First, here's [Zinaval's] quote "I reject Christianity because I've never seen a God in this universe, and all accounts by people about God that I've read seem to be happening in a different universe than the one I live in."

Actually a few questions....

Is it Christianity you reject, or is it broader?  I certainly can understand rejecting Chrisitanity.  (I can also understand embracing it.) But it's not clear to me how much you've taken the silliest or more difficult ideas of Christianity and generalized them to all spiritual reality.  

But if your position is that there is no spiritual reality (consciousness that transcends the body and is causal of the psyche), then what do you do with all the evidence to the contrary - discount it as wishful thinking, delusional or fraudulent?  You cannot ignore the powerful minds throughout history who are credible in every other way who assert there is a spiritual reality.  There is abundant science that validates states of consciousness that are transcendant, and identify practices that foster this.  What do you do with this?  

Then, finally, this fundamental sense one has is highly personal.  I believe you when you say that nothing in your experience points to a God - and that you and I live in "different universes."  If you'll grant me a position of intellectual honesty for the moment, then the question follows: how have I looked at life differently than you to conclude otherwise?  We must be viewing our existential dilemmas with different aspects of the mind.  Either I have construed the data with a romantic longing, or I have access to a personal experience that eludes you.  

And I would tell you it's that I have looked both with my intellectual facilties (I don't discount science) and also with my longing (I don't discount my subjective need for meaning and for profound joy).  This means that I do indeed choose internal directions based on preference - I prefer this experience to that.  So, to one of your earlier challenges, I have in fact given the existence of a spiritual reality an opening along based on hope that it's there.  And it is a self fulfilling prophesy.  I saw it once I believed it, so to speak.  

The point is that I think we choose these deeply personal convictions based partially on the evidence as we see it, but also because it satisfies a preference in us.  And your atheism, which seems as arbitrary a belief as I can imagine, satisfies something for you.  If I am not just a pompous and delusional ass making up stuff out of fantasies, then my question for you is: What? What does atheism do for you?  I mean, at the deepest levels?  

To answer your first question I would into two categories:

First, I reject monotheism.  That is, by the definition given in the current, monotheistic religions of a Supreme Being, the All-powerful, all-knowing, creator, the only real God in the Universe.  This concept, when it's laid out and described, doesn't make sense at all, and is full of contradictions.   Of course, entities and processes exist that I don't or can't understand, but then in absence of understanding, minimally I require unambiguous perceptual evidence of it.  If I accept it as existing otherwise, then my judgment is substituting fiction in response to my needs, and undisciplined to the universe.   (I could underscore later why I think this is generally dangerous in human relations and unhealthy for individuals.)  

While I categorically reject monotheism, I don't reject the concept of "superior beings"-- conscious entities with more power and command over the universe than human beings can aspire to.  I haven't seen evidence of anything like them, but I can't disregard it only from its concept.  

Another nuance: I define Supreme Being here exactly the way my culture understands and defines it.  If anything did create the universe then it's far different than anything we've had a notion of so far.  It wouldn't be Yahweh, Jehovah or Allah, or Zeus for that matter who created this.  Or  any god characters in any mythos.   This universe if far stranger than anything human beings could have imagined, any mythos we would have written.  You take a sample of what humanity believed of the universe in history, 200 years ago, 400 years ago, 1000 years ago, and compare it what we see now. Now, expose these people to what we know now, and their main reaction would be downright shock at what we've uncovered. A human being would have never guessed about bacteria.  We would have never guessed that stars are actually the same as our sun.  You look at the wrong guesses that were accepted-- for example, how unbelievably shocking it was to accept that the earth was moving and spinning, and had to be moving at what was then inconceivable speeds, and yet, our perceptions lied to us.  To us, the earth had to be fixed.

The universe has fooled us many times, and will continue to do so.      

Now to the second point, I disbelieve spiritual processes.  I don't think there is a "real world" and a "spiritual world."  I don't think there are supernatural forces or entities.  It was a dichotomy made at a more primative time that's been carried into modern world as an artifact.  At one time, air, fire and lightning were supernatural.  They're now subsumed into the natural universe.

I think the dichotomy of those two worlds is better explained by the fact that all conscious beings actually *create a world,* and more than one usually.  We do it when we dream-- every night practically.  A world like that is fictitious.  The "real world" to which we sometimes actually refer, is actually our creation, too.  However, it is a world that is tailored especially as our  interface with the universe.  As such, it's very biology is highly disciplined to informing us of events in the universe.  In a dream, when you see an object or a tree, or a color, it's not connected to informing you about the universe.  But your waking perceptions must be disciplined strictly to what's happening in your environment.  This link is made pre-consciously, it's one reason why you can't, by any act of will, alter your sensory input.  Meanwhile, dreaming will usually feel freer, because it's not so disciplined.    

We begin dreaming in the womb.  Why?  I think it's because we're not truly assembled and neurologically ready till we can form a world.  Our mental, "real" world is our interface with the universe, but we form fictitious worlds throughout our lives all the time.      

Consequently, if the word "spiritual" has any meaning now it's as purely a psychological phenomenon.  It's part of "the world" but not part of the universe.  It has no connection to anything trancendent, except in the way it may improve us or impair us.

(continued)

-- Modified on 9/11/2005 10:22:13 AM

[continued]

To get to your other points, I don't ignore powerful minds.  But as Socrates said: (paraphrasing) the best human beings are not that wise.  The best of us can be stuck in error about some things for years.  Just reflect on the fact that Aristotle had the number of human teeth wrong!

It's easy to cross over from thinking to simply being enthralled or praising powerful minds.  Human beings are hierarchical.  It's our nature to fit into a ladder, or dominate the ladder through some psychological system, a system of authority.   If we respect someone enough to read his work, it's easy to get awed by the authority, the status or the stature of that person.  It won't matter from their what mistakes they make (exactly what's happening with our current president).

Moreover, on the strength of the evidence, until modern times, great minds would have not espoused atheism.  It would not have seemed the most likely conclusion you could come to about the state of this universe.  

Most every great mind wouldn't endorse it, because we saw structure to the universe, and because we are so subconsciously familiar with "creating" a world, we assumed that something authored the larger world and gave it laws to behave by at least.  This was all reasonable.

However, this has always been based upon an assumption: that we are not in a universe where things can structure themselves spontaneously.   In intellectual history, this has largely gone unexamined: how do we know the opposite isn't true?  That we are in a universe where things do spontaneously structure themselves?  The structure is all compelling, until you consider the total chaos all around it everywhere.  Also the fact that we can now see things structuring themselves, and even make computer models that do.  A child will form in a womb without any detectable "hand of god."  A hurricane will structure itself out of the right flow of air at the right latitude over warm water.  The religious will rail against this, but all the evidence is that not only are we in a self-structuring universe, but structure itself is a form of chaos, and what we see as structured is actually the chaos that our minds are adaptable to comprehending.

And if a God created the universe, then, what created Her?   Ascribing it to intelligence doesn't solve the mystery, it just makes further questioning blasphemous.

So, why do you come to the opposite conclusion?  It does depend on where you've looked, where you started, and what you've gotten around to thinking about.  Also, it depends upon your willingness to concede to authority.   Not only does atheism fly in the face of living authorities, but you have to concede then that a lot of the most important movers in religion have either been liars, and/or insane, or just criminally insane. One does resist reflecting on that.  

There you have my answers to your question(s).  Excuse the delay.  I had a lot on my plate, and so many things were easier to do.  

I am swamped with 15 hour days, one after another.  I will respond ASAP - this week, with any luck. This is a really interesting conversation (to me, anyway) and I look forward to continuing it.