Hear, hear.
And I find it eye-rollingly stupid when religious fundamentalists complain about being “persecuted” in the United States. Geez, you give 'em Sunday-morning television slots, give them tax-exempt status, protect their right to wear crosses and stars and stick fish on their cars in public, give 'em time off for religious holidays, even let them sell religious toys and books at Toys 'R Us(!), and they still complain of being “persecuted”? Cry me a river, bunky.
Religion is one of the main reasons I rarely go in GD.
As a youngster, I used to love arguing with religious people. Because as a debater you really can’t lose. Debate is all about logic, and faith by definition is the absense of logic. The deepest faith is faith in the face of contrary logic. But as a more (I hope) mature adult, I never critisize or debate peoples religious inclinations. You won’t convince them otherwise, and if you did, what have you accomplished? Many people in my life take great strength in their religious convictions; why would I want to take that away from them?
Yes, religion is a lie. Yes, it’s caused a great deal of grief and death throughout the world. But it’s also caused a great deal of joy, morality, and personal strength. And in my assessment, the good far outweighs the bad.
I knew you meant me, Epimetheus, and that’s a criticism I’ve heard before so I’ll have to give it some thought. Thanks for sharing your story :). I hear you. Your story is quite similar to my father’s (Methodist who switched - abruptly - to atheism at 18). And you know, his co-workers frequently refer to him as Spock, so perhaps I do have a bias. Anyway this is much more the conversation I wanted to have & couldn’t get to before.
Tempted to go off on a tangent about a feisty theist, but not sure it would be wise…
But you don’t have ardent religionists, Christian Jewsih, and Muslim, calling you an unnatural sinner for wishing only to live in peace. You don’t have religious conservatives passing laws to forbid you to marry and repealing laws that protect you from legal discrimination. You don’t have bands of Christians picketing your parades and throwing Bible tracts at you as you enter a bar. You don’t have Baptist wackjobs picketing your funeral with triumphant signs praising their God for consigning you to eternal torment for the crime of loving in ways they dislike.
IMO, religion is just an excsuse for weak and pitiful people to strut their prejudices.
I can’t imagine how much that must suck for you. Still, to be fair, you are talking about a small minority who would probably still act with equal asshattery if they didn’t have religion as an excuse. And I know plenty of Xians who would accept you no matter your orientation.
I’d like to point out that most of the GD religious threads are not simply God exists/No he doesn’t arguments. They are often scientific (evolution) or political (SOCAS) debates in which atheists or agnostics have a genuine stake as to the outcome of the debate (as a cultural conflict, I mean, not the GD threads).
Other times it is simply about dispelling ignorance about such issues as faith healers or psychics.
Also, a number of religious threads actually do start out as challenges from a religious poster to the skeptics. We’ve recently had threads, for instance which assert that no errors can be found in the Bible and that Behe has debunked evolution. Obviously those kinds of challenges are just red meat to a lot of us.
Occasionally we also get someone who wants to try some variation on one of the classic arguments for God (cosmological, teleological or [ahem] ontological) or Pascal’s wager. Of course atheists are going to respond to those as well because it is a debate forum and they’ve been presented with a challenge.
To be fair, I think there is an element of sport to some of the debates as well. I think sometimes we even get atheists who are simply hostile to religion and want to pick a fight about it. The college freshman atheist syndrome is not unknown here. On the whole, however, i think the atheist/agnostic participation in religious threads is within the bounds of fair and sincere debate.
As an athiest, or agnostic, or whatever I am. ( I still am not certain of the difference, but I do not believe that a supreme being exists), my reasons for discussing the subject of god and religion so frequently is because I feel that many of the people who make decisions that affect my life are religious and these decisions at once, affect me, and are coming from a place that I consider to be less than logical. It is frightening tio relize that while our national financial status is in such danger, that Bush wants to give taxpayers’ money to “faith-based organizations”, and that one’s ability to obtain a safe abortion (I am not an advocate of this last resort procedure, but there are cases where it has to be done) is constantly threatened.
The Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage to be legally valid only between a man and a woman, was passed in 1996 by both Houses of Congress and signed by the putatively liberal Bill Clinton (who said he did so out of religious conviction.) Don’t talk to me about small minorities.
Skipping over the previous replies and answering the thread subject directly:
First and foremost, as has already been noted, religion is an absence of logic, a delusion. Comforting and quietly personal in some, an excuse to persecute, attack and murder in others.
