b1-66er: "Nature does not care about your safety and will kill you especially if are not properly prepared."
D4rw1n: Okay if dying is a spiritual experience, you can definitely get that.
Mountain biking yesterday I went over a particularly scary drop and I involuntarily yelled "oh my god," quickly followed by my internal monologue saying "oh shit. I don't have one of those. I might be fucked."
b1-67er: Perhaps "oh any available god!" Would be more suitable.
Advising people to hike by themselves without food in the wilderness is dumb. A buddy system where you check in when you get back is also dumb. No cell phone is probably irrelevant, there's probably no service out there anyway.
D4: Would be funny if the only god is some kind of spaghetti monster. Okay I guess you'll have to do.
Or if there really are all manner of gods and they go "Fuck - emergency call. Thor it's your turn. Ganesh got the last one and Dionysus is out sick. Again"
67: Dyonysus does party a little too hard
I have a theological solution for you D4. It seems that both saint Odan and Saint Augustine are considered patron saints of Aetheists. And the Catholics do pray to saints, asking them to advocate on their behalf to God. So you may have a path to salvation after all.
66: What a great play•
D4: The concept of a patron saint of atheists breaks my brain
But I guess if Catholics are praying to them for my salvation, my work here is done
That is even better than another, slightly more straightforward approach first outlined by the philosopher Blaise Pascal: Pascal's Wager. It essentially says that atheists should accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior ... just in case. It's considered an attractive wager because as an atheist it costs you nothing to say it. But if you are wrong about being an atheist, the payoff is infinitely good.
I reject it because it's not intellectually honest
66: Patron Saint of Atheists is the joker in the Catholic card deck.
No over card trumping the play.
67: But praying to saint Augustin as an atheist really requires no duplicity. It can be a I don't really believe this, but I'm in real trouble, so just in case kind of prayer.
There is an interesting question here. I think most Christians have moments, maybe big ones, of doubting their faith. And I think most atheists have moments of doubting the nonexistence of God. That suggests those Venn diagrams overlap. So at what point is the doubting Christian an atheist, and at what point is the doubting atheist actually religious?
66: THAT'S a good question.
There's NO DOUBT they're all part of humanity.
This is the equivalent of calling 911 from the inner city.
Probably won't work. In desperation, it costs nothing to try.
67: We can think of the Saint Augustin prayer as the "Hail Mary" move.
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