophers call this transcendental, from the Latin "climb over," because it encourages us to accept reality including its negative aspects. Instead of denying the negative, we find a greater positive goal in reality itself, the "meta-good."

When we transcend, we no longer need false absolutes. Instead, we delight in reality because it is a space of potential. Good and bad are methods we can use to make that potential happen.
SCIENCE

Since nihilism is ultimately an affirmation of the scientific method and the need for logical decisions, we can act outside of morality to see what is the best adaptation to reality a civilization can offer -- and pick this design for our own.

We do not have to like the answers we find. These are not choices, preferences, or beliefs; they are deductions from using our logical skills. They are too complex to be "proved" by experiments, but our sense of logic can help us see truth in them.
IV. ORGANIC SOCIETY

Every civilization needs a narrative. This consensus describes the origins of the civilization, its ongoing but unattainable goal, and what its values and methods are to achieve that.

The best goals are not tangible ones, but goals that can grow over time, like we compete against ourselves with our personal goals. For most, the goal is tied to a land, a worldview, a values system and people like themselves.

Immanent goals are patterns which naturally make sense given a certain situation. These do not change over time because humans do not change. When these occur as a part of the growth of a civilization, we call them "organic" goals.

Organic societies are logical responses to their environments. They exist on a "whole" level, or one that considers all factors at once. They are the opposite of linear modernist societies, which consider only one factor at a time.

Where control societies encourage us to think in terms of one condition being true at a time (logical OR), parallelism encourages us to see how many can be true at once (logical AND). Organic societies are cooperation, not control, based.

Parallelism tells us there is no one way all people should live, but that different societies should use different methods toward the same goals. Those that adapt to reality using their specific method will thrive over time.

Further, parallelism does not attempt to repeat the past nor does it throw away learning. History is our laboratory and science is our method. Parallelism encourages us to accept modern society, centralization, technology -- and use them wisely.
PRINCIPLES

As parallelists, we believe that we can establish a handful of principles that modify our current liberal democratic capitalist society, and that these will "organically" grow into a whole concept:

1. Localization. We do not need to live in big cities, and are happier in small communities. These can manage their own affairs, and an overlapping hierarchy of county, state and national governments can address bigger issues.
2. Culture before commerce. If we change our outlook to think in terms of cultural demands which commerce should serve, instead of the other way around, our society will have more consensus.
3. Organic, whole society. In everything that we do, we consider whole factors. It may benefit a few factors to have another McDonald's on a busy street corner, but we must think of all factors and make decisions accordingly.
4. We have a clear consensus and everything else is permitted. We can approach values two ways:
1. use negative logic and try to avoid evil, which implies that everything else is good, leading to lack of direction;
2. use positive logic and try to achieve good, which implies that all not leading to that goal is not useful.
We should approach values through method (cool, as it means that more things are permitted.
5. Direct our resources toward constructive goals. We can spend our time, money and effort on fears, or we can build up the best hopes we have. We should do the latter.

These attitudinal changes alone will produce a parallelist society from what we have. They are easy to implement and require only the agreement of minority of people in society who are leaders in their communities.
V. MANIFESTATION

The possibility of action confounds the modern person who does not want to engage in "activist" politics, or those which empower certain groups at the expense of the whole. How to change a society dedicated to distraction?

Among us, there are 2-5% of people in our society who are leaders in a practical sense. This means that whether they have an official title or not, they lead the community in business, spiritual, community, academic or social settings.

These are the people that your average person trusts. They trust information from these people more than from the government, their televisions, or casual friends. They respect the judgment abilities of these people.

Our goal is to inform these leaders of our values, get them to form consensus that these should be adopted, and then send them forth to implement these values in all that they do and to demand them from politicians.

This occurs in three steps:

1. Identify, brand and promote an ideology via the internet.
2. Bring the discussion of this ideology to mainstream media.
3. Unite the people who find it meaningful to aggressively push it to others.

In modern societies, having a large number of vocal supporters counts, but you do not need "most" of the population or anywhere near it. Successful revolutions are generally championed by 1-2% of a population. That's all we need.

http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/prozak/belief_in_nothing/

Tom, it is very wordy and somewhat high-falluting. What is it that you are really trying to say?

Here is an excerpt from a dissussion I had at another site awhile back:


My Reply:

God, No God its all a perception based on your life experiences.
I included the Nephilism quotes because there are people that understand this.
I am not quite that convinced.

Recently (the last few years) I have been exploring my delusional thinking. It is probably because my impression of what Love is supposed to be seems to be a delusion.

Growing up and living most of my life as a Christian, I had problems understanding why my God would do these things to me. I know my God exists because my Faith makes Him exist.

I've done a lot of thinking and soul-searching to realize that most people are like I was. Delusional by repetition. I now recognize people's delusions as well as my own. It has set me free.

I have no drama, no stress and no trepidation. For the first time in my life I feel completely calm. It wasn't religion that brought me here. Religion had me in turmoil. It wasn't love. Love had me dumbfounded. It was seeing the cold true reality of my life and the world around me that gave me the clarity I needed.

When I die, the energy that comprises my soul will be reunited with the energy of the Universe. That energy will give birth to new things and that cycle will last forever. Essentially, I will be returned to my God.

Until that time I embrace this mortal coil and accept this reality.
Life is just life.

This is what i was asking ^^ in the first place. Thats why i said it is not a debate and not a competition and not a spread-your-philosophy thread. To believe or not to believe in God's existence is a choice, based on experiences and conscious decision making.

Where we think we will go after is debatable and a whole different topic.

This known as the problem of evil.

Buddhism would say bad behavior is due to ignorance (that begs the question, and hence is an unacceptable answer).

The only religion with an answer is Christianity (Judaism has no bona fide answer), so do some reading at the library.

A good place to start is C.S. Lewis' Problem of Evil.

Yes there is a God. If there wasn't why do we have morals?

Hope there is a God somewhere that doesn't hate us because sometimes it looks like he/she/it does.

Religion is one of the few areas wherein humans do not apply reason to explain it but the dogma which supports the killing of others who disagree. One example, the pope goes to africa and does not support birth control which we know helps curb HIV yet christian dogma asserts that its wrong thereby condemning millions to unnecessary death in favor of christian dogma Science asserts that HIV can be controlled but the church ignores this fact to support its own agenda much to peoples demise. Any belief that cannot be questioned in light of reason and science is likely to be supported with fanatical zealots of all faiths...