Religion, for all the (in my mind, few) benefits generally attributed to various sects, is holding this planet back. This is the Twenty-First Century- space travel is nearly routine, we can pick up a telephone and contact nearly anyone anywhere on the planet in seconds.
Yet the delusion, the irrational, illogical belief remains.
Billions are spent on pretty buildings, which have little purpose other than to attract people who are then asked to donate more money so the building can be made fancier still.
Billions more are spent on propagating the falsehood- TV broadcasts, radio programs, free bible giveaways. Missionaries sent out to tell the “savages” they’re doomed to eternal damnation if they don’t read this book. Sunday Schools that don’t actually educate the children, but rather simply teach them to interpret the Bible the way the school wants them to.
Billions are lost over religion- Israel/Palestine, for one (how many lives lost? How many buildings destroyed? How many millennia-old archaeological sites bulldozed? How much spent on weaponry?) even though an Arab and a Jew are the exact same person save for the ideology. Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants, for another. Again, what’s the measure of lives, property and peace of mind? And again, the two are identical individuals, except for a few details of their “sky pixie”.
People protested the US Gemini space missions- it was felt we would be invading “God’s Home” and possibly invoking His wrath.
The Columbia disaster was seen by some as evidence of a vengeful God- and people in another sect assured us the astronauts were “safe at home” with (one presumes) another God.
Some religions treat certain groups as little more than possessions- the average Arab view on women, for example. Others will refuse life-saving medical aid on religious grounds- Jehovahs Witnesses and blood transfusions, for another example.
It is my firm belief- and yes, I see the irony there- that if we, as a race of humanity, can get past the intentional self-delusion, we would advance faster and further. The prohibitions against stem cells is almost wholly religiously-based, yet that’s a technology that could theoretically cure a sweeping range of illnesses, conditions and diseases.
But I understand I’m deluding myself to think that such a day will come.
gobear wrote
Umm, that’s pretty hard to believe. You’ve experienced people picketing funerals of gay people with “triumphant signs”?
Not that I disagree with your point in general, though.
Well yeah, there’s that. I was thinking more along the lines of the Phred Felpses and the violent thugs that hang out outside of gay bars for the purpose of assault. You can’t really define an entire religion by them. Small comfort to you, I’m sure, but don’t paint them all the same color because of a few.
But yeah, religion-based homophobia is a very real problem in this country (and others), and is cause for major concern. Question: How much of the country (percentage wise) is homophobic, and how much is Christian? And how much fits into both groups?
As best I can tell:
An atheist wholeheartedly believes that there is no supreme being.
An agnostic believes that knowledge of a true supreme being’s existence is unknowable by believers or skeptics alike.
By your self-definition, you’d be an atheist.
I think that atheism has taken on it’s own religious connotations as a sort of anti-religion. IMO if you start to explain your stance on religion with “I believe…”, you’re part of a religion whether it worship Jesus or The Invisible Pink Unicorn or The Great Perceivable Nothing. By taking a stance on either side, you demonstrate your faith in your conclusions and that faith is the basis of all religion. In the worship of a God’s case, it is more of a blind leap of faith, but that’s neither here nor there.
I don’t participate in GD threads because in most cases it seems to be an IMHO poll gone awry, complete with questionable and factual links to prove both sides.
I wonder, has anyone in the history of the GD forum every converted someone from one religion to another? If so, then by all means let the debates rage for all time until all ignorance is stamped out, but if it hasn’t, isn’t it about time for all sides to realize that it’s nigh impossible to convert someone’s life-long beliefs through logical debate?
That just applies, of course, to the old “God exists” vs. “You’re an idiot” debates. I think it’s great that people argue about the Church’s place (or lack thereof) in the State and the like.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled Pit Thread.
OK, this is a hijack, but I think fessie would approve:
From wars to the Trade Towers to throwing bibles at paraders who want to live their lives in a way the bible–according to some interpretations–doesn’t support…how many of these activities are caused by religion and how many would happen anyway but people would have to find some other justification for their actions?
Since most people raise their kids the way they themselves were raised, which includes thinking or its lack, religion, educational ambitions and who knows what else, would the world be better off if there were no religion? Certainly many people, if not most, on this board would agree that more thinking would help things, but does that have to mean less belief in gods?
