Why do atheists think they're smarter than most people?

[King Shizzo]

I'll tell you this. The message of Salvation is one that a person must process. Don't attach the message to anything else, including any version of any book. If you attempt to attach it to anything else, you will obscure it.

Process your information, independently, and don't allow something that may be bad, attempt to obscure that which is good.

You are right. Individual salvation is as unique as a fingerprint. You will not find it in any book or by filling a collection plate.

[SF1900]

Tito, looking good in that pic. what did you name that bear?

[King Shizzo]

You driving on the highway is scary enough.

You are on fire! Lol.

[Jack T. Cross]

You are right. Individual salvation is as unique as a fingerprint. You will not find it in any book or by filling a collection plate.

Hard to argue against that.

[Tapeworm]

Maybe he cares the least too much.

[deceiver]

so all by chance out of the 8 planets in the solar system only earth has developed a  well organized life with many types of difference creature...

what a coincidence

It's called probability. I don't know exact calculations but it is way smaller than 1/8 and at the same time way bigger than 1/[numbers of planets in the universe] so odds are, there is life on another planet somewhere. Yet, considering the distances between the planets and our limitations (speed of light ffs) it's highly unlikely we can find them.

Educate yourself because you clearly have a knowledge of a 5 year old.

BTW Pascal's wager assumes that:

1. God is good.
2. God wants you to praise him.

What if God is evil and wants you to kill people and doesn't want you to praise him or you will be damned? There are just as many reasons to believe god is like that as there are to believe that god is on the contrary - zero.

The whole reason why you so desperately want god to be good, caring so much that you will fail to realize that it may not be the case is your desperate need to be a part of something bigger. Deep inside you are still a child. As a kid your parents were god to you - you felt safe with them, they took care of you, they seemed powerful and you really wanted to behave good so they are proud of you. As you grew older and realized they are not as powerful and mighty as you previously imagined you failed to mature and found another "father", imaginary one, a "god".

God is your imaginary father, prosthesis of parent. 

[Natural Man]

The ones I know like to think they are smarter than others yet they are stupids.

Discuss

oh well...

here we go again.

We are animals who are conscious of being animals, it just how evolution made us. Our "intelligence" is just another strategy of survival that allows us to kill instead of being killed by other life forms, humans or not. The point of a life form is to survive, everything is strategy of survival. We help only those who help maintain or insure our own survival, we ignore or erase those who threaten our own survival or the survival of our genes -our offsprings-.  All life forms, vegetal or animal -man included- have for sole and only purpose to adapt to survive. Plant fight each others to reach the sun and survive, have more ressources, and constantly are at war with each others. Same with animals, they re all at war , struggling for survival against each others. Life is, war. Our thoughts fight each others, systems of beliefs (atheism which is a mix of system of beliefs, is a religion itself, made of a patchwork of beliefs) fight each others, we are at war with our parents who only take care of us hoping, calculating that in return when they ll be old we will take care of them. We are at war with our brothers, sisters, others. Life is unequal, and constantly generates inequality, if you want to end inequalities you d have to stop the process of life itself. Life is binary, life is fighting constantly against nil, the "nothing", tries to adapt to not disapear. It is blind and ultimately life is vain as it will be destroyed by some random event one way or another. Our personalities, identities  as we call them, are just a bunch of strategies of survival. Everything that exists, that is alive, is strategy of survival against death. We all attempt to give a meaning to this blind random process, and we re all sure we deserve to survive more than our neighbor who also think he deserves to survive and that you dont.
On earth in the animal and vegetal realms, you re either dominating, or dominated. Again it is binary. You re either creating life, or destroying it.
We all have to "choose" from a very limited set of main strategies of survival; flee, cooperate -cooperation happens when both life forms would be destroyed in an attempt to defeat each others, so as a result they are somehwat forced to cooperate- dominate or submit. All lifeforms have to follow these basic principles "rules of life" wether they re vegetal or animal. All humans constantly calculate how to survive, develop strategies of survival, this is what we call "thinking". Look at people; they re calculating how to dominate you instead of being dominated by you. We submit willingly to other people when we want something from them; strategies of survival, a protection, that we need to insure, maintain our own odds of survival. When people have nothing we need, we ignore them and have no problem erasing them -in a competition for a job, or food, which basically is the same-. People who are interested in us just detected we have something -strategies of survival- they dont have, and they want to acquire them by staying by our side, talking with us. Often once people got what they wanted from us, learned it from us, they abandon us. Except if their own survival depends of ours. We "love" other people because their survival insure our own survival. When someone destroys us we re automatically looking for someone else to follow and submit to.

