“And when did you find out that you were God?”
“Well, I was praying, and suddenly realized that I was talking to myself!”
(Rough paraphrase, Peter O’Toole in The Ruling Class)
Sometimes I live in Heaven and sometimes it rains here. It’s raining right now in fact.
16%
“Nonreligious” (incl. agnostic, atheist, secular humanist + people answering ‘none’ or no relig. preference. Half of this group is “theistic” but nonrelig.
As I do not belong to any organized religion, my religion has no real restrictions upon my behavior. There are certain things I find to be ‘good ideas’ like not killing people because it’s logistically inefficient, in that I have to deal with a whole lot of other ancillary issues I would rather not deal with like police investigations, angry families that want to kill me, disposing of the body all that sort of crap. So I’d rather not kill people.
I’m sorry I invented such a difficult to understand concept as the idea of an atheist political organization. (I suppose that would make it a religion or areligion.) Atheists don’t bother me. I was trying to outline how ludicrous the idea of trying to remove people who believe in God from political office. None of you saw the atheofascists marching in their slick black uniforms through my head, so you don’t realize how cool the idea was, if only you could have seen the slick black uniforms, and the antichrist up on his pulpit. Oh it was a beautiful scene. Anyway, I don’t have such a problem with atheists as people, I just believe that as an ethos it revolves around some silly semantic nitpicks.
The only thing that seperates me from an atheist in any practical sense is that I am willing to admit that I take things on faith. The number of cites tossed at me that I have NO POSSIBLE way of verifying must be taken on faith. I have faith in the peer review process, and faith in the macro-economy. I have faith that people I buy things from on the internet aren’t going to screw me. I have faith that a dollar actually has value. I have faith that my typing right now is actually intelligible, at least somewhat. That’s what faith is about. I’m tired of people going around denying Mysticism and God, when they really don’t even know what those words mean to the people they are arguing with. That’s my problem with atheism. That’s why I find atheism dangerous, because it’s a completely irrational belief system based largely on creating semantic confusion, that claims not to be bound by the same dogmas that the rest of society is bound by, and that’s utter bullshit.
For instance Lightnin believes he’s escaped his ancestor’s belief system, but he’s typing in English. That’s a part of his ancestor’s belief system. He is using the Gregorian Calendar to mark the passage of time. A Calendar that is PINNED to the Birth year of Jesus Christ, and has two months, July and August tossed in there to suit the vanity of the Roman Emperors, yet he’s escaped the belief system of his ancestors.
Simply I am tired of the finger pointing atheist dogma, that most certainly IS dogma, it is zealotry of the most common kind, no different from the guys standing on the street corner force feeding us religious tracts. At least the guy handing us tracts has a certain kind of integrity to him, because he’s not trying to disguise his methods.
I’m all for atheism, if you don’t believe in God, that’s fine, it’s truly irrelevant, because as I said, it’s a semantic argument at best IMO, but the constant forcefeeding of it’s dogma in the form of threads trying to pin the woes of humanity on ‘the religious’ is pretty ridiculous, and all it’s going to do for me is fill my head with comical images of a sexy atheist army marching down the street, getting into their power armor to fight the Angels of Osiris and the Demons of Isis in my Revelations anime extravaganza.
Erek
Hardly worth replying to, but, tell you what, you get an…iron cup. Full of Brunswick Stew. {places cup of stew on table}
{The Cheat responds excitedly (“All right”) and pushes the cup over to his side of the table}
STRONG BAD: But lemme tell ya’s. With a little extra effort, it would have been a trophy full of Steak-umms.
(The Cheat responds glumly “Awww”}
So I guess you DO count Al Qaida on your side? It seems one religious group is waging war on another religious group (or more)… and yet the non-religious don’t seem to be involved in any sort of hostility. You’re worried about atheists?!
Funny… I don’t kill people because I know it’s wrong- I don’t need a fantasy sky father figure to tell me not to do it. I’m so glad that you find murder to be inefficient; otherwise, I’m sure we’d all be screwed.
