Comments on: God Dies: An Essay by Frances Farmer

By: Aron Campisano

Aron Campisano — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:10:52 +0000

Meaning..?

By: nolie

nolie — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:53:54 +0000

co-written?

By: sven

sven — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:14:26 +0000

Saleem, although I may not share your POV of the essay, I was able to follow your thoughts/reasoning on the subject matter. Please do not let others upset you with their agendas. Aron adopted an almost religious zeal in making his point.

Aron, we get it that you do not believe in God and quite frankly, you hammered the point home. Lighten up man, at least Saleem was gracious enough to visit and read the blog and leave a comment. I doubt she expected to become embroiled in a debate.

I also enjoyed the posting and essay! Thanks!

God Bless,
Sven

By: martin

martin — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 12:41:31 +0000

What you wrote here is amazing.

By: star213

star213 — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 03:33:16 +0000

Frances didn’t write the whole essay. It was a collaboration/joint effort from her peers in her drama class in hopes to win the grand prize to go to Russia but the point was the stop in New York before boarding the ship to USSR. She just wanted to be on Broadway.

By: Saleem Abdul-Azeem

Saleem Abdul-Azeem — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:41:59 +0000

I have realized that the term subjective does not quite satisfy the understanding I’m trying to get through. Experiential evidence is what validates God for the majority of humanity. Whether we seek to understand these phenomenon, is in the end solely up to the individual. In Frances’s experience she tried to understand but decided not to look deeper. What are we calling reality other than the laws of causation(cosmos)? Indeed the world we are in and the laws behind them are intelligent, so who or what is behind this phenomenon? The question begs for the answer of a higher Intelligence or else deems the universe chaotic which is not coherent with the laws we are now studying. My definition of God is the One who brought everything into being. The Beginning and End of the universe. The One whom none other is like, nor is that One begotten or conceived of with anything. The One who is Eternal and unlimited by any laws, imperfection or dependence. The One who brought our core of being into existence and we like everything else will perish and return to that One. The universe is clearly not a light matter for us to throw out searching for its purpose. Whether we call that search science, religion or spirituality we are all in it together.

By: Aron Campisano

Aron Campisano — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:56:47 +0000

Nope. Saleem, you’re downing in nonsense. You’re now abandoning common word definitions to support your existing bias.

Atheism is not faith-based, it is evidence-based, clearly.

The validity of God isn’t proven by popular opinion.

Regarding your examination of belief, faith and trust are not the same concepts. You’re blurring the lines between the two ideas to support your mistaken reasoning that one must have “faith” in everything, which is untrue. Of course, your implication here is that some “faith-requirement” to reasoning validates the concept of God, which is ridiculous. There is no faith requirement to reason. Facts are not subject to faith. Facts are facts.

Saleem, “subjective evidence” is preposterous nonsense, a classic oxymoron, and an imaginary idea. Evidence, by it’s nature, is objective. “Subjective evidence” is like saying “objective subjectivity”. Just nonsense, literally. Does 2+2=5 when you need it to?

Moreover, have you considered that your personal “subjective evidence” is also known as your imagination?

In closing, you are not alone with your mystical experiences. They’re not special. Atheists have them all the time, we just have the courage to call them what they are. They are almost always our emotions, desires and biases at work. When Atheists can’t explain something, they just say “I don’t know”. They never say, “it’s God”.

Why? Because throughout human history, the real answer never turns out to be God. Never. It also never turns out to be Godzilla.

Saleem, why not pour your efforts into a philosophy based on reality? Why spend so much time pondering mystical places, beings and states of mind conjured-up by ignorant men in the Iron Age?

By: Saleem Abdul-Azeem

Saleem Abdul-Azeem — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:36:24 +0000

The analogy that I left was not an explanation of arrogance but to explain the route of my argument. So again, don’t take offense to it in any way. I don not think lightly of you to take you as a fool, you are obviously very intelligent and the purpose of me responding is not to prove some height over you. Indeed, the essay is not about Frances believing in God, the point I was making about the essay was a matter of examining the process of belief. She believed in God before and then she didn’t, so my explanation was explaining the process of that change. Atheism which simply means not believing in God, is faith-based because it could not be proven and thus requires faith or trust. On the other hand, the majority of humanity is saying that they do believe in God, providing mainly subjective evidence. Objective evidence is not the only worthy type of evidence because some phenomenon(which I myself have experienced) cannot be explained objectively. So some proofs, by nature, require basic trust in them. Whether one wants to believe in a thing or not is not my aim but instead is to provide a common comprehensive understanding about things because in the end we are both part of the human phenomenon.

By: Aron Campisano

Aron Campisano — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:59:25 +0000

I’m not a baby, Saleem. You don’t have to grind it up for me.

I understand your position, and it is not enlightened, special or parent-like. Assuming God exists is just your convenient false premise. You’re simply using the circular logic that all theists use to cling to pre-existing belief systems that they can’t, for emotional reasons, abandon, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

You assume God exists, because you have been taught so since a young age by authority figures, like YOUR parents. Every argument of yours presupposes that he is there, but you have no evidence to lean on, only “feelings”.

Evidence is required for truth. Evidence itself is never subjective, it is objective and actual. All ideas and feelings do not qualify as evidence, no matter how desperately we want them to in order to support the existing and comfortable beliefs we have been taught since childhood.

Atheism is obviously not faith-based in any way, it is evidence-based, and by common, conversational definition it is simply the refusal to deny obvious truths (i.e. “God is gone” does not mean he used to be there). Atheism is nothing like theism, and suggesting it is isn’t an enlightened unique perspective, it’s just common cliche.

“God Dies” does not mean God lives, Saleem, no matter how badly you want it to. This essay is not about Frances believing in God.

I disagree with you, and you do not hold a position of greater understanding to inform me otherwise.

By: Saleem Abdul-Azeem

Saleem Abdul-Azeem — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:59:59 +0000

Im sorry to have left a deeper void of understanding in my argument. Don’t take offense to this but the crafting of my arguments is akin to grinding down food for a baby because swallowing it would be detrimental to it. Yes my argument is the same but it needs crafting so that it could be better swallowed by certain people. The essence of my argument was that though we cannot prove God exist does not mean he doesn’t exist. The proving or evidence for whether He exists or not could be subjective and objective and therefore would require both of these types of evidence. You are correct when you say that reason works best with evidence but these ‘proofs’ could either be subjective or objective. The unseen phenomenon(emotions, ghosts, dreams, etc.) are largely subjective and therefore are backed by subjective evidence. Yes there could be objective evidence(physiological, bioglogical) but even still we as humans who are created beings do not yet know the fuller picture(reality). Even astrophysics has proven that the majority of our universe is made up of dark matter and the rest is luminous matter. So there is still some things we do not know and cannot know just through human reasoning. Which goes back to another part of my argument which is not that reasoning is a fallacy itself but contains fallacy practiced in the human being. And to be clear ‘ism’ is usually used to describe an action, state or set of beliefs. Atheos means “without God” (theos = God). The proving for these types of things are largely subjective, which is one of the reasons why belief in them are described as ‘faith. It is dawning now upon me that even the atheist is faith-based. For the sake of inner peace it is not my objective to push ideas not tasteful to others onto others but to seek common grounds. I tend to find that the atheist is just as zealous as the religious fanatic, which is fine because their hearts are alive and searching.