I only have to read their respective religious texts to find abundant proof of their preoccupation with death, and with fanciful tales of how to overcome it and live forever. The portrayal of death without repentance is depicted in the most horrible detail as a warning towards those who dare to consider that perhaps things are not as the shamans/preachers would have them believe. It is abundantly clear, to me at least, that no one would would contrive a complicated universe of interlocking faery tales to explain the unknown unless there was a powerful motivator to do so. I don’t think scientific proof consisting of subjective measurements is necessary or appropriate to judge human nature. They look scared, they act scared; I’m going to go with “They’re scared,” Alex.
Yes, it’s called agnosticism, otherwise known as ‘not knowing’.
Of course some people believe that God deals more directly with infants, and as such they don’t believe in God because they know God directly.
shrugs I guess this depends on whether or not God really does exist.
Of course you think that babies accord with your religious belief system.
It’s kind of funny how you ‘praise’, you do it as much as an Evangelical. You cannot resist every opportunity to proselytize and praise atheism, and then dishonestly claim it’s not a religion. For you it’s definitely a religion, otherwise you wouldn’t praise as much as you do. 
You have more in common with the fundie evangelicals than any member of this forum. Refusal to learn about the things you hate, you just know you hate them, constant praising, unceasing proselytizing, making people feel guilty for believing differently than you.
You’re cute in your passionate ignorance you Evangelical Atheist you. ;p
I don’t understand the “vengeance” of God. I mean…shouldn’t God be above that shit?
I guess this shows the quality of logic classes they do at Liberty U.
I seem to remember this guy the last time he posted here. He hasn’t gotten any smarter since then. Tsk, tsk.
In 35 years if arguing this subject on computer message boards, I have run into maybe one person who thought they could disprove the existence of any god. I worked fairly hard at trying to show him the error of his ways. Some people do have very high standards of proof for a god.
Could you give me your definition of “god” - which I’d expect to be much broader than the god you happen to believe in. Thanks.
Maybe vengeance was the only way people in early times could comprehend the idea of consequences?
Moron. :rolleyes:
You want Atheism to be a religion because you’re too stupid to judge things on their merits. Conservatives are the opposite of liberals, and Atheists are Theists multiplied by -1.
Except that even though you want to think that you’re wrong. By your ignorant standards not believing in vampires is a religion. Once again, because you have trouble following while the smart people are talking:
Atheism is not believing in god. It doesn’t require the claim that there is definitively no god. We have no evidence for god, vampires, zombies or a smart parallel dimension version of MSWAS. 
If there is no evidence for something that goes against our senses, smart people don’t believe it.
Shit dude, go crawl away and stop embarrassing yourself.
Being raised Jewish, I can testify that it seems to make no sense at all unless you were indoctrinated from birth in it. Now I was indoctrinated in the belief in god as the default, even though my parents were not exactly religious and my grandfather was an atheist, I’m almost sure. The reason most kids, especially 50 years ago, wound up believing in god was that they were surrounded by people who believed – or at least acted as if they believed. My kids weren’t, and neither has shown any inclination to god belief - and they are both adults now. They also both went to a Christian nursery school, and so were not kept from contact with religion.
I plead guilty to helping to continue this nonsense, One year I took my daughter and a friend trick or treating. The friends mother was fairly religious. For some reason they were talking about the devil, and without thinking I tossed out “don’t worry, there is no devil.” She was shocked, and then asked “but there is a god, right?” I chickened out and said something that could be taken as positive. My daughter rolled her eyes. 
She never told anyone there was no Santa, either.
I don’t have a religious system. Atheism isn’t a religion, nor is it a system.
Don’t be foolish; I talk about it so much because the believers won’t shut up about it and leave us unbelievers alone. I also think that believing in a lucky rabbit’s foot is stupid; I don’t bring it up because the rabbit’s-footers aren’t trying to force rabbit’s footism on everyone. Nor do I “praise” atheism; I condemn religion. Atheism isn’t anything praiseworthy; it’s neutral. It’s better than religion because religion is bad, not because atheism is good.
I am not interested in wasting my time learning irrelevant details about a mythical system I find boring and repulsive. I don’t need to know every last detail and commentary to know it’s irrational nonsense, just as I don’t need to know every detail of the Babylonian religion to know it’s nonsense, and just as I don’t need to memorize the Silmarillion to know the Lord of the Rings is fiction.
I know that it has no evidence for it’s claims; that it contradicts itself; that it contradicts physics and logic; that whenever it has made a factual claim it’s virtually always been wrong ( wild guessing would be better ), and that it’s effects on the world have been of overwhelming evil. That’s what is important to know.
Great thread, and I especially love what** Der Trihs** and Linty Fresh are saying. I’m basically in between them as far as how dangerous religion is. For me, something like Dubya standing in the way of stem cell research strictly for religious reasons (and of course, more political money) hurts us. Bush is an idiot, but I can’t say all born agains really are.
