People who think that Texas represents the apex of ignorance and hostility, like some kind of cartoonish reactionary fundamentalist conservative themepark, probably haven’t seen enough of Texas. Or haven’t seen enough of other states.
Oklahoma, on the other hand, is Hell on Earth.
I feel dumber for having read this thread, and I was pretty dumb to start with.
This is true. To paint the majority of the people with the same brush that accurately describes some of the stupid politicians there is ridiculous. But I’ve come to expect it from some on this board. I’ll stop here.
I heard Texas has a whorehouse in it!
Sorry - as noted, the use of “sheeple” is usually an indicator that a whole lot of other objectionable material is right behind. Let’s start over.
I’m a Christian myself, and I agree with the overall point of your post here. I think religion, as some people who label it as some variation of a poison, is largely aimed at organized and endoctrinated religion, but has served a useful purpose. And though much like children, when young, will inherently believe just about anything their parents say, religion did much of this to help establish some social norms, some of which were good, and some of which were bad. And though much of the world is at a point where we’ve outgrown that form of religion, not unlike a child growing into a young adult, to throw out religion as a whole, seeing it only as that form and unable to change, is missing out on so much more.
Personally, I think the idea that the lessons God has to teach us would remain unchanged for millenia even as we have changed enormously as a species is just ridiculous. I think that holding onto a lot of the old dogma and ritual that goes along with it is ultimately counter-productive, but I also don’t believe that somehow ultimately reason and faith are mutually exclusive. In fact, I think that either makes the other more worth-while. Ultimately, the greatest common threads amongst all the religions that I can find is that they are an ultimate search for purpose and for how we should treat eachother, and those are both questions that everyone should evaluate, even if one holds as true that there is no god.
And this, I think, is where the mindset of both the pitted and, in fact, many theists themselves fail. That both seem unwilling to consider that religion both can, has, and will continue to change. By all means, use of religion to justify attrocities and enable corruption should be eliminated, but assigning blame to religion for these things, for those who hold reason above all else, utterly indefensible. We simply have no way of knowing how the world would be now if religion never existed, and any assertion that it would be better or worse without it is nothing more than speculation.
But ultimately, religious or not, these lines that we draw, the demonizing of those with whom we disagree, is ultimately at least as damaging as what any other beliefs we may have cause. We need to learn to live and work together. Yes, there are plenty of religious zealots who need to relax, but calling them mentally ill is hardly the way to get your point across. We can use reason, compassion, and any number of other positive traits that humanity possesses to improve the lot of us all.
oh I thought it was just kind of another word for calling someone a dummy. Thanks for the link, I understand better now. Starting over sounds dandy to me.
Just so you know, Gyrate made a bit of an understatement. I advise you not to go any deeper than Google if you value your intelligence, and sanity.
Based on my 24 years in Texas, I can definitively say it is a cesspool. And Oklahoma is Hell on Earth.
haha… I’m still reading the thread, but your objection to my distaste of metal was funny.
Come on now, metal is trash for 14 year-olds. There’s Mountain and then there’s Deep Purple and a few Black Sabbath tunes, the rest is pure trash.
I don’t have to prove it. It’s readily obvious to everyone that acknowledges reason as a requirement of examining and analyzing reality.
Religion is a psychological response to the idea of eternal death. People want to associate themselves with something eternal to escape from their perceived horror of death.
When it becomes a justification of behavior in living human beings, to label others as undesirable, kill them at will, or treat them as objects (see: Christianity or the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, in the past 2,000 years) then it’s an anti-social behavior which is obviously a social disease.
I don’t have to prove anything. Religion is a disease. We all know it.
I’ve never been to Texas.
I read the news and I know how they score in all kinds of metrics from education to social welfare, and they’re constantly at the bottom, always seeming happy to kill as many (wrongly?) convicted minorities as they can.
There are good people in Texas. But they’re not winning.
There’s no “fundamentalist” atheism.
The religious use this term to try and equate their critics as equal in their attempt to impose an unsubstantiated belief system on everyone else.
I don’t like this term, atheism, although it is ancient and has been used for many centuries. It is a good term on its own, but it has been used for many distorted and convoluted meanings in the past several decades.
In our current culture, “atheism” implies that a god may exist but an “atheist” is refusing to acknowledge the god, which is misleading, untrue and just false.
Some times people talk about “strong” or “weak” atheism. Strong being a statement like " I do know that no gods exist", and Weak being a statement like “There is no proof of any god so I will not accept one until some proof is evident.”
The second position above is a theistic position, by the way, because a person would readily accept the existence of a god if some “proof” was available.
You know, some times we observe the obvious. The object we observe is not obvious because we observe it, but we happen to be the witness or reality.
Religion is a disease because that’s what it is. History has a lot of substantiation for it.
No, repeating it is irrelevant.
Repeating it may make the self proclaimed religious to acknowledge their insistence of claiming that they have a direct connection with a supernatural being, and only them are aware of something no one else is – if they are of a different religion, that is.
This claim is just nonsense. That’s why religion is a psychological or behavioral issue and has nothing to do with reality.
On this point you’re correct, religion is most definitely a coping mechanism for the human condition. If you really had “credentials” in psychology, however, you would realize the fundamental flaw in your mental illness argument.
The majority is who decides that a belief/behavior is abnormal. If you don’t believe me, ask any gay person who dealt with mental health professionals prior to 1973.
I guess we’ll just have to take it on faith then.
Religion is infectious, subverts those it infects to the purpose of spreading and preserving itself, and is destructive. That certainly sounds like a disease to me; the mental equivalent of a virus. Nor is it a unique view of religion. “Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses.” - Arthur C. Clarke. Naxos didn’t make up the idea.
I once started a thread questioning how one could distinguish religious belief from insanity. No one came up with a satisfactory answer, IMHO.
**Naxos **is still carrying on like a dick though. Being kinda right isn’t enough to stop you from being unpersuasive and obnoxious.
I’m pretty sure I just did, it depends how many people agree with you.
sorry if that’s too cynical an answer, but it’s true.