Agnostics vs. Atheists

Just wondering where people stand on this issue?

My feeling is that perhaps there's a higher power out there - who really knows?

Perhaps we could have an internal tournament of the committed vs the non-committed?

Put me down for the agnostics.

The reason I use 'atheist' instead of 'agnostic' is because in at least one sense everyone is agnostic.  No one knows anything for certain.  We live in a world of probabilities. The burden of proof is on he who alleges; therefore, she who alleges the existence of god must give evidence of that position.

There being no reasonable evidence in the existence of the traditional god of orthodoxy, a theistic god with a personality, the default position is that there is no such god.  Defining god as some vague 'power out there' is to not define 'god' at all.

I simply believe, and I think many agnostics share this belief, that it is more probable there is no theistic god than that there is.

I don't mean to offend, but for those who share this position, 'agnostic' is a cop out.  I prefer to take a position and declare myself an atheist even though I have no absolute certainty about it.

New to the team, new to the forum - interesting discussions here!

I see agnosticism not as an alternative to either atheism or theism, but as something that addresses a whole different issue.

Agnosticism is about lack of knowledge and it's opposite is gnosticism, which is a a claim of knowledge.

Atheism and theism are the opposites when it comes to belief.

The don't adress the same thing - gnosticism vs. agnosticism is about whether or not you claim to know, while theism vs. atheism is whether you believe.

I myself am an agnostic atheist, meaning that I don't believe in god or gods, but I don't claim any special knowledge on the issue either. I don't claim my belief to be knowledge, but instead, I'm open to being persuaded by good evidence.

I can't help but feel that there's simply something missing, when people describe themselves as just "agnostic" - yes, so you don't know, but what do you believe?

There may be many people who really can't decide; who are truly on the fence on the question of whether or not it is likely that there exists a god. Maybe they should call themselves "agnostic undecided" or something to that effect to emphasize that they don't really hold a belief - not even a tentative, strenuous one - either way.

I suspect though that most people fall on one side of the fence or the other though, or at least tilt one way.

There are agnostics though who seem to refuse to confess to any belief, and in fact claim that not only don't they know whether or not there is a god, but that the question is fundamentally unknowable, to the extent that no belief, no matter how strenuous, is justified.

I think that this position is fundamentally flawed - because it seems to put one question - the question of whether or not there is a god - on a pedestal, and treat it differently from all other questions, without giving a good reason as to why it should be treated differently. The claim of, say, invisible unicorns existing doesn't receive such special treatment - I don't see agnostics arguing that since the question of invisible unicorns cannot be conclusively settled, it is unreasonable to either reject or accept the claim! But why not? Why is the God claim special, in that even tentative beliefs are somehow morally bankrupt?

There's nothing wrong with a belief, as long as it's not an absolute one - as long as it is tentative, and subject to change with evidence. I believe it's going to be a sunny day tomorrow. I don't KNOW this, neither do I claim to, I merely think that on the balance of evidence (weather forecast, clear skies today) it is likely to be sunny tomorrow. My belief is tentative, and I am quite willing to change my mind if contrary evidence comes to my attention.

My belief that there is no god or gods is similarly tentative, though I do consider the case for that belief to be quite a bit stronger than the case for tomorrow being a sunny day.

This is a quote from Bertrand Russell on the topic. Russell was a famous philosopher and auther of the book "Why I am not a Christian".

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

The problem with calling yourself "Agnostic" is that there are no real consensus between religious and non-religious about its definition. Since "Agnostic" seems to be interprented as "Prey" or "Weak" by many religious followers I feel forced to call my self "Atheist" when discussing religion as I usually do not want to spend several hours on discussing and explaining my linguistic position.

I am as certain about my athiesm as I am about the tooth fairy and unicorns.  It is true that there will never be any way to concretely prove that unicorns don't exist.  That does not mean that I must say "I'm not sure" when someone asks me if I believe in them. We are entitled to take a stance based on the evidence. 

