Chaos

Hi, I just wanted to comment that we've seen this message, and are discussing this.

Hi there! I have removed the Taravangian Odium spoiler in the topic title. Since those can be seen outside the forum in a variety of ways, we can't have big spoilers in topic titles. Sorry about that! @Rg2045 No comments on Secret Projects are allowed outside the Secret Project forum outside of spoiler tags. We need to allow people to go into those blind if people wish

Hi there. You're looking for the Stormlight Archive board. The 17th Shard Discussion forum is for discussion about the website itself, not book discussion. I have moved this to the appropriate place.

Hi there. You're looking for the Cosmere Discussion board. The 17th Shard Discussion forum is for discussion about the website itself, not book discussion. I have moved this to the appropriate place.

So a few things. Randomness totally exists. It happens all the time and does lead to some weird, unintuitive effects. Quantum mechanics, insofar as we know, actually requires randomness to match observations in the universe. It's baked in! I perfectly respect the notion that it does seem crazy for randomness to do so much, but I would just argue that it seems even less likely for there to be an all-powerful super being that is infinite and sees everything. One of these sounds so extraordinary that I need truly, truly extraordinary evidence for that. I guess I'd just say, "at least I know randomness and time definitively exists." Two, evolution isn't an "atheistic belief." There's so so much packed into that line that it's hard to even start. But I wouldn't even call it a belief, much as I wouldn't call gravity a belief. This phrasing makes it seem like you can't be religious and agree with the premises of evolution. That's definitely is not true. Plenty of religious people do! In my opinion, this is a pretty uncharitable point of view at best. I do not think you meant to offend, but I think you fundamentally misunderstand atheism, and it has kind of been bothering me all day. I can only speak for myself and not all atheists, but from my atheist friends, I think my experience is similar. Atheism is not about God/gods at all. I'm not "choosing" to not worship. I don't even think there is something to worship, so it's not even a choice, really. It's not replacing: it was never there in the first place for me. It was never in the system. It's not a struggle or anything. It's really easy. God never comes up in my thoughts. I don't feel anything divine, much less divine love. I may as well as get into my own personal experiences and opinions, in the hopes of trying to explain how my way of seeing things is pretty different. I do not think in terms of sin, so the standard Christianity pitch that everyone is a sinner just fails, because I don't think sin is a useful construct. I don't have spiritual experiences. I don't think I have a soul, and I'm perfectly content with the fact that my existence will cease (and I don't want to exist forever in an afterlife; no good can come from immortality to me). I don't wonder or look for some deeper meaning of life, and I don't feel the need to. The vast majority of events that happen are completely boring. Why did I go get a drink of water right now? I'm thirsty. There doesn't need to be a fancy metaphysical reason or plan for that. I think most events are exactly like that, and humans just ignore those boring ones to remember the important things. It's easy for me to say, yeah, I don't think there needs to be a deep reason why anything occurs. There doesn't need to be a meaning to it. I realize that might bother people, and that's totally fair, but for me, there doesn't need to be a plan for me. This is just not at all how I see the world. Why am I here at my current job in California? Because I wanted better pay than Montana, and I was sick of snow, and I was a good fit for the job. No metaphysics required for me and that's not a thing I think about. It fundamentally does not bother me that we are on a tiny planet rotating around one star of one hundred billion in our galaxy, out of two trillion galaxies that exist. We're small and unimportant in so many ways. It... almost feels like supreme hubris to think that everything was designed just for us. There doesn't need to be a greater meaning for us. If you are reading this and you think that's a sad, lonely, and meaningless existence, well that may be true, but it doesn't affect me in the slightest. I don't feel something is missing from me that I need a deity to fill. I don't need a deity to tell me to be nice to people, or feel guilty when I'm not. I can be perfectly happy without religion. Now, I'm not perfectly happy, but I will say, I was quite soured on religion when I was really depressed and suicidal that someone brought me to church (I can't remember why or how I actually got to church; I was firmly agnostic at the time) and the pastor basically made it sound like Jesus would solve all my problems, and my problems are all because I don't believe. Well, I got through that, and it was because of antidepressants and treatment, not any deity. If God helps and solves your problems, I am happy you found something that worked for you! I see a lot of bad religion does, and that doesn't endear me to it (I know it's bad people and not really a god's fault, but it's still kind of a rough sell.) I have seen many people who follow religion and Christianity and have needed to rebuild themselves from the abuses they received. There are many things I see that certain don't feel like God's love to me. Frankly, it can seem quite judgmental and hateful from the outside. Of course, plenty of religious people and Christians do genuinely aspire to act like Jesus and preach tolerance. Those people get my deepest respect. If you have become a better person because of God or any religion, I am sincerely happy for you. That's fantastic. I think the best part of religion is if people are like, "yeah, I am a better person because of this." God and spirituality is just completely irrelevant to my life. It's not a dimension to myself. I'm not trying to take it away from anyone, and if that's important to you, fantastic! I read these other experiences here and it's very interesting, but profoundly foreign and bizarre to me. It's kind of hard for me to describe how deeply strange this seems to me. If God did exist and I meet Him when I die, I am perfectly happy to tell Him that I at least believed in absolute verifiable facts of science and mathematics (important note: there is no element of faith as I think most would define it here), and I have not been fooled by false gods from other religions. At least I didn't choose the "wrong" religion. If He sends me to hell for that, then honestly, He doesn't seem worthy of my devotion anyway. Also, I'll ask him why the universe's expansion is accelerating. (It may show you how differently I think that I wouldn't ask for something like the meaning of life, and instead asking this.) I don't understand this question. I don't think anything said here can't be explained with some other, separate non-divine rationalization, no. Maybe this universe, but who's to say that the rules can only be this way? There could be an infinite amount of universes with different physics governing it. Maybe only a small amount of them have life, but that could still be so so many. The fact that the universe exists certainly doesn't need to imply that a god caused its creation. It's possible, sure! No question. I was an agnostic for a long time by this entirely reasonable idea. But I don't know. I can imagine a lot of other ways to look at this that don't require a creator. Plus a creator existing certainly doesn't mean, "please worship this specific deity." Anyway, the physics of it is kind of beside the point. I don't seek out or require a greater meaning, and even if I did, I don't think it exists. But hey, that's just me. Thanks for reading. I'll probably remove myself from the thread because I don't want this place to turn into a bunch of people trying to debate my atheism. I'm happy to continue if people would like to learn more about me, perhaps, or have a discussion.

