Would a dolphin recognize a table as a table? Probably not, because what we call tables do not serve any function the dolphin recognizes. Would a cave man understand the “correct” function of a golf club? Probably not.

So, tables and golf clubs have no absolute existence but only exist to the degree that we imagine functions for them. Aside from that, they are only random atoms.

Since, in this way, objects exist in our minds, they are not permanent things but are subject to change according to changes in the minds or perspectives of the observer.

Now, I’m not sure where the whole Men in Black kids-playing-with-marbles bit comes in, but I wouldn’t call such discussions “vague”. Unsettling, yes, but not vague and certainly not meaningless. Last time I checked, epistemology was a field of study valued by scientists as much as anyone.

I have to say you are certainly not making a very good case for the positive social benefits of atheism with statements like “imagine the impact your own death would have on the world as a whole – none whatsoever”. That’s not only depressing and cynical but also totally wrong.

Cripes, man, haven’t you read Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder? You know, the whole “killing a butterfly changes history” business. My death – any person’s death – would have an enormous, unknowable impact on future events. The presence or absence of any object or actor in the universe create nearly infinite ripples in the rest of existence. That’s just physics.

What I think you may have meant is that the presence or absence of one object doesn’t create an effect on the universe that can be easily measured by humans. But that doesn’t mean such effects don’t exist, and it’s the flip side of the whole “there is no table” argument: just because a human doesn’t perceive something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. (And, no, that’s not a contradiction, it’s an enhancement of the Buddhist “life is illusion” principle: we perceive things like tables that don’t have an absolute existence but fail to perceive things that do have existence like radiation, so our perception of the world is critically flawed and unreliable.)

Which ultimately loops us back to spirituality vs. materialism in general. There’s this great line in The Matrix: “You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

All these people, all through history, have had this feeling. This feeling has been so powerful to them that they’ve been desperately willing to swallow all sorts of patently ridiculous explanations (e.g. Scientology, Mormonism).

You, like all atheists, don’t have this feeling, so you sit and sneer at it and believe yourselves to be superior. But, of course, scientifically, you can’t know that’s true. It could be that people with spiritual feelings are in the early, stumbling phases of a new evolution of the human mind, and atheists are a throwback.

Or, it could be the reverse. Who knows?

All I know is that Buddhist meditation and ethics help people live better lives whether or not they buy into the epistemology and cosmology, and that it’s one of the few religions where that’s the case. So I highly recommend it.

Anyway, I just wanted to close off saying how much I’ve enjoyed this debate. This is one of those topics that so easily descends into emotional name calling but I think we succeeded, on the whole, in keeping this on the level of respectful dialogue, as befits a topic of such importance, and I thank you for that.

Everything we perceive is based on conditioned notions. Objectively, there is no such thing as a table, only collections of atoms we choose to call tables.

It is not just ‘a collection of atoms’. It is a very specific collection of atoms whose basic arrangement occurs frequently enough that we label it with a name to recognise this pattern. As such it can most certainly be said to exist. Saying that the name is arbitrary is fair enough, but there is no difference between saying ‘that is a table’ and ‘that is a collection of atoms we choose to call a table’ – one is just a shorter version of the other.

The briefest moment of thought will easily demonstrate that no existence is independent; all existence is inter-dependent. Our human perception of independent, personal existence is therefore a delusion.

Being independent and being individual are two different things. Of course everything is inter-dependent, but if you don’t think there is such a thing as individuality imagine the impact your own death would have on the world as a whole – none whatsoever. In which case there must being something ’separate’ about you as an individual or surely you couldn’t just vanish like that without leaving so much as a ripple.

It should also be noted that individuality is not unique to humans and exists throughout the animal kingdom. It may be a mysterious and ill-understood concept, but we aren’t the only ones who feel it.

This higher-evolved mind you are talking about sounds pretty much like any old run of the mill trance-like state which is not exclusive to Buddhism and does not need to be dressed up in fancy language.

Ultimately, whilst the people who feel strongly about all the stuff you mentioned are welcome to feel it and take it seriously, the whole thing is sufficiently vague as to be pretty much meaningless – along the lines of the table vs. bunch of atoms non-argument.