All humans on earth are convinced their "god" (allah, buddha, shiva, etc) are with them and not with the enemy. In fact  they re confusing their own survival, their interests, with the will of a "god". "god" is the ultimate, perfect man/animal , and this concept is embeded in all human minds. In the end only the strongest, smartest, fitest will survive, I guess the survivors will consider their God to be the right one, as he will be the only one standing. At this point they ll probably realize they are, the god they believed in. In fact our faith in ourselves is just our instinct of survival, also called "ego".

The goal of westerners is to rise in society by using your intelligence to work, earn money and fuck others in the ass, get at the top of the pyramid. This is essentially the western philosophy of life. As long as you dont get caught, are smart enough to hide how you got there, it's allright. Other decide to develop maffias to survive, others pick being welfare recipients all lif elong as their main strategy of survival. There s no dumb strategy of survival, as long as it works. But in the end, all strategies of survival fail ultimately as everything that lives is mortal.

It's exactly the same process at work everywhere else on the planet, in all countries, communities, whatever the religion; because we are animals, these rules, principles, are animal ones; all humans run after the same things, we are all the fucking same and we all need, want, the ressources that get scarcer. Which means we will fight to death and will probably destroy oursleves ultimately. If we dont some random
"natural" disaster will take care of us anyway. Had it to happen, or only "freedom" would be to find a way to survive it. It is probably also the same rule everywhere in the whole universe; same causes have same consequences;
the receipe for life is the same everywhere in the universe. The same key elements are needed and "evolutions" probably take the exact same paths everywhere.  Our will to "know" , is the will to learn
how to dominate, to control, to subdue. It is often falsely labelled as a "good quality", but in fact it's just a sheer will to learn strategies of survival in order to better "know" how to dominate others and keep
them below.
Wether muslims , chinese orthodoxian christian russians or atheist westerners take over the world, in the end we will destroy each others for the last remaining ressources, it cannot be otherwise. Mankind will disapear just like dinosaurs and other past animal species. Mankind has an end, it's not a matter of if, but when. "How" is what keeps us interested in understanding how we will disapear. Probably some kind of sublimation process.
Odds are high humans from the future will be a mix chinese, russians, europeans, africans, and north americans. Only a few survivors having all the knowledges and powers, "gods". 

All lifeforms organize themselves in pyramidal societies where a minority of the rare smartest and/or strongest are a the top while the dumbest are below them and outnumber them by a tenfold. In all societies the richest, most powerful and "intelligent" pay dumb people who love to use weapons to keep control of the even dumber masses.
 You want to end this? then end life, because that's just the way life is.

Now these fast food fuckers work a shit job and probably deserve more than they earn compared to people who pretend to work more than they actually do; it's not like the corporations dont have the money. Problem is the minute they quit millions of third worlders will gladly take their places. This is multiculturalism and "globalization".  Looks like a salary raise aint gonna happen anytime soon.

All of this will somehow "end" very soon anyway when global economy crashes. Most of the first world population has been living beyond its means for so long a necessary and automatical balancing process will have to happen. Again , only the smartest fittest and strongest will survive.
Hapiness is dominating. You re unhappy when you cant dominate, when you hope, envision yourself dominating later in life, when you envision your ofsprings dominating , you want to live. You "sacrifice yourself" hoping that even if you cant dominate in your lifespan, your kids learning the best of your strategies of survival, will in their own lifespan.

