More importantly, it introduces doubt about the veracity of any part of the story.
I mean, I dont doubt the guy came close to death - it’s even reasonably plausible that his recovery happened in the face of being frighteningly unlikely, but the story (in light of the details we’ve just discussed) looks as though it has been embellished a bit.
“…Okay people, we’re done here. I’m calling it. Time of death - 8.32 am.”
“Aww! But I didn’t get a turn on the defibrillator!”
“Oh, what the hell. The guy’s dead anyway. Knock yourself out.”
“Yay!”
“Hey, when he’s done with that, can I stick a needle full of adrenaline into the body? I love doing that.”
“Sure, whatever.”
…“let’s keep ventilating too!”
“Great idea! It’s not like Oxygen costs anything…”
It’s starting to look like:
The story is true in detail, but the doctors present were incompetent
or
The story is embellished or confabulated.
Either way, it’s not suitable for swallowing whole.
But we’ve already been provided with evidence that the bible says the wages of sin are death. What else do you need to fully accept anything GEEPERS is credulous enough to believe?
Fortunately, after so many centuries inflation has whittled it down to a minor case of the sniffles.
Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do.
What’s that?
Go through his clothes and look for loose change
“Bless me Father for I have sinned.”
“All right, ‘bless you’. Here’s a tissue.”
What is the minimum wage of sin, anyway? A headache?
I don’t see those as being equivalent terms.
The OP asked for why I was an atheist and details about it, and I’ve provided them. I don’t “hate” religion. If you disagree, so be it.
He’s telling you that all the people who die of disease, or poverty, or innocent bystanderdom must have deserved it somehow.
And it’s a fucking terrifying outlook on life, if you ask me. I kind of understand where the “just world” fallacy comes from, I really do - but the consequences of thinking like that, the kind of thoughts and certitudes you must maintain to keep thinking like that ? To me, that’s much, much more fucked up than the notion that random shit simply happens and the Universe isn’t fair by a longshot.
Hmm, browsing through the thread it seems to be mostly doing what Marley23 set out to do. I’d be pleased to add my bits.
** “Why are you an atheist?”**
I was trying to be the best Christian I could be at one point. I was raised with an ecumenical viewpoint and had friends that belonged to different denominations than from my Catholic upbringing. At one point some Baptists welcomed me to check out their church and upon doing so they raised a number of reasons whereby they thought Catholics weren’t Christians. They piqued my curiosity and with a number of bible verses began making me wonder if they were right. Upon presenting these to a knowledgeable Catholic he neutralized their arguments in about 15 minutes and brought up arguments against a literal reading of the bible. This back and forth continued for a while, whereupon I started asking questions of people from other denominations and each time I received an answer and biblical examples the arguments on all sides became weaker and weaker. I realized after a time that there are so many contradicting passages in the bible that nearly any case for anything could be made by using it. Moreover, everybody cherry picked heavily without exception. It became clear that the bible was not some perfect word of God but a collection of muddled documents. I started having doubts in Christianity. So I asked God to show me as I looked elsewhere the religion where he truly showed his hand as I still thought there must be a God. But upon further examination all other religions I looked at had no such evidence and were equally muddled and often preposterous claims. I went through stages of being a deist and a period where I thought of myself as an agnostic until I started reading what atheism, and mostly skepticism, were and they did away with what last reasons to I had to believe in the likelihood of deities. I became focused on considered evidence and there are no good cases for the existence of a God as ordinary logic explains away claims that can’t be measured or quantified. Because you cannot demonstrate a truth value for anything that is not conscientiously real, measurable, and testable. Which provides the same results whenever tested. Without that, a claim cannot be proven to be true. So unless some compelling evidence for some deity comes along, I don’t believe.
**
“People across all kinds of cultures and throughout histories have religions, and many of them are pretty similar. Doesn’t that suggest they’re on to something?”**
Up to 150,000 years of momentum keeps the social construct of religion likely to continue to be a wide-spread notion for a dozen or two generations before that might change. Until about 250 years ago there were no widespread answers about the Big Questions regarding the universe and how it worked. Mystical beliefs were the best attempts at logical frameworks to explain it. We are pattern seeking animals and intellectual fortitude required people to ask. Believing in gods or not, life looks pretty vast to us. But the more mystical explanations are challenged by scientific ones the weaker they get overall.
"Did something happen to you to make you an atheist?"
There wasn’t any one for me nor does it seem to be so for many people. It was a conclusion that fell into my lap after a while. There it was; I saw no compelling evidence for the claims people made about gods.
"Are you angry at god?"
Again as others have stated, I may boo a fictional character if warranted, but there are no actual persons to be angry at or otherwise pleased with. It’s a giveaway that a person has not yet wrapped their mind around the idea that a God could actually not exist. They have not heard or accepted what most atheists would tell them about their non-belief.
"Do you hate religion?"
"Do you think religion is evil?"
It seems to me that the ills of religion outweigh the good stuff. By shear volume of wars and genocides over religions, systematic protection of diddlers of children and those who’d take child brides and perform clitorectomies, the current killing of children in Africa who are said to be witches and of adults when the Catholic church insists there that condoms cause aids, children who die without proper medical care, presenting the moral high ground for slavery etc. etc., these horrors weigh heavily against the good. There are attempts at putting laws into place to make way for a dominionist, theocratic rule in America. We have those who war against and breed nearly complete distrust of science, or try to at least legislate their beliefs on non-believers of all sorts. Any legislation here that promotes bigotry has full support of some churches behind it as their main drivers. I don’t like what religion does to so many people or the widespread misery and corruption that can come from it.
