GeologyRocks

Hi, welcome to Geology Rocks! 

I have always been into the sciences, so i have no story like yours to tell.

I wish you luck doing your course!

Hi and welcome to GR!

I'm afraid I have never been "converted" to the sciences, in fact - pretty much the opposite! My parents just sent me out into the world and let me make my own mind up about things.

Not wanting to sound condescending, but there are probably people out there that could help you come to terms with this change in perception. It sounds as if you've undergone your own personal "paradigm shift", essentially, interpreting the same information in a completely different way from that used previously:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift

If I were you, and could afford it I'd probably consider consulting a psychologist or psychotherapist. (No offence intended there at all, I know that some people still attach a lot of social stigma to this particular act of, what is, in effect helping yourself.)

I regard the teaching of any Creation "Science" as tantamount to brainwashing. It is not science at all, it is theology, and as such belongs firmly within the realms of religious education.

By way of illustration, science can be, (and is often) defined as:

"Systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." www.dictionary.com <accessed 08/06/07, 19:11>

How can one "observe" a creator, much less experiment upon it to eliminate one's hypotheses concerning it?!

Anyway, I seem to have gotten a bee in my bonnet, and am diverging from your original post.

Good luck & best wishes for the Geology course, and of course, the comic book art/animation!

 P.S. I only hope that this recent revival of Ultra Chrisitan Fundementalism (UCF), that appears to be sweeping much of America, (and other countries too) is short lived, and is in fact a "last gasp" of a dying religion!

Again, welcome to Geologyrocks.  I know that it might seem that there is not a lot of activity here compared to some other boards.  However, there are some regular posters that will work to answer any of your questions.  Geology is a great subject to help develop your visual skills and being an artist helps as well!  Don't get too frustrated.  Creationism can be cured!!!

Welcome to the forums, I do hope you find them useful and interesting - I certainly do. Take a good look around, try some of the tutorials and check out the links section too.

Science can be described as an organized way of asking questions - so ask as many as you like, both here and on your geology course. Read all you can, sketch all you can (your artistic skills could be a real help in geology - both in field sketches and in diagrams for essays etc, I've always found it hard to draw what I mean). Don't be afraid of making mistakes - all science, all knowledge only progresses by trying new ideas.

Try to find a local amateur geology society - there are a lot about, and meeting with others who share your interests will stimulate your mind and soul.

 Best wishes!

Thank you for the warm welcome all. 

Hi,

Just ad d my welcome to the site and to reiterate that if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

UPDATE

I've hit a critical point in my atheistic development. I understand the only thing that matters in life is whether or not there is a greater life trajectory than another. By this, I mean the only thing that matters is whether your 'pride', 'intrinsic value', 'smile' and 'laugh' mean anything.

If we go absolutely nowhere when we die, you can do anything you want and your only punishment is the knowledge that you did nothing wrong in a cosmic sense when you did it. You can justify anything and hurt/help humanity or even conceptual beings perhaps littered throughout the cosmos.

For example, you could justify ending the life of the human species. Just end the suffering. Blow up the world. End this game of humans popping into consciousness in nothingness, forced to deal with the game of religion, existence and the pain and joy it gives.

Perhaps the human species will advance into space and find beings who will not enjoy our presence. What suffering will lie ahead in such a scenario? Thus, you can justify literally ending the life of a dominant species and effectively do some good to conceptual beings who will no doubt be hurt by us in some way.

Essentially, I have a clear visual understanding of my 'value' in a cosmic sense relative to any other being -- Hitler, Stalin, a mass murderer, a serial rapist. Anyone. I feel no greater than them. I feel like a killer at the top of the food chain, 'living it up', masquerading around like I have some kind of intrinsic value. I feel I could launch an offensive in the streets of any hypothetical city and suicide without any punishment.

I'm an artist and have now forced myself to embrace meaninglessness and lack of any intrinsic value when I go to create art. Why? Because the chances of any sectarian faith being true are very low. Running with any major faith and a specific sect in that faith seems like utter uselessness now. I've done enough work to see the probability on hitting on the 'right god' (tm). However, I come from a YEC schooling background (13 years of it from K-12). So I'm not a scientist... and only have a rough visual understanding of the evidence for and against evolution. I know YECs are holding onto their position with theories like 'no known beneficial genetic mutations', because it effectively allows them to launch into a hyperbolic attack on all religions, playing the evidence for their position, effectively saying everyone who doesn't believe is damned, join up with this or that Christian sect and "you'll be saved!"

So then, a YEC with a lifelong scientific background could still dominate me in a debate. I've studied some geology and read a lot of articles on evolution now... and certainly see the ways we can counterattack the YECs. Why would a 'loving god' create a world with evidence which is clearly interpretable for a theory of evolution which completely undermines its own genesis account of creation which it uses to effectively save the day with Jesus? Like Richard said -- if you've got monkeys rising to consciousness all over Africa, how could the story of Adam and Eve be true...and if there isn't original sin, why do we need a redeemer?

