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In the monotheistic worldview, our lives are imbued with meaning by virtue of having been created for a specific purpose by God. Thus, a common criticism of atheists from monotheists is that a universe that exists arbitrarily, where humans emerged from natural processes rather than deliberate creation, cannot possibly have meaning.

When I cook a meal, the meal could correctly say its creator (me) brought it into being for a specific purpose (to be eaten and digested). It could thus rightly claim that it has an objectively meaningful existence in its ability to nourish and bring pleasure to its creator. However, I doubt most humans would be satisfied to know their existence was only as meaningful as my meal's.

But is it any more meaningful to have been brought into existence by God for the purpose of worshiping him? Do our lives only have value in the context of a hierarchical relationship where he is superior and holds power over us? Would our existence be less meaningful if God had created us as equals, as his companions and friends, to share power with and make creative decisions democratically?

If meaning can only come from being created for a purpose, shouldn't God himself (who was never created and exists arbitrarily) be concerned that *his* existence is meaningless? Or if an uncreated intelligent being can create meaning for itself, why can't humans in an atheistic universe simply create our own meaning in just the same way?

If you're one of those people who says "We know the Bible is true because..." and then goes on about how there's no transitional fossils, or how the Bible predicted scientific discoveries before they were made, or how some people found the remains of Noah's Ark up on a mountain somewhere, in what sense do you actually have faith?

The whole point of faith is believing in something even though it might be false. Faith is an emotional conviction which isn't predicated on rationality. When you try to defend your religion intellectually, you are essentially admitting that you think it needs to be defended, which means you DON'T actually have faith in it, or that you are on some level ashamed of what you believe and are trying to make it make more sense so you don't look stupid. Spirituality should go beyond the petty desire to look smart in front of your peers.

To put it another way... If it came down to it, would you rather be miserable but have an unassailable belief system, or be happy but hold a belief for which there is no evidence (i.e., have faith in something)?

Parataxis, for those who are unaware, is a writing style in which there are no subordinate clauses: every sentence expresses one idea, or if it expresses more than one, they are linked by "and." This means there can be no explanation of causal relationships, no "this happened because such-and-such."

The Book of Genesis is written entirely in this style. This often leaves the reader baffled, especially about character motivations. We hear that a character does something, but we are never, ever told why, leaving the text largely open to interpretation.

I mostly want to hear from Christians who believe that the Bible is perfect (or at least that God had a hand in its writing). I don't want to hear "that was just how they wrote back then," and I certainly don't want to hear from anyone who just wants to bash the Bible.

Ten points to whoever has the most interesting thing to say.

Longer answers preferred.

Also, please include the religion, philosophy, or other worldview you identify under (or a relevant summary of your beliefs if you don't use a label).

I asked this question about a year ago, but my understanding of pantheism has evolved significantly since then, so I wanted to ask again, with a different explanation of pantheism, and see if I get a different response. As follows is an overview of my worldview. I apologize if it's lengthy, but it's really hard to properly represent an idea like this in a few words, as you will see if you'd rather just skip to the TL;DR.

I will use the metaphor of a pond, which represents the universe. There is a ripple in this pond, which has the uncanny ability to perpetuate itself. This ripple represents life. The further along the ripple you look, the better and better it gets at perpetuating itself (due to evolution). Past a certain point, the ripple has gained self-awareness, but it thinks it is a bunch of tiny separate bits of energy, not a ripple. This represents what I call the illusion of separation. It is the belief in the ego, the self as separate from other. This boundary is ultimately arbitrary and doesn't exist outside of our heads. As my allegory implies, it is only evolution that has caused us to believe in this illusion. It has helped us to survive better, but it is also making us suffer.

By seeing past the illusion and recognizing that we are fundamentally one with the universe, we can put our suffering in context. If you will indulge a bit of mysticism, we are the result of the universe getting bored, and deciding to play human for a while. Suffering while in human form just makes the universe (which we can also call God, or Brahman, or the Divine Self, or the cosmic consciousness, or whatever term you prefer) all the more relieved when it remembers that it was just, after all, a game. (It's important to understand that I'm not literally proposing that the universe is a spirit being that gets bored and incarnates as humans. This is heavily symbolic language meant to convey concepts that would be too difficult to explain directly.)

