Hmm. Let’s see. Went to Summer Bible School? Check.
Read the Bible? Check.
Studied religion in college? Check.
Thought seriously about becoming a Theology major? Check.
Studied Chrisitan mythologies both in college and informally? Check.
I know more about Christianity than most Christians do (although probably not most Christians on the SDMB), and I’m the most “evangelical” atheist I’ve ever met. Sure, it’s anecdotal evidence, but I think you’ve got your head up your ass.
There’s a reason we think this. It’s because we’ve considered the issue rationally. No theist can make the same claim, because belief in God is irrational. The crafty among them just say that doesn’t matter. If you want to believe some delusion, well, I guess that’s OK. But keep it the fuck away from my kids – and by putting your dogma on money and in schools is a piss poor job of live and let live.
John, there are many stupid things in your OP that I’m too pissed off to comment on, so let me just address the most egregious. You seem to have forgotten that there is objective truth in this universe. So you get just as pissed at everyone who claims to know the score – but you’re willfully ignoring the fact that some are right and some are wrong. Yes, those who are right do have moral superiority. And we’re right. The theists are wrong. I’m not saying that because I was raised that way, or because I want it to be true. The exercise of reason leads to the rejection of god, or at least the Christian god – and I am a reasonable man.
–Cliffy
P.S. Rune, you’re not clever. Your rap was tired when we all heard it in junior high.
Polycarp, to flesh out my response to you, I suppose I am in agreement with your post. I simply fail to see how if one individual behaves in a certain way “every so often” it rises to the level of evangelism.
While agree with most of your post, on this point you are simply wrong. A great many religious people have devoted their lives to considering the issue. A great many have studied far more texts on it than you’ll ever have time to. And while some come to the conclusion of no god, many are drawn even further into their faith.
Oh, I agree with you that Sunday school usually isn’t a trick to brainwash children, far from it! It’s a way to pass on one’s beliefs and religious heritage to children in a place where it’s warranted (which is not a public school), no different from sending a Jewish kid to Hebrew school or a Chinese-American kid to Chinese language and culture classes. I was just trying to say what a militant atheist might say. There ARE fringe religions and cults who do brainwash children through innocuous activities so they can recruit them for devious plans later on, but I don’t believe that holds true for mainstream Christianity (or other religions).
Also, how are things coming with the Pittsburgh Dopefest?
It’s true that there’s no groundswell of people trying to ban religion from the private sector, but many atheists belittle the religious. How is saying “you’re a moron because you believe in God” all that different from “you’re going to hell because you don’t believe in God”? Both positions are extremist and an embarassment to the moderate believers and non-believers out there. And not all religious people are trying to ban gay marriage and evolution. Yet I’ve seen atheists ridicule totally peaceful, politically progressive theists just because they have a different conception of the universe than atheists have.
It’s just as irrational to claim that you know everything there is to know about the universe, with your pathetic little monkey brain made out of meat. IMO, strong atheists (i.e. the belief in NO god, instead of just a lack of belief in a god) are just as short-sighted as people who say “God made everything, so let’s not look into the mystery of universal creation.” Both of them claim to have all the answers to everything ever. Sorry, but unless atheists have solid proof of what happened in the first few milliseconds of the universe, I’m going to have to say that atheism is just as irrational as theism.
You seem to lack the ability to appreciate degrees of things. Isaac Asimov had a essay on this, called The Relativity of Wrong, in which he plausibly criticizes people who see things as black-and-white in which everything is absolutely right or absolutely wrong and all wrongness is exactly equivalent. I highly recommend it for its sections of the evolution of science, if nothing else.
This is a WAG, but I’m guessing those whose belief system doesn’t have issues over the three items just mentioned don’t make a lot of noise about it. Anyone can be “tolerant” of something he doesn’t think is wrong. :rolleyes:
Some atheists are assholes. So what? It has nothing to do with their atheism. There is no atheist dogma. There are no atheist tenets. There is simply a denial of a particular god. There is nothing about espousing atheism that compels one to spread the word, contrary to many organized religions.
My point is simply that there is no evangelical atheist movement, and nothing in your post refutes that.
All monotheists are atheists with respect to every other god but their own.
