A committed atheist was on a trekking holiday when he became lost in some dense woods.
A large angry bear, with ten starving cubs back home and claws like kitchen knives, suddenly emerged from the undergrowth.
The atheist screamed in terror, turned and ran. The bear was quicker however, and after a long and desperate chase eventually cornered the atheist in a gully.
The exhausted atheist sank to his knees, shaking.
The bear, seeing that its prey was trapped, moved slowly towards the petrified man, drooling. The bear was drooling too.
The atheist lifted his head, with tears in his eyes, and uttered the words he thought he would never say in all his life: "God help me..."
With these simple three words, a blinding flash of lightning lit up the sky. There was a deafening crash of thunder. The clouds parted. A brilliant light shone down. The forest fell silent. The bear froze still, in a trance. The atheist stood gaping, transfixed.
A voice came loud from above. Louder than twenty AC/DC concerts all happening at the same time. We can safely assume this voice to have been the voice of a god of some sort.
"You atheists make me seriously mad," boomed the god, "You deny me all your life. You tell others to deny me too. You put your faith in all that bloody Darwinian airy-fairy scientific nonsense, and then what a surprise - you get lost because you can't read your stupid map, and now you're about to get eaten by an angry bear all of a sudden you're on your knees snivelling and begging for my help?......... You must be joking..."
The atheist looked down, realising that he was not arguing from a position of strength.
"Okay, I take your point," said the atheist, thinking on his feet, while he still had them, "I can see it's a bit late for me to convert, but what about the bear?... Maybe you could convert the bear instead?"
"Hmmn... interesting idea..." said the god, thinking hard, "...Okay. It shall be done." At which the brilliant light dimmed and vanished; the clouds closed; and the noises of the forest resumed.
The bear awoke and shook its head, a completely different expression on its face. Calm, at peace.
The bear closed its eyes, bowed its head, and said, "For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen.."
From: Analogies on learning
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I have reproduced the story above without any intention of hurting religious sentiments, least of all that of atheists...
"There was a deafening crash of thunder. The clouds parted. A brilliant light shone down. The forest fell silent. The bear froze still, in a trance. The atheist stood gaping, transfixed."
ReplyDeleteFV, haha. :) But atheists have been demanding such a light and sound show in order to start believing, and centuries have passed with no such act of tremendous awesomeness to dazzle atheists into following the one true path and repent for their lack of faith.
This atheist was not quite that quick thinking on his feet. If I were him, I would have requested god to covert the Bear to a buddhist or a pastafarian, but then clearly this god is a christian given what the bear did shortly after being converted to a religious fundamentalbeast. Funny how such stories reveal the mindset of the person who wrote it in the first place. :-)
"I have reproduced the story above without any intention of hurting religious sentiments, least of all that of atheists..."
Nice disclaimer :). The atheists who form their beliefs out of "conviction" rather than comprehension of reality are not atheists for long (like many ex-communists and closer to home, dravidian atheists (Dravdar Kazhagam) who go around wearing vibuthi and surreptitiously visiting temples.
Also, allow me to yell "DEATH TO ALL BEARS!!!" in the religious fundamentalist tradition of getting all riled up on hearing from reliable sources that a co-religionist was attacked by some other group..that is the norm for religious people, one hears (from reliable sources of course) :-)
Of course, anyone who has absolute proof of the supernatural can apply for 1 million dollar prize at randi.org -- don't wait, apply now, and god will ever be grateful to you!
1. have proof of god's supernatural awesomeness.
2. apply to randi.org
3. Profit!! (kaching!)
-Al
Very funny. Of course when things really turn against us we are more open to help from anything or anyone.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if atheists don't believe in anything supernatural or just a supreme creator called God. Maybe they just don't believe the explanations of the current religions and are waiting for a better one.
"I wonder if atheists don't believe in anything supernatural or just a supreme creator called God. Maybe they just don't believe the explanations of the current religions and are waiting for a better one."
ReplyDeleteThe former and the knowledge that science can only answer certain types of questions and not others. Religions depend on "faith" and science depends on verification via experimentation and validation -- the exact opposite of faith. Certain questions are not answerable by science because you cannot design experiments to validate those questions. However, when you understand how things actually work, which is usually based on hard mathematics -- and this can include understanding where the very edge of human understanding ends -- then you can easily see why religions have it all wrong, and why easy and simple explanations like "God" just won't do to understand the myriad complexity of reality.
At each level of reality around us, there is an immmense amount of details that can be understood once we can describe that reality accurately in a language called mathematics -- then the next step is to use that language to manipulate reality. You know your theories are "correct" in a statistical sense when you can use them to build machines and make them work, between limits.
God is just something invented for lazy/ignorant people who need something to hang on to when they can't think their way through problems that arise in their reality. Not to mention, it is a bit unsettling to understand at a basic level that every human and the entire human race is essentially irrelevant to the universe at large -- humans don't matter and never will, so "God" was invented to make us all feel special when we are not, and other humans who know better use this as a political tool to execute their own stupid plans.
"Of course when things really turn against us we are more open to help from anything or anyone."
ReplyDeleteIt would best not to generalize such nonsense -- it all depends on who you know. There are certainly a large number of people who take clear-headed look at the problem before them and work to resolve it, knowing fully well the parts they will not be able to resolve and those that they can, and what can be resolved and what cannot be resolved is something to get used to (or work with).