In order to keep the illusion of separation at bay, I meditate. Meditation suspends the ego and allows you to directly experience the flow of the universe. As I once put it, meditation is a way of becoming God, because once you realize that you don't exist, there is no one else to be but God (this, again, is heavily symbolic language).

TL;DR: The idea that there is a separation between self and other is an illusion. We are only (metaphorically) the universe playing human for a while. We can realize this through meditation, which suspends the ego and opens a direct channel to the flow of the universe.

So that's the gist of it. Thank you if you actually read all of this. I will probably hang around for a while to read any responses I get and reply to them if I feel the need to. I'm mostly interested in hearing thought-provoking opposing viewpoints. I want you to tell me why I'm wrong.

"There is no God."--Psalm 14:1

Yes, it actually says that. Go look it up. Or if you're lazy, just click here to see the verse in various translations: http://bible.cc/psalms/14-1.htm

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Now that you've read it, can we all agree that quote mining is bad? I'm tired of seeing Christians on here post quotes from Darwin, Dawkins, Hawking and Einstein that seem to show them admitting that God exists or that there's a flaw in the theory of evolution or that the universe seems to have been designed. These people do not and never will agree with you, and while you may be able to take words from their publications out of context so it looks like they do, that doesn't mean you should. Lying for Jesus is still lying.

(Can't wait to see how many people will totally miss the point of this question.)

It seems like a lot of people, especially atheists, tend towards this attitude of cynical superiority, like "Everything sucks and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot." It's like in some way they take satisfaction from having "figured it out," and now they believe they have the right to look down on everyone who still thinks life isn't that bad.

I wonder, have these people really gone through life experiences or had certain revelations that cause them to conclude that "life sucks and then you die"? Or are they just emulating a behavior that they think marks them as enlightened and superior to all those who remain optimistic? I ask out of curiosity, because I used to be the latter, and have never yet heard of someone who fits the description of the former.

Specifically naturalistic pantheism. Theists can feel free to answer too if they have something interesting to say, but "pantheism is wrong because God is personal and supernatural" is not what I'm looking for.

Some quick info so you know where I'm coming from: Pantheism is perhaps best defined as the recognition that all things are fundamentally part of one unified whole. We can call that whole the universe or God, but I prefer Oneness, to distance it from the scientific understanding of the universe and the theological understanding of God. When we do use the word God, it's not because we're monotheists, but because we view this mysterious Oneness as metaphorically equivalent to the deity that monotheists worship.

Just to be completely clear, (naturalistic) pantheism does not involve the supernatural. God is not a bearded man in the sky, but rather the sky itself. It is not a person, and it doesn't think, know, or act. It simply exists. The pantheistic afterlife is nothing but a dissolution of consciousness and a return in full to the Oneness. Unlike most belief systems, pantheism doesn't promise rewards after death or good fortune on Earth. It just affords a means of happiness and inner peace. It doesn't dictate any particular way of life, instead trusting that the transcendence experienced by communing with Oneness will come with intuitive behavioral changes.

I am mostly interested in hearing thought-provoking opposing viewpoints. Why is pantheism wrong? I will probably hang around to watch and respond to answers. Best answer goes not to the person I agree with but to the person who makes me think the most.

Recently in my studies of world religion I came across something that gave me an interesting idea. Some quick background: There is an Islamic philosophy known as Sufism. Many Sufi mystics during the Islamic Golden Age wrote that while meditating, they felt as though they became one with God. This was not to suggest that they believed they "were" God in the sense of having his intellect and abilities. They believed that, through meditation and by God's will, the psychic barriers between themselves and God had been broken down and their minds had become one with him, the source of all thought.

