Are you an atheist?

john eden

male pale and stale
I’ve met more humanist celebrants than most and on average they put more effort in than priests. Lots of tales of vicars rocking up with the usual template and misdescribing the deceased.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Simply being alive and conscious is all the proof you need for something powerful at work in the universe, what more evidence do you need? Science has nothing to say on the subject. All humanity's civilisations have been theistic. Ours isn't. Going well, isn't it?
Yeah man, if we all just believed then we could go back to a cultural phase as peaceful and enlightened as the 16th century.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
nihilism is just too horrible
Short of Faith, the best you can get are windows of insulation from the pressure, no? Moving one hand underneath the other with enough dexterity to catch the warm mercury as it drips down, and you can only keep it up so long, short of Faith.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
From your position, how does something like the standard model stack up with what could be the absolute cosmic fundamentals?
I don't know enough physics to make a real comparison. but - tho they're both concerned with "what is?", one is metaphysics, the other is physics.

Spinoza isn't really creating a model of how reality works in that nuts + bolts sense

he's not directly speaking about actual natural forces as we understand them now, that's my extrapolation

tho I don't think he would have been surprised by them. it's very of his time. Newton published his theory of gravity 10 years after Spinoza died.

potentiality of expression of matter is another extrapolation, or more like a rephrasing of Deus sive Natura

which I understand as God is everything which is or can be, or going the other way, everything which can be is in God

the difference between infinite potentiality and actuality of expression of matter is the difference between being an infinite and a finite being

tbh it seems to me that if you remove it as the causal factor you don't actually need "God" by Spinoza's definition of God

and causation is the weakest part of his definition - it's a turtles all the way down handwave like all cosmology ultimately is

again, this is my limited understanding of a famously difficult topic
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
peronsally, I would love to truly believe in a theistic (as opposed to Spinoza type God is Nature deal) God and afterlife

what a comfort and joy it would be

but I just don't

you can't believe what you don't believe and you can't not believe what you do believe
 
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