If in discussion someone insists that I clarify my belief to account for the fact that there will always be a small amount of uncertaintly, I simply acknowledge that certainty is a sliding scale and I suggest that we try to define our certainty without using absolute labels.  Then I define mine using the example I gave above.

I have a problem with this insistance on "evidence." It may not be that there is no evidence for this or that or the other, but merely that we lack the understanding at a given moment to understand it. For example, how long did humans think that the earth was the center of the universe and the stars and other planets revolved around it? The "evidence" was right there before them! Look to the sky -- you can actually SEE the sun revolving around the earth, etc. Indeed, when the first serious astronomers thought differently, they were killed for their "heretic" thoughts. Too, the world was thought to be flat. Again, the "evidence" was right there. As our minds expanded and new information was gathered, we revised the old thinking and formed new theories.

The trouble with tis "God" idea is that it is, in my opinion, simply too "big" for us to grasp. If there were a God and if he did indeed create (please, not the biblical story!) everything -- that is, got it rolling and set up the natural laws -- I would not expect us to be able to understand him/her/it. We're still trying to understand the weather -- how could we possibly understand some Higher Being behind all this?

So I am content to leave that topic to my musings when I am in a philosophical frame of mind and call myself an Agnostic because I DON'T know and don't believe I CAN know.

But without any hesitation at all, I do reject every single religion I have ever come across. They are so obviously of human creation and attempt to define the Divine and go ridiculously astray with all their holy scriptures and interpretations thereof. Religions have done so much harm in human history. Witness the many wars, the many unkindnesses performed by man to man (and by "man" I mean "woman" as well), the many cruelties visited upon those with different beliefs. Ir makes me ill to even think of it. Ironically, most religions claim to be based on love.

Anda, we DO have evidence pertinent to the question of whether or not god claims are plausible - and that evidence seems to me to very strongly go against such plausibility.

However one defines god, I think that for the term to be justified by the definition, i.e. that it doesn't water down the concept of a deity down to something meaningless or trivial, I would say that the definition of a god includes the notion of agency; of cognition. That god is capable of having intentions, and carrying them out; that he/she/it's capable of putting together thoughts.

If we accept this basic feature to be common to all meaningful god-concepts, then we do have a great deal of evidence to speak against the plausibility of such a god existing, as a first cause or creator, prior to anything else.

The evidence comes in terms of cognitive science and neurology - the study of cognitive capability. The crucial insight that these fields of study have given us is simple, and obvious once you think about it, but it's one that wasn't available to our ancestors: cognition, or thought, isn't magic!

Cognition is produced by the enormously complex biological structure of the brain, or rather, the electro-chemical activity of that brain. Further, this complexity isn't just any kind of random connected network of neurons - it is very specific kind of complexity, with more than 50 different types of neurons arranged in very specific patterns.

Every single aspect of congition has been tracked down to brain activity in some part of the brain, and when any part of the brain gets damaged, cognition is impaired in a very specific way, depending on what part is damaged - whatever function of cognition that part was responsible for, is lost. Studying the effects of various kinds of brain damage on cognitive capability, personality, and the very feeling of self, and such basic features as the impulse to act, leaves little doubt that cognition is a very, very, complex, intricate thing.

After that realization, it ironcially simply comes down to the design argument:

If you find a watch on a beach, you infer that it must have been designed, because of it's intricate parts working purposefully together in a complex manner to produce a coherent effect. Now with living things, we know that Darwin provided an alternative to conscious design - natural selection.

But what remains true in the design argument is that complex intricate things don't just randomly exist, without explanation - they must have come about by some historical process, whether conscious design or a natural process.

Cognition is orders of magnitude more complex than a simple watch. Yet if I were to claim that there exists an eternal watch, which predates everything else, which just happened to hang around in nothingness for all eternity, you'd find this claim preposterous, I'm sure - you'd point out that it's unreasonable to claim such a complex thing to have simply existed, without having any kind of a history through which it's complex features are explained. You might also point out that it is a silly idea to have a time-keeper existing before anyone capable of appreciating time exists!

