Atheism Thread

Personally, I couldn't care less if anyone thought that Eve was created from Adam’s rib; that the world rests on the back of a turtle; that the Sun god rides around the earth in a fire chariot; etc. So long as it doesn't affect me. But therein lies the problem. I am affected on a practical level. Churches get tax exemptions to the tune of about $71 billion dollars per year... while they drain public-funded resources. While folks like you and me foot their bill. Further, national policies are often shaped by christians in this country (U.S.). Right to an abortion; right to contraception; right to have kinky, consensual sex; right to refuse medical treatment; right to die; right to buy booze on a Sunday; etc. These civil rights are constantly under attack. They also advance discrimination, e.g., Mormons spending ghastly sums in support of Prop 8 which is against gay-marriage. They favor institutionalized discrimination, which bleeds into the fabric of our society. And not to mention that they have attempted to thwart advances in science, e.g., stem-cell research, which obviously can save lives. And they want to teach creationism in science classes, and favor curriculum that oppose critical thinking. The aforementioned is just in the US alone. In present day. This doesn't even contemplate the malignancy that is fundamentalist Islam. Every time a TSA agent cups my 'nads when I go through airport security, I'm reminded what a blight on our existence they are. So you ask how can anyone care? I think the better question is, how could anyone not care?

There's a difference between church and God.
 
There's a difference between church and God.

And there is a difference between church and state. Look how often that boundary is blurred.

You can take the church out of God. But you can't take God out of the church. If there was no belief in a god there would be no church... no religion... no doctrines that lead to discrimination... and all the things kip mentioned in his post.
 
I think justifying Atheism because of the fault of organized religion leaves something to be desired in the logic department.
 
I think justifying Atheism because of the fault of organized religion leaves something to be desired in the logic department.

No one was doing that. You are claiming a god exists. You need to justify why one should accept your position. We don't find that there is evidence to support belief in a god(s). That is why we don't believe in god. Even if religion were as sweet and wonderful as pink frosting on a big fluffy cupcake, it wouldn't make the belief in god more rational or valid. Our disbelief has nothing to do with the horrors of religion.
 
Again, your ignorance regarding these two brilliant men is astonishing.

Okay. Excusing the nervousness of the questioner (he's addressing one of the most intellectual men of our age, I'd be nervous too,) please watch this and discuss.

 
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Okay. Excusing the nervousness of the questioner (he's addressing one of the most intellectual men of our age, I'd be nervous too,) please watch this and discuss.



So, intellectual and guru to the far left, Chomsky, calls Hitchens and Harris religious fanatics. And he is a linguist. Poor Chomsky. Is he losing it? I think he meant anti-religion fanatics. He's getting old. But the guy made some great contributions to linguistics and will go down as one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, as will Hitchens.

But just to have a little fun here... let's play along with Chomsky's linguistic faux pas and imagine if Hitchens actually had been a religious fanatic. What kind of shenanigans might he engage in? I know, he'd rewrite the Ten Commandments...

 
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So, intellectual and guru to the far left, Chomsky, calls Hitchens and Harris religious fanatics. And he is a linguist. Poor Chomsky. Is he losing it? I think he meant anti-religion fanatics.

No, Chomsky meant exactly what he said. Religion comes in many forms. Hitchens just happened to worship at the alter of American military hegemony and aggression. The fantastical belief that it's a force for good and can project democracy and secularism into the middle east is just as fantastical as any dogma you can dream up.
 
No, Chomsky meant exactly what he said. Religion comes in many forms. Hitchens just happened to worship at the alter of American military hegemony and aggression. The fantastical belief that it's a force for good and can project democracy and secularism into the middle east is just as fantastical as any dogma you can dream up.

Hitchens and Harris are not religious. Religion does come in many forms. But one thing that all religions have in common is the belief in a god(s) or supernatural force.

But even Chomsky wasn't religious. Here's what he had to say about religion...

"As for the various religions, there's no doubt that they are very meaningful to adherents, and allow them to delude themselves into thinking there is some meaning to their lives beyond what we agree is the case. I'd never try to talk them out of the delusions, which are necessary for them to live a life that makes some sense to them. These beliefs can provide a framework for deeds that are noble or savage, and anywhere in between, and there's every reason to focus attention on the deeds and the background for them, to the extent that we can grasp it."