And even with the good works of and comforts found by the moderate main-streamers, I find myself in a world that might be best understood by a theist as imagining a world were suddenly everyone believed in Leprechauns. Whereupon you watched them living their lives and making huge decisions based on their interpretation of Leprechaun lore. Partaking in rituals so as to please them and especially not anger them. Explaining the world through the eyes of such a believer. Fervently believing in gold at the end of rainbows and other such superstitions. I realize that people can get angry for having their viewpoints dismissed this way. But honestly they usually admit down inside that they too often dismiss other major religions as being as nonsensical as someone truly believing in leprechauns. Or they have a very hard time admitting any such thing because it suggests their God could be also as trivial and thus making their world view likewise trivial. Nor would I blame them when they first encounter that idea. To be fair though, fundamentalists discriminate with shunning and violent threats, with housing and jobs. Even moderate, liberal theists are no less likely to discriminate against non-believers as being immoral and distrustful using it as a tacit litmus test for keeping them from American political office and with tacit defense of the fundamentalists. Only because of the ‘sin’ of most non-believers to, above everything else, want as much certainty that the things about the world that they accept are demonstrably true.
"Do you think religious people are stupid?"
Intelligent people can be gullible. I suspect that some small part of the human population could be wired to really need the idea of some possible uber shield of security being out there to help them deal with the world. Most people don’t even have a good working definition about atheism, which is no more than a disbelief in the existence of gods. More importantly, the real driver which leads to it for most, is the skeptical demand for evidence where one tries to use a process to actually catalog the true and false answers to things we observe and / or believe in. Most people, in America at least, don’t require observations, when it comes to religion, to be repeatedly demonstrable when examined. And failing that, putting them in the dismiss column until demonstrated as real at some other time. There will be much less religious belief around if some hard proof is required for most people in their acceptance of any claim that comes their way.
"Do you think religion should be stamped out or banned?"
No and no. As long as it doesn’t infringe the rights of others or their freedom of speech believe whatever you like. Some have suggested that the church communities are still a good model for people in society without the religious part. The sharing of resources, helping others, creating art and as an exercise in the freedom of assembly with certain goals towards extending good will are all good things. In the short run it might be something that some secularists might like to duplicate and develop. Or at least trying to do so until the atheists have won. Which will be when no one cares that we are atheist any more than they might care whether we were Methodists or Episcopalians, or Buddhists, or the fan of any given sports team.
That’s almost my point. Racism-the-concept exists only in the mind, a predicate which can be — but need not necessarily be — applied to certain acts or individuals. You and I have that concept, right now. Have we been compelled to make distorted judgments and behave improperly? We could imagine a world without racism, but in which some novelist or philosopher invents the concept as a hypothetical: “What if someone hated another person simply because of irrelevant phenotypic differences?” Would it make sense for her to feel hatred towards her invention?
It might make sense to hate this or that particular religion, but hating capital-r-Religion feels like a two minutes hate to me.
Moreover, without a just world or one provided in an afterlife, suddenly the responsibility for all justice is laid on our own shoulders, as are the reasons for all evil perpetrated by humankind. It is childish to simply assume that those who suffer needlessly will be justified at a later date. Without that assurance to rely on some celestial judge or karma does makes us our brothers keeper far more keenly. Having those religious scapegoats or excuses prevent us from doing much towards getting at the root causes of much misery. Much of that by recognizing the perpetrators as often being those bearing titles such as reverend, father, rabbi, oh most enlightened one, or providing aid and comfort to the corrupt that do such things in their name.
I’m an atheist because being anything else takes too much effort. Seriously I don’t want to reorganize my life around some sort of dogma or superstition and be miserable following my religion knowing I’m filled with all these doubts about it. I want to live my life doing what I want to do (within reason and limits of the law).
I can’t put my faith in a religion particularly Christianity because it doesn’t logically make sense to me. Because I can’t believe in the logic of it I can’t put my faith in it. I think Science has all the answers to the wonders of the universe…our understanding of science is flawed because we are flawed and we learn as we go. I’m sometimes a bit leery of people using science to poo poo something because new discoveries are made all the time that make us reevaluate our old theories (example: water on the moon). Science has the answers…we just have to accept that science marches on and old ideas we’re indoctrinated with also have to change.
I’d likely be an atheist but as a scientist I cannot be completely sure – so I am agnostic.
As others have posted, the questions mainly reflect the problems and internal conflicts of theists. I would note that the prospect of spending eternity with the Ned Flanderses of the world has never been a selling point for me – while the Twains, Hemmingways, Socrateses, Feynmans, Galileis and other more interesting souls, as we are told by learned theists, will be in hell. Makes me want to do some sinning just to be sure.
I’m not a scientist though I always wanted to be one. I am however a strong proponent of the scientific method.
Just like you I too cannot be sure of some things. For example, the flying spaghetti monster, leprechauns, and Jesus horses. And so I too remain agnostic about these things, just as i’m sure you do.
Sounds like you’ve run a code in a teaching hospital before.
Interesting claim, given that I have never met a “learned theist” who has ever made that claim about any of those persons.