Given that, why would you find the claim that a cognition, which is orders of magnitude more complex, would have eternally existed and set off the Big Bang, plausible? What about the complexity of a god-like cognition, when the mere meager human cognition requires a structure consisting of billions of neurons, arranged in no hapazard manner?

What kind of structure would be behind this god's cognitive ability, and how did that structure come to be that way? Are we to simply accept such complexity without an explanation? Why would we find that any more satisfying than assuming that the world with all it's complex features "just is" without origin or reason, or process by which it came to be as it is?

Further, just as with the time-keeper keeping time for eternity for no-one's benefit, cognition too has features that only make sense in a social setting - and we have good evidence that cognition of the human kind evolved through a long and tortuous process of trial and error, and could not have come to be in isolation, outside a population of similar beings, and an environment to provide food and shelter. Why would it make sense to have a cognitive being without such history, with it's cognition fundamentally unexplained?

Now of course, if God is simply an alien in another universe, that evolved naturally, and gained through billions of years of technological development the ability to create universes, this point about cognition does not speak against the plausibility of that kind of a god.

In that case, I'd simply defer to Occam's Razor - would that being's universe then have needed it's own creator god? What about that creator god's universe? Is it God's all the way down, in infinite regress?

A much simpler explanation is to forgo such notions at least untill independent evidence comes along that can only be explained by such a cumbersome hypothesis.

Finally, one could perhaps argue that maybe only the cognition we know of is so complex, perhaps there could be simple, immaterial cognition, without all that structure - that, I think, is utter nonsense; first, were such a thing possible, why did evolution leave us with this redundant grey lump in our heads that does it the hard way? Especially considering how costly such a large brain is - it is the most energy consuming of our organs, it requires a large skull that forces our infants to be born premature and helpless, just in order to have the head still be small enough that it can pass through the birth canal - and even then this happens at great difficulty and danger to both baby and mother.

Further, cognition without structure and mechanism to produce it is like a car that works perfectly fine with it's engine removed - it would be magic, pure and simple.

As an agnostic I don't agree. You pose it as if atheism and theism are the only ways to go when it comes to belief. I'll argue that agnosticism definitely has a place in between.

I reject all 'modern' religions. At the same time I reject atheism, though I am sympathetic with alot of its underlying ideas.

I don't think that the big bang is sufficient explanation of how 'it all' started. Neither do I think the concept of an 'eternal god' is a good explanation.

I am interested in the discoveries science is yet (undoubtedly) going to make though. Perhaps it'll give us a definite answer, perhaps not. Time will tell.

Alphastar18 - are you also agnostic with regard to the question of whether fairies exist?

And I don't mean that as a derogatory question - not too far in the past, fairies were quite widely believed to exist, and things going inexplicably missing was "good" evidence for it - the fairies were thieving folk.

The point is that any argument for agnosticism with regards to the God question, seems to me to equally apply for agnosticism with regards to the fairy question.

Both claims have no good evidence going for them, both need to assume a whole lot of baggage in the form of open questions and inexplicabilities were they to exist, and both are/were used to explain observations that weren't easy to explain otherwise.

Did you read my post above, regarding the nature of consciousness and how I argue that modern cognitive research and neuroscience provide a devastating blow against the plausibility of gods? I wonder how you would answer that argument? It seems to me that some sort of a response to this consciousness problem would be called for in order to preserve the view that it is just as plausible that there is a god as that there isn't.

Atheism and theism are, in my view, the only ways to go with regard to belief - perhaps there's a "genuinely uncertain" position in between, but agnosticism doesn't - to me - seem to fit the bill. It's apples and oranges. Agnosticism is a lack of knowledge. Atheism is a lack of belief. Gnosticism is a claim of knowledge. Theism is belief in a deity.

I don't see any way to put agnosticism in between without conflating belief and claim of knowledge. I am an agnostic atheist, and see absolutely no contradiction in that - I don't know, but I don't believe.

Oh, and regarding the Big Bang theory, I don't think it does a very good job of accounting for origins either - but then again, modern cosmologists have proposed many models that do do a very good job at it, and manage to explain the nature and existence of our universe with a good degree of intellectually satisfying explanation. Various multiverse models require you to accept the bare minimum of otherwise unfounded assumption, have great explanatory power - faring in all these areas enormously better than the God hypothesis (which carries with it enormous and counter-evidentiary assumptions - see my earlier post).