Later, a Muslim named Mansur al-Hallaj would be imprisoned and brutally executed for blasphemy: he had cried out in a state of ecstasy "I am the Truth!" (or "al-Haqq", an alternate name for Allah). Like other Sufi mystics he believed in a unification of man and God, and at the time of his death he apparently believed that he and God were one and the same. Al-Hallaj gladly accepted his fate, praying for his executioners to be forgiven and believing his death to have redemptive significance. The parallels between Jesus and al-Hallaj are quite blatant--indeed, al-Hallaj admired Jesus and held the unorthodox (for Muslims) belief that Christ was God incarnated, and no doubt this had a lot to do with why he was executed.

This got me thinking. We already know Jesus was well ahead of his time. Could it be that when he claimed to be God, he meant it in the same sense as al-Hallaj would mean it centuries later? A sense that he had achieved oneness with God through introspective practices such as meditation, rather than a literal belief that he was God in human form? This would fit with how he clearly makes a distinction between himself and God, and would explain troublesome passages of the Gospels that otherwise depict Jesus praying to himself, or claiming not to have knowledge of certain things when he should be omniscient. This obviously puts Christian theology in a whole new light. Interestingly, it solves Lewis's "lunatic, liar, or lord" trilemma neatly by showing how a perfectly sane and honest Jesus could have claimed to be one with God, without actually being one with God. Perhaps this can allow those who don't accept the divinity of Jesus to develop a greater appreciation for one of the most significant moral teachers of human history.

I don't know why I'm bothering with an honest philosophical question when the usual fare of this section is trolling and bashing each other's beliefs, but I guess I mostly want to see if anyone will reply. Like all of my questions, it is intended as a consciousness-raising exercise, but this time it's directed to Christians and non-Christians alike.

I know, you're against it because life begins at conception and aborting a baby is murder. But hear me out. The baby goes straight to heaven, right? A person who never makes it out of the birth canal never has a chance to sin--so they can never go to hell. Every baby you abort is a person you've saved from an eternity of torment.

What greater love could there be than to save your unborn child from the fires of hell, even if it means that you yourself will burn there for committing the sin of murder? You risk an eternity of terrible, unimaginable torment so your child will be safe in a perfect paradise. And surely, since you were acting so selflessly, Jesus will forgive your sins, if you call upon his name to be saved.

Now, you may say that if everyone did this, the human race would go extinct, and I agree. Abortion should certainly not be enforced. But if a brave mother wants to make that sacrifice for her child...what kind of Christians are we to tell her she can't?

Let's take as an example stories where there's a plane crash, and over a hundred people die, but one young child survives. This really has happened; for example the recent case of the plane crash in Libya where a 9-year-old Dutch boy survived. It's a miracle, God saved that child! Right?

Think about that for a second. Out of over one hundred people, God chooses to only save one kid? Not his parents or his brother, who died in the crash. Not any of the other children on the plane. Not any of the handful of innocent, righteous, Christians who, statistically speaking, were probably present on that plane. Only one random kid. And he wasn't even unharmed, he was seriously injured.

Was God just showing off? If so, why didn't he save everyone on the plane? It's not like this would be hard; there are plenty of cases where all passengers and crew survive a plane crash. And if God is okay with calling attention to himself by saving a kid, why not call attention to himself in some more obviously supernatural way, like making the plane stop falling and levitate just above the ground rather than hitting it, allowing everyone to get off of it safely?

Or maybe we can just accept that probability allows for amazing (but not supernatural) things to happen without it being an act of God?

To set the stage here, consider the following quote from Einstein: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can change this." He was a pantheist and often said that he was religious in the sense of the awe he had for the universe, but found the idea of a personal God naive.

Now note what two Christians had to say to him about this.

A Roman Catholic lawyer told him: "In the past ten years nothing has been so calculated to make people think that Hitler had some reason to expel the Jews from Germany as your statement [criticizing the idea of a personal God]."

The founder of the Calvary Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma said: "Professor Einstein, I believe that every Christian in America will answer you, 'We will not give up our belief in our God and his son Jesus Christ but we invite you, if you do not believe in the God of the people of his nation, to go back where you came from.' [...] Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, 'Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.'"

