Without your faith God doesn't exist for you.

If you choose to believe that the world is so complex wonderfully designed that there must be a God and then take that as your basis for declaring God doesn't exist, that's your own prerogative.

I'd be left wondering, however, if you're really searching for the truth, or if you're just hell-bent on proving God doesn't exist for your own ulterior purposes.

To really discover the truth, you need to uncover and confront your inner insecurities and demons, become secure and develop a firm personal foundation, and then search for the truth without regard for how unpleasant it is. (Frequently the right thing to do is the most hard and the least fun.)

The truth (and the best choice) for you may be atheism. Maybe for you to be the best you can be, you need to shed faith. But it's also likely that belief in a higher power (not religion, just a loving merciful God) will help you be a better person than you thought possible.

I respect both choices-- what I don't respect is, as I mentioned above, an ingrained or repressed fear of allowing that there might be a God, and the resulting quest-for-adequate-proof against a perceived attacker. (Or vice versa for staunchly religious people)

PS: I know this is probably just in fun, and I love Douglas Adams, but being placed on this blog I feel like commenting on it.

Fscking hilarious!!!

Thanks Norm :)

RIP. Douglas Adams :(

I'll just ruin it for you all! The only reason we exist is because mice created Earth as an experiment to answer the meaning of life. We are just a giant experiment! Think about that next time you kill a mouse ;-} BTW, the experiment is over and Earth will be destroyed shortly in order to make room for a galactic super highway. Goodbye!

I'm not a regular here at One Good Move (I just occasionally come for the funny clips of politicians being humiliated), but I gotta say this type of post... just feels out of place.

I consider myself an agnostic for the most part (I follow religions because they've got some cool stories, like y'know, the Norse Gods and Ragnarok, and Jesus seemed like a cool cucumber and could spin a good parable, and all those Bhuddist monks tell some mean koans) and as such, I can't get behind a definitive conviction in any spiritual belief, atheism included. I mean, I've got no problem with the idea that when I die, all I do is rot in the ground and that's it. I'm cool with it, I think I'm having a pretty good time right now and most things come to an end.

But the conviction that Dawkins and Adams and other devout Atheists display sort of scares me. They just look like zealots that have a slightly more easily defendable position. I read some interviews, from Dawkins especially, and I'm like.. well.. "Shit, you're a scary asshole." I mean, he's a guy that makes Pat Robertson look amicable.

If these were posts about keeping religion out of public policy and in the private life, I'd damn well be behind that. But Atheism is spirituality whether you've got an easier time justifying it or not.

And if you're gonna make a lot of posts about Atheism, Daniel Dennett should be the source for more of them. At least he's trying to frame the seeming human desire for faith in terms of what benefits it has and continues to provide to people.

Let's be complete shall we? That bit ends:

"Well, that was easy," says man, who goes on to prove that black == white, and is promptly run over at the next zebra crossing.

It's a small rant that is obviously about human presumption. You can't validly criticise others when you're selectively quoting (even fiction) to make yourself feel better.

Knara, you're right about the rest of the quote, BUT, douglas adams was indeed a 100% atheist who often disucssed his disdain for religion. He was great friends with Richard Dawkins, who he says converted him to atheism with his book "The Blind Watchmaker."

loved that series. if anything, it restored my faith in humanity. no comment re: gawd. i still like to think it's a personal thing and one can listen to other people's arguments and make one's own judgement. decreeing something morally right or abhorrent is not something for me to do.

Right Will, an agnostic rant is unnecessary-- the passage of this book was definitely intended to be FUNNY. People are way too serious around here. The babel fish is a classic bit from a classic sci-fi novel. Adams was a well-known atheist. He was a very funny writer, and he wrote from his perspective as a non-believer.

And I'll also say to Danno that this clip is not out of place at all on this site; if you visited more frequently you would know this. It has elements of humor AND atheism-- perfect for 1GM.

Norm, have you ever posted the 1998 Adams interview from The American Atheist? I think I remember it being posted a while ago. Here is a link for those that haven't read it before. I love his story about how he became a non-believer, and I especially love this quote: "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."

http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html

Oh! Another great one is Adams' speech at Digital Biota 2 in Cambridge U.K. from September 1998. Put on your thinking cap before you sit down to read this one. It's really great stuff.

http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/