Do Atheists Feel Guilt?

[Stoic]

OK Stoic I will leave you with the last word - good talk.

It's been pleasant, in contrast to a lot of such discussions. I expect we'll be having more.

[seer]

It's been pleasant, in contrast to a lot of such discussions. I expect we'll be having more.

I'm going to jump on Starlight's thread again tomorrow - join us!

[Tassman]

If the process unfolded as He designed to get us where we are today

Nobody designed us – this is an unevidenced, prescientific assumption. The “process unfolded” according the Laws of Evolution when bacteria first evolved c. 3 billion years ago in the waters of the first oceans. Our Adam and Eve were Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae,

that is not a failure.

I would not rate a design having a 99.9% failure level a success.

This does not answer the question: why do we have a survival instinct in the first place?

Because of the mutation process in Natural Selection, which reduces genetic variation by eliminating maladapted creatures and enhancing the variations that better enable survival.

[Machinist]

It appears objectively ambiguous to me. Why does it always end in stalemate if there is a solid argument for the existence of God?

Perhaps we just haven't discovered it yet. Could there be realms of thoughts that are undiscovered/unchartered like areas of physical science?

And are these realms discovered or are they created as we go?

Because I have an idea.

That existence, the fact of existence, which is not a thing, nor a person nor a place

it is immutable, it is everywhere and nowhere in all time yet is timeless

It is not even a property of some other thing.

It just IS, and you can't think of it.

Everyone will agree that there is something rather than nothing

And never was there a time when something came from nothing

I don't think anyone would ever say "something came from nothing".

Existence is an irreducible primary,

and if it is this,

It is also conscious.

Existence and consciousness are One.

[Starlight]

Existence and consciousness are One.

I am very sympathetic to that argument.

But establishing that consciousness is a fundamental of existence lends itself as easily to Buddhism where our consciousness is like a droplet of water and upon our bodily death it rejoins the ocean from which it came, as it does to anything remotely approaching Christianity.

One can equally think that there might exist an Original Consciousness, but that there's been a long chain of subsequent events and beings, so that that Original Consciousness is not at all the same as the being(s) who created the universe, e.g. Marcion's view was that the god of the bible was an evil being whom the 'true' god, a being further back along that chain, had come to save us from.