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If you accept the premiss that consciousness in an effect of matter, then of course the arguments for atheism are going to loom large. I don't accept that premiss. For me there is nothing more real than my consciousness, my thoughts, my awareness, my being. We take the reality of matter for granted of course, but what is matter? No one knows really what matter is!! Scientists can yammer on all day about protons and electrons and quarks and what all of that stuff appears to be doing and all of the "rules" that are seemingly being followed, but at the end of the day all scientists will ever come away with are measurements and more measurements. So why should we put matter in the drivers seat, and our own "being" in the trailer? When you hold a memory in your mind of something simple, like having been shown a card with a square printed on it, what is the grey matter in your head doing to give you that memory? Are little swimmers in there swimming into a square formation?? Are other swimmers beholding that and giving a thumbs up signal? Maybe it's morse code, or a binary code or neurons are dancing around like beads on an abacus or transistors on a chip or trillions of tiny little dominoes are sent cascading into formations and there is a picture there to behold. But of course whatever the system or code or arrangement of grey matter there is in there won't change the fact that there is no one else in there to behold it but ourselves. Why reduce our "knowing" of things to an illusion given to us by matter? If anything is illusionary it's the matter, and not our consciousness. What leads us to the absurd conclusion that for something to be real it has to be composed of matter? Well again, scientists like to measure stuff. How do you measure your own "being"? Scientists are very proud of what they do I think, and are likely to contemptuously spurn whatever they can't measure. I believe that our body is like an antenna. It's a machine, unfamiliar to us, that draws us in for a few short years. It's there to give us participation in this world of matter. Matter is subject to cause and effect and beginnings and ends and begs every question about origins and organization and it even begs the question "what is it?". But my "being" is not matter, and in fact is the only thing that begs no question at all from me. I "know". Your "being" is hidden from me, but from what I can interpret, you are like me in that you are also a "being". There are apparently billions of us and we are all truly hidden from each other despite all the animating we give for a time to our bodies. So it would be with any sort of being that is a being whether we would be inclined to deify them or not. I don't know if one special being is running the show, or a small group, or billions, but I'm not going to attribute all of this around us to the random chance of matter bumping into matter! Especially when there are billions of examples of "beings" running around all over the place, coming and going, and we are each intimately aware of what it is to be a "being"!! And while of course there is random genetic mutation going on in the world, to seize on that stupid puke of a theory and attribute all that is and all that we are to it, has got to be the crowning thoughtless idea among all the ideas ever "thought" of in the universe. How can I say that the universe is dead when I am alive? I can't see you and you can't see me and yet it's still considered a cop-out to believe in the unseen. No, the cop-out is believing only in the seen.