Just when you had me feeling guilty, you go with the hipster hate. Hipsters are people too, you know.
Heh. Hipster. Don’t hear that about myself often. Heh.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are certainly no Jews when it comes to intellectual standards. They are great people in general, hard-working, and sincere but I have never known one that graduated from college or even attempted to do so. I have read every WatchTower I could get my hands on and that is some crazy stuff kind of like a Chick Tract in its cartoonishness but they take it seriously and believe it. Despite working closely with a lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses, they never tried to convert me. They just quietly did their thing in the blue-collar or manual trades and planned to for life. They don’t celebrate any holidays or engage in any vices so that was no fun. The only travel they do is to help new congregations build new Kingdom Halls. It is a sincere religion but not fun at all and certainly not very intellectual.
There are many individuals of faith who I respect as people. Of groups, although I don’t necessarily believe the way they do, I tend to have some respect for the ones who do more of the “walking” than the “talking”.
The religious institutions that engage in the good works (eg. helping rebuild after a disaster, soup kitchens, social justice, assistance for the needy) but not really evangalistic, I’m pretty good with. The ones that emphasize higher education, bonus points! 
Most folks who are good people and attend church, synagogue, temple or other religious services, would be good people with or without religion.
Yeah… I’ve heard horrible things about him… from brainwashed servants of an oppressive atheist empire.
This is a joke, right?
Kind of odd, given that Zen (Taoist) Buddhism is an atheistic religion.
Heh. Good one.
Cite? My info sez more that it’s not *concerned *with believing in Gods, as opposed to a direct denial there is a Deity. In other words, agnostic, not atheist.
Untrue; religions are destructive to society.
Of course!!:dubious:
Can you cite where atheism requires a direct denial of any deity’s existence? Is the atheist sentiment “I do not believe there is a god” exactly the same as “I believe that there is no god”? What about apatheists, who are indifferent (“a god may or may not exist but its existence would not make any difference to anything”), is that agnosticism because it fails to deny the existence of a deity? Is uncertainty the same thing as indifference?
Buddhism does not address the existence of a god. This does not make it agnostic, otherwise it would address the existence of a god (“god might exist”). Theistic religions center on a deity or pantheon, a-theistic religions, by definition, lack that component. Buddhism is atheistic.
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2] In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities
The same Zen adept, Sokei-An, further comments:[49]
The creative power of the universe is not a human being; it is Buddha. The one who sees, and the one who hears, is not this eye or ear, but the one who is this consciousness. This One is Buddha. This One appears in every mind. This One is common to all sentient beings, and is God.
The Rinzai Zen Buddhist master, Soyen Shaku, speaking to Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, discusses how in essence the idea of God is not absent from Buddhism, when understood as ultimate, true Reality:[50]
At the outset, let me state that Buddhism is not atheistic as the term is ordinarily understood. It has certainly a God, the highest reality and truth, through which and in which this universe exists. However, the followers of Buddhism usually avoid the term God, for it savors so much of Christianity, whose spirit is not always exactly in accord with the Buddhist interpretation of religious experience … To define more exactly the Buddhist notion of the highest being, it may be convenient to borrow the term very happily coined by a modern German scholar, ‘panentheism’, according to which God is … all and one and more than the totality of existence … As I mentioned before, Buddhists do not make use of the term God, which characteristically belongs to Christian terminology. An equivalent most commonly used is Dharmakaya … When the Dharmakaya is most concretely conceived it becomes the Buddha, or Tathagata …
In any case, Buddhism is a religion and is an organized one, altho less so than others, of course.