What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a god? What’s a god to an atheist?

Nobody asked about religion.

The spaghetti monster

Odin, of course….

Religion did have good morals in theory. Not in practice.

Also, unrelated to your points, religion didn’t evolve. It stayed about the same for thousands of years, despite new science.

If you need to rely on an external force and fear of hell to have morals, you’re not a good person.

Exactly! I haven’t seen any proof of a god(s) but I’m willing to keep an open mind. At the end of the day if I live life trying to do well, I should be good.

That quote resonates a lot with me as well.

Wow, I had no idea that there was a quote out there that aligns so well with my beliefs. I grew up in a semi religious household but was never forced to go to church. My parents encouraged me to go, not only to theirs but even go with friends that were different religions.

After going to various churches through some really vulnerable times I still don’t subscribe to any religion, but I also can’t bring myself to go full atheist.

Too bad that quote is way too long for a tattoo 🤣

It’s a bit wordier (well, most people are wordier than the stoics lol) but Socrates had the right idea too I think:

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.

Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not.

What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.

Seconded.

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When I was religious (I’m not any more) that was something that never actually troubled me. I believed that god was benevolent but that suffering must be necessary in ways that we humans can’t conceive of. Who were we to question the grander plan?

Cool, and also terrifying.

You must’ve been thinking of Reddit…

Surely the reason you can’t disprove God is because you can’t leave the universe. Since it isn’t possible for us to know what is outside of our universe we can’t prove or disprove a god’s existence.

Assuming you are sarcastic - I agree wholeheartedly.

Look up The Invisible Dragon anecdote by Carl Sagan (in his Demon Haunted World book), or for more serious people - Falsifiability principle by Karl Popper, If you haven’t already.

Since science is deductive it’s probably impossible to prove the negative there, but I think there’s enough evidence beyond reasonable doubt that you can confidently deny it (unless your god is non-falsifiable, in which case it’s not worth discussion).

Same logic applies to unicorn and dragons, to be honest

R’amen

I went through an existential crisis in my 20s because I was ‘told’ I needed to be religious but never was. I read a lot of theological and philosophical texts and came to a conclusion similar to yours, if there’s a ‘God’, then they’re cruel. I oddly get Pantheism more than Monotheism, because at least it justifies that there’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deities but a lot of them are based on interpretations of phenomena that can now be explained by science.

I took much more to philosophy. I know what I believe is right and wrong morally, and science explains (almost) everything. If there’s a ‘God’-like figure, they can suck my nut sack because I believe they are at best indifferent, at worst, evil.

And of all the bad things, I find it quite disconcerting how many bad things organized religious have and continue to do. As someone raised Catholic, the organization leading it has, to say the least, a troubled history. This happens unopposed by an all-knowing, all-powerful being under the excuse of free will?