Atheist Memes

I've been to the Grand Canyon three times, even hiked it once. While it is a sight to behold, it never once made me start believing in a deity.

Edit: The other part goes without saying.

Nature can be beautiful without attributing it to God. Everyone must have seen beautiful mountains, lakes, rivers, canyons, etc.

That maxim, "There are no atheists in foxholes," it's not an argument against atheism — it's an argument against foxholes.

- James Morrow

Weird then that theists are typically not the ones concerned with preserving that natural beauty.

For them, god put that oil down there for us to extract and burn. Nature be damned.

Grand Canyon is proof that the world isn't 5000 years old.

It bothers me that they didn't angle the text to the wall, have pride in your work memers

My mom is a strong believer in God, and claims that she and I surviving my birth is proof enough. Her body rejected me at 28 weeks because our blood has different rh factors. She went into eclamptic seizures and I had to be surgically removed. We both almost died. I was an incredibly sickly child. At one point, my mom was as looking into signing me up for Make a Wish, because so many people, my mom included, thought I was just going to die. I was that unhealthy. My left lung has permanent scar tissue from having pneumonia so much when I was younger. You can still see it clearly on x-rays. My lungs weren't fully developed until I was 19. Doctors were tracking their development to make sure I wouldn't need any extra care as an adult.

Now I'm an adult who is relatively healthy considering all of the debilitating ailments I have, most likely a direct result of being born early. My mom says it's a miracle and a blessing from God that I survived and am as successful as I am. I don't think it's any of that shit. I think it's modern medicine and my desire to succeed to spite people who've wronged me. God ain't got shit on antibiotics and spite.

To be fair, it's hard to be a Christian or someone who presumes a benign creator when looking at children's wards or the overrepresentation of children and youth in disaster, plague and famine mortality.

As a player and occasional programmer of sims and models, the degree of suffering in the universe is compatible with a creator when the well being of the individual units (or even species) are not a goal.

If the objective is drama and entertainment, creation as Reality TV, where Anyone Can Die™ then mountains of dead babies is all part of the show.

No, what makes it hard to be a theist is how everything is procedural. None of the life around us looks like a pocket-watch made by an artisan. It looks like a pocket-watch made by generative AI, itself programmed by generative AI, itself programmed by generative AI. We aren't the Sims, we're the dead drunken cats in taverns who got alcohol poisoning from spillage on the floors ingested when cleaning ourselves.

This doesn't entirely disprove intelligence creating the universe, of course. The simulation hypothesis is still valid, but we can expect God to be more like Azathoth ( Long may be slumber ) than Adonai. And we are microbes in the tree bark of a single Sequoia Redwood in central California, rather that God's chosen. Heck, if there is a divine purpose to the universe ( ꜰᴏʀᴛy ᴛᴡᴏ ) then we are just as likely incidental to its function, or even an emergent antagonistic side effect thanks to the chaos of complexity, than we are a critical element of its function.

But then, You are a redundant functionary in God's great machine to prepare Its morning breakfast does not sell people into your organized money-driven religious ministry.

When you look at a sunset you are having an emotional reaction to what you are seeing.

Emotions are not real. They do not Exist outside of your head. And therefore cannot be evidence of anything except that you can imagine

Hasa Diga Eebowai

Why are people floored into faith by the scale of the Grand Canyon, when they can just look up at the sky, and see a gigantic rock that has been falling towards us for millions of years, and feel the heat from the nearby (in cosmic terms) star which is an accumulation of hydrogen so massive that it's gravity alone has enough force to sustain a fusion reaction? But a trough in the ground caused by flowing water, that gotta be the work of god.

Not to downplay the Grand Canyon. It sure does look amazing!

E...ro...sion??? Must be God!

It should also be said, "It's hard to be a Theist when you're taking a stroll through a cemetery with 100+ year old tomb stones where every other one is a dead child."

Those children have all sinned and god is vengeful.

Adding "fucking" to the retort makes it funnier

Yeah I do not get it.

Like this bridge collapse in Baltimore this morning. All over facebook, praying hands and people claiming they're going to pray for the victims. If you thought that worked, why wouldn't you pray that no one would be on the bridge at that moment? Why wouldn't you pray that no ships hit the pier of the bridge? Surely those two things would be within God's power.

I used to see an SUV near work that had a vinyl cut on the rear window that said something like, "so-and-so, 1978-1998 - God cured his pain and called him to heaven". In other words, no matter what, God comes out on top - either he's cured and look how great God is for curing him! Or he dies and look how great God is for ending his suffering!

B-b-but b-but they are closer to heaven than any of us! /S