Maybe we should specify what kind of atheist we're talking about. You have the steve shaw kind who are resentful of their religious upbringing and rebelling against it now because they can and then you have the kind like me who never had a religious upbringing, never went to church, never read the bible unless we had one of those little gideon new testaments they hand out on street corners. I take no satisfaction from rebelling simply because I have nothing to rebel against. I'm not a hardline materialist. I think there is a universal consciousness that dreams this reality as well as all of us. You can't pray to it because it can't change anything. As though a character in one of your dreams can pray to you and make you change your dream. This consciousness needs to experience everything bad as well as good so it's not going to change the bad even if it could. That might be unfair to the innocent people who are caught up in these rotten circumstances but that's how it is. There might be innocent characters you dream about who get caught up in something bad you dream about or ina nightmare but they're really you anyway just as we are all really bit players of the universal consciousness that dreams us. It's easier to accept than believing in a moral god that refuses to act to save an innocent soul despite all the praying, beseeching and cajoling people do to get it to act and all the promising they give the rest of us that this creature who does nothing to help us actually loves us. I guess the deists were sort of right. The atheists are wrong. Atheism itself--as a group of logical arguments--is a very useful tool--but most atheists are just rebelling, thumbing their noses now that they are adults and no one can whack their pee-pee for it. The theists are wrong. Their whole system is nonsensical and badly thought out. The philosophers and the deists are really the most correct. The philosophers maybe a little more than the deists.
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