For those who think it’s even possible for a person to be born with a natual belief in a god or creator is just using what we like to use best, our imagination.
Humans, as infants and toddlers, are to me absolutely feral. We want and need and there’s only an id running our existence for the moment. We can’t worship anything but ourselves. We also really do imagine things. A huge child-eating monster in a closet is imagined all too easy.
I really think if none of our current religions existed, we WOULD still have mythological and magical stories of worship from our one real trait that separates us from any other earth creature, that imagination thing again.
Seriously. We’re really discussing the most watched soap opera on Earth, aren’t we? This shit’s been airing even before TV by word of mouth before pen put to paper, eh?
I disagree with everything else in mswas’s post and I don’t agree that atheism is a religion at all, but I was actually just thinking about how he’s right about the Der Trihs’s of the world. I sit here and I read about how he thinks all theists are crazy, and I just find myself shaking my head and going “Where’s the proof?” Switch a few sentences around, and he could be the worst of the preachers going off about atheism. Oh, he knows alllll he needs to know about religion . . . even though he’s never bothered to read up on it, and he knows allllll he needs to know about believers, even though he thinks they’re mentally ill. For all his lack of beliefs, Trihs combines the internal logical consistency of a WBC flier with all the insight into human nature of a Chick tract.
Part of the reason I became an atheist was to exercise my reason and my senses. I don’t know why you became an atheist, Trihs, and I don’t especially care, but even most of the bad theists are cannier, more mature, and all around better tuned in than you.
I’m not talking about scientific proof. What about all the theists who risk their lives on a daily basis in the fire department or the military? You’ll find plenty of believers among those guys. If that’s scared, I’d love to know what’s brave.
A fireman can be brave in the face of danger, but still be terrified about the the unknown. I don’t see any inconsistency there.
And a belief in a foma like Christianity can bestow courage as well. It is easier to put your life in jeopardy if you believe you have escaped eternal punishment.
The proof is the fact that religious people act in a way and believe things that nearly everyone would call crazy - if the religion label wasn’t slapped on it. The proof is the fact that by being religious they are denying reality and logic, and if that isn’t insane what is ?
Really? Have I said that it’s better to murder for atheism than it is to save people for Jesus? Have I said that anyone who is not an atheist will be tortured forever? Have I told a child that I’d prefer that they suicide rather than be religious? Have I said that religious people are all lying and that secretly everyone is an atheist?
I’m surrounded by believers, I live in a nation that swarms with them; I know what they are like. As for “reading up on religion”, what exactly should I read? Religion is all baseless; it’s all just wild claims pulled out of thin air. There’s nothing there of importance to learn. If I wanted to “study” religion I could just make up my own and “study” that; it would have just as much meaning, just as much basis in fact as any other religion.
There’s no there there, so what is there to study? There’s no evidence; there’s nothing to study but hot air. Why should I consider something with no evidence, consisting of thousands of mutually exclusive claims, something that consistently fails to be accurate about anything as worth studying? Religion isn’t profound; it isn’t something that requires some sort of deep understanding to dismiss. It’s blatant nonsense. Exactly how much nonsense am I supposed to “study”?
I honestly don’t understand why you’d need proof to say “all theists are crazy”? They all happily admit that they believe these things. It’s the defining feature of the word “theist”.
Edit: right, what he said
Pascal’s Wager is a human way of looking at the unprovable and is not a good argument for a God. The word God has, and has had many meanings. I still would like to know If God is a Being, who created the place for Him to be? If he exists as a being then it requires a place in existence before He could be in existence!
What is not in existence is nothing.
Religion is a giant con game. People believe it because they are brainwashed to believe it and are afraid to question it.
I do not agree that religion is a con game, but I do know that all religions come from a human mind or thought. What any one believes, is taught or was written is from a human being and humans can be wrong. Belief’s are not really in a God but in the humans that describe Him.
Religion is a tool for some to get through life, when life gets hard it can be used to help them. It evolved just as man’s tools did. Tools can be used for good or evil. A hammer can be used to build a house or harm another person. A scalpel can save a life in a doctor’s hand, or kill them in a criminal’s. Using religion like the Knights Templars did in the past, or the Radical Muslims do now as an excuse to kill people who do not share their beliefs is using religion for evil, saying it is from God is the worst kind of evil that I doubt any God would approve of; surely no Good being would justify killing because they didn’t believe the same as they did. Lable them heritics etc. is not what a good religion would approve.
Too late to edit…I should have said label…being human I can be wrong!
I don’t think you’re talking about the same sort of fear. Fear Itself (I didn’t realize how fitting the username was until I typed it) is talking about the existential fear that life is meaningless, short, and unfair.
“What’s the point of living if you’re an atheist?” is a question I’ve seen come up again and again from the religious. They don’t have an answer to that question (neither do some atheists), so they fear it enormously.