Heaven is a state of mind

I’ve been down this road before, but I’m feeling grumpy, so…

Atheists who feel a need to proselytize and testify strike me as no different than the God-botherers who proselytize and testify.  Both think they’re saving me in some way but both just sound to me like they’re bragging about how they’re going to a heaven inside their heads.

Comments

[actor212]

I've had the worst online arguments with atheists, worse even than many conservative crackpots.

Me, I'm tolerant. Them, it's usually, "But you're so intelligent! Surely you see the logic behind having no God."

I have to bite back hard to remind them that if logic was the answer to everything, we'd know all there is to know already.

[El Jefe]

actor212,

This. As someone who spent part of his life teaching and even writing about the actual (not the cleaned-up modern version) Scientific Revolution and who knows a little about the real-world, "wetware" evolution of the scientific mindset, it's a healthy reminder that there are (as the social scientists say) cross-cutting cleavages among the mentalities of the human animal.

Lance,

Well said. The difference (well argued in philosophy, a field both these parties regard as simply a club to beat your opponents with) between belief and faith is lost on them, whether that's faith in the presence of God or faith in the ultimate sense-making of a universe with no God. Instead these stern recokners, in the words of Shepherd Book, "believe hard," crowding out life and curiosity and possibility and messiness and totality and other people along the way. Belief that hard -- and I've had both kinds hurled at me -- leaves bruises on the rest of us, and not because we are as they would say weaker, but because we view life as an experience to be shared and explored rather than a door to be battered down in a headlong charge towards a Heaven solely in your own scared little head.