I'm a Bright

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I am a Bright

The Brights

What is a spirit

A Truely Great Work

I am in awe of this man, the life story he tells, and this video lesson it seems he has produced. The breadth of his experience (if it is indeed a true story) is mind boggling, and I was robbed of the opportunity of having similar experience by being born a non-believer into a non-believing family (anyway, that's how I remember my very early life). Of course, had I had a beginning similar to his, I might have remained in the trap, and have been robbed of the opportunity of having similar experience in that manner also. The title does not do it justice.

This playlist has spurred my idea machine, e.g: Has "The Will to Believe" somehow been converted to a will to know the truth? Or was it always the will to know the truth hijacked by belief? Is this possible for anyone or only a few?

God does indeed exist

What it means for me to be an atheist is that I don't believe. I know that God exists and is very powerful. God is a belief, a mass delusion, and there's no denying it's existence or power as such. Each believer supplies a different piece of God according to the peculiarities of their belief and the believers classify themselves into larger or smaller groups so that they can share a version of God compatible with their individual belief. The trouble is in the divergence of these various groups. God is not whole. God is born of the tribe and a tribe can only be so big before it divides.

To Penn Jillette

Your Reason Rally video strongly reinforced my non-belief. Your very strong, repeated assertion that there is no God knocked me off balance enough for me to realize that I could not make that same assertion in that same way unless I were a good actor and had a good reason, or I would have to believe it. For me it just wouldn't be true. I don't believe it. So I'm not an atheist in the popular sense of the word since that requires belief. I do, however, live without God as a supernatural being, and that is because there is not enough evidence to show me how to live with God as a supernatural being. Unfortunately I do have to live with God as a common delusion maintained by others, and they are constantly providing evidence why I should not emulate them in the way they live with a God as a supernatural being.

The idea that (a) God created existence as one would build some Rube Goldberg contraption and set it off to see how it goes is interesting. (Here's Nick Bostrom's variation on the theme proving(?) this is more likely than not, without solving the problem of first cause.)

What's also interesting to me is that we cannot prove that anything in nature is random. We can only test whether we should be convinced something is random or not. So God can hide, and act, in the shadows we are convinced are randomness. (But I don't gamble because it seems clear that whichever God might be hiding in those deep dark shadows doesn't favor gamblers. And I don't take advantage of gamblers because... well... I don't want that sort of God on my side in that manner.) I became convinced of this when I was introduced to pseudo-random number generators in a computer programming class since pseudo-random number generators produce deterministic sequences which satisfy tests of randomness.

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