The reason a lot of us post in this forum is to dispel incorrect assumptions such as the ones above. If we remain silent, we invite people to believe things about us such as what George Bush said: “I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.” I think it’s important to put the lie to those who would demonize us.
One of the board’s many open atheists here.
I don’t generally weigh in on a lot of the religious discussions debates on the board. Not being religious myself, I don’t feel I have a lot to offer. And I’m not like this:
Some atheists pop into the religious discussions just to throw darts. Myself, I bear no ill will to the faithful. If it makes them happy, great. I have no need for it myself, but I can see why it gives some people a feeling of structure and belonging and comfort, and I don’t know what would be achieved by taking that away. So, since I neither can contribute to Scriptural interpretation nor want to attack the faithful, I don’t make many comments in those sorts of threads.
And yet, even though, as an atheist, I may believe that religion in general is an example of persistent delusion on a staggering scale, I am also fascinated by it. I believe that by studying it closely and objectively, one can come to a deeper understanding of human nature. There was a thread a while back in GD called “So why don’t you believe?” or something, in which I weighed in with my perceptions regarding the importance of narrative and “placeholder” explanations in the human psyche, and how not just religion but a lot of other things can be explained from that point of view. The point is, I’m not trying to eliminate religion — rather, by subjecting it to careful analysis, I feel like I have a philosophical advantage in understanding human nature in general.
That said, I do wish the evangelists would leave my life alone. There is something to this:
I think I might make a pretty good politician (read: public servant, i.e. a bureaucratic problem-solver), except that the fact that I’m irreligious makes me unelectable in this country. And yes, that does piss me off. It’s unreasonable and totally unfair. Everywhere I look, I see religious activists trying to wedge in their evangelism. Putting “In God We Trust” on our money strikes me as a beachhead of sorts, as an anchor point that allows the evangelicals to argue, “Hey, the government puts God on the money, and it doesn’t hurt anybody,” a position from which things like the Ten Commandments monument can be rationalized.
And yes, I roll my eyes at the whining and moaning about persecution that typifies the view of evangelical activists. “Don’t remove the monument!” cry the Bible-thumpers. “You’re pushing God away!” Yeah, we’re pushing God back into the dozens of television channels and hundreds of radio stations and thousands of Christian bookstores and millions of bumperstickers and tens of millions of God-fearin’ greeting cards and all the obnoxiously saccharine Jesus-Rock compact disc commercials that force me to mute the television during my shows not to mention the magazines and t-shirts and calendars and prayer meetings in the company lunchroom and the Religion section of the daily newspaper and the huddling devout on the field at sporting events and the daily discourse of the Mother Fucking President of the United States. Quite a margin to be marginalized into.
But that’s behavior. The belief might strike me as silly, but, again, as I said, it’s undeniably fascinating from a standpoint of human psychology. Just leave me out of the behavior, and we won’t have a problem.
And note how I introduced myself in this post: One of the board’s open atheists. I am not an open atheist in the regular world. I would expose myself to harassment and worse if I publicized my beliefs in a non-anonymous way. And that is truly a tragedy. Would Jesus send someone a death threat? No? Then why are his followers so good at it?
-Personally, I think far fewer.
Yes, there are some, like the aforementioned Phelps, who will hate whomever he feels is worthy of his hate, given any justification at all.
However, much of the rest, I think, had those individuals not been ingrained with the religious teachings- and their local priests’ opinions and interpretations of the scriptures- they might not let it concern them at all.
Sure, they might well have something else they’re marching against- unwed mothers, abortion, gun control, unflavored denture adhesives- but one hopes they wouldn’t be tossing Chick tracts at them and screaming “God will Smite you!”
-And a nontheist understands that religions in general were no more than attempts to explain natural phenomena or other Great Questions, and Gods were merely literary figures, characters used in fables written to illustrate those Answers to Great Questions.
One need not deny or ‘disbelieve’ that which was never proven to exist in the first place.
-Which is a typical theist strawman: It implies the faith of “no it isn’t” is no different than the faith of “yes it is”.
And that straw man ignores the fact that the vast majority of realworld, observable fact, natural laws and physical phenomena, is very strongly- overwhelmingly- on the side of “no it isn’t”.
