Religion and beliefs

[complich8]

I'm sort of a Taoist, in that I believe everything is connected, and that all things flow from and will return to the same universal nature. I'm also a fan of the Three Jewels of the Tao (compassion, moderation and humility) as guides which are both useful and attainable. I don't believe in a personal or supernatural God. I also don't believe in anything supernatural, be it miracles, angels, psychic powers, anything like that. I think all that stuff is bullshit. Really I'm an atheist who uses the basic premises of Taoism as a pocket reference card.

My background starts in a Lutheran tradition. Since my break with that tradition, I've wandered through numerous others under the Christian umbrella, then outside of it, before finally ending up where I am now. I believe in cherry-picking the good and discarding the bad, which makes me pretty much the diametric opposite of a fundamentalist.

If you just want to be argumentative, please don't reply, I really dislike arguments. If you want to engage in some meaningful dialogue though, I'm more than willing to listen and respond to any questions

I'm going not going to argue the Christianity points or your choice of career or anything else like that with you, because I think that as long as you can do objectively good things (like teaching people to read and/or raising their standard of living) that's very admirable, and I say more power to ya.

That said, I've got to take issue with some of the stuff you said here, not the least of which is the attempt to preclude argument for argument's sake. You're basically saying "this is what I believe, and I'm willing to entertain questions about it, but not challenges to it" -- which sort of comes across as intellectually dishonest.

And here's some more stuff I have a problem with:

To be atheistic is to say that you believe nothing is true. In this view, humans are their own measure of truth, and we can change it as we see fit. With no higher being governing our actions, we have no accountability or responsibility for what we do.

This is a gross mischaracterization. The statement "I don't believe in god" (or rather, "I believe that the God hypothesis is false") doesn't reject truth, it rejects the specific concept of god. You're saying here that all atheists are relativists, but I'd say the vast majority recognize that there is, in fact, an objective reality in which we live and from which basic principles arise.

God and truth are distinct concepts, and you're conflating the two to construct a straw man for atheism. Truth doesn't depend on God, it depends on an objective reality. To put it another way, you can start at a different place than God and still arrive at objective truth, and starting at God doesn't necessarily get you there.

And as far as accountability goes, society is more likely to hold you accountable than God is. If the Calvinist concept that we're all wretched sinners is to be believed, then our only hope for salvation is that God doesn't hold us accountable for the things for which we should be held accountable. It's ok to kill people, to cheat, to lie, to steal, as long as you truly repent of your sins before you die.

The atheist perspective is that this is all there is. If you kill people, you run the risk of having a shorter, less fulfilling life (in prison, or on death row, and with a guilty conscience). If you drive aggressively, you run the risk of a shorter, less fulfilling life (because of the car accidents). If you're mean to people, you alienate them and they leave your life, leading to less happiness because of social isolation. Society, psychology and biology carry numerous mechanisms to hold you accountable for your actions, none of which depend on God.

[Agnostics believe] there must be something that determines these standards of good and bad, something higher than ourselves, an unwavering standard that people can be measured against. The agnostic, seeing many options, essentially gives up on the enterprise, resigns themselves to not knowing, and blindly hopes that it will all work out.

This is also a mischaracterization. Agnostics believe that there's no way of knowing whether there is or isn't something supernatural from within nature. They're not just conceding the point that there's a God and just not sure which one. They're saying there's no way of knowing whether such a thing even exists.

If you believe there's no way of knowing the supernatural, then you're presented with three options: blind and unfounded faith, the rejection of that blind faith, or tabling the question indefinitely. Faith is the realm of any religion -- the belief that you're right to the exclusion of other principles. The outright rejection of faith as a value is atheism, and the rejection of the question indefinitely based on insufficient information is agnosticism.

I have some friends who told me they viewed religion as a giant lottery: only one is a winner, so just pick one and hope that you luck out, but choose wrong and you're screwed. I think this is a bit of a fallacy because in such a case, you'd still be agnostic. You wouldn't really believe in the truth of the religion you ascribed to, and thus would still be agnostic because you haven't been convinced.

When you make a choice according to Pascal's Wager (as your friends are suggesting), you still have to actually adopt the belief. You can't fake your faith on Judgment day, you've got to commit to it.