It’s a bit like the ‘existence could all be in the imagination of a five-year-old boy’. Sure it could, but so what? Does that really change anything? We all have imperfect information about the universe and we don’t really know what it means to be, say, me, instead of you, or Gary Busey. So we act on what we can have in front of us.

Can I disprove the scenario at the end of Men in Black, where the aliens are playing marbles with little galss balls enclosing entire universes? No, of course not, but I have no desire to do so. In all practical senses it is a meaningless speculation.

Even the most realistic, non-superstitious schools of Buddhism have a level of transcendency, albeit a rather proto-Nietschean one, which runs like this:

Everything we perceive is based on conditioned notions. Objectively, there is no such thing as a table, only collections of atoms we choose to call tables.

Therefore, everything we think and do is fraught with illusion because it is all based on our own accrued preconditioned notions.

First and foremost of these illusions is the notion of independent existence. The briefest moment of thought will easily demonstrate that no existence is independent; all existence is inter-dependent. Our human perception of independent, personal existence is therefore a delusion.

This delusion causes us to suffer and to cause suffering, because it blocks us from properly perceiving our interconnection with all other people and things.

It is possible, under the right conditions and, typically, with great effort, to achieve a more highly evolved form of human consciousness that is beyond conditioned perception and the delusion of independent existence. This higher-evolved mind does not suffer and is in harmony with all existence. (At least, this is what we’re told by numerous people who have allegedly achieved such super-consciousness.)

So, you see, that is all one hell of a lot more than just some little “set of life principles”. It is a viewpoint that, while entirely realistic, is nonetheless at odds with the narrow definitions of materialism and atheism.

And, yes, I do expect these views to have special status because they are the ultimate truth. Of course the truth should have special status, right?

If it doesn’t invoke magic and simply sticks to the ‘what you say has an impact on future generations’ or ‘you should behave in a certain way’ then there’s nothing to have problem with unless they start annexing these ideas into some special status simply because they have decided to define them as religious.

But basically saying ‘be nice to people’ or ‘think about the impact of what your doing’… well, that may be included in some religions but its hardly exclusive to them, is it? If that was all they were saying I’d have no argument.

As soon as they start talking about infinite reincarnation then it changes somewhat.

Calling a basic set of life principles a religion is a bit meaningless because every single person has those. Are my principles for living qualitatively different from a religious person whose religion invokes no magic and no dogma? Probably not, but then I don’t claim special privilege for the principles by which I live my life over and above any other sort of idea I or anyone else might hold.

Love and forgiveness are functions of being a social animal? Whoa, that’s a stretch. Maybe you can say that about concepts like “tolerance” or “accommodation”, but among us chimpanzee-type species even those notions have to compete with those other strong, strong social impulses, like revenge/justice/fairness and desire for dominance in all situations. Forgiveness in particular is a singularly counter-intuitive idea that requires us to stretch beyond just being social animals.

As for stepping off a building on faith, of course I’m not going to do that because I feel afraid just thinking about it. But, you know, I’ve noticed I feel equally afraid when faced with such situations in dreams.

Can you prove that all of this isn’t just some sort of shared illusion a la The Matrix? Of course you can’t; no one can, any more than someone could prove the opposite.

As for keeping religion out of politics, I have no quarrel with you there. I don’t know how it is in the UK, but in Canada I can’t think of a single occasion when a candidate’s religion (or lack thereof) was a public issue. The Americans seem to have a peculiar fixation with such things.

I can’t help but notice that you didn’t address my comments about Buddhism at all. I have a theory that atheists find Buddhism unsettling, because it agrees with them in many ways but challenges them in others. Can you prove me wrong?

The idea that universal, unconditional love and forgiveness will make the world a better place is irrefutable. It deserves to be repeated often and loudly, even if it comes with baggage.

This is absolutely not some great special thing that religion has brought to the world. Religions preach both for and against this in equal measure, both in their day to day practises and in their holy books. This is a universal aspect of humanity and a necessary by-product of being a social animal.

Science rests on the notions that the evidence of the senses is reliable and that all questions can be answered rationally through the scientific method. These are assumptions, and no better than faith.

