If a person chooses to believe in a deity, it’s a personally held belief, it helps them cope with the world around them, and it is their motivation to behave and do good deeds then more power to them. Much like if a child believes their teddy bear protects them at night and wants them to be nice to their siblings in return I’m not going to crush their fantasy.
But if the same child starts telling other kids the doll or dinosaur they have is b.s. and only their teddy bear is the real deal then divisiveness starts and nothing good can come of that. And if the teddy bear company starts making declarations about what the teddy bear deems acceptable and not acceptable in the childs life then they become the ones controlling behavior and thought.
Sex has consequences far beyond childbirth and pregnancy. If a woman has no consequences for sex and leads even a moderately promiscuous life her chances of forming a deep bond with a man and raising children together in a 2 parent home is greatly reduced. So I see abortion as an erosion on society besides being murder and that makes it my business.
As for magic, yes, people are taught that everything happened by miracles. Most people by the time they grow up, sort things like this out, and it just lives in the subconscious. It would not have been possible to introduce religion without making it comprehensible. and just as importantly, interesting enough to actually listen to. The bottom line is God is your model, not another human.
This is you attempting to force your beliefs and morals on others. Full stop.
What if I sincerely believe that Christianity has caused great harm to society, through enabling discrimination, abuse, exploitation, and murder in the name of God? What If I see Christianity as an erosion on society besides being murder, and that makes it my business?
By having something that just plain breaks and doesn’t work if it changes even a little. Like most advanced human-designed technology; even if it had genes it couldn’t evolve much because most advanced technology just stops working with little changes.
It’s more that if a life form couldn’t evolve, then it was simply eaten deep in prehistory by the ones that could and left no descendants for us to find. Viable natural life is pretty much restricted to the “design space” of something able to evolve.
Well, it’s evidence not actual proof.
Still, early Christian theology recognized that issue and therefore held that magic was impossible. Back then instead of persecuting people for witchcraft, it would go after people who accused others of witchcraft because believing in supernatural powers other than those of God was heretical.
I’m with you on “strong agnostic”, but the trouble with Russel’s Teapot is that it’s a good analogy with blind faith in the traditional Judeo-Christian god, where the faith is rooted in ancient writings. But more abstract ontological concepts of “god” aren’t based on ancient scripture, but on the more rational notion of the possibility of some sort of Prime Mover, or primary causal agent, that was perhaps responsible for the creation of the universe but is not part of it.
Such a notion excludes all the trappings of traditional religions including miracles, omniscience, afterlife, and an anthropomorphic god who involves himself in the minuscule workings of the universe with an apparent special interest in everyday life on Earth. These are pretty clearly the inventions of our ancient predecessors that arose from simple ignorance and the desire to institutionalize norms of behaviour.
Life is fundamentally a chemical process and evolution fundamentally driven by randomness and natural selection. It’s a poor reason for belief in any deity, and is one of the reasons that Creationism is so discredited.
You have the same rights I do; you vote for people who best represent your views. When change takes place slowly, we can weed out what works and what doesn’t. Where a lot of atheists have overstepped their bounds is when they start instilling their values into our children through the public school system.
Where a lot of Christians have overstepped their bounds is when they start instilling their values into our children through the public school system.
I could do this all day, but I won’t. The point is: because your beliefs and morality are driven by your faith and belief in the Christian God (as opposed to being a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, an atheist, or even a Jedi) doesn’t give you any special right to impose those beliefs and morality on others. And, yet, there are a significant number of American Christians who believe that, yes, it does, and that their particular faith and morality is supreme.
Thing is, that’s more of a rhetorical “God” meant as a wedge to use in arguments rather than something people take seriously. Few people care about a vague abstract creator that disregards humans; they care about the god or gods of their specific religious sect. Most of the people who bring up the concept would probably turn around and disavow it if science produced actual evidence of such a creator, as it would seriously undercut their preferred religion. After all, it would be hard to imagine better evidence against the existence of, say, the Christian god than discovering the actual creator of the universe who doesn’t resemble the Christian god at all.
Those are astute observations but I don’t believe these differences are vast, and in particular, they’re not in any way fundamental but are just differences in degree. And in the context of this discussion, they have no bearing on the existence of any realistically plausible deity because outside of the lunatic sphere of Creationism, humankind is just an evolved species like any other on the planet, just more evolved in terms of intelligence and dexterity.
While you’re absolutely correct that animals mostly live in the now, and it’s generally humans who fret and obsess about the future, it’s pretty clear that animals do have concepts of future events, evidenced in behaviours like anticipation or fear.
And language is definitely part of the animal kingdom, just different in degree from human language. Birds communicate all the time, for instance, and dogs in particular are very adept at understanding human language. Yes, they’re very sensitive to tone, but they explicitly understand many words – some especially intelligent dogs can understand the names of hundreds of their toys, and fetch them on request. And some bright dogs have done remarkable things with “speech buttons”, where it’s been experimentally established that they don’t just learn by rote to press a particular speech fragment to get a particular reaction, but can actually use them in novel ways and even combine them into compound expressions.
Which beliefs and values do you think atheists share? Are they similar to the beliefs and values that people who don’t collect stamps share?
Many atheists put their trust in science, but so do many religious people. And, many atheists, no doubt, are anti-vax or believe in the healing power of crystals (that is, don’t put their trust in science). Unless you can point to some public school class that tries to disprove God, or wrestles with the problem of evil and comes out with “there must be no God or gods” or something, I really have no idea what you’re talking about.
Good to know promiscuity only affects women!
(Don’t try to rehabilitate this bit of misogyny by coming back and saying it affects men too. If you meant both genders you wouldn’t have singled out just one.)
Also, citation very much required.
Exactly. Instilling their religious values into defenseless young children is precisely the politically powerful objective of millions of American evangelicals and the conservative politicians behind them.
The difference with atheists is that very few of them are crusaders the way evangelicals are. There are a few exceptions like Richard Dawkins, but for the most part agnostics/atheists keep to themselves and if they involve themselves in public policy, it’s mainly just to keep religious indoctrination out of public schools, not to discredit religious beliefs.
Schools exist to educate, meaning to teach fact-based history and science. If parents want to instill religious faith in their children, it’s a private matter, not one that should involve public institutions.
The biblical god himself states that there are other gods in the very first commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. So if you prove he exists, then those other gods must exist, too. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made such a big deal about it.