Domination is happiness. In most animal species there are alphas males the fittest, smartest -in the sense of their ability to out think others in order to kill them or keep them below themselves in the hierarchy-  or /and strongest who are fewer, lead the weaker, sitting at the top of the pyramid. There are always more dumb, weak individuals in a group, and they all hope to become strong one day, to be at the top of the pyramid.  This is "hope". Eventually even the strong leader gets old and weaker, and if he was never "smart" and "wise", will be defeated by the youngest in violence. If he was "wise" -planifying his own future survival- he led them all life long so when they get stronger
they wont eradicate him and will take care of him...in order to learn from him his strategies of survival...his "wisdom".

putin, the sheiks and obama/bush and co are all laughing out loud with their arm selling friends and other "politicians" "religious leaders" trying hard not to choke on their caviar and champagne. They cant wait to start a little fireworks, but in the end, they re all business partners first and foremost. They dont give a single fuck about the common man, woman or kid from "down below in the pyramid", whatever his, her skin color. It's all about riches vs poors, powerful vs weak, dominating vs dominated.

There wont be any WWIII, the current war is between the 1% and the 99%. Considering the 99% want to be part of the 1%, they ll always keep destroying themselves at the amusement of the 1% who give them a salary instead of focusing on destroying the very same 1%. Animals, the lots of us.

The big, fat cigar smoking deciders are always comfortably sited in a nice warm desk, while the rest of mankind is trying to get at their level to take their place in the comfy chair.

If you re not rich and smart enough to be a slave owner or if you dont have the chance to be the son of a slave owner, chances are you are a slave yourself. Your two only hopes are that you or your offspring will become a slave owner instead of staying a slave.
When you dominate your feel good because you know your odds of survival are superior compeared to others who are dominated.
Being frustrated, a slave, trapped, makes you feel unhappy, being too unhappy for too long makes you fall into depression. Depression is just the surface of the water,
deep below is death itself. We re unhappy when we know we have few odds of survival, or when we realize our offsprings will be as dominated and frustrated as ourselves.

You people should read about hans peter zappfe who perfected what nietszche , darwin and other nihilists developed. He basically announced the end of mankind with
his essay about the "last messiah" while explaining how humans give a meaning to their existence. Before being thinking, believing animals,
we are animals first and foremost and our only goal is to adapt, "understand" to dominate and insure our odds of survival are higher than those of the competition.
 We re just an animal species among others , dinosaurs existed millions of years but were dumb. We are very "smart" but
we will probably die or destroy ourselves and wont live millions of years. Yes, all of this is is absurd. Dumb people are often happier than smart people. Real smart people
use their smarts to dominate others and can become happy as a result. Very smart people cannot be happy. Ugly people are nice because it's how they survive,
most good looking people, porwerful people see no need in being nice, as they dont have to, to dominate and survive. They revert to being nice when they lose
all their money fame or beauty. Most people are not happy or couldnt explain what is hapiness, because it doesnt exist. In fact most people who are happy
are not aware of why they are happy, they most of the time "designed" to be happy by their genes and education. Most people especially in the west
pretend to be happy more than they are, which is in itself a strategy of survival; you ve got to look happy, because when you feel depressed, others
see it and in order to make themselves feel good will try to destroy you, because you re an easy prey, target. We all do this. We are all fake, we are
all animals pretending to be something else, something "better", but it's just hypocrisy.
I went from atheism to buddhism, realizeb buddhists couldnt even defend themselves against chinese oppression, that it's easy to feel happy
when you re the dalai lama revered by everyone else since birth, realized he didnt help the least tibetans, i went into psychoanalysis, psychology, realized
psychologists are just paid friends who will brainwash you into their own beliefs hiding behind "science", then read the Bible and realized we were just animals.
My mother smoked while being pregnant of me , my father was a nihilistic atheist who cheated on her and abandonned us when i was 6. My mother remaried
with a step father who hated me... and thanks to my good looks i survived being supported by a woman with a self esteem. This is real life.
We re all trying to survive and there s no dumb way , strategy of survival, just strategies that work, and strategies that dont work. Some might work for a while and fail later.
As a result the strongest, best strategies of survival are those who last forever. I found out the closest is the jew / christian / orthodox religion.
Family, work, power, money, self improvement, domination, survival. Ultimately tho, every life form is doomed. We are a bunch of preprogrammed
strategies of survival inherited form our parents. We are the psychological, biological, physical sum of them. We are a mix of strategies of physical and mental
strategies of survival. We also learn system of beliefs that allow us to survive in our thought process, acquire them and then share them.
Strategies of survival fight each others randomly over and over and when you are successful at dominating someone, at acquiring a ressource others
are deprived from -the feeling of being uique, chosen = instinct of survival- you feel happy, the chemical receipe that produces hapiness in your brain  is complete.
Emotions, feelings are a byproduct of our attempts at adapting to survive. Life is all about killing or being killed. Humans are wird animals because
even unfit humans can survive, such feel depressed, frustrtated, useless, because other humans need them to get a job. People who "care" about
older people, handicapped, we only care about them because it gives us jobs. It pretty sums up the meaning of so called "compassion" and "empathy".
Young people tolearate and help older people only to learn from them strategies of survival that would increase their own odds of survival. Nothing is free. And old people
arent dumb, they slowly give their advices to the youngest in order to stay alive. Mutual interest. In insuring each others odds of survival thru "cooperation".

