Metacom, actually, I might be finding your argument persuasive (and no, this isn’t a rhetorical trick; I’m serious). Help me think about this.
Is it your suggestion that any organization set up for the specific purpose of helping people by any means may, as long as they do not charge for that help, be considered tax-exempt?
For example, I decide that guacamole enemas will help pepole appreciate the Essential Green Vibration of all the cosmos. I set up a guacamole enema clinic, and while I ask for donations, I do not require them. May I receive tax-exempt status?
Same thing if I set up a shop where I play music all day long and anyone can come listen without paying any money, or I paint pictures in my office and folks can come watch, or I do folks’ taxes for them at no charge?
That actually does seem like a reasonable stance to me: as long as the guacamolebutts can get tax-exempt status, I’m okay with the preachers getting it, too. The central criteria would be:
Is the primary purpose of this organization to help people (whether through valid or bogus means)?
Does this organization charge for its help?
Obviously, some nonprofits DO charge for their help: if you want to adopt a dog from our shelter, it’s $85. However, I think we can safely say that anyone who answers yes to the first question and no to the second could receive tax-exempt status.
You are asking for it to take atheistic values as the normative values. That might not seem like respecting one religion over another to you, because you’ve got your intellectually dishonest stance that atheism is not a religious belief. If it wasn’t a religious belief then this debate wouldn’t even be happening.
You have no proof one way or another. Atheism is a statement of belief not a statement of fact. Just because your belief system eliminates the ability to build an edifice for worship, due to the fact that your belief system has nothing to worship, does not mean it’s beliefs should be respected over the beliefs of many other belief systems. Especially since you are packed far away in the minority.
The voters decide what is right, not proselytizing atheists who believe their pseudo-intellectual moral code should apply universally.
Sorry, I thought this was the pit for some reason. I apologize for impugning you in Great Debates. The church is treated like everyone else. Your own belief system is what keeps you from tax-exempt status, not the law. I am certain if an atheist sect decided to get together and form an organization that was attempting to seek emotional communion with one another, it could be recognized as a church. What is intolerant, is that you are arguing that others should not be able to have something, because YOU don’t want it.
According to your unsubstantiated belief system.
They do affect the world in a verifiable fashion. You and your fellow atheists refuse to accept the explanations people give you. To me it’s simple, you are on one side of the debate and other people are on the other. You want to impose your beliefs by claiming that they are ‘more secular’ than the beliefs of others. Secularism and atheism are not equivalent.
I apologize again.
Atheism is a religious opinion. If you had no religious opinions you would not enter into religious debates, which you do frequently. Arguing whether or not God exists, is a religious debate, taking a side on it is voicing a religious opinion. What you are trying to do is create a doublespeak so that the semantic framing of the debate favors your side. It doesn’t work like that. Claiming that your religion is not a religion, is not a way to get it’s tenets respected over the tenets of other religions. If atheism were not a religion, it’s belief systems would not come in conflict with religious belief systems.
Just so you know, if you were a dogmatic christian, making the same sorts of arguments that you make, I would explain to them, that science doesn’t conflict with religion in any way, as I have explained to you more than once.
You are talking about the laws that YOU want to enact as though your personal idea of intellectual integrity is in any way normative and what is “right”. When it comes to law, what is “right” is the will of the populace, just look at all the people wasting away in jail because they were selling pot. I don’t see that as being right, but that’s the way it is.
If you want to argue for equal treatment, then I am all for it. If we get rid of property taxes across the board, then I would be willing to argue that churches should not get tax exempt status. I am against property taxes in many circumstances, basically because they unfairly target the poor. If someone’s property suddenly goes up in value because of the rich developers trying to gentrify an area, and they can’t afford it, they are forced to sell to pay for those property taxes. I do not wish to see churches close down because of this. You may not believe in God, and you don’t have to, but it would be nice if you realized that what you are proposing is an elimination of one of the few places that poor communities have to congregate and organize as a cohesive community. This of course would send people flocking to the wealthy profiteer churches, as suddenly they are the only game in town.
In my experience with you, you seem to have an agenda. It’s not so much that you don’t believe in God, but you seem to really hate religion, and want to put an end to it. I am trying to help you to realize the redeeming social values it has, all the edifices and social constructs you take for granted that you wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for religion. If you want to start from a reasonable position why don’t you start looking at the pros as well as the cons. It seems like all you are looking at is the holy wars and the televangelist profiteers, but the reality is, what you are advocating, won’t stop the things you hate about religion, it would hurt the things about religion that are actually good and healthy for society.