Feel free to PM me, if you want, when you get a chance (I don't want this to be the Chaos show). But I will say that many people have tried to make the argument, and it generally doesn't feel convincing to me.

Sure, that's certainly possible, but God doesn't need to exist for that. I guess my thought is: if God created everything, then that should literally be a mathematical requirement for physics to work. It should be in all sorts of observations. It should be more than me just needing to feel God is real. It should be as obvious as inherent physics facts like gravity. If God was real, He sure likes hiding His majesty and making things with very physical properties, making Him feel unnecessary. I don't know. I want to write a book series on what I think an intelligent designed planet would be and really dig into it, because I don't think it'd look anything like what we have.

Sure, makes sense. Well I'm happy to explain whatever. I think people don't need religion or God to be morally good (or, really, that "morally good" even needs to exist or be useful). Humans are both incredibly special and incredibly mundane. Like, assuming there is no God--and I'd argue an omnipotent God would have obvious evidence literally everywhere, baked into the foundation of the universe, and that just doesn't seem to be the case--how amazing and special are we that the random chances that we developed in this tiny portion of the colossal universe? It's amazing! No one needs to save us; we have to do our work for ourselves, because there isn't going to be a planet B. But at the same time, eh, we are all just specks of dust compared to the grandeur of galaxies. Our sun will expand and destroy our planet eventually, and the universe's expansion will accelerate so much until no particle can ever interact with each other again. So no pressure; that's going to happen no matter what puny mortal decisions we make. What a fascinating dichotomy of awe and humbleness looking at the universe can give us.