Source
 
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So, intellectual and guru to the far left, Chomsky, calls Hitchens and Harris religious fanatics. And he is a linguist. Poor Chomsky. Is he losing it? I think he meant anti-religion fanatics. He's getting old. But the guy made some great contributions to linguistics and will go down as one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, as will Hitchens.

It seems to me that you are a tad too engrossed with worshipping at the alter of Hitchens to grasp the concepts at hand enough to discuss them. Let's resort to name-calling instead. :rolleyes:
 
It seems to me that you are a tad too engrossed with worshipping at the alter of Hitchens to grasp the concepts at hand enough to discuss them. Let's resort to name-calling instead. :rolleyes:

This is not a thread about the Iraq war. What exactly are you wanting to discuss?
 
This is not a thread about the Iraq war. What exactly are you wanting to discuss?

The merits of Atheism and it's proponents. You seem unaware that Atheism has consequences and that your beloved Hitchens is known by many enlightened circles as a warmonger. Also Dawkins isn't just a zoologist, that's the cupcake version of Atheism you would Pinterest for you friends over a latte down at the intellectual cafe in your brain.

Robert Wright from Foreign Policy Magazine:

And there's a subtle but potent sense in which New Atheism can steer foreign policy to the right. Axiomatic to New Atheism is that religion is not just factually wrong, but the root of evil, which suggests that other proposed root causes of the sort typically stressed on the left aren't really the problem... Most New Atheists aren't expressly right wing, but even so their discounting of the material causes of Islamist radicalism can be "objectively" right wing... Dawkins, for example, has written that if there were no religion then there would be "no Israeli/Palestinian wars." This view is wrong -- the conflict started as an essentially secular argument over land -- but it's popular among parts of the U.S. and Israeli right. The reason is its suggestion that there's no point in, say, removing Israeli settlements so long as the toxin of religion is in the air. ...Maybe this is the New Atheists' biggest problem: As living proof that religion isn't a prerequisite for divisive fundamentalism, they are walking rebuttals to their own ideology.

Are these people just youtube celebrities to you? They are as radical (and dangerous) as fundamentalist Christians.
 
Not believing in god(s) has consequences?

Extremism has consequences. Having your mind closed to concepts beyond your control has consequences. Stating your views without a firm grasp of the entirety of it's ramifications has consequences.
 
Also, pardon me for addressing this late but it's bothered me. I worked in the book industry for eleven years, I'm no stranger to the book trade, real books made out of paper. :)p). You wrote that Hitchens, "like Dawkins, has published hundreds of articles and dozens of books... some best sellers." Christopher Hitchens did indeed technically publish about two dozen books, because he put his name on anthologies, long essays published as books (a short history of Thomas Jefferson that historians laughed at, the short book of Clinton conspiracy theories, collections of his reviews of books he hadn't actually read), etc. These books were all so short and trivial that when his memoir appeared a year before his death, under the awful title Hitch 22, it was greeted as practially his first attempt at a major work. You also said that Richard Dawkins wrote "dozens" of books. He wrote eleven books, not even a dozen. What I'm wondering is if you've actually read any of them. :squiffy:
 
Personally, I couldn't care less if anyone thought that Eve was created from Adam’s rib; that the world rests on the back of a turtle; that the Sun god rides around the earth in a fire chariot; etc. So long as it doesn't affect me. But therein lies the problem. I am affected on a practical level. Churches get tax exemptions to the tune of about $71 billion dollars per year... while they drain public-funded resources. While folks like you and me foot their bill. Further, national policies are often shaped by christians in this country (U.S.). Right to an abortion; right to contraception; right to have kinky, consensual sex; right to refuse medical treatment; right to die; right to buy booze on a Sunday; etc. These civil rights are constantly under attack. They also advance discrimination, e.g., Mormons spending ghastly sums in support of Prop 8 which is against gay-marriage. They favor institutionalized discrimination, which bleeds into the fabric of our society. And not to mention that they have attempted to thwart advances in science, e.g., stem-cell research, which obviously can save lives. And they want to teach creationism in science classes, and favor curriculum that oppose critical thinking. The aforementioned is just in the US alone. In present day. This doesn't even contemplate the malignancy that is fundamentalist Islam. Every time a TSA agent cups my 'nads when I go through airport sdouecurity, I'm reminded what a blight on our existence they are. So you ask how can anyone care? I think the better question is, how could anyone not care?
Tremendous post!
 
