.

[_Buffalo]

Try reading Myths To Live By by Joseph Campbell. Especially the first few chapters.

[_Blixa]

I am atheist and I am no pessimistic.
As of myths I agree with You.
This is three line (including this one).

How isn't atheism pessimistic? I see atheism as quite a negative outlook on the universe. Agnosticism I can understand a little more, where one is more of a fence sitter. Outright atheism though, and the accompanied nihilism that goes along with it. It is like one has not only given up on the idea of a God existing, but given up on the probability or even possibility that a Supreme Being exists. Therefore, the motivation to search for meaning in the universe is gone, as with the effort spent trying to find God. Seems pretty pessismistic to me.

I probably shouldn't even enter into this, but...

You have quite a limited definition of atheism. If what you think were true, there would be no atheist philosophers, writers, artists, filmmakers, sociologists, anthropologists and so on.

Here's a jumbled list of various atheist writers, philosophers, artists---by no means comprehensive, just off the top of my head:

Julian Opie, Tom Friedman, Martin Creed, Graham Greene, Richard Long, Olafur Eliasson, Jeremy Deller, Kurt Vonnegut, Matthew Barney, John Fowles, Marina Abramovic, Andrea Zittel, Nadine Gordimer, Samuel Beckett, Edward Weston, Yukio Mishima, John Stuart Mill, Mikhail Bakunin, Virginia Woolf, Ashley Bickerton, Tracey Emin, E.M. Forster, Diego Rivera, Harlan Ellison, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Prince, A. E. Houseman, Edward Ruscha, Michel Foucault, Ariel Dorfman, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Schwitters,Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter, El Lissitzky, James Joyce, Nobuyoshi Araki, Phillip Larkin, Chris Burden, Luis Camnitzer, David Wojnarowicz, George Eliot, Yayoi Kusama, Leigh Bowery, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Gavin Ewart, Ezra Pound, Bruce Nauman, Hans Haacke, Robert Graves, Mona Hatoum, Matta, Damien Hirst, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Fritz Lang, Angela Carter, Sigmund Freud, Paul McCarthy, Jean Paul Sartre, Jeff Wall, Steve McQueen, Cildo Meireles, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, Slavoj Žižek,Tina Modotti, Benedetto Croce, Carlos Garaicoa, Simone de Beauvoir, Ryunusuke Akutagawa, Lord Byron, Joseph Kosuth, John Searle, Jack Smith, Albert Camus, Alexander Rodechenko, Man Ray, Otto Dix, Jean-Luc Godard, Somerset Maugham, Vladimir Tatlin, Guy Maddin, Eva Hesse, Georg Baselitz, Phillip Lorca-diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Robert Gober, Larry Rivers, László Moholy-Nagy, Sigmar Polke, Anthony Gormley, Walter Crane, Antonio Gramsci, Iain Banks, Seamus Heaney...

None of these people would say life is meaningless, none could be described as having a one-dimensional "negative" outlook on "reality."

[_beefcalf]

Ezias,

I am an atheist and I am an optimist. I don't, however, conflate my optimism with willful self-delusion.

It seems quite clear that the God as described by the major monotheistic religions simply does not exist. Christians, Jews and Muslims describe a god who interacts with humans, who blesses and curses the children of men in measurable, tangible ways. God cures this person of a horrible disease, God inflicts upon another person some horrible disease. God causes (or prevents) earthquakes, monsoons, cyclones and tornadoes, wildfires and floods, drought, famine and plague.

If God was the source of these interactions, there would be a pattern. Innocents would be affected at a measurably different rate than the guilty. Those of the wrong faith would feel his wrath more frequently than those who know how to recite the proper magical words.

But we don't see that. What we see, when we allow ourselves to look, is a world where God is so tricky, so clever (so deceitful?) that, although he interacts with every faithful believer, he conceals his interactions from the prying and inquisitive eyes of the world. Is the God of this world a lying, deceitful God?

No. God does not exist. But because humans do not like (or are unable) to contemplate their own non-existence, we imagine instead a continuation of our consciousness after our biological death. And we've invented all these thousands of Gods to be the shepherds of our consciousness in the afterlife, to be the sifters of souls and the final arbiters of justice in an unjust world.

To me, willfully pretending to believe something which is transparently untrue just to afford ourselves a little psychological comfort is the basest form of cowardice and dishonesty.

Evolution has granted our species a brain large enough and complex enough to discover and invent clever ways to survive and reproduce. As a side-effect, we have self-awareness. Just because this self-awareness is a by-product of natural selection and not result of a supernatural creative event does not mandate that we must sit around and feel sorry for ourselves because there is no sky-daddy. You easily dismiss the supernatural myths and legends of a thousand dead cultures which came before you. Just add one more to that great slag-heap of childish ideas and live your life!

Be the captain of your own ship! Continue to be a good person. To imagine that you are unable to be a good or moral person without some authoritative security guard looking down at your every thought and every action is just silly.

I am an optimist because I believe that humans can be better people when we are mature enough to accept the world as it is, not as we want it to be, and that as we accept this reality, we can be more accepting of each other, and treasure the gift of life more fully.

[_Fence Sitter]

Do religious people ever wonder about the reality of nature?

[_zeezrom]

Do religious people ever wonder about the reality of nature?

Excellent question!

[_Some Schmo]

Do religious people ever wonder about the reality of nature?

LOL... awesome, man.

[Rikiti]

.

[_Buffalo]

Do religious people ever wonder about the reality of nature?

What if God is nature?

That is how I view God anyway.

In which case, there is no need any concept of "God."

[_EAllusion]

Buffalo -

Reading such a post tempts me to call my salt and pepper shakers God and say therefore I believe in God. However, this is Ezias we are talking about and he almost certainly meant that to express pantheism/panentheism.

[_Mad Viking]

..is it evidence of common human experiences that cannot be explained by science quite yet?

Which human experiences are you specifically referring to that are not explained by science?