[softwarerero]

Interesting, I had almost the opposite experience after having grown up in a fundamentalistic atheist environment. When I read the bible with an attitude like "God, if you really exist I will listen", it seemed somehow I understood what I read for the first time. It was the strongest experience I had in my life. This is over 30 years ago, I'm a senior developer now) and I still read almost daily in the bible. No other book has really changed the way I think about the world to any close extend.

[olalonde]

> "God, if you really exist I will listen"

I think most atheists would agree with that statement and would want a benevolent God to exist.

[dionidium]

Maybe most, but certainly not all. See: Christopher Hitchens:

"[Religious belief] is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you - who must, indeed, subject you - to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life - I say, of your life - before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!?"

[paublyrne]

Out of interest are you atheist? I find my own atheism comforting. To be confronted at my death with the Catholic Heaven I was taught about as a child would send me into despair. Life would be rendered meaningless for me were I to find out it's all been some sort of game, for which the prize for winning is that you meet your creator and praise him.

[olalonde]

I am atheist (born and raised). What do you mean by the Catholic heaven sending you into despair? I thought it was supposed to be a fun and happy place. Hell does sound scary as hell (pun intended) though and I'd rather stop existing than risk going there. For the record, a capricious god which allows hell to exist is incompatible with my definition of benevolent. That being said, if I believed the Catholic god truly existed, you can be sure I'd be following the bible to the letter (a tiny price to pay to avoid an eternity in hell).

[MichaelGG]

I mean, that's sort of what I want out of AI. A Culture-like Mind, like one of the hubs in an orbital. Resource allocation issues would cease to exist if we had a benevolent god or something like it!

[evincarofautumn]

Whereas I grew up in an agnostic household, and I’m still pretty strongly agnostic, especially as I’ve gotten into constructive mathematics (where we talk about provability, not truth). Maybe unlike you two, I just didn’t have anything to reject, so there was no need to look into the “other side”?

I like to say “if a god made me, it made me unable to believe in it”, which is certainly an interesting thought exercise, but not exactly inspiring.

[PaulAJ]

You might like to read "The Minds I", a collection of philosopy edited by Hofstadter & Dennett. It has a number of pieces that address this issue pretty directly, including "Non Serviam" by Stanislaw Lem. In it the writer describes the fictional field of "personics" (we would say "artificial life") and considers the role of a human experimenter in creating artificially intelligent beings that inhabit a virtual world in a computer. From there it considers the question of what rights and obligations creator and creation have to each other. For instance, what would we think of a human who created such a virtual world and then demanded that the inhabitants worship their creator?

[nilved]

> fundamentalistic atheist

Did you invent this term just for the comment?

[loxs]

Seems like this term has been used before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalism#Atheist