Um ... I'm pretty sure Sagan was an atheist. It's also not clear to me that Einstein believed in any sort of God that you are advocating.
It seems to me that real communication is always a challenge, isn't it. This is the value of sincere dialogue; it helps to create consensus.
PRAYER, FOR ME, BEGINS WITH AN INTERNAL DIALOGUE
IT IS A KIND OF PNEUMA-PSYCHO-CYBERNETIC ACTIVITY
I am continually involved in having an internal dialogue with the Spirit within myself.
It is the way I "pray".
I begin by asking myself questions.
Then I set goals as to what I need to do with my life;
the circumstanceS in which I find myself.
Then I visualize that which I would like to accomplish;
that which I would like to see happen;
that which helps the situation and harms no one.
An eternal Cosmos makes a lot of sense to a lot of people - that's not what you're talking about.
How do you know what I am really thinking until you ask me?
You're taking cosmos and imputing properties to it that there is no reason to believe it has. Moreover, btw, it's important to distinguish the idea of something being 'possible' from it being 'likely.'
IMHO, the Cosmos has a lot of properties about which I am learning more and more each day. I have no problem with the term 'agnostic'. I am very agnostic about many things. It is possible that there are all kinds of God-like beings scattered throughout the billions of galaxies.
(BTW, I just not knowing how they looked, I just tried some of the features of the UBB code. Interesting.)
You write
Everyone, including me, has whatever purpose to their life that they ascribe to it. In short, I agree with Spinoza (a theist with whom Einstein agreed) who said, 'to be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.'
I love much of the teachings of Spinoza, who, BTW, was condemned by his fellow Jews, in Amsterdam, as a heretic and atheist.
It's a non sequitur to insinuate that I think the world ends with my existence. No idea how that popped into the discussion.
This illustrates a point I made above. I should have asked you questions. Now, do you believe that it is rational to think that life, in one form or another, is eternal?
We're not talking about what rights people have. People have no control over what they believe.
I feel that I do have some control. I know that I have changed my beliefs, deliberately, over the decades. This is one of the reasons I have had to come up with new ways of writing them down.
G?D is not the same as god, or God
For example, when I write my special word for 'god' as G?D I can give it the baggage I imagine. Orthodox Jews do the same when they write G-d.
Only what they assert. The only question is whether a person professes those beliefs which he actually holds. So I'm not saying you don't have the right to believe that martian mole-men will revive me after I am dead and take me to Nirvana.
Thank you for making this clear. Now you tell us what you would like to see happen, after you are dead.
I'm answering a question that you asked, namely how can you convince atheists? The answer is - think clearly, write clearly and cogently, and make sense. "Well isn't that nice!" and "Love is wonderful!" aren't arguments.
Let me be clear: I do not want to convince atheists--and, I presume, not all atheists think alike--of
anything. I want to know what they believe, or don't believe. And certainly I want atheists to stop twisting the sincerely held beliefs of believers so as to ridicule them for their sincerely held beliefs. BTW, I have never believed in "Martian mole-men".
