This is not true, Jesus didn’t live a great many things a human man would have to do, He didn’t support a wife, have the stress of feeding and caring for a family, never suffered the long and lingering pain of a lot of humans,When he needed money for his taxes he just sent Peter to a lake drew out a fish got the money for His and Peter’s taxes. Chose when he would suffer, how much,and how long, and knew he would be dead for only a few hours, no human man could do this. as for food, it would seem he could drum up food and wine when ever he saw fit. No way did he ever experience what a human man would experience, and no way what a woman goes through!
Our service men go through a great deal more and are not sure of the out come!
Is it possible pchaos is using the term ‘atheism’ to describe humanism and rationalism? There’s a lot of cross-over, sure, but there’s different drives behind all these words, and they don’t necessarily imply or presuppose one another.
The Atheists I know aren’t united, just share a non- belief in a Supernatural Being, most want facts, since non are shown they think for themselves.Most do not want a government to force a belief or non-belief on others!
I think the issue here is that you expect atheism to inform someone’s world view in some way but really the word is just a descriptor showing one thing that does not inform our world view. That’s it, that’s all. You are trying to use a broad brush to impose opinions on people based on how you think an atheistic world view should be ordered. People are directing you back to the definition to show that is does not imply a world view at all. It only states the one thing that does not inform an atheist’s world view.
I would say, More like the Pharisee’s, that Jesus seemed to despise ,because of their thinking they were better than others because they wore their religion on their sleeves and didn’t follow the spirit of the law!
The only thing we are “uncomfortable with” here is your persistent and apparently willful misunderstanding of what atheism is and is not. An example in this very post: “the practice of atheism”. There is no ‘practice of atheism’. Lack of belief in something doesn’t compel, or even suggest any sort of behavior at all that could be called ‘a practice’. Atheism isn’t ‘practiced’. Your last sentence is utterly meaningless. And we keep telling you that. But you keep coming back to that meaningless thing, insisting that there’s something we’re ‘refusing’ to discuss. We’re not refusing, we just plain can’t discuss it because “the practice of atheism” is meaningless and non-existent. There isn’t anything to discuss.
I’m starting to come to the same conclusion, beyond the lack of belief in God and other deities, atheism has little to offer. As a possible consequence, they will remain a small percentage of the population.
There are people that do not sky dive-let’s call them “askydivists”. They don’t organize askydivists groups, they don’t have a skydivist’s worldview, they do nothing to actively promote askydivism at all. As a result of this people that do not sky dive will remain a small percentage of the population.
Atheism is not trying to offer anything, and it is not an alternate religion. It is a choice to have no religion, which, given the real-world track record of most faiths, can be very attractive to some folks.
Nah, I wasn’t trying to ascribe motivations to you at all, it’s purely a semantic argument. Although I’m curious as to whether the anti-religion group you described would unironically call themselves a church (it seemed almost that might have been what you were saying). If so, I’d be tempted to point and laugh at them, myself.
Anyway, in a thread where the OP seems to want to redefine atheist as “someone who believes in God but thinks He wandered off to go play cosmic golf or something” I’m willing to let this one go without further discussion.
It wouldn’t make any sense for them to have churches. So apparently the atheists that have started churches are a relatively small minority of atheists.