Theat straw man is used to imply that agnostic bumper sticker- you can’t prove it, and neither can I, so they’re both just systems of blind faith. And that’s simply not the case- To assume the Theist standpoint were indeed true- even partially- that would by definition require huge leaps of logic: the Universe, a hundred trillion suns and spanning a hundred billion light-years, is created in a matter of days by some ultra-powerful, transdimensional being, from nothing (violating conservation of energy, which is ironic since the theists often quote the second law of thermodynamics in an effort to discredit the theory of evolution, but I digress.)
Yet this being, capable of creating entire Universes, has apparently populated only this one little dust fleck off in the corner, and watches over us constantly, occasionally interfering in some lives- like Polys and Deweys- yet refusing to help others- like those in the Trade Center towers.
On the other hand, “faith” is largely unnecessary for the “no it isn’t”- we can see the red-shift of light from distant stars (a verfiable, logical, repeatable, observable phenomena) and very accurately deduce that such-and-such a star is moving away from us.
Measure a certain number of stars for the phenomena, and we can logically extrapolate that the universe is expanding. And by extension, we can logically infer- with no magic, mysticism, or transdimensional space pixies needed- that the expansion must have started from some point.
We have verifiable, datable specimens of creatures long dead that predate any biblical reference by a hundred million years. Those dates can be inferred logically by knowing how atoms and molecules interact- observable, repeatable, testable phenomena.
In other words, “no it isn’t” is everything- the science that keeps satellites functioning, the research into viral infections, astronomy, geology, animal husbandry. Scientists are not going around looking to “disprove” God, they’re trying to discover how the world works, how to cure illnesses, how to create better foods, how to make faster processors. It is not a “belief system”, it is all of science and learning. We don’t have to “believe” in it or have 'faith" of it, because somebody has already sat down and proved it to whatever degree it can be proven.
The “yes it is” crowd has to pick and choose at this array of data, and manipulate it, warp it or disregard it to make it fit their preconceived notions.
…
Sorry, forgot this is the Pit. 
Sorry, one more: Friend of mine just summed it up nicely:
Theism: “Yes, it is!”
Athiesm: “No, it isn’t!”
Nontheism: “What are you guys arguing about, again?”
Firstly, Leviticus is pretty unambiguous in it’s condemnation of many practices considered by all right-thinking people to be uncondemable, there’s no “some interpretations” about it.
But, take homophobia, for instance – person X stands up says, “All fags are fucking fuckers”, we point, we laugh, we say “You dumb schmuck, fuck off back into the hole you crept out of,” and most people get the point, BUT, when some sincere “right-thinking” Christian says that “the bible tells us that homosexuality is not a righteous state to be in”, we have to catch ourselves, after all, there’s a veneer of respectability (maybe I should say “a gossamer”, but even that goes too far), we cannot say, “fuck off out of our lives you narrow-minded piece of shit”, as is fully deserved, lest those that are “sympathetic” to the “message” of the bible are unduly swayed by their bizarre, irrational allegiances. Fuck, condemnation of homophobes is necessarily one click away from “blasphemy” (which, incidentally I believe is still a criminal offence in my country(?)) in the minds of all those who give any credence to the OT.
So forget how many of such activities are caused by religion, ask yourself how many are implicitly sponsored, ask how many atrocities have hidden behind a religious shield of ignorance, ask how we as a society accept “sincere religious beliefs” to be untouchable, and beyond criticism.
And, yes, MORE THINKING MEANS LESS BELIEF IN GODS.
Did you just call me a theist?! You take that back right now! 
I can assure you that I am not a theist. Forced to apply a descriptive to my particular belief system, it would be non-theist. I hesitate to do even that because my beliefs are my own and I share them with no one, not even someone else who claims their system is called non-theism. Call it soulmurkism if you like, but I don’t think a name should be applied to one’s beliefs as it invites others to label theirs the same and the truth is: no one’s are the same. They’re always tempered by our own unique, individual personalities and experiences and even if two people believe in the exact same thing, they interpret and apply them slightly differently.
The point I was trying to make was that atheism has become a religion of its own, a sort of anti-religion.
The foundation of any religion is faith. With that criteria, the faith of “no it isn’t” is no different than the faith of “yes it is.” One believes blindly based on evidence taught them through some form of scripture and one believes blindly based on evidence taught them through some form of science.
The only differences that I can see are the symbolic rituals and whose praises are “sung” at gatherings.