No [one was doing that. You are claiming a god exists. You need to justify why one should accept your position.

That's all they talk about. If you tell an atheist you believe in God they think you're a Christian. If that happens to be the case would I also have to "justify" why someone would accept differing viewpoints? Or what? They get stoned in the public square? Whatever I believe about anything I'm entitled to that belief. It's only in imposing it on others that someone is in error. People have different reality tunnels. Yours is ultimately not verifiable. We know what our instruments tell us but how do we test our instruments. Science is a process and a way of thinking but there is no time when science will explain everything because everything we learn opens up new possibilities to learn even more.

I personally can't imagine how something that is dead (the universe) somehow generates life. It seems it wasn't dead. So was it always alive? Then it's immortal. Whatever condition it is that allowed life to occur seems miraculous to me. Is it just time? But then where does the "stuff" come from that everything is made of? I think that if you don't put anything in the oven it doesn't matter how long you cook it, Sunday Dinner is not going to happen.

Then to go beyond that, this stuff that we don't know where it came from sits around for billions of years and then decides to invent a single-celled organism. The single-celled organism wants to be a monkey and then decides to write Hamlet. To me that progression shows that there is potential that we might have a hard time understanding.

The problem is when anyone claims to know something about the nature of "God" and wants to sell it to you or use it as excuse to tell you how to live. Religion is dangerous but a belief in something greater than humanity is not in itself.
 
Personally, I couldn't care less if anyone thought that Eve was created from Adam’s rib; that the world rests on the back of a turtle; that the Sun god rides around the earth in a fire chariot; etc. So long as it doesn't affect me. But therein lies the problem. I am affected on a practical level. Churches get tax exemptions to the tune of about $71 billion dollars per year... while they drain public-funded resources. While folks like you and me foot their bill. Further, national policies are often shaped by christians in this country (U.S.). Right to an abortion; right to contraception; right to have kinky, consensual sex; right to refuse medical treatment; right to die; right to buy booze on a Sunday; etc. These civil rights are constantly under attack. They also advance discrimination, e.g., Mormons spending ghastly sums in support of Prop 8 which is against gay-marriage. They favor institutionalized discrimination, which bleeds into the fabric of our society. And not to mention that they have attempted to thwart advances in science, e.g., stem-cell research, which obviously can save lives. And they want to teach creationism in science classes, and favor curriculum that oppose critical thinking. The aforementioned is just in the US alone. In present day. This doesn't even contemplate the malignancy that is fundamentalist Islam. Every time a TSA agent cups my 'nads when I go through airport security, I'm reminded what a blight on our existence they are. So you ask how can anyone care? I think the better question is, how could anyone not care?

A recent edition of Horizon (UK TV show) had genetic modification as a subject, specifically all the things science could do but the bible bashing halfwits in various seats of power won't allow. One of the most striking things was the company in America who could alter genetically the properties of a certain yeast so instead of alcohol, the by product of brewing would be a cellulose that could be readily turned into petrol. They can literally brew up petrol like they do vodka, but because it meant Genetically altering a living organism, yeast they couldn't get the process licensed to do it industrially, because congress cant get any laws passed which would allow science to alter genetics, because baby Jesus's daddy didn't make it like that in the first place.
 
You are attacking my love of Hitchens because...

Hitchens is known by many enlightened circles as a warmonger.


Does this mean you are a pacifist? That you believe no forms of aggression should be a means to resolving a conflict?

If so, how do you justify posting this comment in response to a comment made by Midnite that wasn't even addressing you, or any personal interest you might have regarding anything?


Will you please go do your light work in the bathtub so you'll be electrocuted? Jesus.

Post in question


Doesn't sound like a pacifist position to me. You are requesting someone to kill herself for posting something you thought was objectionable. So if someone's beliefs are different from yours, you think violence is a reasonable means for silencing him or her? Inflate this to a larger scale... say a country... and you have war. I think, my dear, you have been hoist by one's own petard.

PS-Please tone down your troll-like manner with me in this thread. It is making me feel like I am being asked to defend every post I am making. This is creating a hostile environment for me. There is a softer approach that in the end will yield more fruit.
 
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