This is also why people ar ein debt nowadays; they want do buy the big truck, house in order to dominate others, even if they dont have the money for it. Assholes
who allow them do so in the financial system also benefit from it.
We re all looking for something that doesnt exists; perfection, omnipotence, eternity. We re all frustrated, imperfect, suffering constantly, and ultimately mankind and earth
will be destroyed one way or another. PRobably only a small fraction of mankind will survive and escape. The "chosen ones", result of millions of years of "evolution" and
artificial and natural selection among humans. But what will be the point of their lives? To survive. Find another planet...and there, they ll have to struggle for survival,
again.
Those who have kids raise them hoping they will dominate other little kids, let's not fool ourselves. We all hope our kids will raise in the pyramid, social, animal
ladder, to the top. This is "hope", hope to dominate, to control, to be powerful. This is what keeps us breeding.  This "hope". We dont have any hope for "mankind", we dont care,
we only pretend to care about people we have no links with in order to make ourselves look good, which itself is a strategy of survival; we re designed to only take care of our own genes,
and everything else is "competition". Observe animals: they eat, rest, and rest alows them to replenish energy and then they go hunt again, trying to survive and avoid being
eaten by predators. They sometimes cooperate or enter in competition with siblings in their species. We as humans are doing exactly the same every single day.
In more complexe ways, but essentially, we re doing the same.  We fight each others with stares, with words, with poses, with our fists. We rest to replenish our forces
for the next day, we hope someone bigger, richer, smarter, faster, wont find a way to eradicate us at work, in the streets, on the road. We buy bigger, impressive
scary looking cars to dominate others on the road. Rest, or peace, is only a preparation for the next struggle, war, fight. It's just a phase in a cycle, a process in another
bigger process.  We all thiink as humans we re unique, special, but we arent, we re just animals fighting to insure our own survival. We didnt even choose the whole thing,
we were spawned into this world without any consent. We didnt "want" it. We dont choose to be alive. We re just a bunch of strategies of survival and "we" reproduce them
blindly. Being successful at "surviving" makes us automatically feel good, being unsuccessful makes us feel bad, and when you fail too often at "surviving" you dont die,
simply become depressed, until you find a way to dominate others , we call this finding a "place", a profession, a function. Reality is, the majority of humans never dominate,
they are slaves to other more powerful humans. This is why the 99% are depressed, and the 1% laugh all the way to the bank, making money out of the 99%'s stupidity.
Most people barely survive daily, in their own thought process. We all need a strong, stable system of beliefs. It has to be reassuring and empowering. It has to give
a meaning to everything, even if it doesnt have a meaning. This is the software of our brain which is the hardware. If the software is corrupt, malfunctionning, the hardware/body is at risk
of not being able to function and to deteriorate over time.