I don't know if any of the multiverse theories is true, but they at least demonstrate that there are natural options that do not need to invoke inexplicably existing complex eternal cognitive beings.

Wow! You guys have given me a lot of food for thought. I won't even pretend I understand it all. As in Dawkins' The God Delusion, much of what you, Stegocephalian, said simply went over my head -- not because I used to be a blond, but simply because I have never studied biology in depth and some of the terms and concepts would simply require more attention than I can give them on this chess site to fully appreciate your ideas.

But do you really believe that everything is explainable? How about the parapsychological? Don't some people (more than others) have experiences beyond the "normal"? Again, this in no way proves God's existence or non-existence. All I mean to do in bringing that up is that there are many things going on that we cannot explain -- or not yet, anyway.

Too, we are so used to our many highly technical instruments that measure everyting from the tiniest particle or electrode or whatever that I think we have lost that elusive sixth sense. I honestly believe it may have atrophied from lack of use. Don't laugh, but I do think there is more to instinct than most of us would like to admit. Again, what has this to do with God's existence or not? I don't know exactly, but I often feel that there is SOMETHING out there (or in here) and that we can, during brief moments, communicate with it -- usually during highly emotional times, or perhaps in the midst of meditation, or..... I know I've experienced this connection several times, but have no explanation for it. I'm not saying it was a connection with some divine force, but I don't want to rule it out entirely, either. I can feel this when I look at certain art or listen to certain music (please, not Michael Jackson!) or read certain passages of great literature. There's just something there that touches me in some secret place that I'm not even aware I have in the day-to-day.

I don't expect the above to make much sense, but those experiences are part of what keep me from categorically saying "There is no God."

Does anyone understand what I am trying to say?

Yes Anda,

 I have delved into  parapsychogy to see if it could answer a few of my moments. Unfortunatly there have been way to many hoaxes with this to allow for any credibility. The only truth we have is what we have experienced personally ourselves.

You're SO right about there being way too many hoaxes in the area of parapsychology. But do the many hoaxes negate the few real legitimate parapsychological events?

As for things we experience ourselves, I admit that we sometimes chalk certain events to parapsychology when it later turns out that there is a  perfectly logical explanations for something that we perceived as being paranormal. Still, haven't all of us at some time experienced events that have defied any explanation of any sort -- except, possibly, "coincidence"? But I tend to wonder about "coincidences" -- especially if they are repeated an uncanny number of times.

Anda - first, do I believe that everything must be explainable?

Well, depends what you mean by that - if you mean that everything must be explainable in terms that are intuitively acceptable and understandable to us, so that when we hear the explanation we go "Ah! So that is how it is, but of course, why didn't I think of it before?", then I would answer no, I very much doubt that a mind who's "common sense" has evolved in quite a limited environment, on a scale where Newtonian physics are accurate enough to be indistinguishable from what the more accurate relativity predicts would be the kind of "common sense" that would allow the intuitive understanding of models beyond that scale.

That is why relativity, and especially quantum physics is so counter-intuitive. I don't know that people will ever achieve a comfortable understanding of what it means to say that light is both a particle and a wave.

If, on the other hand, you mean to ask whether or not I believe that every real phenomena has behind it a mechanism that operates within laws of physics and that produces that phenomena, then my answer is an emphatic yes! I do also believe that htese explanations are at least in principle within the possibility of people to discover and describe if not in intuitively satisfactory manner, then at least as mathematical models that allow us to predict how those phenomena unfold. There may be some exceptions to this - there may be historical phenomena, say, the question of what preceeded the Big Bang, which may be outside our grasp to conclusively settle, simply because of the lack of evidence that has survived from that time. I won't say that this is the case though - I don't think that cosmologists are without hope of ever answering that question quite yet.