Utter bollocks. Science is by its own self-definition imperfect. It actually incorporates its own flaws into its approach to the universe. There is nothing – nothing – in religious writing even remotely as unarguably proven as the bulk of science we take for granted every day – F=ma springs to mind – and still scientists call even Darwin’s theory of evolution, one of the most conclusively proven facts in the world today – a theory, not because they think it is wrong but because they recognise that absolutely anything we believe may always be utterly reversed by things as yet outside our ken.

The other mistake is to place Science in the same class as religion. It is utterly different. It is a way of describing, not a philosophy. It doesn’t preach or judge because these things are not within its compass, nor does it claim them to be.

That’s why I don’t want to hear about candidates and their religion. This isn’t an atheism thing – I don’t want to hear about a candidate’s atheism either – nor a yell for the scientific method, it is actually a plea to keep closed, unarguable emotive nonsense out of the kind of political discourse that depends on active debate for its legitimacy. Religion is the apotheosis of this sort of non-argument.

Sorry I’m joining this so late. You should give me a head’s up when non-musical topics are coming; you know how I like to shit-disturb on those

Your statement that “All religions basically rely on a belief in magic” is false. In all this discussion, I noticed there was no attention paid to the peculiarities of Buddhism, a religion that does not believe in a soul or in an anthropomorphic god, and whose chief prophet is on the record saying “Don’t believe in anything unless it makes sense to you”. Non-magical enough for you?

However, Buddhism also demonstrates the apparently inevitable slippery slope of superstition. Although the basic tenets of Buddhism are logical, within a few hundred years its followers started to dress it up with all sorts of bafflegab. Reincarnation, originally a simple statement of causality (if I tell you something, then part of me goes into you and starts a chain of events in future lives), was turned into this whole big hocus-pocus. Buddha said “there is no soul” so his followers invented a notion of “personality clusters” to compensate.

The history of Buddhism also shows that this breed of religious nuttiness that we see in Mormonism has been around a long time. Hundred’s of years after the Man Who Woke Up died, some of his followers claimed to have found some “secret” scriptures hidden in a cave. Shades of Joseph Smith, eh? Today, they make up one of the two major denominations of Buddhism.

Still, you are too hard on the concept of faith. Everyone practices it, even scientists. Science rests on the notions that the evidence of the senses is reliable and that all questions can be answered rationally through the scientific method. These are assumptions, and no better than faith.

Ultimately, I think Christians and skeptics alike focus too much on the rituals and superstitions of the religion and far too little on the philosophy and teachings. The idea that universal, unconditional love and forgiveness will make the world a better place is irrefutable. It deserves to be repeated often and loudly, even if it comes with baggage.

And that’s not to say that Catholics, Protestants, etc. don’t have ceremonies or elements of their faith that they are guarded about, but Scientology and Mormonism are both notoriously tight-lipped (and defensive) about a great many things. When you tell people that they can know what you’re about only after joining up, they’re bound to be suspicious.

Another part of what hurts Scientology is its own membership. When you have people like Jenna Elfman & Tom Cruise yelling wild-eyed at Matt Lauer or saying they’ll clear the planet of all those nasty Thetans or else, people get very nervous. Tom Cruise went from egotism to meglomania in what seemed like a very short time, from the public’s perspective. When you are deluded enough to believe only members of your religion can help victims of a car accident, something has gone wrong upstairs, and people can see that.

That aside, I think most religions are control mechanisms, and agree they are usually held in place to keep the populace concentrated on everything but what’s actually going on. A useful tool for a politician, really.

One other thing I will mention having worked in an office full of Mormons – they do believe in the Bible, but only so far as it corresponds with the Book of Mormon. If there’s a contradiction (and there are many), they view the BOM as the authoritative text. In fact, I was raised in a very strict religious environment as a youth, and I could remember far more scripture than any of the Mormons I worked with.

In fact, now that I think about it, Mormons also think that after they die they become gods and rule their own planets. Is that really so far removed from Zenu and Thetans? In 30 years, Scientology could very well be recognized as being just as religiously ‘valid’ as any other religion. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, except that it has nothing to do with the practical aspects of running a national government.

I suppose people like Obama throw the occasional reference to being religious in the pot because half the population thinks it’s important (or they think they think it’s important), and no politician wants to alienate potential voters.