They sure do! My cousin announces upcoming meetings on Facebook, ranging from getting together locally to heading to Vegas to a JREF sponsored convention-type thing. I don’t know if they talked about atheism there or not, as I was not present.
Personally I don’t see the purpose. I don’t really want to go for drinks with people with whom I may well have nothing in common (except for my cousin) other than not pretending god is real. And while I’d shake James Randi’s hand given the opportunity, I’m not going to pony up a bunch of cash and make a vacation out of doing so.
Indeed. Dart leagues meet for drinks (and occasionally they throw darts). Salesmen go to conventions. Darts and sales don’t get called religions because of it.
Taken seriously by who? By you and people like you? Fundamentalists don’t care about that. Indeed, they regard people who care about rationality as deluded and dangerous fools.
You had better take them seriously though. Fundamentalists have plenty of power these days, and they are on the brink of destroying the American economy. Your disapproval of the weakness or fallaciousness of their arguments is not going to stop them, or even give them one moment’s pause.
First of all, please let me know of this attack by science on religion. I grew up in the '50s, and have never seen any such thing. What I have seen is science independent of any agenda, discovering things about the world which contradict certain religious beliefs, and this drives the believers nuts. If you’ve read Dawkins, you’ll know that his anti-religious books (and some of his popular evolution books) come as a direct result of the mail he gets from whacked out creationists. Do you want scientists to stop publishing things that annoy fundamentalists? Do you want archeologists in Israel and Egypt to not publish anything that casts doubt on the Bible?
Second, whether it matters if Jesus loves me or not depends directly on the question of God’s existence. How do we know he exists? It has to be based on evidence, and this evidence can be scientifically evaluated. We in the West have been brainwashed by our culture to assume our particular god, which is why we may think that calls to disprove it (instead of demonstrate it) make any sense. I grew up Jewish, and I never believed in Jesus, and find the whole idea total rubbish, and did long before I became an atheist. Was it the responsibility of my Hebrew School teachers to disprove Jesus?
The rabid fundamentalist rejects science because he is irrational, he did not become irrational because science didn’t support his pet beliefs.
Yes the whole war on religion by science meme is a false one. Science very rarely thinks about religion unless there is something like a study on the effectiveness of prayer. Stephen Hawking has been saying pretty innocuous things like the universe doesn’t need a god for it to exist, it’s hardly more than a warning shot. The reason there isn’t a war on religion by science is that most of science has nothing to say about belief in a supernatural being that can’t be proved empirically, apart from the obvious ‘so far nothing supernatural has been proved to exist or even been detected in any way whatsoever, nor is there a credible theory as to why these things might exist’.
That vast majority of the attacking has come from religion against science, most notably in the area of evolution with Intelligent Design, which tries to pretend it has nothing to do with God, but also with the deliberate misleading of people on what science is and how it works.
Well I have many beliefs. If I should ever cross your path I will remember this. However, I don’t plan to argue about what I don’t believe in. If you choose to believe in something it’s not my concern, but don’t push YOUR beliefs in my face. I would say I expect you to defend them, but I’ve heard enough to know there’s no such possibility.
The psalmist said,“I say you are gods and sons of the most high” Jesus reminds them of this fact, and questions them as to why they say he blasphemes because he calls god his father,when their fathers did. The word God has had many meanings over the centuries, by many people.
One way the atheist can defend their" dis belief" is to remember that there is nothing thought,taught, written, or read, that was not of human origin, there fore, the belief is in the human beings not a god!
So? Anyone claiming the existence of a particular type of god needs to define it first. I knew one person on alt.atheism whose argument was: Caesar was considered a god. Caesar existed. Therefore, gods exist.
Of course, God being the generic father of all humankind because he created Adam is far different from claiming one has God as one’s direct and only father. As far as we all being gods, I assure you that the people who taught me who could read the Psalms in the original Hebrew didn’t think that was meant literally - any more than those who wrote “Clapton is God” on the walls of London burned incense to him.
Not true, this does not fit the definition of a religion seeing as there is no God involved, no book to follow, no supernatural beings that can grant wishes etc.
However it is true that there is a certain amount of faith in deciding morals, though the vast majority of them have evolved via evolution which is why the human race has a relatively standard set of things they think are bad and good.
Morals are decided by humans, and mostly they are decided because they are good for their current society, and because we have set goals (freedom, equality, justice) that we think it would be nice to reach, not because an old man in the sky told us so.