Dawkins speaks of "consciousness raising"; the experience of realizing something profound that drastically forces you to new avenues of thought - understanding how natural selection works, and the power it wields in it's deceptively simple mechanism, is one realization that does that, as Dawkins argues and I would agree.

It's funny that someone can tell you the mechanism, and can explain it to you with evidence, but only after hearing it for the n:th time, or reading some particularly good description of it, does it really "hit home" - and that is the consciousness raising that Dawkins argues, I think.

Another consciousness raising idea, I think, is that if something does something non-trivial, non-random, then there must be a way in which it does it. There must be a mechanism behind any complex, non-chaotic phenomena.

This may seem fairly trivial on the face of it, but like the idea of natural selection acting upon variation, generation after generation, it may take some evidence before it "hits home", and becomes absolutely self-evident.

I think the evidence necessary comes from reading a little on research on consciousness, and how it has shown that consciousness is a product of the electro-chemical activity of the brain. Consciousness is not magic!

After seeing that even such an elusive and mysterious phenomena as the qualitative nature of the "feeling of being" can be traced down to actual mechanisms that produce it, step by step, acting within completely natural laws of biochemistry, you suddenly realize that claims of phenomena just happening, without a mechanism to produce them, are absurd to the highest degree.

You say:

"But do the many hoaxes negate the few real legitimate parapsychological events?"

I used to believe in the paranormal (just like I used to believe in God), and it was through my extensive research into the subject, in order to find good evidence to convince the skeptics, that I discovered, to my dismay, that no such evidence that would stand up to the light of critical scrutiny exists. At the same time I learned about human psychology, and the many surprising, intriguing, and disconcerting flaws that make it succeptible to drawing hasty and faulty conclusions when it comes to things we don't immediately understand - and how such conclusions, once they are formed, get only reinforced by the very plastic memory that actually adds detail to the original memories to make better stories - without your conscious knowledge or concent!

The many psychological pitfalls we are all succeptible to, added to the absolute absense of concrete evidence, forced me to conclude that there does not seem to be any such thing as a legitimate paranormal claim.

This does not mean that all paranormal claims are hoaxes though - the vast majority are reported by honest and sincere people, who whitnessed something they couldn't explain, and jumped at the paranormal "explanation"; with re-telling of the story, details get added, and the experience that may have been fairly trivial, becomes dramatic.

You say:

"Still, haven't all of us at some time experienced events that have defied any explanation of any sort -- except, possibly, "coincidence"? But I tend to wonder about "coincidences" -- especially if they are repeated an uncanny number of times."

Certainly there are coinsidences that seem uncanny to us, but the reason they seem uncanny to us is that our intuition is not built to deal with probabilities very well, nor is it built to deal with what is known as the law of very large numbers.

There are several factors that make coinsidences seem more uncanny to us than they are: first, we don't count the OPPORTUNITIES for coinsidence that did not take place, we only count the actual coincidences that did take place. A million-to-one shot is not that remarkable, if there are a million opportunities for a million-to-one shot of some kind, to occur.

The second factor is what is know as confirmation bias - this is when we cout the "hits" and forget the "misses". Striking coinsidences are memorable, while a coincidence that could have happened but didn't isn't noted at all. Our memory emphasizes those coincidences, and exaggerates them, because they make great stories, and are self-affirming (me as the center of some benevolent supernatural attention) and thus confidence boosting.

Finally there comes the bias towards making false positives - which is universal to other animals too, not just humans.

This bias is favored in all animals of any cognitive ability by natural selection because of a few facts. First, the world around us is incredibly information rich. Our senses are bombarded with imput that may be relevant to us - but brains, even human brains, simply can't deal with all that information; they must make assumptions and decisions - sometimes life-and-death decisions - on incomplete information. This leads to the inevitability of mistakes.

Given that mistakes are inevitable, the question becomes whether some KINDS of mistakes are consistently safer than other kinds of mistakes, and whether you could guarantee that the mistakes you make fall on the safer side?

