Quote from: Cin on July 21, 2016, 12:41:44 AM
Doesn't the world seem chaotic and random if there's no God?
Most gods are arbitrary meddlers at best. For example, the entire Greek pantheon is basically a giant soap opera which occasionally leaves mortals as collateral damage. Most derivatives of Aten (especially the Abrahamic tradition) are simply psychopathic jerks. I'd argue the world makes much more sense when you remove superstition from it and begin to explain why things actually happen rather than relying on primitive animism. How many peasants have died young from disease throughout history, leaving grieving, bewildered (and starving) families? Those were written off for centuries as "god's will" or "karma" or whatnot. Remove the cop-out supernatural "explanation" from the equation, and you can begin to address the actual disease process. If you go to the hospital today and get a diagnosis of congestive heart failure, the good news is that it's not the sheer random chaos of "being struck down by god" but now it's explicable. And because it's explicable, it might even be fixable to some extent. Same thing with lightning strikes, or shipwrecks, or wars, or really anything. This is not only making things seem
less random and arbitrary, over time it makes life absolutely better when you cast off the infamous "goddidit" crutch for every event.
And if there really are no gods, as certainly seems to be the case, the real question is not what we want to be true, but: "How does lying to ourselves about it really help?" Really, how scary the world is with or without gods pales to insignificance next to the truth of whether or not there are some. Reducing the question to one of whether or not we have the courage to grow up as a species and let go of our imaginary friends is simply irrelevant when pondering whether or not the imaginary friends are real in the first place. Reality doesn't even have the capacity to care whether or not we like it, and the quicker we figure that out the more we're going to be able to take our own steps to make sure we do like the universe we're in.
Quote from: Cin on July 21, 2016, 12:41:44 AMDo atheists have a problem with God OR religion or the books mainly?
You'd need a grand total of three atheists to give you three different answers to this question. You might get four in that group. Personally, I do agree with the assertion that gods are a phase a species goes through when it's smart enough to ask questions about the universe but not smart enough to answer them. Religion, taken as a whole, is unquestionably evil, although polytheistic religions clearly much less so than the monotheistic cults. The books are a mixed bag. The Abrahamic books are outright abominations which set the tone for some utterly despicable faiths, while the more contemplative Eastern philosophies manage to generally not be actively evil, at least.
Quote from: Cin on July 21, 2016, 12:41:44 AMTo me books don't make that much sense, at least some parts of it.
Most of the books are so derivative it's appalling. The problem is that so many of the books were not only written by committee, but plagiarized by committee. You get everybody's favorite parts of older stories from differing mythologies, and it is unsurprisingly a mess. Literary criticism is unkind to the vast majority of religious texts.