I maintain that whether God exists or is just a bunch of scientific principles in an agglomeration is purely a semantic argument. It’s actually pretty irrelevant whether or not you believe in God. What IS relevant is the intolerance shown on both sides of the debate, and your strict unwillingness to even attempt to understand the perspective you are condemning. In my mind you are the same as a holy rolling christian, only wearing different clothes. Neither willing to attempt to view the other’s perspective.
The law now is equal. There is no reason that you cannot have a tax-exempt house of worship, except that your belief system precludes that sort of behavior. What you are expecting is for everyone else to adhere to the same standard that you are adhering to.
In Freemasonry, we don’t want to become a religion so we don’t have tax exempt status. We pay dues. The reality though, is that we wouldn’t allow a crackhead into our lodge. We wouldn’t accept them as a member. A church will, and they will minister to him, and help him get off of crack. That is a redeeming social value that you most definitely reap benefits from, even if it is non-monetary. If we went with your method, it wouldn’t even affect me. I don’t go to church. I find my sources of worship at festivals I am willing to pay for, I find it in my lodge with my fraternity brothers, I find it at parties and amongst peers. I’ve lived on the street, but I’ve never been alone in the way many homeless people are. I lived on the street because I didn’t want to get a real job, I wanted to party and didn’t mind living hand to mouth. As lost as I have been in life, I was never the true lost soul that needs those poor churches the most.
Something I want to explain to you is this. I come to the SDMB as a recreational activity. I argue in GD to refine my rhetoric and learn new things. I argue in the Pit because it’s cathartic. I know I have crossed the line of tolerance many times, and I am sorry if that reflects upon “The religious” as a whole for you. That’s not my intent. I don’t take these boards 100% seriously. I think that a lot of people here are elitists and nowhere near the levels of intellectual prowess they like to claim they are. I believe that the intellect on this board rides the mean average. I have that same sort of elitist snobbery in me too, I come here to work that out. So what I am trying to get at is that I’m not meaning to devalue you overall as a person. If I didn’t value you as a person I would simply not speak to you at all. I just hope that one day you can realize that there is more to religion than blind crusades, jihads and inquisitions regardless of whether or not you ever believe in God.
“Secular” and “atheist” are not the same thing; not even close.
The religious are the ones claim that god (s) affect the world; it is not my obligation to prove a negative. If there is no evidence for something, and no logical need for that something, then the rational assumption is that is doesn’t exist. Atheism is the rational default belief.
No they don’t; if the voters decide to relegalize slavery, it’s still wrong.
:rolleyes: Yeah, and gays have equal rights because they can marry a member of the opposite sex. Why should I pay for your social club/live theater/propaganda palace/hate club ?
So using Bin Laden as someone whose opinion is of value doesn’t reflect on you ? Keep dreaming.
Because they have no evidence. That’s what “verifiable” means.
They are more secular than your “theocracy is good” arguement.
Atheism is the absence of religion, like vacuum is the absence of matter; by your argument, space is filled with air. Atheism is in conflict with religion because by nature religion is intolerant; it tries to subordinate everything to itself. In essense, religion is in conflict with everything.
Religion is about faith and ignorance, science about reason and knowledge; they are opposites.
The tyranny of the majority in action; that doesn’t make it right.
That…makes no sense. Paying the same as everyone else is fair; the type of tax is irrelevant to this arguement.
The elimination of one group of parasites upon the poor is hardly a tragedy; if they flock to others, I can’t stop them.
As I’ve said elsewhere : Yes, I despise religion, and would even if it were true; and I see no evidence that it’s benefits outweigh the costs. I see no evidence they even come close.
Hardly; a bunch of laws aren’t even close to being a creature; it’s not semantic at all. It is relevant because of the damage the believers do.
First, being intolerant of stupidity, irrationality, ignorance and bigotry is not a vice, and those are what religion is about. If the other side is blatantly stupid ( religion ) or evil ( Nazis ), it’s perspective has nothing of value.
You have a strange definition of equal.
It’s called “switching drugs”, no different than turning him on to crystal meth. He’s still irrational and dangerous, just in your cause.
Sure it is, God isn’t going to put out a fire the local fire department will. God isn’t going to sweep the streets, the local municpality does. God isn’t going to stop your church from being robbed the police will. The local government doing all these things for free is a subsidy.
beagledave made the same argument in the previous thread and NurseCarmen shot it down. One more time, the difference between these two threads is that in the first the churches were providing material aid and resources specifically for one canidate. In this thread a preacher made a speech critizing both canidates, a completely different scenario.
Atheism is a lack of belief, not a statement of belief (at least not “weak” atheism).
