Basic questions about what you believe (survey of sorts)

[randomperson42]

I have a few short questions for anyone who is willing to answer. You can think of it as a bit of a survey.

1. What is your worldview? (Simple answer - Christian, Atheist, etc.)
2. What does it mean to be human?
3. What happens after death?
4. Elaborate on who Jesus Christ is according to your worldview.
5. How does your worldview deal with the concepts of evil and suffering?

[Jashwell]

[Replying to post 1 by randomperson42]

1. I don't think "Worldview" is applicable to the non-religious.
I am an atheist, and that tells you literally nothing beyond a lack of belief in gods.

2. To be human is to be a member of the human species, by having a number of characteristics in common.
Whether or not you are of the human species (are a human) does not uniquely entail relevance to ethics, morality, art, culture or value, and it certainly isn't (non-pragmatically) exclusive to humans.

3. The world keeps turning? (until it is incinerated by the sun, or its orbit decays)

4. According to my beliefs (or significant lack thereof), some guy (whose existence is itself questionable) whom a lot of people worship.

5. Do you mean what are my beliefs with regards to the concepts?
What do you mean 'deal with'? Attempt to solve?
Would be quite a broad answer. Charity, justice, etc.

[randomperson42]

[Replying to post 2 by Jashwell]

I would say "Worldview" is in fact applicable to the non-religious. A worldview is a set of beliefs or views that one has. Your belief, or view (among others) is that there is no God.

The meaning of the last question was regarding how your worldview explains the existence of evil and suffering. In your case, why does evil exist if the universe is limited to that which is physical (matter, energy, etc.)

Thanks.

[Divine Insight]

1. What is your worldview? (Simple answer - Christian, Atheist, etc.)

No 'group' truly fits. In a word I'm agnostic simply meaning that I don't know what the truth of reality might be. I believe that all humans are agnostic on this question whether they fess up to it or not.

I personally find it difficult to believe in a purely accidental materialistic existence. As an added note here I'm very well-educated in the sciences. I have no problem with evolution, Big Bang cosmology, etc. I believe that science is correct and true. But that still doesn't explain why a physical universe that is capable of evolving into sentient life forms should exist in the first place. All science tells us is that this is indeed what apparently happened.

On a more philosophical note, and based on personal intuitive feelings, I'm willing to "believe" that something along the lines of the Eastern Mystical philosophies may potentially be true. Taoism, Buddhism, or something along those lines. I think I do "intuitively believe" that something mystical is going on, but I'm certainly not convinced intellectually that my intuitive feelings mean much.

So agnosticism is the only position I can claim. I simply don't know the truth of reality.

2. What does it mean to be human?

I believe that we are simply the most highly evolved species of primate just as science has determined.

One thing that would obviously "mean" is that I am currently experiencing the most highly evolved state of existence on Planet Earth. If there is any truth to concepts like reincarnation I may have been lower life forms in previous lives. I can't rule that out even though I don't have any clear memory of having lived those lives.


3. What happens after death?

I have absolutely no clue. We might simply black out at death and cease to exist as the pure secular materialists believe.

We might be reincarnated into yet another episode of life again, maybe as a human again, or maybe there are even more highly evolved lifeforms on other planets that we will "graduate" to become.

We might simply 'wake up' and realize that life was but a dream and we are the mysterious dreamer.

We might find ourselves before a board of higher beings who are going to evaluate our "grade" in this life. It's hard to say what surprise reality may hold.

4. Elaborate on who Jesus Christ is according to your worldview.

To begin with there is no such person as "Jesus Christ". Christ was not Jesus' last name. The New Testament rumors claim that some guy named Jesus was "The Christ" where "The Christ" was a preexisting superstitious legend. A legend that Jesus didn't even fulfill as the Jews will be glad to point out.

When when you ask "Who was Jesus?" you are asking many different questions at once because there are many different rumors of "Jesus". Which, if any, represent any actual person named Jesus is impossible to know. The Gospel rumors contradict themselves concerning who Jesus was and what he supposedly taught, did, and stood for.

Having been born and raised as a Christian I had a very deep interest in questions concerning the truth of who Jesus might have been and whether or not even even existed at all. My conclusions after many decades is that there probably was a guy named Jesus who argued with the orthodox Jewish Priests, called them hypocrites, taught opposite values than are found in the Old Testament, and was potentially crucified for his blaspheme against the orthodox religion just as the Gospel rumors claim.

I don't believe all the supernatural claims made by the Gospel rumors about Jesus. Nor do I believe that the actual person named Jesus actually said every single quote attributed to him in the Gospel rumors.

Jesus, if he existed at all, was most likely a mystic-minded Jew who was actually well-educated in Mahayana Buddhism or a very similar Eastern philosophy, and was actually trying to bring the higher moral values of Buddhism into his home culture of Judaism.

One thing that I am absolutely not agnostic about is that Jesus was clearly not the demigod Son of the God of the Old Testament as the Gospels rumors claim. This is one thing that is crystal clear to me. Jesus was no the virgin-born demigod Son of the God of Abraham.