Atheism, on the whole, seems a lot less likely to call for genocide than, say, Christians. At least we don’t seem to have a track record of it…
Come to think of it, I guess you would have a problem with difficult concepts like “Think for yourself” and “Don’t blindly follow others just 'cause that’s what your parents did”.
You think atheism is “irrational”? And you’re the one who believes in a mystical omniscient omnipotent (yet completely invisible) father figure that tells you what to do, but which can’t be proved in any way?! Dude, take a step back and look at what you’re saying!
What language would you like us to use? What calendar? Do you seriously think atheists should, just because they don’t believe in your god, use a completely different language and calendar? I think you’re conflating religion and society.
Just 'cause I use a Gregorian calendar and speak english doesn’t mean I worship your god. Heck, I sometimes say “goddammit” and “hell”, but even THAT doesn’t mean I’m a believer, just like when I say “bitca”, that doesn’t mean that I think Willow Rosenberg is real.
This country has a hard enough time switching over to the metric system- do you REALLY think we need a different measurement system for every religious belief (and disbelief) there is?
Religious extremists perform atrocities all over the globe in the name of their god. And you’re worried about atheists? We don’t even go to church. We don’t indoctrinate our young on Sunday mornings. We don’t even hand out tracts. Somehow, I don’t think you need to worry too much about atheists.
We, on the other hand, have a lot to worry about from believers like you.
Wow, there’s a lot of religions. Why do so many people believe in the wrong one?
Does that mean it’s ok to kill people in your (unorganized) religion?
Can I join your religion!!! It sounds cool! In my religion they won’t let you do anything cool! Do I still have to go to church?
You said “… There are certain things I find to be ‘good ideas’ like not killing people because it’s logistically inefficient,…” Can I kill people if I think it’s a good idea? Does “logistically inefficient” mean hard? If it wasn’t hard would it be ok?
It wouldn’t be as hard, if I helped you, right, it would be logistically inefficient to kill, me, if I was your helper!
(the rest of you are on your own)
NO, I CAN’T SEE YOUR BRAIN MOVIES.
Word arguing makes my head hurt.
Can I sell you something on the internet? please,PLEASE!
(One of us needs some object lessons on the limits of faith.)
Words are confusing! We should all use the same language, English. So everybody can understand our brainwords.
Bad Lightnin, using English, everybody knows,
“English is a West Germanic language that originated from languages brought to Britain during the first half of the first millennium by Germanic settlers from various parts of north-west Germany. The original Germanic language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonized parts of Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries. The second wave was of the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke a variety of French. These two invasions caused English to become highly ‘creolised’; creolisation arises from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication. Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Friesian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of European languages; this new layer entered English through use in the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a ‘borrowing’ language of considerable suppleness and huge vocabulary.”
and
“English is now the third most spoken native language worldwide (after Chinese and Hindi), with some 380 million speakers. It has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century to the present. Through the global influence of native English speakers in cinema, airlines, broadcasting, science, and the Internet in recent decades, English is now the most widely learned second language in the world. Many students worldwide are required to learn some English, and a working knowledge of English is required in many fields and occupations.”
He’s just doin it cause it’s part of his ancestor’s belief system.
I bet his Great Grandfather was a Thuringii!
Bad Lightnin, stop believing in English, and stop looking at the calendar, especially in July and August.
Words make my head hurt too!
NO, I STILL CAN’T SEE YOUR BRAIN MOVIES. Damn, this movie get better every time I hear about it. I can’t wait for the DVD!
May I PLEASE steal this for my sig?
And religion is quite irrational, IMHO. It just feeds into certain basic human needs, is all.
Tangentially, this does bring up an interesting Constitutional question: in the event of Rapture, with the President beamed up with the Elect into the bosom of Abraham, etc. Would he be still be considered eligible to serve in his capacity? Or would his Executive functions be subsumed into those of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Horatio Christ?