Cite? Show me one single verifiable instance of the “divine” interacting with the universe.
Atheism is the absence of religious opinion.
Atheism is not a belief system. This is one of the most annoying memes perpetrated by religionists- that atheism is a “religion.” It’s the same sort of impulse that causes people to call people “evolutionists.” Atheism is the absence of belief in a deity. It is not a belief in itself and it’s not a “religion” any more than not believing in leprechauns is a religion.
Moreover, this particular thread is not a religious debate but a debate about tax law.
Incidentally, I don’t know about Der Trihs but most intelligent skeptics do not try to argue that God does not exist. That would be empirically impossible to make a case for. What we argue is that there is no evidence that God does exist, and that the logical default (and Occam’s razor) requires that we should assume (conditionally) that all-powerful, magic, invisble sky gods do not exist until someone proves that they (or until it can be shown that there is at least some empirical reason to hypothesize it).
Not it is a statement that God DOES NOT exist. Agnosticism is the lack of a belief. Atheism and Agnosticism are not synonyms.
I exist, and you exist. There is my cite.
No, again, atheism and agnosticism are not synonyms. Atheism is a declaration.
If atheism is not a belief system the how come atheists have so much groupthink? There will always be atheists who are unwilling to be intellectually honest, and admit that what they suffer is simply conflicting worldviews, and of course they are the most vocal.
That’s the side of the atheist religion yes. From the other side, it’s a religious debate. It’s about whether or not a church has the right to denounce an action performed in their name as reprehensible. That’s a religious debate. Trying to formulate the debate in a way that favors the atheist side of the debate is intellectually dishonest.
To expect a religious person to remove the concept of God from ANY aspect of themselves is like asking someone with a glass of water to remove the concept of “matter” from the discussion of the glass of water. The atheist side of the debate is making the ASSUMPTION that they are de facto correct, and that as such they should be able to frame the rules of the debate to leave God out of it, something that a religious person is not going to do. It makes it easier then for the atheist to paint the religious person as being unable to have a civil conversation, which is simply not the case, the case is that the debate is about the single most fundamental aspect of the universe.
You want to remove tax exemptions from churches. I would argue that this country would cease to exist were it to do so. Regardless of whether or not God exists, the one thing that will unite religious people faster than anything is the government attempting to institute an atheist agenda.
Der Trihs argues that the type of taxes are irrelevant, I think they are most relevant. I am not against a taxation system that is more equal, but I also understand that some arbitrary idea of intellectual standards is not the way to go about it, because I think that the churches are providing a service that no one else is providing, and that many would have to close up shop if they had to pay the exhorbitant property taxes. Income taxes, Sales taxes etc… would not drive them out of business like property tax would. His idea of intellectual honesty is completely lacking in nuance, and ignores the balance that makes the fabric of a healthy society. He has an agenda of hate, that he freely admits to. I don’t see anything rational in his agenda.
I consider myself a skeptic. I don’t believe anything until it’s proven to me, I know that I have to go ahead with partial information and I am ok with that. That’s where “faith” comes in. I believe that the reason you cannot wrap your mind around the idea of a “God” is because you are looking for an entity that is “other” that is easily definable. God is the singularity, it is the whole undivided. Seeking out the nature of divinity is attempting to reconcile the human need to compartmentalize and segment with the fact that the entirety of the whole is a singularity. The only thing that HAS BEEN proven to me is that God exists. I know it as I type this, I know it as I drink water, I know it because I was born, I know it because I know that I was born.
In my opinion the state exists to further the pursuit of understanding the divine and for no other reason. If you remove that aspect from the state it has lost it’s legitimacy, and what I am arguing is that myself and the MAJORITY of people would stop supporting the state at all if this were the case.
So the question that I’d have to ask you is. What’s more important to you, that churches be held to the atheist’s standard of fairness or that civil authority doesn’t break down due to irreconcilable differences between large segments of the populace.
I simply am unwilling to oversimplify this debate.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Corrolation is not causation. Science is about deductive reasoning, and your argument relies upon induction.
That’s really all I can say to you about your “atheism is rational” argument.
?? His objection is that you’re comparing the current case to one where “church resources were used to organize a campaign.” Are you claiming that in this case, too, church resources were used to organize a campaign? Or are you claiming that this is an insignificant difference between the two cases?
Oh, garbage. There is plenty of evidence for our non divine orgins, none that we are anything other than jumped up animals.
“Groupthink” ? The only thing atheists agree on is atheism.
Once again, Atheism is not a religion. The atheist side is favored because the evidence ( or lack of, in this case ) favors it.
So you’re claiming the religious are fundamentally irrational ?
