Naturalism, take 2
2006-06-10 14:54Apart from some childhood animism (apologizing to doors I kicked, mercy-killing my breakfast sausages) and fear of an unnamed but Zeus-like thunder god ("to whom it may concern, if you're going to strike my house, could you please wait until my parents get home so I'm not out on the street by myself?"), I've always been an atheist. (I think atheist and agnostic overlap a lot, but called myself agnostic once out of cowardince on a school bus, and was promptly shamed out of that.) Or "godless", to be more general. But over the years many debates, over atheism and religion, over libertarianism, over AI, made me realize that this was only one of two key issues, and possibly the less important one. Many an atheist will try to argue the impossibility of God, which I think is a crock, since I can easily imagine us being in some big comptuer simulation. The Christian deity is tres unlikely, but a Deistic Creator, while uninformative, is certainly possible. Heck, a meddling Creator is equally possible.
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