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Latest post 09-10-2008 4:24 PM by Mike Waite. 4 replies.
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  • 08-19-2008 8:28 PM

    • Rich
    • Top 75 Contributor
    • Joined on 10-14-2007
    • 'lanta, Georgia
    • Posts 372
    • Philosopher King

    Who made god?

    I was stumbling around the Internet and I felt happy when I read this:

    http://atheistnexus.org/profiles/blog/show?id=2182797%3ABlogPost%3A85086

    The three of us were laying on my bed, looking at the ceiling and talking about the day. "Dad, I have to tell you a thing. Promise you won’t get mad," said Delaney (6), giving me the blinky doe eyes. "Promise?"

    "Oh jeez, Laney, so dramatic," said Erin, pot-to-kettlishly.

    "I plan to be furious," I said. "Out with it."

    “Okay, fine. I…I kind of got into a God fight in the cafeteria yesterday.”

    I pictured children barricaded behind overturned cafeteria tables, lobbing Buddha-shaped meatballs, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and Jesus tortillas at each other. A high-pitched voice off-camera shouts Allahu akbar!

    ...

    I asked if the two of them were yelling or getting upset with each other. “No,” she said, “we were just talking.”

    "Then I wouldn’t call it a fight. You were having a conversation about cool and interesting things."

    Delaney: Then Courtney said, ‘But if there isn’t a God, then how did the whole world and trees and people get made so perfect?’

    Dad: Ooo, good question. What’d you say?

    Delaney: I said, ‘But why did he make the murderers? And the bees with stingers? And the scorpions?’

    Now I don’t know about you, but I doubt my first grade table banter rose to quite this level. Courtney had opened with the argument from design. Delaney countered with the argument from evil.

    Delaney: But then I started wondering about how the world did get made. Do the scientists know?

    I described Big Bang theory to her, something we had somehow never covered. Erin filled in the gaps with what she remembered from our own talk, that “gravity made the stars start burning,” and “the earth used to be all lava, and it cooled down.”

    Laney was nodding, but her eyes were distant. “That’s cool,” she said at last. “But what made the bang happen in the first place?”

    Connor had asked that exact question when he was five. I told Laney the same thing I told him—that we don’t know what caused the whole thing to start. “But some people think God did it,” I added.

    She nodded.

    “The only problem with that,” I said, “is that if God made everything, then who…”

    “Oh my gosh!” Erin interrupted. “WHO MADE GOD?! I never thought of that!”

    "Maybe another God made that God," Laney offered.

    “Maybe so, b...”

    "OH WAIT!" she said. "Wait! But then who made THAT God? OMIGOSH!"

    They giggled with excitement at their abilities. I can’t begin to describe how these moments move me. At ages six and ten, my girls had heard and rejected the cosmological (“First Cause”) argument within 30 seconds, using the same reasoning Bertrand Russell described in Why I Am Not a Christian

     

  • 08-20-2008 6:45 AM In reply to

    Re: Who made god?

    I LOL'ed.  Kids are amazing... only culture can bring human beings from their incredible state of rationality and awareness that it takes a 40 year old man (or however Russell was at the time he wrote the book mentioned) to think with the clarity of a 6 year old.  Fuck cultural sensitivity... it destroys us.

    When people kill for a lie, they also murder the truth. - Stefan Molyneux

    “Don’t stop,” yes, no, I don’t, not ever, won’t, can’t. - J.C. Hewitt

  • 09-10-2008 9:11 AM In reply to

    Re: Who made god?

    and religion is hardwired? lol, awesome....not from where im stood :)

  • 09-10-2008 3:31 PM In reply to

    • Rich
    • Top 75 Contributor
    • Joined on 10-14-2007
    • 'lanta, Georgia
    • Posts 372
    • Philosopher King

    Re: Who made god?

    Here is another great snippet from that post that made me really feel for this girl.

    There was more to come. Both girls sat up and barked excited questions and answers. We somehow ended up on Buddha, then reincarnation, then evolution, and the fact that we are literally related to trees, grass, squirrels, mosses, butterflies and blue whales.

    It was an incredible freewheeling conversation I will never, ever forget. It led, as all honest roads eventually do, to the fact that everything that lives also dies. We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.

    “Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.

    She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:

    "I don’t want to die."

  • 09-10-2008 4:24 PM In reply to

    • Mike Waite
    • Top 500 Contributor
    • Joined on 05-01-2007
    • Utah, and no, I'm not a....
    • Posts 20
    • Diamond Donator

    Re: Who made god?

    That was absolutely beautiful! I'll remember it always. Seeing uncorrupted children is such an anomaly in the world we live in.

    Now I'm feeling angry. This could be the norm, instead of being such a rare exception. Arrrrg. We've so got our work cut out for us.

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