Regardless, you can play for and against every faith. You can be like Kenneth Miller and have faith regardless of these issues -- the liberal Roman Catholics, for example. However, we have the cherry-picking issue. Once you start to pick and choose, what stories are truth and which ones are fables? This leaves RCs open for attack. For example, conceptually 'work Islam', using 'faith' whenever you have issues... and you effectively have a faith system which is equally as probable a 'shot' as going with the RCs and Kenneth Miller. You could do the same with Judaism, as well as any sect of Christianity. All of the sudden, you have a VERY strong disbelief that giving any of your money or time to any religious organization results in you being on a greater life trajectory than any past, present or future human being.

This obviously results in a battle with agnosticism and the kind of 'morality' a removed deity of the agnostics would find interesting. If it did create us, it obviously is not very interested in morality. It certainly doesn't mind that we eat creatures which would be just like us if given more time to evolve -- killers at the top of the food chain, killing without remorse, just like lions on the hunt about to rip the heart out of another animal and purr with their cubs as they cover their faces with blood and animal parts.

Similarly, it (the conceptual agnostic deity we're now dealing with)let religion develop, which results in violence, hatred, bigotry, wars and much suffering. So then, if it doesn't mind this happening, why would it care what life trajectory you took? If it's even there and if it's whisking us away to a conceptual eternal realm, certainly, it's requirements for avoiding any conceivable 'eternal torment' or punishment are VERY hard to hit on with your actions in life.

So then, this leads to me today. I've done the work. Actually seeing the physical evidence and doing the lab experiments with my own two eyes is the only thing stopping me from accepting pure valuelessness in every life trajectory. Sure, you can find joy in anything (as well as balance that joy and happiness by considering the insanity of aidless existence in nothingness -- god (Einsteinian one) in motion in nothingness), but is it really joy if you know you could rip the heart out of any person on the street and eat it for lunch without punishment other than the punishment that is the knowledge of the nonexistence of punishment? Certainly, that removes your smile and takes away your laughter. It has with mine.

I now walk around and see everything much like a very odd system. I'm disassociating everything. Everything seems VERY odd -- like a system of structures succumbing to existence -- like rooms in nothingness waiting for activity to fill them. A walk through the city is like (pardon the movie reference) Truman walking through Suburbia in 'The Truman Show', sensing something is wrong. I sense something, and it is very scary. Like some sort of 'melted' system.. The once sure and confident reality projected from these structures in nothingness is melting away... and I'm seeing something very twisted and systematic. Something very scary. Everyone succumbing to existence without complaint. They chew and feed on this odd and textured material which mobilizes them.

So then, I realize art is not what we would consider a 'hard line' into the evidence. It's not science. It's not looking at the physical evidence and doing experiments 24/7 in an attempt to gain a mathematical understanding of the probability of evolution (which you're probably laughing at if you're a hard evolutionist, because it's like me asking if the earth is at the center of the universe -- but it's not that clear to me.). Essentially, I know my laugh, smile and 'so-called pride' are probably a complete illusion, and have subsequently stopped laughing and showing any emotion at all. I know the next step is to change life trajectories and look at the evidence.

However, I can't really break free of my trajectory now unless if I had a major boost from the outside. Still living with my YEC parents because 13 years of YEC schooling completely crippled my ability to think (I wanted to be a pastor and ended up attending major pastors conferences like 'The Sword of the Lord' conference in North Carolina, etc etc). So then, I see art as the complete embracing of meaninglessness and feel immense pain when I create art. I feel that the same is probably true for any scientific position and life study, but I'm not mathematically sure.

What I am sure about, however, is that statements like Sagan's at the end of Cosmos episode 01 -- "meaningless self-destruction" -- they seem hollow. They seem like manipulation and not truth. Like evolution forcing Sagan to make value statements to 'coo' his species into self-preservation. Meaningless? Why not end the earth and stop this game our species is playing in nothingness? Just end it all. Stop the game. Stop the balancing between suffering and joy. Stop the teetering between meaninglessness or the unprovable agnostic god which doesn't care about morality.

And I'm hurting now... and have no damn idea what to do. I tried to talk about it with someone at school and I think they put me on a warning list. Teachers are all now looking at me in a strange way.

When all of this realization hit about 3 months ago, I tried to drown myself in the bathtub. I didn't have the strength to keep myself under long enough though. I've hit complete and utter destruction of self.

How do you deal? I see Richard Dawkins smiling in the documentaries and on his page, but I honestly cannot understand how he smiles. Is it just for publicity? Is it a secret only he and a few at the top hold?

If it helps you to understand my position of what seems like utter honesty about my self-worth, I've been isolated without a friend for about 6._ years now. I've lost count.

