Cite? You just made a pretty damned broad generalization there pal.
Again, cite? How would you know how much money is given how much time is spent by an atheist doing charity work? As atheists, the only thing we know we have in common is that we state that there is no god. We are not united by our not believing in sky ghosts. We don’t go to meetings or erect monsterous buildings in which to revel in our disbelief.
Oh you mean like crashing some remote village in the Amazon, forcing the natives to cover their naughty bits and then force feeding them Xtian dogma?
Nonsense, for two reasons:
(1) Please try to name the things that anything other than trivially tiny numbers of atheists are doing in the US right now thare are the equivalent of trying-to-get-creationism-taught-in-schools, outlawing-gay-marriage, trying-to-cure-gays and putting-the-10-commandments-in-public-places. And note that the examples I picked are NOT just the crazy fringe extreme, but large and powerful movements within Christianity.
(2) Your analogy makes no sense. Democrats and Republicans are the same type of group. They are both organized political parties. It’s at least reasonable to make comparisons between them, and it’s likely (although not automatically true) that they share many of the same flaws and foibles. Religious people and atheists are NOT the same type of group, any more than “people who love gardening” and “people who don’t love gardening” are the same.
Ahhh the typhoid infected blanket of the 21st century.
And if the only reason they volunteer is because someone told you to, that does not say good things about their character.
Then infecting their entire village with some virus that they’ve never been exposed to and have no resistance to thereby wiping out most if not all of their population in the name of helping them overcome their primitive ways which are of course not as good as the way of the xtian missionary who brings the genocide to them…
Honest to God, the only place I ever run into obnoxious atheists – and I mean ever – is here, on the Boards. But people use the cloak of anonymity to be dicks about a lot of subjects, not just religion, so I can’t even chalk their obnoxiousness up to atheism as opposed to (a) anonymity or (b) general dickishness. But there’s no getting around it: There are a number of people here on the Boards whom I have gone from thinking seem like nice enough people, to thinking are dicks, based solely on their IMO intentionally offensive anti-religionist posts.
Meanwhile, in the real world, I’m pretty sure my dear friends and next-door neighbors are atheists, or at least strong agnostics, and I’m sure they know I’m a Methodist. We just don’t talk about religion. And since we have a real relationship we’re all invested in, we go out of our way not to be dicks to each other. Seems to be working out fine.
ETA: When I hear people complain about overzealous atheists IRL, I tend to assume they (all of them) are in college. At that age, a lot of people conclude they Know The Truth (be it pro-religion or anti-), and are none too adept at sharing that Truth with others. And they haven’t lived enough of life away from school to have the corners of their certainty knocked off. My response is generally “Once you graduate, this problem will mostly go away,” because that has been my experience.
Sure… if only because there are tons of atheists here, and some atheists are assholes, thus there are as many atheist assholes here as just about any place you’re likely to be.
Obviously what you’re saying is, at some level, unarguably true. But it strikes me as just a matter of scale. Sure, there are atheist extremists in the world. And sure they bring some unhappiness in the world. But they are so hilariously comically dwarfed – both in terms of numbers and in terms of the unhappiness that they bring – by religious extremists that I just can’t take a pitting of them very seriously.
If you felt that I was lumping, I apologize. But I will point out several things:
(1) I never said ANYTHING about all religious people. I said “religious extremists do the following”, which I think was basically true as long as you read it as “(many) religious extremists do (some subset of) the following” (although I guess it depends how you define “extremist”). And no point in any post this thread have I said anything about religious people as a whole.
(2) I’ve posted plenty of things on this board (such as in the thread I linked in my first post) which make it very clear that I do not hate or disdain religion or religious people. I see no need to constantly disclaim that over and over and over again, particularly in the midst of conversational back-and-forth.
Religious people have platforms to expound their faith. Atheists just shut up and watch. You do not go about telling everybody you are an atheist. Most would not dare. It is not safe.
Atheists pretty much stay to themselves. Religious go on crusades and Fatwas and door to door trying to grow the business. Whos dangerous,atheists keeping to themselves of Christians,Muslims,Scientologists etc involved in conquering the people who do not believe properly.
If you’re really an atheist, it does. Not about the experience, but about there being a god behind the experience.
I’m not sure what your definition of atheist is. Atheists don’t doubt that theists and others, have religious experiences. Atheists don’t doubt reasons for god belief exist. Flying saucer debunkers also don’t doubt people have abduction experiences, or that there is a reason people see odd things in the sky. That’s a lot different from believing in LGM, or thinking that god belief is justified.
I couldn’t agree with that statement more. I understand outrage and disdain for organized religion, I can’t stand it myself. I’m not part of any it, I’m actually one of those ‘fence sitting’ agnostics. If I have faith in a god of some kind, what’s it to anyone else?
Yes, the fundamentalists and the extreme religious right and Pat Robertson’s of the world are out of their fucking minds. They’re using a simple thing that was meant to give a person peace of mind when they needed it and have turned that into a fucking mess.