I fail to see how these quotes from the OP are incorrect:
Didn’t the Jesuits say “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”?
I don’t see how anyone can honestly say that Sunday School isn’t about the indocrination of young minds. Whether the content of that indoctrination is good/neutral/bad is irrelevant. That’s what Sunday School is basically about - getting them while they’re young and unquestioning so they’ll grow up in your faith.
Heck, that’s what schools in general are for. Socializing kids into a certain culture, and teaching them skills to live within that culture.
Now many of the other quotes in the OP are more over-the-top declarations about of the “evils” of Sunday School or religion or specific religions. Although I am an atheist, and agree with a few snippets of some of the other quotes from the OP, I think you’d have to be an extremely hard-core atheist to fully endorse all of them.
Amen
People who believe in religion think nothing of characterizing older religions as quaint myths and fairy tales, but get quite upset when atheists think the same about today’s mainstream religions.
Like other atheists in this thread, I know quite a lot about christianity as well. I spent six years in sunday school, was an acolyte, got confirmed, and considered being an Episcopal priest. I also read “Don’t Know Much About the Bible” (great book) and the Narnia series [ ].
So what did I see in my church? Families that left when a gay priest took over, the church pulled apart over the ordination of women and gay marriage, a person that complained that a painting of a saint “looked too black”, and being told that black people were “burnt” but white people were cooked just right. My mother’s church now hosts a mandarin chinese service and one of the old coots told some of the chinese people that “this is our church”.
Am I evangelical? No; apart from this board I rarely discuss my beliefs. I bow my head during grace at other peoples houses and even invite my brother in-law to say grace at my house whan he is over for dinner. I am respectful at churches when I travel and am horrified when people in shorts wander around churches talking in loud voices and taking flash pictures.
Left Ear (and is there an explanation for your username?): You’ve posted some interesting things on the boards, and I hope you cough up the $15 to join. But at the risk of losing the sale, I’ll tell you a secret about the SDMB: not everyone here is equally worth listening to. I think Malacandra gave you some excellent advice in post #3.
Well, I wasn’t involved in the thread but go ahead and add me to the list of those that distrust religion and believe it is almost viral in its destructive power and its desire for young converts. It isn’t that I give a damn what someone believes; God, alien abductions, government mind control, whatever, it’s certainly their business.
I don’t dislike the religious, I fear them.
As far as I can tell, there is no way you can have the “peace and sunshine and Jesus loves you” kind of religion without the fundys. There seems to be an inevitable competition between religious folk over who is the most holy. Who adheres the most strictly to whichever iron-age document they have put their faith in.
Take Islam for example. Regardless of how peaceful the religion claims to be, there is also an injunction to live under Shariah law, something that doesn’t make it if you want individual freedom. Ask our gay members about living under Sharia, or many of our women, for that matter. Assuming you are Christian, your own religion would be suppressed. Of course, in Spain a couple of hundred years ago the shoe was on the other foot and Moslems were killed or “converted” as a matter of government policy.
You say you will fight them and that is great and I admire you for doing so. The problem is that it is religion which caused the problem in the first place.
Well, I try. On the other hand, there are many people here well worth listening to IMO even though I disagree with 90% of what they post. Figuring out who is and who isn’t is part of the fun.
Excuse the snippage, but I wanted to focus on this one point. I largely agree with you. But I think history provides ample examples that, in the absence of religion, mankind finds plenty of other things to disagree violently over, and it’s reasonable to conclude that the fault is not in religion.
I’d certainly agree that religion is not the only reason people behave savagely toward each other. I would say that religion offers a means of making people more savage than other reasons. After all, those other people are infidels, Godless heathens and deserve no consideration or mercy. There are numerous examples of this, both historical and recent, that either of us can find.
While that is indeed true, I think it’s a fair criticism of religion that it doesn’t seem to do anything to assuage that violence tendency despite its claims to be a positive force in the world. In fact, much of history shows us ample examples of times when religion is at least a compounding factor in the violence if not a causal one.
So if some guy jostles me on the subway and I, being an angry asshole, clobber him, the fault is not in my anger, since there are all sorts of other reasons that people clobber each other?
If religion is telling them to disagree violently the fault is with religion.