There's no answer though, is there? It's just 'live' or 'die'. Right?

I'm talking about all the value statements of people like Sagan, Dawkins or any atheist at the top leading the pack. What they're really saying is "Let's just do this until our species dies out inevitably, like everything in the cosmos must die." Any religious system is not right or wrong in a cosmic sense. They are just 'there'.... a 'fly' to be swatted at by another fly. Both are flies and both are equal. Both are doing the exact same amount of 'good' and 'evil'... because there IS no good and evil. It's just stringy 3dimensional matter pushing itself around in nothingness, like some brainless game of bumping starstuff in cosmic pinball. Doesn't matter how you bump against one another. You're just bumping. You're always bumping... and the only thing that keeps us smiling and masquerading is because our global civilization cannot handle this kind of 'Vulcanism' --emotionlessness. We're not ready for it.

So then, I cannot do anything else other than drop art and go after science. I consider YEC the last stand for humanity's pride. Once it goes down, we have no intrinsic worth or value and we embrace a cosmos which is not interested in our prayers, actions or sufferings. We embrace insanity....and at this point, we're just working to get to something like Kurzweil's singularity where we can upload our consciousnesses to some system floating in the cosmos, completely removing the emotional factor of existence. Just a borg that gathers data in the cosmos.

Yes, I didn't go the geology route as proposed initially in this thread. I still didn't have the strength or interest because I didn't see how it's so inseparably interwoven with our existence and supposed 'intrinsic self-worth and value'. I returned to art school for two quarters and saw an IMMENSITY of students flooding the school, creating MORE AND MORE AND MORE art. ...like we need any more of it. Like the lungs of the earth aren't getting hacked enough so hordes of art students can draw a cartoon on some paper and then support whatever ideological system they're stuck in because they don't major in existence. We have enough art. Enough to entertain us for millenia to come. It's all the same... and we can't get over re-doing it all with different costumes, dress and color. We just can't get over it... and we're going to let this world destroy itself because we refuse to look at what's happening to the meaning of our 'pride' as a species, which is why Nietzsche and Darwin aren't smiling in their photos.

So then, any suggestions on what to do?

my suggestion is to lighten up.  I don't mean that in an offensive way, but find joy in everyday things if the totality of existence is perplexing you.  Don't worry so much about the meaning of life, just enjoy what is here in front of you.  OK, so you don't like religion, just push it to the side.  Sure our country and culture is constantly bombarded by people within it expressing and pushing their views, but I've found that it's actually not that hard to think "whatever they think is fine for them even if it's not for me" and just go about your day without giving it a second thought again.  I have a somewhat similar story to yours, as my parents took me to church all the time when I was a kid (didn't attend a religious school though), but when I was about 13 or 14 I decided I didn't want to go any more.  My curiosity about science has grown my whole life until I finally changed my college major to geology about halfway through.  But I choose not to think about what happens after death or too much about religious thinkings.  To me it's a subject that can, as far as I can tell right now, never be proved.  I mean yeah I'm an evolutionist, but as far as after death, I don't know.  The scientist in me says nothing happens.  But the side of me that never likes to be 100% on hypotheticals says well maybe there could be something.....  But I never think about it.  I hate thinking about something that can't be proven, as I'm very much a "If I see it I'll believe it" guy.  So I've long ago decided to just wait until the end of my time comes to think any more about it and to just enjoy life while I'm here.

But like I said, I think taking joy in everyday, simple things is the pleasure in life.  It could be playing video games, watching or playing sports, eating a big juicy steak, seeing a pretty lady walk by on the street, taking pride in building something or getting some work done, etc.  Getting all heavy in life is not for me.  I leave that to other people so that my blood pressure can stay low.

Your thoughts of going out in the street and killing people because there are no otherworldy consequences is a little disturbing.  Perhaps you should look at the consequences within your city, like.....going to jail?  If spiritual consequences don't matter to you, focus on domestic ones.  Live within the rules set forth by your country.  Even if you don't agree with all of them and think they have religious motives, they're not all bad.  Laws make me feel secure because they give me an outline of conduct.  Being totally free can be scary, whereas living within rules gives a sort of security blanket effect because you know you're protected from certain things and people.  Perhaps you should read Locke's "Two Treatises of Government."  It's not all just about government, but his ideas on the state of man before government and why certain aspects of civilization came about.  Freud's "The Future of an Illusion" is good too, and it gets into more personal psychology.  In it he talks about how he thinks religion was necessary when civilization was first beginning but has now lost it's effect and is no longer necessary.  Among other things, like human desires and needs and maybe why we feel them.  I read them in a class, and some parts actually changed my outlook on the world.

But I'm no psychiatrist.  If you are really having problems in life maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to see one.  We all want you to have friends and positive relationships, as that's one of the joys in life.