This is probably the only truth there is. The one our brains conveniently try to avoid by not "thinking too much", by "working", being part of the society, by watching TV, sports
etc. Most people successfully pretend to ignore this reality because it endagers their thought process, the normal functionning of life. Life kills anyway, all of us,
in the end. No matter how long you pretend to ignore its real purpose, meaning, functionning. We occupy our minds working, having hobbies, perfecting, improving ourselves
until we reach mastery in one or several domains of our existences. But we never do this for others, but just for ourselves, because we want to dominate,
be unique, have unique skills that makes us important to others who dont have these skills, thus insuring we will have better odds of survival, being
more important than others. We never do this for them per se, we never do anything for others, we always do things for ourselves first and foresmot. 

You can be as intelligent, smart as you want, if you cannot use it to dominate others, you will realize the sheer aburdity of life. Ignorant, dumb people are in factsmarter
as their volonturay ignoring of what truly underlies life actually prevent them from becoming mentally sick. Being smart doesnt mean being happy. You need to be smart
and dominate others to be happy. This is why many artists who are "smart" are unhappy and suicidal and lonely. Being dumb doesnt mean being unhappy, many dumb people
are happy to not understand the daily routines they reproduce blindly, having no clue what they are doing. They re just following "dreams", "models". When we imitate
a model just like chimps do, we imitate someone else strategies of domination, survival, we learn them from them, we copy them, internalize them
and reproduce them to insure our own survival. We pick different strategies of survival from other people s strategies of survival. A personality , identity, is just that, a patchwork
of strategies of survival inherited, acquired, learned, by an individual.

[Borracho]

I hope to meet uberman someday and have a beer with him.

[Jack T. Cross]

It's called probability. I don't know exact calculations but it is way smaller than 1/8 and at the same time way bigger than 1/[numbers of planets in the universe] so odds are, there is life on another planet somewhere. Yet, considering the distances between the planets and our limitations (speed of light ffs) it's highly unlikely we can find them.

Educate yourself because you clearly have a knowledge of a 5 year old.

BTW Pascal's wager assumes that:

1. God is good.
2. God wants you to praise him.

What if God is evil and wants you to kill people and doesn't want you to praise him or you will be damned? There are just as many reasons to believe god is like that as there are to believe that god is on the contrary - zero.

The whole reason why you so desperately want god to be good, caring so much that you will fail to realize that it may not be the case is your desperate need to be a part of something bigger. Deep inside you are still a child. As a kid your parents were god to you - you felt safe with them, they took care of you, they seemed powerful and you really wanted to behave good so they are proud of you. As you grew older and realized they are not as powerful and mighty as you previously imagined you failed to mature and found another "father", imaginary one, a "god".

God is your imaginary father, prosthesis of parent. 

Don't get tripped-up by words, deceiver. Try focusing on meaning.

[deceiver]

Don't get tripped-up by words, deceiver. Try focusing on meaning.

What the fuck are you talking about?

[Natural Man]

Haha, I just mixed , synthesized probably everything I ve heard, read, and added some of my own observations to it, nothing really revolutionary. Many before have thought about it, many died and were forgotten, others started writing it on paper or stone. The funny in the end is that it's still religious people who ultimately keep the will to live/ the faith, and will survive thanks to strong and powerful families and who will inherit what is left of the earth. They willingly choose to ignore atheism which is a mix of nihilistic beliefs and just take the best of it to add it to their "belief in God" thus protecting their minds from being corrupted by destructive thoughts. The 1% who will go thru all of this will be religious because only blind faith can get you thru the inherent absurdity of life. Which somehow perfectly invalidate what is written in the coran,  in buddhism or other religious books, but perfectly validates what is written in the Bible. Only the hard working, nice, just believer will survive and be chosen for "eternal life".

[The True Adonis]

Why the fuck can't people be happy with not knowing? 

Thats a rather stupid and ignorant thing to do that paves the way for idolatry and superstition as well as stifles any progress.