5. How does your worldview deal with the concepts of evil and suffering?

There is no such thing as "evil". Evil is a term invented by humans to describe things that they simply don't like. If animals could talk many of them would consider humans to be the most evil species on the planet.

We made up the term "evil". No such thing exists. All that exists are thing we don't like.

And of course there are a lot of things that exist that we do like, and we call them "good".

As far as suffering I can look at that in three possible ways.

1. Suffering through the lens of pure secular materialism:

The answer there is simple. Duh? What do you expect? If life is just a random accident then why should everything be perfectly good and flawless? Clearly a pure secular universe is going to have suffering and pleasured randomly mixed.

So what we see is precisely what we would expect if pure secular atheism is true.

1. Suffering through the lens of Eastern Mysticism:

In this philosophy no one suffers anymore than they are willing to suffer. And they also bring all suffering onto themselves, either by their actions in this life, or potentially by actions in a previous life since they also embrace reincarnation.

They also point out what should be obvious. There is no such thing as emotional 'suffering'. We choose to suffer emotionally, often times beating ourselves up with this kind of suffering either from feelings of guilt, or because we are extremely angry over something that happened and we want to make someone suffer. Since we can't figure out who to make the person responsible suffer, we end up torturing ourselves thinking that this is somehow making the responsible party suffer too.

This may sound callous, but if we really stop and think about it deeply it's true. We don't need to suffer emotional pain at all. That is entirely a choice that we bring upon ourselves.

So the only suffering left to explain in Eastern Mysticism is physical pain. They actually have excuses for why this isn't as bad as it might see too, but I won't go into them here.

In short, in Eastern Mysticism suffering isn't as big of an issue as you might think. Also, since it's a spiritual philosophy the ideal is that we will eventually free ourselves from all suffering by becoming fully spiritual beings.

2. Suffering through the lens of Christianity or Hebrew mythology.

I don't care what anyone says. All suffering in a world created by a single egoistical jealous God who is supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient is entirely on his head. Trying to pin the blame onto humans is absurd, and IMHO cannot be made to work.

What would I like to be the truth of reality?

Well I confess that a purely secular freak accident of material is not the most attractive reality. So I would not prefer for that to be true.

Eastern Mystical religions with their reincarnation and everyone ultimately returning to the source (god) at least has a happy ending for everyone. So I suppose that would be ok.

I like the idea of being judged based on how well I did in this life. So the idea that we will be judged by higher beings after we die is attractive to me if and only if those beings are truly intelligent and reasonable.

The idea that some jealous God will hate us and condemn us if we didn't like his stupid bible or accept his plan to have his own corrupt priests brutally crucify his innocent demigod son as a drama to hold over the heads of humans does not appeal to me in the least. On the contrary, the thought that such a God exists would be the worse nightmare I can imagine.

A purely secular accidental freak temporary existence expressed by atheists would be a far better reality than the picture being offered by Christianity.

If Christianity were true verbatim as the Bible claims, then I would gladly choose death. That would be the only sane choice available to me.

So ironically Atheism is far more attractive to me than Christianity.

[OnceConvinced]

1. What is your worldview? (Simple answer - Christian, Atheist, etc.)

Atheist, but if someone could actually prove to me there was a God, then that would have to change and I'd be very happy about that.

What does it mean to be human?

If I had to answer I would say:

1) you are a humanoid species of animal.
2) you treat others in a benevolent fashion.

3. What happens after death?

You lose consciousness and your body returns to the planet via decomposition. I would love to believe in Heaven, but to me that is simply just a fantasy.

4. Elaborate on who Jesus Christ is according to your worldview.

I'm inclined to think he did exist and he was simply a fallible human being trying to get people to see his world view and live in a manner he saw fit. He appeared to also be a deluded man who believed he was the son of God.

5. How does your worldview deal with the concepts of evil and suffering?

It's just simply the way things have evolved. What we have is the inevitable outcome of millions of years of evolution. It may not be pretty but it makes way more sense than some all powerful all knowing being having always been there. Then zapping everything to existence using magic words and creating some ultimate evil villain who goes around trying to wreck all the works he's done and make people's lives a misery.

[Jashwell]

[Replying to post 3 by randomperson42]

Worldview isn't a word worth using when beliefs are so freeform.
Only ideologies (e.g. religions) generally restrict beliefs such that 'worldview' can be used.

The word worldview has little to no use. Other views a person has are not relevant to the truth of their other views.

It exists partly to invoke the idea of non-overlapping magisteria, i.e. that there is some "naturalistic worldview vs supernaturalistic worldview" dichotomy and that people are perceiving the world through different lenses.
This is not how it is - if I say I'm an atheist, this tells you nothing but my lack of belief in gods. It does not tell you whether I believe in an afterlife, the supernatural, other magic, vampires, homeopathy, astrology, etc.

It doesn't even hint at it.

It's also a term used to group people that might not belong together and then make it acceptable to assume common ground between them.



What is the difference between an atheist worldview and an atheist worldview?
One believes in an afterlife, the supernatural, the other doesn't but does believe in magic and thinks homosexuality is evil.

There is no 'atheist worldview', and there's barely a 'Christian worldview' considering how fragmented Christianity is at this point.