Who says that these things have anything to do with the “definition of a religion”? In fact, they clearly are not central to the idea of religions. Buddhism, for example, has no God, no book to follow and no supernatural beings that can grant wishes, and yet it is generally considered a religion.
You are posing a false dichotomy here. Religious people generally also propose goals which they consider good to reach. The distinction between religious and non religious ethics is not that one pursues good and the other does not; they both pursue good. The distinction lies in the reasons offered for proposing that a particular value is good.
Your dismissal of religious reasoning as “an old man in the sky told us so” is a common trope, though you will I think be aware that it is a caricature of much religious thinking about ethics. Setting up and dismissing a caricature and then pretending that you have established anything therebyis one of the way in which militant atheists annoy reasonable people. It seems to me that what the world needs is not more atheists who will speak like this, but more atheists who will, e.g., talk about the non-religious reasoning which leads them to propose certain values as good, and so provides the foundation for their ethics. Too often, people seem to think that simply saying that their reasoning is non-religious is enough to establish the validity of their reasoning.
Well I think a lot of atheists would agree that stating their reasoning is non-religious immediately makes it more valid, not necessarily correct perhaps, but more valid. And as you say the believers reason for pursuing good may be different that those of an atheist, and the main reason for this is because ‘God said it’. The major ethical battles between religious and non-religious in the US, for example, generally come down to ‘God said it’ - i.e. same sex marriage, abortion, stem cell research…
I have often, and from multiple places, heard religious people say things like ‘How can atheists have morals if they don’t believe in God’, and while I understand that a lot of philosophers and moralists were of a religious background, it’s the modern people who seem to think that God is needed for morals that I’m most against. There are of course enlightened believers who take seriously the idea of morals and don’t think the bible has all the answers, but they’re not interesting to discuss here
It seems there is always some who will say ‘But not all religious people are like that, in fact the majority aren’t’, but what I, and I assume many others, find the most interesting/annoying are the fundamentalists and there are enough of them around that they need to be talked about. I don’t really want to have to say 'Of course not every thinks that way’every time I caricature a believer on a message board.
I know the person who taught you was a human, humans can all have different ways of looking at or translating things that came from the mind,pen etc. of other humans. Some human said there was a man named Adam and a woman called Eve. No one can say in truth that God said or did anything!
“A lot of atheists” may well agree that, but obviously no theist will agree it, nor indeed many thinking atheists. In terms of winning people over to atheist viewpoints, or even promoting a better understanding of atheist viewpoints, this is not looking like a winning strategy, is it?
You seem to be saying that we need more militant atheists so that they can cast
atheism in the same light that ignorant fundamentalists cast theism!]
Or maybe it’s that atheists that dare to push back are so rare that they are mislabeled “militant”, so if more atheists spoke up when pushed into a corner by law and/or society people would eventually get used to the idea that the days of “a silent atheist is a good atheist” are over.
I live in Western Canada, and I’m always a little shocked when I hear stories about “In your face” religious groups—In my city people are mainly quite laid back and have that “live and let live attitute”----But I have a question, and this is (I believe) an important one.
In the 1980’s to about 2000 + or - my region was totally absorbed with the “Smoker versus Non-Smoker” fight which was passionate, political and invoved a great deal of lobbying and special interest groups—It was huge. Now that this ‘Debate’ is over, I question and reflect–we had many little laws here and there, get passed and noted as footnotes in the papers as the ‘Smoking Debate’ raged on…many important things happened to change the ‘rights of the citizen’ in my country at that time (eg: gun laws, information access laws, overseeing bodies were dismantled, government accountability was reduced etc. etc.) Joe citizen lost out during that decade where I live. I don’t know if this was a 'planned conspiracy of diversion on the part of the powers that be (I’m not big on conspiracy theory) or simply ‘what happened’.
Here’s my question:
“What if all the energy being spent arguing on this issue was instead redirected to DIRECT INVOVEMENT in much needed causes?” and "Is it better to change somebody’s mind from theism to atheism or the other way (and I still don’t ‘get’ where the drive to go either direction could possibly come from) or to actively contribute to the world being a better place where all people could find a meeting ground?
When I see an atheist arguing with a fundie I think—Wow—why waste a brilliant brain on that!! It’s like me walking into the ghetto of my city and telling the bums to get jobs, or trying to explain literary theory or philosophy to a drunk----WHY-Why–Why----You’ll never change them—but you can change the world. And impossible arguments are a terrible distraction for whatever purpose we’ve set for ourselves here!
