But that’s your relationship to music. Lots of people are a complete pain in the ass about their music. I’ve known quite a few people who could rant for hours on the subject of how bad such and such genre is, or how any genre or group other than their favorites are such shit. Heck, it’s got to be one of the most common variants of “kids nowadays”.
I used to be in a team of a dozen people which took turns playing whatever music we had or choosing radio stations. Different styles, different languages… generally we just enjoyed it, but sometimes we’d talk about it. What is this style, is it new, radical, traditional, where is it from, what variants does it have.
Until one guy declared he hated all our music.
From then on, we only played music when His Tone-Deaf Lordship wasn’t in the room.
LOL! You might want to re-read what I posted, you just rebuked me by agreeing…
If that is your feeling about God, then that is truly agnostic and requires no proof. I don’t know you, so I can’t say what unprovable crap you believe, but I believe (unprovably) that all humans believe something on faith.
I don’t understand how/why you separate your concept of God from the universe. Time is an aspect of our current universe. But we don’t know what happened/existed before the Big Bang. Maybe time did not apply then, or some different and inconceivable version of time applied. If you are going to suppose some concept of infinite and eternal, why make it even more complicated by creating a separate entity - God?
If you simply wanted to define your god as an aspect of the universe - nature’s laws, I’d have no objection to that other than to ask why it is necessary. Even when folk try to carefully delineate a “god of the gaps,” I wonder why they feel the need to make something up, rather than just admit the gaps in our knowledge.
As far as all that talk about salvation and the purposes of creation, I don’t see how those are anything other than aspects of one’s chosen mythology. And relying on them in support of arguments is entirely circular. Since I don’t even see any reason to believe in the existence of this supposed god, it impresses me as utterly ridiculous for people to have beliefs as to individual vs universal salvation, etc.
I’m not sure what I expected this thread to be, but I thought it would be something a little different than the standard theism vs atheism. And I acknowledge I played a big role in taking it where it is. Kudos to everyone to the extent they have kept the discussion on a pretty respectful level.
One, even if you were disagreeing, you were disagreeing about something that actually exists. Religion, philosophy, fairy tales - while they can be printed in a tangible book or made into a film, they are just ideas. Debating religion is essentially the same as arguing which superhero could beat up each other. Can be fun to debate, but still, bullshit.
Now once a myth gets written down or filmed, we can debate the quality of the representation. But that says NOTHING upon the underlying premise.
Second, as you acknowledge, people intolerant about others’ choices in music are a PITA. It would be extremely unusual for me to say certain styles of music are better or worse, or more or less valid than others. I would be very happy to express my personal preferences, tho, and to assess various attributes of performances within a particular genre. There is no way I would consider someone’s different personal preferences to be wrong.
If I’m flat out missing something, please see if you can help me understand.
I knew you didn’t really think what you wrote. I think you fell into the very common trap that a belief in a God of some sort becomes belief in very specific divine characteristics and commandments. Growing up as a religious minority helps one see that. My neighborhood was mostly Jewish, as were the classes I was in, so some part of my brain is astonished at there being so many Christians around.
The kidnapping I mentioned happened in the 19th century, not the Middle Ages. And by a Pope on his way to sainthood. If you believe in salvation, you can easily justify forcible conversion being in the best interest of the person converted.
I have been told several times that I’m in big trouble for not being Christian. (Not by Catholics, to be sure.) That was by people knowing nothing of my atheism. And this was in California, not in the Bible Belt. So don’t think that your tolerance is universal. I’m here because my grandparents and great-grandparents were forced out of Russia by those very religious Cossacks. And remember, not all that long ago Catholics were discriminated against in the US because they were not “real” Christians.
Atheist humanist sort here. I also tend to think that religions focus people on the wrong things – rather than enjoying their lives and the richness of the world, there seems to be a lot of THOU SHALT NOTS!, petty rules, infighting, and rejection of other real humans because they don’t believe in the same supreme being.
Be careful; that’s the beginning of the slide into being a nonbeliever!
I understand that the acknowledgement that it all might be wrong is common today. possibly as a way of dealing with our increasingly diverse society.
But I am interested in your claim that religion cannot (not usually does not) give a claim to certainty.
Don’t you think that God can ensure that your understanding of his message is correct? And God can certainly give signs that it really is God - he did that for the Patriarchs and for Moses. If I thought God was talking to me my skeptical nature would not accept it unless I got some factual evidence, for instance predictions. Him telling me spiritual truths out of self-help books isn’t going to cut it. And I accept the experience. Some people are prone to it (I’m not) but I don’t accept that it is coming from anywhere outside your head.
The lack of certainty of religion is a natural consequence of religion being so darned wrong so darned often.
Spoke with two people today who were eager to tell me at lengths about the voices in their heads.
No, I reject that God “revealing himself” privately to a single individual comes anywhere any acceptable standard of proof. Individuals - or groups - don’t have to be mentally ill to believe they experienced something that didn’t happen. A lot of what people think they experience depends on what they want to experience. And eyewitness testimony has been proven to be woefully unreliable.
We’ve discussed before what it would take for God to reveal himself in a way that would make unbelievers accept his existence. He clearly could do so if he existed and were as powerful as most religions believe him to be. But he doesn’t, so believers have to talk about his “mysterious ways,” and his supposed reasons for wanting folk to believe based on weak evidence.