Lets not know how germ theory works. Lets not know how to make vaccines.  Lets not know how to understand the Bernoulli effect and how to invent airplanes.  Lets not know how to do anything.  Why can`t we just be happy not knowing.


Thats the dumbest thing I have ever read Calfzilla.

[Jack T. Cross]

What the fuck are you talking about?

I'm talking about assigning a description to something called "God" that would attribute characteristics that could only be described as "ungodly". It completely ignores meaning, which is a pointless way to communicate.

[Jack T. Cross]

Gotta give props to uberman. Despite being overwhelmed with caustic negativity, the dude can spin some shit out of nowhere.

[Natural Man]

Happiness is linked to knowing because knowing is dominating controlling the environment, other life forms, wether they are vegetal or animal, which proves dominating underlies the feeling of happiness.
Knowing, controlling, dominating, means better odds of survival, means being happy. Being happy is linked to knowing that you have better odds of survival than others.

Many people are happy believing in systems of beliefs that "work" (ie insure their survival and the survival of the loved ones who reinforce by their alliance with them their own survival) simply because..it works. It produces and cover their daily need for gratifications, chemical receipes of hapiness in their brains that allow them to last one more day. Most people are happy because they follow daily routines that produce "well being" in their lives; they couldnt tell why or how they got there, the conditions were just ideal for them, as simple as that. Everything is just fine in their minds, everything has a meaning, an explanation, even what is unexplainable, which is reassuring. These beliefs also make them the good guys while giving a meaning to the ennemies, the bad ones. It justifies everything geographically, temporally and emotionally. Look at how nihilists end -vincent van gogh, nietschze, darwin etc, they all experiment with everything in life, atheism, nihilism, homosexuality, bisexuality etc; they all end crazy because the clear understanding of what is really "going on" actually drives anyone looking for a positive, pure, meaning of life to madness. Religions actually keep people away from madness and the will to destroy the absurd world, because if you re not part of the world, if you dont participate, build, insure its survival, you re actually fighting to destroy it, life is binary, you either build or destroy, if you re not building, you re destroying. And good luck finding out for sure if someone is actually trying to create, help, or destroy.

Anyone interested in understanding nihilism/ atheism and generally how we give a meaning to our lives should read eugene rose's work:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/nihilism.html

[deceiver]

tl;dr

nobody reads your ramblings, hope this helps.

[Primemuscle]

uberman is negative as hell, but he's one of the most intelligent guys on getbig.  Everyone of his posts are worth reading.

He isn't my favorite poster here, but I wouldn't say I dislike him. I rarely agree with him, but that's fine.

[Jack T. Cross]

Happiness is linked to knowing because knowing is dominating controlling the environment, other life forms, wether they are vegetal or animal, which proves dominating underlies the feeling of happiness.
Knowing, controlling, dominating, means better odds of survival, means being happy. Being happy is linked to knowing that you have better odds of survival than others.

Many people are happy believing in systems of beliefs that "work" (ie insure their survival and the survival of the loved ones who reinforce by their alliance with them their own survival) simply because..it works. It produces and cover their daily need for gratifications, chemical receipes of hapiness in their brains that allow them to last one more day. Most people are happy because they follow daily routines that produce "well being" in their lives; they couldnt tell why or how they got there, the conditions were just ideal for them, as simple as that. Everything is just fine in their minds, everything has a meaning, an explanation, even what is unexplainable, which is reassuring. These beliefs also make them the good guys while giving a meaning to the ennemies, the bad ones. It justifies everything geographically, temporally and emotionally. Look at how nihilists end -vincent van gogh, nietschze, darwin etc, they all experiment with everything in life, atheism, nihilism, homosexuality, bisexuality etc; they all end crazy because the clear understanding of what is really "going on" actually drives anyone looking for a positive, pure, meaning of life to madness. Religions actually keep people away from madness and the will to destroy the absurd world, because if you re not part of the world, if you dont participate, build, insure its survival, you re actually fighting to destroy it, life is binary, you either build or destroy, if you re not building, you re destroying. And good luck finding out for sure if someone is actually trying to create, help, or destroy.