What I have a hard time understanding is the furor some people have in regards to someone believing in god or anything else. I don’t give a fuck whether or not a person believes in the FSP or Thor or nothing at all. Faith is a personal choice, to either have it or not. If you choose to believe in something higher, great. If not, great. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter anyway. You will believe what you want and so will I. And that’s all that matters, whether or not the individual is happy with their choice.
Obviously there are more people preaching about religion and trying to convert everyone and blowing shit the fuck up, but there simply ARE more of them. Someone mentioned it earlier, atheism is a minority. It would follow that you’d run into more religious freaks than very, very passionate atheists. However, there are still those atheists that do go on about how there is no god as much as a person who believes will say there is.
If everyone would just stay the out of everyone else’s personal choices, this wouldn’t be a problem.
This kind of stupid argument about who is better drives me nuts. Most Christians aren’t blowing up abortion clinics. Most Christians just go about their lives and that’s that. But most Christians do volunteer.
By the way statistics show that Christians volunteer more but that’s sort of a moot point since there are more christians in the country anyway. But Martin Luther King Jr was a relgious man, and so were the many Jews that volunteered during the Civil Rights Movement.
This isn’t tit for tat, yes there are people who make mistakes and people who are just nose crud, but there is a lot of good that has been done in the name of religion as well.
Its part of our human profile.
Here’s an interesting perspective on Atheism as a Belief. Again I am an atheist who has no belief. I don’t suggest that all atheists have belief. Some like me just stand there waiting for the “evidence” to show up and when it does it appears that the believers are misinterpreting the data. Because I get something totally different out of it.
That’s not true. An atheist can admit that there may be a god responsible for religious experiences but also believe that there isn’t enough or any credible evidence to support any gods’ existence.
Belief but not a belief system, for one thing. Second, belief is far different from knowing in the theory of knowledge sense. One poster said that he knows there is no god but is willing to be convinced otherwise. That’s a much weaker use of know than me saying I know 2+2 = 4 (since I can prove it.)
Given that atheism is a belief, it is a perfectly justifiable belief - and it is even falsifiable, unlike most god beliefs. All God has to do is pop down here and part some seas and write my message in the stars and I’ll believe at least as strongly as I disbelieve now. But every passing day with no god, with every archaeological discovery showing that the history described in the Bible is wrong, there is more evidence for disbelief in the Western god, at least. I’ll default to disbelief in the god of the planet 5,000 l.y… from here, whose Bible might have gotten creation correct.
Exactly. I don’t see any evidence but I don’t disregard that thousands of millions of people have claimed to have first hand experience that there is a God. I’m seeing it different. But I’m not going to disregard their experience.
For me its all about proof. People say there’s no proof of god, well there’s no proof but there is evidence. If thousands of millions of people said they saw a UFO I’d still think they saw something else.
I wouldn’t believe it until I saw it with my own two eyes.
Right now I don’t believe that there’s a God. I’m not hemming and hawing and maybing it. Its full stop no until I see proof.
Lacking belief in a god, or even disbelief, does include the possibility that someone may demonstrate one someday. That’s why it is not knowing. My statement doesn’t preclude that - it only says we have no belief, or disbelieve, that there is a god behind the experience.
But the evidence supports disbelief in both cases. People experience god the way their culture says god must be. The experiences across cultures are mutually contradictory. In the same way, aliens people claim they have contacted change across time - strangely in sync with the latest sf movie, in fact.
In the 1890s hundreds of people across the country claim they saw airships, piloted by men. There was no such thing, of course.
If the believers were inspired to make testable predictions that came true, and if the saucerites got some physical evidence, they’d have something. The longer they don’t the more reason there is not to believe.
I absolutely agree that there are. And, if the OP had actually ranted about them, well, I probably would have stayed out of the thread because it would have been, well, this thread, and I have no real interest in being crushed between both sides in the “atheists are aggressive assholes”/“Religion is the anti-christ” shouting-fest that is the tragic yet inevitable conclusion of those sorts of threads.
In this case, however, the atheists the OP has a problem with are not specifically the assholes, but just, it seems, the ones who state how they feel in no uncertain terms. I would hope that the OP would come back and either correct and apologize if he didn’t communicate his thoughts clearly or answer some of the questions put forth, but he seems to be MIA. I thought that this rant would be one that most people could come in here and say, “well, you’re a little bit off, thanks for playing,” but I guess I was wrong.
Go the fuck away. I made my point multiple times. Let me quote for you:
So, four posts of fairly reasonable tone illustrating clearly (IMHO) a question I have about the rant in the OP and how I think it is flawed. After that question being repeatedly ignored (and it still is), I get a little pissed off.
I’ve made my point multiple times. It is you and others who are more concerned with ranting and playing the ‘gotcha’ game than having a discussion. So, you need to put up or shut up. And, you really need to stop talking about atheists as if you are not one. How you can blanketly criticize all atheists while absolving yourself is beyond me.