Theft is the sincerest form of flattery,steal away!
crowmanyclouds
It’s often funny how often the derision of my rationale requires no rationale of its own.
However, I simply disagree that faith means “blind adherence”, as it is so often implied in these arguments.
It is intellectually dishonest to claim that you HAVE verified everything that you’ve ever discussed on an INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD MADE UP OF KNOW-IT-ALLS. Basically, there is this idea many people have here that they are more intelligent than people off of this board, and I must confess that the average intelligence of this board in my experience has ridden the mean average. There are a couple people who are quite intelligent that bring up the average.
However, most atheist debates I have seen bring in inductive arguments while they are politically argument for deductive reasoning. The best example of one of these inductive arguments is the Tri-Omni argument that tries to prove that God is a logical impossibility due to disproving that he is “omniscient, omnipotent or omnibenevolent”. They oftentimes narrow the definition of “religion” so that it supports their arguments, and will not allow for a seperate interpretation of the religion.
So they induce two things “Necessary properties of God”, and “Everyone shares my definition of religion”. For instance, Daoism is considered a religion, though it doesn’t quite have a God as we understand it. When using logic, the affirmative has to prove that it is 100% true, whereas the negative only has to give one example of it not being true. As there are many world religions, and it is quite easy to prove that they don’t have the same makeup, the same goals, or same beliefs, it is very easy to ‘deduce’ that the limited definition of religion that is put forth in these particular debates is woefully inadequate.
Atheists want to argue oftentimes that atheism isn’t a religion, though it has standard dogma, and SOME atheists will show solidarity with other atheists, choosing a strength in numbers approach rather than maintaining FAITH in the objective approach they pretend to be advocating. I would argue that it is a religion as there is a cultish devotion to disproving God, that is quite widespread.
If you spoke to any scientist worth his salt, he would tell you that trying to prove or disprove God is simply junk science.
Generally as I accept that this is a semantic argument, and not one with a correct answer, I attempt to explain what I mean when I say “God”, rather than trying to provide hard evidence of such. The constant pleas for me to “prove it” show that the atheist in question simply does not get science, religion, mysticism or that the word “faith” is a synonym of the words “trust” and “belief”. It is very difficult for them to understand why in their lack of using sound critical thinking that they fail to sway those “Irrational deists” with their arguments. I hardly think that such a logically inconsistent group of people should be the ones to frame this debate, or to define religion. Though I am perfectly willing to accept that there are atheists out there capable of comprehending that the words religion, and faith are a little more nuanced than the average rabble on the SDMB would have you believe.
So debates with atheists have increased my ability to explain my point of view on this subject, and I have found some really nifty tools within the critical thinking skills set that they have been trying to push toward me, that I have known all this time they were not using. So now that I have learned words like “inductive reasoning”, I am far more capable of explaining to an atheist why I think they are a fool, so that they will more completely understand what I mean when I tell them to kiss my @$$ for trying to sell their irrationality as something it is not: Logical.
Erek
Atheism is not a “dogma” or a belief system any more than not believing in elves is a dogma or a belief system. Claiming over and over that it is will not make you right.
Well, that depends. My atheism happens to be a belief system, because it happens to be composed of things I believe without having any other epistemological justification than what “feels true” to me. I hold my atheistic views not because of any epistemological commitment to pure materialism and rejection of supernaturalist hypotheses, but because that’s what my faith tells me.
Saying “There is no scientific or material evidence for the existence of a supernatural deity” is not a statement of belief. Saying “I believe that there is no God” is, though.
Same-same for the corresponding statements “There is no scientific or material disproof of the existence of a supernatural deity” and “I believe that there is a God”.
Do you say “There is no scientific or material evidence for the existence of Santa Claus” instead of “I believe that there is no Santa Claus”? If you do not, is your belief system a religion?
“Atheism” can be argued as not being a monolithic belief system. Which I will agree with you.