Anyone interested in understanding nihilism/ atheism and generally how we give a meaning to our lives should read eugene rose's work:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/nihilism.html

Uberman, you speak like a man that does not have faith.

[haider]

uberman thinks we have forgotten his nihilistic rants from only a few years ago. Now he's made himself over as a christian and wants us to buy it 

[haider]

I hope to meet uberman someday and smash a beer bottle in his face

LOL, ditto 

[Natural Man]

Uberman, you speak like a man that does not have faith.

Im still not finished reading the Bible so obviously I d have a hard time saying i have "faith", and nowhere do i find humans or phenomenons that would allow me to find and hold it once and for all.  Actually it's a work in progress. Sometimes I feel like I start to understand what faith is, just to find I lost it the second after. It is indeed, quite an effort that is required, just like when you want to build muscles -naturally-.  Im currently exploring the opposite side of faith, the dark side of the coin. Most self proclaimed atheists (atheism being "in" nowadays it's pretty smart to tell everyone you re"in") claim religion and christianism are a bunch of bulshits created to control them , failing to realize it is the anchor for a stable and productive life that keeps regenerating itself while atheism lead most people to stop breeding after several generations of believing in it. The funny is that they re also scared by sheer, unalterated nihilism, which means they still hold christian values deep inside their minds. They pretend to be atheist yet "believe" in the seven days of the week, have christian names and so on. Be honnest ands push your reasoning to its most perfect nature; nihilis, then. Oh wait, nihilism causes one to want to end his life after a while. It means no more hamburgers, no more sex -or porn for most- no more tv, no more video games...no more hope for joy and happiness.

[cephissus]

Happiness is linked to knowing because knowing is dominating controlling the environment, other life forms, wether they are vegetal or animal, which proves dominating underlies the feeling of happiness.
Knowing, controlling, dominating, means better odds of survival, means being happy. Being happy is linked to knowing that you have better odds of survival than others.

Many people are happy believing in systems of beliefs that "work" (ie insure their survival and the survival of the loved ones who reinforce by their alliance with them their own survival) simply because..it works. It produces and cover their daily need for gratifications, chemical receipes of hapiness in their brains that allow them to last one more day. Most people are happy because they follow daily routines that produce "well being" in their lives; they couldnt tell why or how they got there, the conditions were just ideal for them, as simple as that. Everything is just fine in their minds, everything has a meaning, an explanation, even what is unexplainable, which is reassuring. These beliefs also make them the good guys while giving a meaning to the ennemies, the bad ones. It justifies everything geographically, temporally and emotionally. Look at how nihilists end -vincent van gogh, nietschze, darwin etc, they all experiment with everything in life, atheism, nihilism, homosexuality, bisexuality etc; they all end crazy because the clear understanding of what is really "going on" actually drives anyone looking for a positive, pure, meaning of life to madness. Religions actually keep people away from madness and the will to destroy the absurd world, because if you re not part of the world, if you dont participate, build, insure its survival, you re actually fighting to destroy it, life is binary, you either build or destroy, if you re not building, you re destroying. And good luck finding out for sure if someone is actually trying to create, help, or destroy.

Anyone interested in understanding nihilism/ atheism and generally how we give a meaning to our lives should read eugene rose's work:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/nihilism.html

great post but nietzsche wasn't a nihilist, far from it

I hope to meet uberman someday and smash a beer bottle in his face

[Natural Man]

great post but nietzsche wasn't a nihilist, far from it

The most speaking picture of nietzsche, probably summing best the results of believing all life long into his own system of belief/ religion he created:

Mental breakdown and death (1889–1900)

Photo by Hans Olde from the photographic series, The Ill Nietzsche, mid-1899.
The house Nietzsche stayed in while in Turin (background, right), as seen from across Piazza Carlo Alberto, where he is said to have had his breakdown. To the left is the rear façade of the Palazzo Carignano.

