What I see you doing here is attempting to find a way for something called God to exist regardless of what its qualities are. I have no problem with that.

I, and most atheists, however, are interested in whether or not a sentient ruler of the universe exists. We haven't forgotten that "God is everything" to many people. We hear it constantly. We just don't care. We know that to most people "God" has sentience, and that's what concerns us. We typically call ourselves atheists for practical reasons...basing our definition of God on what society typically defines it as.

I can't argue that God doesn't exist if God is some mysterious source of all things that may or may not be sentient. I can, however, come up with some arguments that I think are pretty good for why, even if a sentient ruler of the universe does exist...it was almost certainly created by other sentient beings...perhaps being part of some computer simulation or something, and there's a good chance there is no sentient ruler of our universe.

@MrShittles First let me say it is a pleasure to be participating here. I am an aging baby boomer who is unsure of the processes used in this kind of website but from what I've seen I feel comfortable in assuming that most members I may find myself interacting with will be civil and, hopefully, more intelligent than I am. I have read a lot of readers comments on a lot of websites that are angry to the point of being rude and outright hateful. I hope that can be minimized on Slug. I don't know how old Slug is but I am brand new here and you're my first contact. It's good to be here.

Your response to my comment gave me a couple of things to ponder on. In almost all spiritual traditions what is usually called 'God' is considered absolute- even sometimes referred to as "the Absolute" in order to avoid freighted names like God, Yahweh, Allah, just to name the Judeo/Christian/Islamic variants given to it by the respective religions. By definition absolute means unqualified, unlimited. In Vedanta it is defined as partless, whole and complete.Therefore it has no qualities beyond being. Just simply being. I would say that it is not a sentient being but is simply sentience. Religions have taken the mystery of the absolute and smothered it in notions of human-like characteristics for God, such as "ruler of the universe" or an angry and jealous God!. For myself, I say when the religion starts talking about God being jealous and angry, this is not designed to liberate or save but to control. If we have working intellects how can we conceive of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence (all in one) being jealous or angry? How can such be anything but limitlessness-- bliss. I have found for myself - whether correctly apprehended or not- that Vedanta presents "God" not so much as "a being" but as an ongoing "process" that simply maintains creation. Even worship is not designed for the deity but for worshipper. True worship is praying to God without asking for ANYTHING. Simply praise and thanksgiving. It is a way for the worshipper to be connected. I don't know if he was completely correct but Jim Morrison of the Doors said, "You cannot petition the Lord with prayer."

And...I would add that from my experience, I like most atheists a lot more than I like most believers in God. They have not given over their intellect to something they don't understand.

This Slug site is a big learning experience for me and I'm getting a refresher course on how difficult it is to converse about vedanta with those who may not be acquainted with it, and whether or not one should even try, but fool that I am I blunder forth anyway. I always welcome the open mind.

@Geofrank I've found Slug.com to be a much better experience than the other website I post on, Citi-Data.com. Citi-Data.com is far superior when it comes to some organizational aspects. For example, I can click a button and highlight parts of your text I specifically want to respond to. The setup is better in many ways. However...this website seems a lot more personal. Here, I'm responding to you, and you're responding to me. On Citi-Data, you make one thread, and then everyone on the website responds to it...which tends to lead to people's responses getting swiftly buried, which motivates people to not even try to make better responses, but to, rather, use Citi-Data as a venting outlet, which buries the good responses faster.

I like this environment far better.

Regarding your response...the main issue I have with the idea of God being everything is that...if we somehow obtained proof that God is not a sentient being, do you think most people would feel the same way about God that they do now? If we found proof that God is sentience...but not a single sentient entity, or some kind of self-aware force that rules over the universe and created it, I think the atheists would usually feel much the same way as they do now...but a lot of theists would have their views dramatically altered.

I know a guy who says he suspects there is some kind of sentient force in charge of the universe, but if the universe is not sentient he'd have no problems calling that God. I have no problem with that. Some people do. I look at it like, for whatever reason, the word God is important to him...and I've seen conversations on Citi-Data.com that drag on forever for no reason, where people argue about the definition of God...in all important ways, all those people agree with each other but they find things to argue about anyway.

So...if other people want to call the Universe, or the universe + sentience, God...that's fine with me.

In exchange for that, however, I think that people should understand that when atheist talks about God, they're probably talking about something with sentience that, if it didn't exist, the universe would look different than if it did exist. That's also how I think most people perceive God. Definitions change over time...so I think modern ways of viewing God are, at minimum, sensible to take into account...and like I mentioned before, if God were discovered to not be a sentient being...a lot of atheists and agnostics would feel exactly the same as they do now, and most theists would feel very different.