Personally I was floored to hear this from two followers of the man who encouraged love and tolerance of all people. It seems to me that they are essentially saying "An ethnic Jew insulted my beliefs! I'll show him, I'll say the Holocaust was justified!" Even if they were in the right to condemn Einstein (which by the standards of Christ, they certainly were not), how can people like this sleep at night knowing they implicitly condone genocide as a lesser evil than blasphemy? How are people like this allowed to hold positions of respect in our society?

This is a purely hypothetical question, so don't say "that would never happen because God does exist" and prance away content that you found a loophole in my critical thinking exercise. I want you to actually apply those God-given brains and consider this honestly.

I ask because many Christians say atheists have no morals because they don't believe they are held accountable to God. I want to know, does that mean that if it was proven that God didn't exist and there was absolutely no threat of hell, you would lose your sense of morality?

If so, is pleasing God and avoiding hell the only reason you behave morally? Did you even really have a sense of morality in the first place? Even psychopaths (who have no sense of guilt) can be made to behave morally if they have to under the threat of unavoidable punishment.

If all that is true, then wouldn't you agree that people like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, and Mark Twain, who all behaved morally and contributed much to our society, although they did not believe in the Christian God or any sort of force that would hold them morally accountable, are actually morally superior to you? And if you disagree on any of the previous points, will you at least stop making the absurd claim that atheists have no morals?

1. The ark couldn't possibly have been big enough to fit two each of all the land animals in the world. Some say Noah only had to bring a few kinds of animals and they evolved from there, but the flood was supposedly only about 4000 years ago. That much evolution cannot happen that fast.

2. If even one animal died (disregarding the clean animals that they brought extras of), its species would go extinct, so none of the animals on the ark could have died. Zoos employ far more people to do this kind of work and they still can't ensure no animals will die in an entire year. There's no way Noah's family could have cared for them all on their own.

3. There is not enough water on the planet to cover all landmasses. Feel free to provide any explanation for this, and I will add an additional comment telling you why your theory is impossible (unless you just say God did it by magic). Also, where did it go? Water doesn't just disappear.

4. Noah didn't bring fish on the ark, but many species of fish need specific salt levels in the water to survive. A flood would have caused mass extinctions of fish. Likewise, most plants could not have survived being underwater for the better part of a year. Even their seeds would have died from prolonged exposure to saltwater, rendering the vast majority of plants permanently extinct. Also, some kinds of bacteria can only survive in human or animal hosts. This means that the animals and humans aboard the ark would have to collectively been infected with smallpox, polio, gonorrhea, etc. for those diseases to still exist today.

5. Most of the animal species would have quickly gone extinct in a post-flood world. Again, the plant life would have been devastated, so herbivorous animals would have died quickly. Carnivorous animals would find all of their prey long dead, and if they ate anything that had been on the ark, we wouldn't still have those species. The inhabitants of the ark could not possibly have repopulated the earth.

6. If there was really a worldwide flood, the geological evidence should be everywhere, but there is none. We have ice cores and tree rings that show us thousands of years of geological history, with no disturbances to suggest a year when the earth was covered by water. Studies of the ocean floor also provide no evidence of a flood. Most damning of all, there are civilizations that have been recording history since before the flood. Not only should these have been destroyed in the flood, their historical accounts don't even mention a flood.

There are more problems than this, but these are enough to make my point. Be careful if you're tempted to reply "God could do all of this because he's omnipotent". Why would God have used such an inefficient method of cleansing the earth that would have required him to use so much "magic" just for any life to recover? Surely a perfect god could have done better than this. And why would he have painstakingly covered up the evidence of the flood afterwards? Undeniable evidence of a clearly supernatural flood could have caused thousands, myself included, to convert. That's not consistent with the idea of a god who wants us to know and worship him.

I don't ask this to troll or to try to "convert" you to atheism, but I'm genuinely perplexed as to how anyone could believe this after applying even the slightest bit of critical thought.