Why are there so many pessimistic atheists?

[tnick777]

I'm just wondering.

They've won the cosmic lottery, a 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 any of this would ever occur. (even more).

The chances are so slim for something as PERFECT as this world to come out of nothing, they should be living everyday to it's fullest because chance gave it to them.


They should be happy that the moon came and slowed down the earths rotation.

They should be happy *Some how* there were organisms that *adapted* over time to *climates*... and grew ways to sexually reproduce.

They should be happy our bodies can break down naturally accuring energy.

They should be happy that our *nonliving* anscestors (ie rocks and water) decided to *come alive*.

They should be happy our earth isn't 1 mile closer or 1 mile further from the sun, or else it couldnt sustain life.

They should be happy that there are all these different natural laws that make the physics of life happen.


There are many things they should be happy about... Because by chance, they've won a lotter (with the stakes at 1 in a few google) billions of times to create a universe that is self sustaining on such a large level.

They've been given *by chance* a brain and eyes.

They've been given *by chance* a 4 billion period in time when single celled organisms grew eyes, and penises, and stomachs, and vocal chords (to be honest I still don't know how all of a suddon we had them and knew how to use them)

So really, next time you see an atheist down, tell them they've won the lottery more times than they can count. Because by chance they are here today.

God bless you Atheists.
Tyler

[Elohim]

I know, it's funny isn't it.

Especially when they lose their grip and have nothing left to hold onto.

ahahaha...

But that's cruel, I take it back.

If anyone's interested in a spot of da'wah to liven up their Evolution Blues, Ibn Rushd started up an excellent Islam thread just round the corner.

[Lone rider]

The world is to unfair, why wasnt i born without a ****. Born a slave with no future? The world is basicly unfair in every aspect. We humans do to much wrong and we do it again, we learn history so it may not repeat however it does. God is fair to all. Why didnt he learn the indians kristianty in Amerika befor the Eurpoen discoverd it, so they are doomed in hell befor they came. Becouse they were less worth, they didnt get a chance he didnt like them, he liked those other people over the sea?

Mathematik reasen to why the world is unfair: to many variables

However im very happy atm, going around living my life like nothing else matters. I get joy of reading and seeing a moving I love musik, I go to school I read manga, playing games. However that doesnt mean that the rest of the world is happy. The world is very crappy we just try to make the best out of it.

There may be a creator, but "he" doesnt care much about us, specialy the way the bibal says. If therer exsist a creator, it doenst mean that "he" have feelings or thoughts he may live like a microisme with only the purpose to live or he only cares about stars and planats and we are insignifisent to "him". To say that the creator cares about us is a selfless act of humans to get a higher prupose.

[Tom Paine]

Anthropic principle much? There is equal chance for any specific single outcome, mate. Were we not here, the only reason we would not find it surprising is that we would not exist. Oh and evolution isn't at all against the odds, in fact it significantly raises the odds in favour of us... and while you may not understand how it works, that's because you haven't grasped that its based on slow, not rapid, change.

[Elric von Rabenfels]

Who said we Atheists and Agnostics are always pessimistic

I´m a non-believer and enjoy life more than many religious people I know.
We only have this life, enjoy it!

[Kanaric]

Because theres so many different religions, so are 1.6 billion chinese going to hell because they never followed the word of Jesus?

Are an almost equal amount of indians going to hell because they follow a polytheistic religion?

What about the various natives across the world? What about the muslims? What about the other sects of christianity? Are Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and others going to hell because they dont heed the word of the pope and the religions that splintered off of that?

I am a atheist simply because any god that would send all those people to hell is not a god that is worth worshiping.

I'm not pessimistic, but this is what I believe. I'm more of a glass is half full person, but when it comes to this the religions speak for themselves. Anyone that sends people to hell for no reason other than not following sounds like the pessimist to me.

[FunTex]

I'm very happy, thank you very much. But i disagree with you calling earth "perfect", it's very nice, I'll give you that, but I could point out a couple of things I would like to see changed. Furthermore, the immense size of the universe taken into account, it is very propable that these "perfect" circumstances are present elsewhere in the universe.
If, indeed, we accept the infinity of the universe, there might be a whole lot of such places.

The notions put forth in the first post I find very weird, the idea of being "happy" about the very circumstances that made living possible I find very absurd, I wasn't really presented with an alternative was I?

It is very hard for me to express my opinion on this right now. I'm sorry if it's nonsense.
What the heck.

[tnick777]

but I could point out a couple of things I would like to see changed.

What are they?

I'm sure if you took that away the world would end

[Irishman]

They've won the cosmic lottery, a 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 any of this would ever occur. (even more).

This number is complete nonesense. Crackpot science. The man who came up with this assigned random values and probabilities to the world.

The fact is, given the state of the singularity, the laws of physics would result in this world. It had nothing to do with probabilities.

[Scorch]

Well I understand evolution is a scientifically sound theory, but I find it easier to believe in god than to believe that our body and species - with a brain that can make 1 x 10^(1 with 10.5 kilometers of typewritten zeros after it) connections between itself, or a civilization that can build all this - appeared as a result of gradual change in adapting to it's environment.

[harm]

Just because you believe in a GOD, doesn't mean your too far removed from reality. Everyone is in the same world here... but only the atheist is in reality.

If everyone were an atheist, we'd be living for ever by now....

[Scorch]

Just because you believe in a GOD, doesn't mean your too far removed from reality. Everyone is in the same world here... but only the atheist is in reality.

If everyone were an atheist, we'd be living for ever by now....

Treading on thin ice harm. I'm not going to moderate this, as I've involved myself in the thread, and I'm a Christian myself, but this is clearly a personal attack meant to incite a group of board members, in other words, both a troll and a flame.

Just warning you.