The answer is yes - false positives are generally much safer than false negatives. An example of false positives would be this: Imagine two apes, one of whom picks up a berry from a bush, and eats it - and drops dead. Now the other ape sees this, and makes the inference that the berry is poisonous, and from thereon avoids it. Now if it just happened to be that the berry in fact was not poisonous, but the other ape just happened to have a fatal heart attack after eating the berry, due to no extent at all to the berry, then the other ape who concluded that the berry was poisonous, would have made a "false positive" error - seeing a causal connection where there is none. The cost to the ape of this mistake, would be the loss of one potential food source.

Now consider the converse - if the berry was indeed poisonous, and that is why the ape died, and the other ape concluded that "nah, it probably was just coinsidence", and promptly went to the bush and ate a berry himself. Then the ape would have made a "false negative" error - he would have dismissed a possible causal connection as just coincidence. The cost of this mistake would be death!

So it's easy to see why evolution has biased us towards seeing causal connections on very flimsy grounds - all it takes is a suggestion that there might be a non-random cause to something, and we adopt that idea. And once we've adopted that idea, it's almost impossible to get out of our heads - evolution did not favor individuals who forgot or dismissed the causal connections they had made; that would be risking a false negative.

The unfortunate side-effect of this is superstition - and you can see it even in animals as simple as pigeons!

B.F.Skinner first peformed an experiment that demonstrates this quite effectively:

You put a pigeon in a cage, and in that cage there is a lever, and a food-dispenser that can be used to drop seeds to a bowl. If you connect the action of the food-dispenser to the lever, so that pecking the lever would cause seeds to be deposited in the bowl, the pigeon, being naturally curious and pecking at things, quickly discovers this connection and learns to feed itself.

But what happens if you make the action of the food dispenser random, so that if you peck the lever, you've got 50/50 odds of getting seeds?

Something very curious - the pigeon gradually starts to do more and more elaborate motions between the pecks; it develops a "pigeon dance". Now how is this explained? It's the bias towards false positives. The pigeon has, in the past, gotten food by pecking at the lever, so it's got in it's head a rule "peck at the lever -> get food". But when pecking at the lever fails to give it food, then rather than rejecting the old rule (which would be risking a false negative), and concluding that it's just probably random, the pigeon elaborates on the rule. Perhaps, last time when it got the reward, it had it's weight more on the left leg? Let's try that - weight on the left leg, peck, and reward!

So now it's got a rule in it's head "Put your weight on your left leg, peck at the lever -> get food". But then again this fails. Again the pigeon doesn't scrap the old rule - it worked in the past, so there must have been something more to it that it might have done and not realized it, or perhaps there is a way to increase the success of this rule - let's say by swaying it's head from side to side.

And so the "dance" gets more elaborate, step by step.

Now think of people - how many times do you see people performing their versions of "pigeon dances" - they won in roullette once, so now the shirt they wore then is their lucky shirt that they always wear when they go to the casino; and it doesn't matter if they lose after that, the shirt worked before, so there just had to be something else that they did wrong this time.

It doesn't matter that people are smarter, and should know better - it doesn't matter that there is no conceivable mechanism by which a particular shirt could affect the spinning of the roullette, and where the ball lands, and it doesn't matter even if these people, when made to think about it, agree that there's no possible mechanism. But STILL, what if.... better not throw that shirt away, just in case.

This, I think, is the major "flaw" in psychology that is behind the persistence of the belief in the supernatural, especially among people who think they have witnessed supernatural events, and people who believe they possess paranormal abilities.

If someone genuinely believes, for example, that they can use their dowsing rod to divine the location of water, and you set up a controlled experiment, being very careful that the participants agree fully that the test is fair, and that all possible disturbances that might affect the result have been ruled out, and then they fail to produce anything above chance results in the test, how do you think they'll react?

99% of the time they'll be just as convinced afterward that they can dowse, because, after all, "it's worked before" - the intellect that we humans have over other animals is not used to critically examine this belief (that would be risking a false negative), but rather to rationalize the failure. Perhaps all those skeptics present emmitted negative vibes that spoiled the effect? Our "pigeon dances" are just more elaborate and imaginative than the pigeon's.