And maybe that's a shame. Maybe we are missing out on something by shoving God into the box of being a sentient entity that's more like an individual than some more vague presence...but in my experience that's how God is defined more often than not. I always like hearing about those other sorts of views of God though...like Einstein's view of God...whatever that is. I usually end up being more confused than I was originally when I try to learn about those views though.

Wanted to reply to other comments here, somehow didn't find reply button. Being assessed as 'off the charts for divergence', expect me NOT to be a linear writer, but 'all over the place'. Some nice writing, interesting, good ideas presented.
One of THE most amazing, wonderful shifts I saw on YouTube was first Dave Robbins and more profound Stefan Molyneux who traded his former belief in philosophy (which I also love) for a form of Christianity, for lack of a better position.
I was led completely miraculously to Jesus, or Yehoshua. An epiphany occurred. First and last for me.
I somehow knew that if I went this way it wouldn't be quasi? For me, or why do it at all?
Comparing beliefs of the group I came into Christianity to other Christian beliefs, I turned completely to Scripture, thus sola scriptural. This required the original languages of Hebrew or Greek when something just didn't ring right.

gnos·tic
/ˈnästik/

adjective
relating to knowledge, especially esoteric mystical knowledge.

I used to talk to one of the founders of Atheist Ireland. He probably gave me more ideas than anyone else. Now...the second person who gave me the most ideas, however, was a Muslim. To be specific, over the course of his life he'd been a Catholic for many years, then an atheist for many years, and finally a Muslim until he died. He was also a psychologist.

I saw that Muslim guy as reliably having as good of ideas as my fellow atheists, if not better ones on occasion, from my perspective, even with our very different foundational worldviews.

I would prefer a nation filled with skeptical, curious, fun-loving Christians than a nation filled with lemming-like atheists who just kind of follow along with everybody else. Despite the low percentage of atheists in the general population, a much higher percentage of scientists are atheists than the percentage of atheists in the world at large. I believe this is because people who want to learn the most about the world are usually going to end up being atheists...but there are exceptions. Isaac Newton is a very big exception. He may have had the best brain the world has ever seen, and he was a Christian.

I think there are definite truths in the world, and the less you see of those truths the more its going to skew your whole world view and give you disadvantages. Regardless of which worldview is correct, all incorrect worldviews are going to cause some degree of harm, and they'll be more harmful the more wrong they are...just through giving people incorrect starting points they're working from. If Christians are correct, my worldview is quite destructive if there's a hell...and I'm quite possibly missing some important aspects of reality if there's not. If I'm correct, there may be a lot of people focusing on preparing for an afterlife they'll never enter and investing less in this life because of it.

However, I think almost everyone loves to build their own fictional realities. I think atheists will have a lot of advantages other groups lack because in my view they're correct...however, I think they'll also kind of instinctively tend to manufacture their own fictional realities too, and these other fictional realities may end up, sometimes, giving them a less accurate worldview than many non-atheists have. For example, it seems like all our instincts tell us that my life is more important than yours because you are not me. I think this is, more or less, an illusion.

That Muslim guy, though he had a different religion than I had, lacked many of those less commonly discussed sorts of illusions.

On the other hand...that atheist Ireland guy has described religion as a disease. He did this in a kind of protective, maternal way. He's kind of a motherly figure. He cares a lot about our species and he's sometimes pretty venomously protective of humanity. I think he sees religion as a threat to his children, more or less, and he responds like a mother bear defending his cubs.

And I can't say he's wrong...on average...only that his worldview will not be accurate in all instances. Even he liked that Muslim guy I knew though, saying things like, "Islam is dangerous, but your version is considerably less so" and giving that Muslim guy the name of some fanatical, rigid-thinking Muslim or other to argue against.

Then there's my mother's worldview. She describes herself as a Christian...but at a Catholic funeral she was surprised that some people saw Christianity as having so much to do with Jesus. She knows nothing of the Bible, and she just kind of likes the idea of an afterlife and godly, parental protector figure. I've got a soft spot for that sort of relaxed religion. I wonder if it can be kind of fun for many people, and maybe fulfilling.

Then again there are the horror stories I've heard from people like atheist celebrity Mat Dilahunty, whos mother believes he's going to hell...and my own father who, though he's a deist or agnostic rather than an atheist, had a dad who converted to become a Jehovah's witness due to fear.

I wonder about things like religion making our species moving slower about developing technologies to cure aging...and therefore, more or less, leaving billions of people with what might as well be called an incurable disease that slowly degrades our bodies called aging, for many decades longer than might otherwise be necessary.