No, the secular side is saying leave religion out of goverment, because the alternative is tyranny and /or civil war.
“Paying your fair share” is an atheist agenda ? You do more to insult religion than I ever could. “Give us a tax subsidy, or we kill you all !!”
First, they provide no services that can’t be given elsewhere, probably better. Second, if the rest of us can survive paying property taxes,so can they.
You, a skeptic ?! That’s one of the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Your assertions that God exists aren’t proof, not even close. You may believe, but you don’t know one exists. If you claim otherwise, you’re simply wrong.
Utter, absolute garbage. That is not the purpose of state and never has been.
If the average American is that rabidly insane, the world is better off if America collapses, the sooner the better. Not that I believe it; if you were right, there would be massive religious riots and massacres here all the time, and there are not.
It is if the hypothesis violates physical laws ( like God, souls and so on ), and where there is no problem that needs such a violation. You might as well claim the universe is embedded in a drop of sweat on a twelve dimensional orc; it makes as much sense as any religion, and has as much evidence.
I never said we are anything other than jumped up animals. The two concepts are not incompatible. My God is also the God of the animals.
As for evidence that we are of non-divine origins, may I see a cite please? Throw out anything about the big bang or evolution, for they are of divine origin.
Then why do they use the same tired arguments?
News flash, the atheist side is not favored. Ignoring evidence and lack of evidence are different things. Your poor grasp of the language of your adversary is not a compelling argument to the rightness of your claim.
No
I agree. This is why you don’t start kicking people out of their churches.
You could go start a church if you want to. Your lack of desire to start a church doesn’t make it unfair that other people desire to do so. The law IS fair.
The services are given there and have been for quite some time. I fail to see how capitalism is of higher value than religion.
Being able to prove something to you, and having had it proven to myself are two different things. Again, I maintain that your atheism is based on ignorance of language, nothing more. You are claiming that something you cannot comprehend does not exist, this is in no way rational. I may believe you to be wrong, that’s irrelevant, what I am arguing is that your argument is not rational as it is faith based. The existence of God HAS been proven to me. You are incapable of understanding what I say when I try to explain it to you. Your ignorance is willful, you do not WISH to understand. It is not for me to MAKE you understand, I do not have this ability. Again the problem is a mere semantic defect nothing more. The difference is I do understand the language you are using, I simply dismiss the argument that it is incompatible with my beliefs.
It is the purpose of life, the state’s purpose is to help humans survive. Therefore it is fundamentally the state’s purpose. I would argue that scientific pursuit is seeking a greater understanding of the divine. Largely your tactics are those of a fundamentalist christian, and your arguments are arguments made during a schism where the church had overriding authority that was hindering science, so the two sides broke into opposing camps with their seperate propaganda. You are merely spouting dogmatic propaganda of the past, fighting a church that is no longer a threat to you.
The average person is religious in the entire world. A belief in God is not a prerequisite toward being religious. I use Buddhism and Taoism as my cites. There aren’t massacres here all the time because the government makes it a point to accomodate people’s religious pursuit as best it can, as this country was formed by people who were largely escaping religious persecution. If you look at your history there was massive civil strife between puritans and catholics just before this country was formed. Many of the founding fathers were freemasons, whose pluralistic ideals were the basis of the constitution. Freemasons were being actively murdered by the catholic church just before the founding of this nation.
There is no evidence that any of this violates physical laws, that is your own prejudiced induction, nothing more. Your inability to understand the subject matter you are discussing is not a compelling argument against it.
Wrong on both counts. Atheism is defined as the absence of belief in God. Atheists can be subdivided into two groups: “weak” atheists and “strong” atheist." Weak atheism is a lack of belief in God but is not a positive belief that God does *not[/i exist. It is essentially a lack of belief either way. Strong atheism is a positive belief that God does not exist. Agnosticism (which you are confusing with weak atheism) is an epistemelogical position not a theistic one. Agnosticism is a belief that it is not possible to know if God exists. It is subtly different from weak atheism but very commonly confused with it. Collectively, all people without a belief in gods can all be called “atheists” but strong atheists are merely a subset of that whole.
You are not a newbie here. You can’t possibly really expect that to stand as a cite on this message board.
Incorrect. See above. You are misinformed about the meanings of the terms.
They don’t. The only thing atheists have in common is a lack of belief in gods. Other than that they run a full gamut of philsophies and politics.
There is no such thing as an “atheist side” of anything, much less an “atheist religion” and no, this is not a religious debate. It’s a debate about tax exemptions. The truth or falsity of any particular religion is tangential at best in this discussion.