It doesn't even matter if you explain to the dowser the ideomotor effect (the unconscious movement of the arm), which is behind dowsing. Battling against a fundamental instinct against risking dismissing valid causal connections, hard wired in us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, is, most of the time, a hopeless task.

Related to all that I've explained here, there are some absolutely great, clear explanations of some of the more important facts to understand when it comes to evaluating claims of the paranormal, and the nature of coinsidence, are made by a YouTuber using the alias Qualiasoup. I'll give you the link to a few videos I hope you'll enjoy - they tend to be little under 10 minutes each.

Here you go:

Regarding coinsidence and probability:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5NPpoM5lIQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98OTsYfTt-c


Regarding anecdotes and open-mindedness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPqerbz8KDc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI

Wow! That was so much information! I won't pretend I understood it all, but much of it did sink in, even at the first reading. I have copied it into my Word documents and will read it more carefully and thoroughly later. Thank you so much for taking the time to write all that. I'm sure others in this group who are grappling with the same issues I am are just as appreciative. I will also look at the videos to which you so kindly posted the links and get back to you with my thoughts.

Thank you so much.

lol the ad at the bottom of this page...' the atheist riddle'    www.cosmicfingerprints.com

Thanks! I signed up.

By the way, am I going to have any time left over for my husband and 92-year-old mother with all these videos to watch and essays to read? Will I have time to shower? I wouldn't be too unhappy about not having time to make the beds and do the dishes, but I should hope I could have an occasional meal?

Incidentally, there is a very sincere Muslim who is very eager to teach me about Islam. I was up-front with him and told him I am an Agnostic and have no intention of converting to Islam (or any other religion), but I am fascinated by his earnestness and what he is claiming Islam is all about. So there's a whole lot of material he has been sending me that I promised to read -- and will.

Aaaaaaauuuuuuuugh! My head will be spinning by the time I'm finished all this. Maybe I should just look for a mountaintop and meditate for a month.

Which brings me to another point: meditation. They say that if you can be quiet -- I mean really, really quiet -- you can find the answers. I know that sounds far-fetched to anyone who hasn't tried it, but there is such a thing as "enlightenment". But it scares me, somehow, for my "enlightenment" can be different from someone else's "enlightenment" and then we're back to the problem of thinking that it is only our brain cells playing those tricks on us.

Anyway, thanks fto all of you who have contributed to my education!

Anda - you're quite welcome, it's a pleasure talking with you.

Regarding meditation, I am skeptical of whether or not there really is such a thing as enlightenment, but I do think that meditation is a very useful practice, that can help you in things like concentration and stress reduction. And it may teach you to handle adversity with less anxiety.

A year ago, I actually spent two weeks in a Buddhist monastery in England (the Amaravati monastery), practicing meditation, participating in the monastery routine for visitors, and spending time in their excellent library (imagine a library that wasn't very big, but had as many GOOD and fascinating books as a library many times it's size), reading up on not only buddhism but also on Western philosophy.

A great experience - highly recommended. I don't ascribe to Buddhist metaphysics, but there is much in the practical side that I've found worthwile. In the monastery, I found that after about a week of two hours of meditation a day (morning meditation at 5 a.m. - which starts the day - and evening meditation at 7:30 p.m.), I was completely stress-free, feeling good, and my reading speed had increased due to a more focused concentration.

Do you still meditate, now that you're back, even if not twice a day at 5:00 AM and 7:30 AM? What I find fascinating is how often we drop these very good habits -- even after acknowledging how beneficial they are -- after a while. I used to meditate every day, but no longer do, always saying I "should" (so why DON'T I?). I also used to practice yoga every day and was quite supple and could do a lot of fancy things with my body. Do I still? No. Why not? Chalk it up to laziness, I guess, but I hate myself for it. (Of course THAT doesn't help, either!)

I have to say that I've let myself slip in that department too.

I do meditate still, but not every day, and not as often as I should - it's just laziness, I guess, or maybe outside the monastery environment there are just too many distractions. Perhaps there's a social element to it too, in that it's easier to meditate when you've got people around you meditating as well.