However, there is much dogma involved in the arguments. When you disagree with me by saying there is no dogma, you are being kind of disingenuous. Because there is oftentimes quite a bit of dogma levelled in the atheist debate from the atheist side. This however, does not mean ALL atheists are dogmatic.
The Tri-Omni debate is a perfect example of dogma that has no basis. The reason is first of all that it induces that these three properties are a necessary component of a deity, and if God does not contain these three necessary properties, then God does not exist. Questions I would ask would be “Why does God necessarily require these properties?”, and I might also respond that “If these properties do not adequately describe God, the only thing this proves is that these three properties do not adequately describe God.”
Now I’ll go and address the dogmas inherent in this argument individually.
I don’t know what the argument against omniscience is, so there is nothing for me to say. I believe God knows all by definition.
God is omnipotent in that God contains all the power that is. However, asking a question like “Can God create a rock that God cannot lift?” is silly, because intent enters the equation before action. So one would have to answer the question “Would God create a rock God could not lift?”. before a question of whether or not it is possible is even relevant. It’s simply a semantic wordgame designed to trick people who are not well versed in semantics.
God is omnibenevolent is flawed because it relies on a very human centered belief in benevolence. If Humans are suffering God cannot be omnibenevolent. It assumes that the motivations of the creator would be centered around the desires of human beings. It’s simply a silly argument.
Another dogma is trying to claim a very narrow definition of the words “religion” and “faith” in order to create an “us” and “them” scenario that puts the atheists in a position of perceived strength, where their strength only comes from a very minor ability to out wordplay the average person who believes in God.
A final dogma that is the stickiest one is the idea that faith/mysticism/mythology/religion are antonyms of the word science, they are not, they don’t attempt to perform the same job, there is nothing contained within them that is necessarily in opposition to science. This particular dogma comes from a political division between “science” and the catholic church. The Catholic Church found the methods of the burgeoning “scientists” to be less than savory, for instance the cutting up of cadavers for study. This allows a monolithic imperial religious regime to frame the debate even 500 years later. The dogma in this case is inherited from the side that the atheists are claiming to be in opposition to.
So, while you can claim that “Atheism” isn’t a monolithic code of faith, and you would certainly be correct in saying that. It would simply be a lie to try and convince someone that dogma does not oftentimes frame the atheist side of this debate.
As I have said before, if the atheists arguing against painting atheism as a religion wanted to step up and take their dumber brethren to task for extolling the virtues of deductive reasoning while utilizing inductive reasoning, then I’d feel more sympathetic. However, this rarely if ever happens, and that would be the final dogma that I feel qualifies it as a religion: solidarity.
Erek
If you say “I believe that there is no Santa Claus”, that’s a statement of belief, AFAICT. Not a belief system, and not a religion, but a statement of belief.
Unless, that is, you’re using “believe” in the looser sense of “as far as I know, it is generally accepted that”. As in “I believe it’s not supposed to rain today”, meaning not “I personally have faith that it won’t rain”, but rather “The meteorological evidence, as far as I’m aware, is predicting no rain”.
Not believing in God is more akin to not believing it will rain M&Ms than simply not believing it will rain.
Yes, we understand that. It’s inherent in the definition of “Not believing in God”. This however does not mean that someone who claims not to believe in God, is free from dogma.
Erek
Some are, some arent. They’re all free from theistic dogma, and there is absolutely nothing else which unites or defines atheists except that none of them are convinced of the existence of a deity.
I dont know to what degree these figures represent the truth.
For example i consider myself to be agnostic (I DONT HAVE INFINITE WISDOM OF THE UNIVERSE) but come from a greek orthodox background and when ever I fill in one of those forms I tick Greek orthodox. I also take my family to church every easter and christmas as a community custom and the majority of people I asociate with there feel the ame way. For us religion has become a custom that we tolerate… we paint egs, we bake cakes, etc. If the custom was to the 12 Gods of Olympus it would make absolutely no difference.
By the way I have not killed anyone recently.
Whoosh, yes?
No, you said pacifists, not atheists. Reread post #70.