Well, the first impression of the double date is that it went great! Course time will tell. Again I felt like a missionary ... for atheism!!! My friend, St. Pickle and I both like to discuss atheism and Mormonism a lot, still, and I probably will for the rest of my life. But it was really fun talking through, and explaining all the ideas and beliefs we have, and all the facts that support them. It was fun to openly discuss how we lost our faith not only in the LDS faith but also in the idea of gods in general.
We ended up talking with the two girls for 5 hours.
In fact we started at 7, and talked till 10 without even noticing we were all so involved. The Starbucks people were cleaning and sweeping and St. Pickle was like "hey, are you guys closing?" and the chick is like "yeah, at 10 in five minutes." And we're all like "WHAT? its 10?" I think that is the sign of an amazing conversation.
And it was. The two girls were very open and did have a lot of doubts. It was fun talking about our views and finding that all four of us agreed that one particular thing or another just did not sit right with us in the church.
One of my personal accomplishments was to argue, from my view, of how you say a god does not exist if that god makes specific claims about itself and then other facts, or science, prove it false. One girl is very deistic and agnostic and instantly was against my statement. Not that I 'converted' her to my idea, but when I went through the Mormon god and how it is false and how the religion has some fundamental inconsistencies I was glad that the table had a general 'agreeance' with me. I like the idea of tearing down gods.
(note: if i receive requests and eventually feel like it, i may post my personal opinionated reasons for believing that Mormonism makes enough claims about who and what god is and does and that enough of these have been proven false or inconsistent that i can say with a very much more atheistic than agnostic notion that this god does NOT exist.)
I'm hoping that we all meet up again, it ended sounding that way. I feel that I have made two more friends. But, as with the mission, you sometimes leave these people and the next day they tell you they don't want to talk to you again. I would be surprised, given how much fun I perceived us to be having, if this happened though. It was very nice to have the 5 hour conversation, listening to other opinions, being forced to clarify mine, and for having a table of people who were open to talk about these things.
I also had a dirty monkey, and I'm still not sure I like coffee.
There was a question I wrote down, which I'm not sure we ever addressed directly. It is, "Who is they?" If there isn't really one person that made religion up, and there is no single power controlling things, ie: God, then what is the motive? Isn't it kind of unbelievable that society w/c-ould make something like this up? I think we addressed it later, but it brings up some good talking points. The other things I wrote down dealt with the idea of the familial relationship, and how it might evolve into religion, for the sake of a unifying father figure. That's all I wrote down.
ReplyDeleteHmm, good points. Course i think it's possible, but that's a big topic. Also it's a possible proof for a deistic entity in the universe, which i am very agnostic about. the father figure idea annoys me, but i do believe it is the cause of religion and religious following for a large number of people (though maybe a small fraction).
ReplyDeleteThe book Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer (leading cognitive anthropologist) answers this question very well.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Explained