[Siblesz]

Just because you believe in a GOD, doesn't mean your too far removed from reality. Everyone is in the same world here... but only the atheist is in reality.

If everyone were an atheist, we'd be living for ever by now....

I have to agree with harm here. The first part, that is. We're all living one sense of reality or another, whether partially imaginated or not. But when it comes to the closest sense of reality, atheists and agnostics know best. It comes from the fact that we don't believe in faith. Faith decides all doubts for the theist. "Where does lightning come from?" "God made it." "How was man made?" "God made man." "Why are there so many natural disasters in the world if God is good?" "Because God is testing us." We have found the answers for these things, and God has nothing to do with them.

Atheists/agnostics don't stop at God. They go further. They question the historical origins of God. They question the reason why theists attribute all things to God. And they do all these things using a scientific process that turns out to be accurate 100% of the time. Now, the only real question we are faced with that we still don't know exactly ends up being the ultimate question: what is the universe's origins. Yet theists still blind themselves and attribute the universe's origin to to their magical god, and not to the precedent of the past 3,000 years of study. Agnostics, however, continue to question, through the scientific process, the origins of the universe without attributing it definitively to God. For you see, while we view God as being an illogical and archaic form of our ancient and ignorant past, we still retain the chance that he exists as the law of chance requires that we do so. Our logic is objective, and so we do not disregard the theist argument until it is absolutely ruptured to its last bits. Unfortunately for the theist, we have chance on our side. And chance decides all things... not God.

So then what's all the above ranting for? To address one small question: Why do we view this world pessimistically? We don't like to live in faith, we don't like to live in fantasy, no matter how unpleasant our reality is. And reality tells us that we are animals, not God's creature. Reality tells us that religious morality is another archaic weight of our past that we must carry on with. Reality tells us that the society of the present is a small progression over the ignorant and theist society of our past. And society tells us that if human kind keeps pumping up their numbers and looting their environment like we do so, then there will be few of us left in the coming centuries. While the theist jumps in joy and sings happy songs for his loving imaginary friend Jesus, we prepare for the worst by actually succumbing to the pressures of reality and facing the truth of our existence. We accept the truth. You hide from it by putting God in front of it.

[Chaigidel]

Atheists are as blind as any devoted christian, muslim, or any other religion maybe:O

religion keeps society in line with moral obligations(kinda)

and on the thing about living forever if the so called "sphere of aeolus" had been seen and used as the steam engine it was 2k years ago , and the industrial revolution occured in bc times we would be in the stars by now and doing things intangible to our minds now its just chance sometimes sometimes not, either way it had nothing to do with being religious or not .

can i ask the question why are you an atheist?-- give specific reasons why you decided this.

[SickBoy13]

I think this is a rather unfair generalisation. I don't view Atheism as spiritual pessimism (I do think of it as more of uncertainty, but I do not mean indecision), that is rather absurd.

I admire Irishman in that despite his Atheism, he still adheres to a code of morals and believes that we all must do that no matter our beliefs. I have nothing wrong with Atheists, I may disagree with their beliefs (let's not turn this into a convert thread, please) but I may still find some among them to be good people. Religion does not dictate who is good and who is bad. Rather, it is their personal moral values that usually determines what kind of person they are, however those personal moral values generally are those of their religion, but that just starts an ongoing cycle.

[VoodooTengo]

i dont think atheiests are necessairly pessemistic.

also if we did not win the "lottery" then we would not exist, so we wouldnt know we had lost, and even if we didnt win here we or other beings would still exist somewhere else with perfect conditions.

I dont think the idea of nothing is pessemistic either, it is completely and utterly neutral and nonexistant (if you cease to exist when you die than it really doesnt matter at all one way or the other)

I think being an atheist (though im not one) would give you more freedom because you dont have to worry about what happens to you when you die, and i think youd be more tolerant of other peoples and religons (though they wouldnt be more tolerant of you)


* if you think GOd physically created us, you might be almost ********(less than intelligent). it would be inconsistant with God because God is a noninterventionist (which you can see by looking at any of the worlds problems) and intervening with the natural course of nothingness would be extrmely easily detectable and obvious and destroy the mystery of faith. I think its more likely GOd is like a computer programmer/mathmatician who figured out the results of his single action (big bang) and then just let things take their course, because in his infinite wisdom would have known how they would turn out (in his design).

Those are just my personal beliefs.

[Garbarsardar]

We breed furiously.

[Kythras]

Firstly, we have plenty to be pessimistic, the world is going down the pooper, no doubts about it, and being alive doesn't have anything to do with it.

Secondly, I'm... I really need a new world, agnostic, but, for the most part, I think like an atheist, and I'm not pessimistic... maybe a wee bit cynical, but not too pessimistic. And most of the atheists I know are a lot happier than the theists I know (but maybe that's just because the theists have no friends)

Thirdly, As some peopel have state, much more eloquently than I, we have no experience of not existing, it's not like winning the real lottery, where you going from having X amount of money, to having X+Y amount of money. We've only ever have X existance, so we don't know about the proverbial grass on the other proverbial side...

I'll think of some more, I'm sure...

[Ragabash]

Rather, it is their personal moral values that usually determines what kind of person they are, however those personal moral values generally are those of their religion, but that just starts an ongoing cycle.

Remember that general values of the religion are almost always those of the regional culture.

I would argue that personal morals are far more affected by the local culture then religions, of course religions have an impact on moral values but the whole consept of religion and how it's viewed is often cultural product.

[RZZZA]

I'm a pessemistic AGNOSTIC.

Just because youre pessemistic doesnt mean you cant be happy. Just because you dont believe in God, doesnt mean that you cant feel fulfilled and live a happy, well contented life.

Optomistic people annoy me, they expect good things to happen while pessemists MAKE good things happen by analyzing and preparing for the worst.