No one has asked anyone to do that.
There is no “atheist side” of this debate and no one has said that God should be “left out” of anything.
Yes, I do. Finally, a relevant and honest statement.
There is no such thing as an “atheist agenda” and revoking tax exempt status for churches imposes absolutely no restriction on anyone’s free practice of religion.
Churches already pay sales taxes and if they can’t pay their property taxes, that’s their problem, not the public’s. People have a right to free practice but they don’t have a right to have that practice subsidized by me.
How has God been proven to you?
In that case, you might be more comfortable in a country like Saudi Arabia. The US is not a theocracy and the US government has absolutely no charge to “pursue” any “understanding of the divine.” In fact, it is expressly forbidden to do so by its Constitution.
That aspect has never existed- was deliberately kept out from the start- in the USA and we’ve done all right.
What kind of ridiculous false dilemma is this? There is no such thing as an “atheist’s standard of fairness,” the second part of your question doesn’t follow from the first and none of it has anything to do with this debate.
I
Language has nothing to do with is. The fact that religion is illogical and evidence-free does.
Not if I have to pay for it.
Because capitalism has a greater track record for usefulness and increasing the general welfare ? Almost anything has a higher value than religion, as far as I’m concerned.
No it’s not. Proof by nature is objective.
I understand you perfectly fine; I consider you to be mentally ill, along with your fellow believers. The only thing that needs understanding is what brain/cultural defect makes religion so common.
It may be your purpose, it’s not mine. It certainly isn’t the purpose of life, assuming there was one.
Both wrong and impossible; there is nothing for science to study.
They also used to be proslavery, and treated women as subhuman. One has changed, the other is changing; hopefully humanity will outgrow religion. If it doesn’t, I don’t expect civilization to survive, given how malignant, intolerant and irrational religion is.
Nonsense; religion is fully of impossible things, and souls make no scientific sense at all.
You are being more intellectually honest than your contemporaries but are still being intellectually dishonest. This is a debate about what rights to free speech a religion has without losing its tax exempt status. You are trying to subtly steer the argument in a way that removes religion from it. You cannot discuss the rights a religion has to freely pursue it’s own faith and claim it is not a religious debate. If you continue to do so, I don’t see any point in even furthering discussion, because I’m not going to accept your newspeak.
God has been proven to me directly, I have seen God. I feel Gods presence. That is how I know God exists, I experience it every moment of every day. I cannot suddenly give you my experience in order to prove it to you, and expecting me to is irrational. You have no way to know whether or not I am telling the truth, so to tell me that I am wrong is also, irrational.
You are not accepting the fundamental difference in opinion we have here. I cannot argue with you based on your terms, because the terms you wish to discuss things on, I find to be insufficient and narrow.
Personally it disturbs me that the IRS is being used to attack a liberal church. You have taken the time to get up on a soap box and argue about tax exemption. In the other tax exemption thread you will find a lot of good arguments. First and foremost being that a person can start a non-profit that has NOTHING to do with religion and gain tax-exempt status. This argument is predicated on ignorance of both the church and the state.
Regardless of whether or not atheism is a religion. People like yourself and Der Trihs are merely trying to push a personal agenda that would disenfranchise people merely because you have a problem with the activity they are engaging in.
As was pointed out in the other thread. Churches provide a service that takes the burden OFF of the state, because if churches didn’t exist, then the state would have to provide some kind of institution to take their place that does what they do.
Anyway I am tired of arguing with the closed minded bigotry of atheists who don’t want to admit that they are just agenda pushing and trying to influence things to go the way they find most aesthetically pleasing. They are selling their selfishness as some sort of altruistic call for intellectual integrity. It’s no different from a fundie christian.
The question of the nature of the universe is the deepest question there is, and assaulting a metaphor isn’t in any way “more intellectual honest”.
The are not obvious and true. It is obvious and true to me that God exists. Your assault on a metaphor is not compelling.
So you are telling me you don’t need to know what a word means in order to know it doesn’t exist? How is that logical?
You aren’t paying for it. But you are paying for libraries, I don’t use libraries, why should I have to pay for them?
capitalism is only supposed to facillitate trade. It does that. It doesn’t do more than that. Your opinion is not fact.
Proof is by nature objective, and I’ve had it objectively proven to me that God exists.
You don’t understand me, that’s the problem you think you do because you sat around in High School or college with your atheist buddies pumping each other’s egos, and convinced yourself you are smarter than all those deists out there.
So understanding the universe isn’t important to you?
So you are saying that the universe does not exist?
Your tolerance is admirable. :wally
Scientists have been wrong, that doesn’t make science worthless.