I wonder that while wondering about people having these magical little personal religions that are kind of fun, and that if we scrub from the world, perhaps we'd be scrubbing the world raw.

I tend to be most concerned about fundamentalism and have a soft spot for the more casual forms of religion...but that Muslim guy I knew was a self-described fundamentalist who knew the Qur'an backwards and forwards and was constantly studying it, teaching other people about it, and encouraging people to learn about it, Judaism, and other religious faiths.

Personally...I have little interest in learning much more about Islam. As far as I'm concerned, I've found a shortcut that requires a lot less work. I just have a route that convinces me that no god exists at all...so I need to spend a lot of time diving through countless different religious texts. I can feel perfectly content that I'm not going to hell despite having only mild knowledge of any religion because I don't believe in any god at all...and I wonder if, even if there are advantages to certain types of religion...on average I suspect they're mostly causing more harm than good, so if everybody were to just cease believing in God in general...that seems like it could be a quick way to improve the planet, on average, and I can understand why the more militant atheists want that, like Richard Dawkins and that founder of Atheist Ireland guy.

Now for the next part of your post -

[patheos.com]

Oftentimes agnostic atheists will say things like, "I cannot prove that a God does not exist...but I don't see evidence for the existence of that God so far. Please show me your evidence for it, and maybe I'll believe in it."

To clarify my views...I don't necessarily think anyone needs to know how God came to be if they believe in God. However, there's this argument I routinely hear that says "How could the universe come to exist, if not for some force that exists outside of it, that does not obey the rules of the universe, creating it?"

My response to that mentality is: "Why does that permanent (or at least older than our universe) source have to have intelligence? Wouldn't it seem more likely that it lacks intelligence than that it has it? Intelligence appears to come from a brain - a very specific structure that breaks down over time, that usually was birthed or created by some other life form...not eternal forces."

But that's just my argument for why I don't think our universe needs to have been created by a God. The reason I don't believe in a God has more to do with other things. For example, If I no signs of omnipotence, immortality, omniscience, or thoughts existing outside of an organic or mechanical brain, and I can think of no way for them to form...why would I assume they exist? There's this category of infinite possibilities, and we tend to sweep most of that into a box titled "This almost certainly isn't true" because we don't see other examples of it, or we can't think of any reason it would happen. A good example might be a possibility that a teapot was floating around the moon in the 1700's." If we don't sweep most possibilities into that "This almost certainly isn't true" pile, if we're consistent, we'll end up wondering about things like unicorns having sneezed out our universe. I'm arguing that, because I see no reason why a God would exist, I'm going to sweep it into that "This almost certainly isn't true pile," and treat it the same way I treat the prospect of the Sun not rising tomorrow.

Secularism can be quite cold and heartless - seeming. I used to have a pretty big problem with fearing death, for example. I may make another post at some point on how I dealt with that...because it's no longer nearly as much of a problem for me anymore. My own version of atheism suggests that it could very well be that ideally life would have never existed. I'm open to the possibility that the best thing to happen to humanity would be for aliens to just vaporize us all simultaneously.

However...I think greater knowledge tends to provide permanent gains, whereas, regardless of how depressing a worldview seems at first, most of the time we tend to be able to adapt our minds to dealing with that pretty well...so I think that whatever worldview is true, regardless of what that is, it's probably going to be in most people's best interest to have that worldview, although there may be exceptions. Different people's minds work in very different ways, with different emotional needs and such.

Some atheists just kind of focus on concerning themselves with their friends and families and local communities, and occasionally put a little towards improving the bigger issues by voting and learning about the wider world a little...but they just kind of view it like "the main goal of my life is to live well with my family" and for many of them that can seemingly be a pretty fulfilling existence.

I don't consider myself a nihilist, but there are many who do, who just kind of embrace a "seize the day" kind of mentality and they seem to have pretty fulfilling lives. TJ Kirk The Amazing Atheist, on Youtube, is one of these peoples. Then there are other people who just kind of, invent their reason for existence and go along with that - archaeologists may become passionate about learning about the past and devote their lives to it and that can fill them with passion.

There are all sorts of strategies for mentally dealing with the nature of the universe as an atheist...and, really, for any worldview, of course.

I don't understand what you meant by this:

I'm also FE which is not accepted.

or this:

Lot of smoke and mirrors like the vaccine right now and what went down.