There is ZERO reliable evidence of any signs given to Moses or the Pharisees. Hell, John Smith married multiple wives after the angel Moroni gave him the OK. Do you believe that? :dubious: Lotta folk will swear up and down that they’ve been abducted and probed by aliens. Whatever “proof” they have is sufficient for them to face ridicule and ostracism. Is it sufficient for you?
I was amused somewhat recently at something I read contending there was media bias by reporting claims of aliens as “alleged”, yet reporting on religion with no such qualifiers. Made sense to me.
Hell, there is zero evidence that Moses even existed. However a believer has to be able reconcile claims that God will never give solid evidence versus Bible stories where he did. Ditto for faith.
I’d say writing a message that someone requested using stars 50 ly away would be pretty convincing. Ain’t going to happen. But if I thought God was talking to me in my head, I’d ask for at least the names of all the winning horses at tomorrow’s races at Belmont. If he can’t do that, I ain’t interested. That wouldn’t prove it was god, but it would prove something is going on.
In my experience, Believers will swear they have solid evidence, but only because they are open to seeing it. The problem with non-believers is that their skepticism makes them blind to what everyone can see as plain as day, or so the story goes.
Yes like those with a belief in a primacy of a subject:
Ignoring that the most murderous points in the history of the humanity have now been by the regimes and by the members of them that have been motivated by movements explicetely promoting and even imposing athiesm - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. etc. (maybe Hitler).
The idea that it is religion is special in the ability to motivate lashing out violently against those who do not subscribe to their ways and their beliefs is objectively falsified.
I note I do not make a claim here that the athiests in general have any responsibility for these regimes… but the claims you made are not any way different from those made by the strong believers. Ironic.
Yeah, I’ve read “The Last Battle” also. But when you press them for the evidence, what you get back is stuff like “the beauty of a flower” or “the sunrise.”
Actually Communist Russia was much more like a theocracy than it was like a secular state. They did not believe in the traditional gods, but they had their saints - Marx and Lenin, and their Holy Book, and the creed which you disbelieved in at your peril. And their heretics also.
Clearly their attacks on the churches were not philosophical, but done in order to eliminate a non-Communist center of power. Which was not a dumb thing to do as the later experience of Poland showed.
China is allowing churches, but only if the leaders are appointed by the state.
Atheism has no set of beliefs, only a lack of belief. It has no morals. It has no creed. Stalin did not do anything for or because of atheism, just for and because of Communism and his own lust for power.
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that is a kind of athiesm (at least in theory). Obviously there are other forms, like a strong belief that without religion the Good would not do Evil. It was quoted even here.
These were dictators with twisted ideologies that used their power to kill, maim, and terrorize. I will grant you that. But still, on the whole, they are isolated examples of “atheist extremism” leading to wholesale terrorism.
Since you seem to take issue with the idea that religious faith fosters a culture of violence at the extremes, can you please address this point I made earlier?
In the absence of religious extremists, do you really think we’d have the terrorist movements we see today? Because to me, the main thing incentivizing new recruits to these movements is the desire to do God’s will so as to earn their handsome reward on the other side. Take that away and there goes a major motivation for sacrificing themselves to blow others up.
Yes hundreds of millions, in only one single century beating the records of the religious in deaths and in tortures etc. Better organization perhaps, I do not attribute more than humanity to them.
Oddly they are the only examples of atheism on any large scale. Calling them isolated seems very weird to me.
I take exception to the Belief asserted that it is uniquely the religious faith.
Human components fosters cultures of violence.
Having grown up with the european terrorism that was Leftist and athiestic, I find the question bizarre and naive. Having spent time in the totalitarian athiestic state as a youth on exchange, I have no doubts on the capacity of violence.
without religion I have no doubt the human being is capable of generating under the circumstances terrorist movements - we have already seen it with the Soviets, with the various flavors of the Chinese communists, with the Viet Nam with the North Korea (in its Stalinism before it turned in another strange direction), the Cambodia, etc ad nauseum.
I attribute nothing to this but deep currents in the human being. the idea removing religion removes this is a kind of religious belief with out the religion.
You might have taken time to actually respond to the reasons I gave for my statement. I didn’t say it was a theocracy, it was like a theocracy. There were no supernatural gods, only men almost elevated to godhood. And some of the principles of Marx were almost supernatural in the economic sense.
And if you had understood that post, the point about without religion people would do evil is what theists say when they claim that without religion people would be out of control. Considering that we are living examples of people not doing evil despite not having religion, it would be a rather absurd thing to believe.
Try again.
Your reasons about the soviets are special pleadings. Saying more like a theocracy than a secular state is making a hidden assertion about the secular state.
Do you have any examples of people killing for atheism? For Communism, yes indeed. But while they were atheists in the traditional sense, it did not drive their behavior the way religion drives the behavior of terrorists and Crusaders.
We do not claim that atheism makes you more moral or better. Karl Rove is an atheist for Og’s sake. We do claim that atheism is no bar to being moral, and that religion is not required for a moral life. There are people who find God and become better people, but there are also people who find God and blow things up.
The more fervor for anything the more likely extremism is. There aren’t cells of radical Unitarians as far as I’m aware.