I appreciate the responses everyone! I guess you're right, the word doesn't make sense out of a religious context. I wouldn't call those things a spiritual experience, because those just seem like normal emotions and feelings to me. It never felt divine to me. Special, sure, assuming that there has to be something so much greater like a god seems like a big stretch to me, personally. It's just interesting how I'd look at these similar emotions and ascribe perfectly mundane reasons to them. It would literally never occur to me to think of them as anything different. This sort of reminds me of high school health class, when a teacher said there are four different types of health: physical health, mental health, emotional health, and spiritual health. And I'm just here thinking, isn't spiritual health just a combination of mental health and emotional health that some people ascribe special meaning to? It never felt different from the others. @Ixthos I appreciate you writing this up, but I don't know. I certainly wouldn't say souls are a necessary way to think about consciousness and the body. I feel like there's going to be plenty of neuroscience we will eventually discover to find mundane explanations for all it all. But that's just me. And as a math person myself, though I know the math references and well know quantum mechanics and the use of imaginary numbers, I don't know if that's relevant or useful in here. Imaginary numbers were always a terrible name, that Descartes chose to basically mock them; they are just as real any other number. In any case, I think you're sort of going down your own metaphysical rabbit hole of things that may or may not be true. Lots of things could be true, of course, but how does one discern which is actually true? It's perfectly fine for you to believe this, of course, but I'm just saying that isn't a persuasive model to me. Though I don't think you intended to persuade, but merely explain how you see things. I suppose I'd ascribe a lot of these miraculous coincidences are just random happenstance. That seems implausible, but there's tons of random events that happen all the time. Have enough of them, and crazy things are going to happen to someone in the world all the time, even if it's rare for an individual. Like how the probability of you in particular winning the lottery is basically nothing vs. someone winning the lottery (which is quite high). I don't mean to turn this into the "Chaos talks about atheism" hour, of course. I'm happy to answer questions of my beliefs if people are interested. If not, I'll stop talking! I feel like I've already said too much.

Time for me to jump into this, because I'm very curious about something for those of you who believe: what is a spiritual experience? I'm an atheist, but was raised technically Christian. I say "technically" because my dad never opened his Bible and never took us to church. It was easy for me to fall away from religion, and it was unnecessary to my worldview. But I can truly say that I don't think I have ever had a spiritual experience in my life. I am married to the most incredible woman, I've seen gorgeous views in nature, all sorts of amazing things, but I couldn't say I ever felt anything spiritual in any of this, or anything. I am genuinely fascinated with religion because I don't really understand it. I get it intellectually for a variety of reasons, but I feel like I completely lack the ability to comprehend what it's like. I think in my own fantasy works, I end up writing about religious characters because I like exploring this, even though I don't really get it myself.

It's back on phone and tablet breakpoints.

No idea; maybe I'll just give up at have it go on two lines. Though on some phones maybe it's already two lines.

Yep, that's exactly what's happening. It's all about the width your viewport is at a given time. I'll add the emoji button a bit later this weekend.

Screencap this so I can see what breakpoint yours is using? Tablet can be a simplification since it is highly dependent on size and zoom level.

No, only moderators can pin topics. Pinning is a thing that the entire forum could see. Do you need anything in particular you'd like pinned?

Eternal Khol is not quite correct. It is because of the viewport. Zooming out is moving to one of the higher breakpoints (tablets, desktop) which have more buttons. I can readd the emote button on the phone one if people want though.

Oops, I didn't answer this third one. I mean are we talking like a fight to death? Odd premise, haha. I think I could take at least five of them. But you know, I don't exactly want to attack three year olds. 1. Euler's formula. 2. Physics is my jam! 3. This one is more tricky for sure. I can't say I've thought of this specifically. Lots of pressure to say something wise and poignant here. I'll say the American Civil War is a fascinating thing to read about. Its causes are so deep in American history, as are its effects. But at the same time it's extremely interesting to look at the tactics and the time period. If you want to have fun, just go to Wikipedia on the Civil War and see how many tabs you can get. Great reading. I will say that the Lincoln Memorial in DC was such a moving experience for me. Read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and the Gettysburg Address. Incredibly powerful.

Probably nothing that can be done until we do the new version.

I think you're overthinking this editing some. It's clear they can be summoned instantly in certain situations, so just edit the line to say that and cite the RoW chapter. No need to go into detail, and in fact we don't want to speculate on what may or may not be the cause.

Sure, go ahead and edit that. Good idea.