@MrShittles Finally found reply button! Good writing, enjoyed. So miraculously saved by what turned out to be what I call a decent cult. This cult had a few good things: They did teach the Bible, and most importantly did NOT believe or teach any going to hell etc.
What's really key here for me is I couldn't, wouldn't buy many of the Dante's inferno views of hell: I would have walked away.
Then I switched from doctrines of men to sola scriptura. It does teach there IS hell but in the NT says NOTHING relevant to Gentiles at all, and little about Jews. A few are taken out of context where it's referring to a certain group or a different time period.
The NT tells me what a Christian is, what the standards are. And I know, will always know in part.
A person has to very interested in the Word of God bcuz it takes a long time to learn, look things up.
We don't own a TV anymore, never watch movies.
What's going on in the world far outdoes any movie. Dr. Rashid Butter is cutting edge, has been dissed by MSM.
The RCC is a cult and it can be shown to someone interested.
But a Christian actually forsakes who they were for becoming a new spirit centered person in Jesus.
Obviously I had to see why this was good to do.
I thought it was the deal of all time. Much better than a second chance where I'd go wrong again.
But the big thing is it's not for everybody for many reasons.
In essential ways, I have no or few questions myself. But there are some.
On another topic, I know of absolutely no more economically frugal and sound way to live than Christianity.
The big thing I'd say to anyone who is inclined towards theism is to trust God or Theo. To me, it's the only way to trust Theo.

@Boardwine So is there MYSTICAL or Spiritual component, or ghostlike ethereal?
I felt I had a good training for Christianity through the Twilight Zone, the other side, Stranger than fiction, believe it or not(a very interesting book put out or was, once a year. I knew there was more.

@2FollowHim

1 word to find out much of what we're all missing. Dimethytriptaline. If you want to know what's out there beyond ourselves, it's worth the money and doesn't take much time.

@char1emagne I am 100% natural, alternative, never synthetic, never produced in a lab, barring say vitamin C, which I still prefer more natural. I can go up in prayer.

I can totally respect that.

@char1emagne thank you. Meditation can elevate too.

@2FollowHim I believe there is another component to reality. Another dimension so to speak. I call it the spiritual realm. Others may have a different word. Some believe there is nothing but the material world, but human experience generally says otherwise

@Boardwine
That is what I meant by the DMT comment. I had not studied it but had heard mention of it, although not how profound it can be. It's the same drug found in ayahuasca but not orally active (which happens through the addition of an MAO inhibitor) but seems to bring people somewhere else dimension wise and is inhabited by beings, very wise and well intentioned it seems, and I know at this point I sound crazy, I assure you I am not. I am educated, scientically minded and philosophicallly existentialist (though morally not nihilistically). I tried and then realized that these experiences are shared by many if not most who do it properly and show you things you cannot see with the naked eye. This is probably why shamans have been using for i don't know how long. It leaves you with an idea that there is something more out there and our lives are insignificant and still precious and our behaviour matters. These sound like religious idea except maybe lacking in the "made in gods image grandiosity" but they can help people see with a completely new perspective. Look it up, read about it, listen to Joe Rogan's stories about it (if you respect him) and come to your own conclusions but I have shared it with people and had it completely transform their life, for the better. Their experiences, even if they knew little to nothing matched my own and those of many, many users. It's not something I've done since but would recommend to people looking for answers to questions they already know, start playing again and get back in the game. (I should have finshed it differently but once I started the Blaze Foley quote i had to run with it). I accept everyone's opinions on religion and don't argue it which is the beauty of being agnostic because those conversations never change anyones mind anyways. Thank you for the IDW for giving us this space to share without limiting our parameters for speech. Cheers.

@char1emagne I always could ELEVATE, not levitate, but TRANSCEND. It's BUSY up there! You know those channelled. Not sure what they are but I can see it, feeling, AND it's not peaceful for me, not tranquil.
So, I'll have to go higher. More dangerous, 'thinner' like climbers going up. Could get lost spiritually so I'm going to move through Christ who protects. Don't know really WHAT SWAY UP there, and drugs are a crap shoot, who knows? Knowing some, very little, about the brain, magnetic actions, 3rd eye, I can't have ANY control or know. I am NOT controlling but out of control may not be returnable, and I want that much.
Jesus as Savior, Creator, according to my studies and belief of those is my ultimate spiritual protection.

Strange. I find when SPIRITUALLY protected, then physical, mental, emotional assault can and does occur.
Like a choice.
I'm AT LEAST 100% convinced that sola scriptura Christianity is not for everybody. At risk of being branded, there is no great commission. Jesus sent His own disciples out to go find and make more disciples. A special group. So I relax, share experiences.
You're exploring other areas. I can't remember labeling anyone. Best to disconnect if that happens.
Yes, I add my thanks to your's for an open minded IDW community where there's respect.