On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale from shortly after his death states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed to the ground.[82][83]

In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings—known as the Wahnbriefe ("Madness Letters")—to a number of friends including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt. Most of them were signed "Dionysos". To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote: "I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished." [84] Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.[85]

On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day Overbeck received a similar letter and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of a serious mental illness, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890, the art historian Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition. Langbehn assumed progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secretiveness discredited him. In March 1890, Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic and, in May 1890, brought him to her home in Naumburg. During this process Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche's unpublished works. In January 1889, they proceeded with the planned release of Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. In February, they ordered a fifty-copy private edition of Nietzsche contra Wagner, but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed one hundred. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing The Antichrist and Ecce Homo because of their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge.

In 1893, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth returned from Nueva Germania in Paraguay following the suicide of her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche's works and, piece by piece, took control of them and their publication. Overbeck eventually suffered dismissal and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed visitors, including Rudolf Steiner (who in 1895 had written one of the first books praising Nietzsche),[86][page needed] to meet her uncommunicative brother. Elisabeth at one point went so far as to employ Steiner as a tutor to help her to understand her brother's philosophy. Steiner abandoned the attempt after only a few months, declaring that it was impossible to teach her anything about philosophy.[87]
Peter Gast would "correct" Nietzsche's writings after the philosopher's breakdown and did so without his approval, an action severely criticized by modern scholars.[citation needed]

Nietzsche's mental illness was originally diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, in accordance with a prevailing medical paradigm of the time. Although most commentators regard his breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, Georges Bataille dropped dark hints ("Man incarnate' must also go mad")[88] and René Girard's postmortem psychoanalysis posits a worshipful rivalry with Richard Wagner.[89] Neitzche had previously written, "all superior men who were irresistably drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad" (Daybreak,14). The diagnosis of syphilis has since been challenged and a diagnosis of "manic-depressive illness with periodic psychosis followed by vascular dementia" was put forward by Cybulska prior to Schain's study [90][91] Leonard Sax, suggested the slow growth of a right-sided retro-orbital meningioma as an explanation of Nietzsche’s dementia,[92] while Orth and Trimble postulated frontotemporal dementia.[93] Other researchers[94] proposed a syndrome called CADASIL.

In 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche suffered at least two strokes which partially paralysed him and left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had another stroke during the night of August 24–25 and died about noon on August 25.[95] Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken bei Lützen. His friend and secretary Gast gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!"[96] Nietzsche had written in Ecce Homo (at that point still unpublished) of his fear that one day his name would be regarded as "holy".

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche compiled The Will to Power from Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks and published it posthumously. Because his sister arranged the book based on her own conflation of several of Nietzsche's early outlines and took great liberties with the material, the scholarly consensus has been that it does not reflect Nietzsche's intent. (For example, Elisabeth removed aphorism 35 of The Antichrist, where Nietzsche rewrote a passage of the Bible.) Indeed, Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche's Nachlass, called it a forgery.[97]

[Borracho]

Im still not finished reading the Bible so obviously I d have a hard time saying i have "faith", and nowhere do i find humans or phenomenons that would allow me to find and hold it once and for all.  Actually it's a work in progress. Sometimes I feel like I start to understand what faith is, just to find I lost it the second after. It is indeed, quite an effort that is required, just like when you want to build muscles -naturally-.  Im currently exploring the opposite side of faith, the dark side of the coin. Most self proclaimed atheists (atheism being "in" nowadays it's pretty smart to tell everyone you re"in") claim religion and christianism are a bunch of bulshits created to control them , failing to realize it is the anchor for a stable and productive life that keeps regenerating itself while atheism lead most people to stop breeding after several generations of believing in it. The funny is that they re also scared by sheer, unalterated nihilism, which means they still hold christian values deep inside their minds. They pretend to be atheist yet "believe" in the seven days of the week, have christian names and so on. Be honnest ands push your reasoning to its most perfect nature; nihilis, then. Oh wait, nihilism causes one to want to end his life after a while. It means no more hamburgers, no more sex -or porn for most- no more tv, no more video games...no more hope for joy and happiness.

[Natural Man]

now thanks to requote it without the typos.