Is there a side for those who don’t read their own cites in full?
the doctrine or belief that there is no god.
**2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings. **
“Disbelief” is not a belief. If I keep my socks in the refrigerator, context does not transform them into my dinner.
There’s an explosion at the mine. One miner takes a spike through the head, and loses all sensation in the part of the brain that forms speculations and beliefs. A second miner takes a spike to the groin.
After convalescing, they stop at a bar. Also at the bar is a man who has thought and studied about religion, and rejected it in any form as he understood it. The forth man, there because he enjoys debate with the third, was a celibate Catholic priest.
So who is at the bar? Two atheists and two asexuals.
I really don’t understand this compulsion to bring up Communism the minute anyone starts talking about atheism. Firstly, several posters have done very good jobs explaining why the argument is nonsense. Secondly, and I think more importantly, who exactly is talking about Soviet Russia? I’m concerned with the present day United States; I could care less about Stalin in this context. If Stalin comes back from the dead and starts pressuring the government to limit abortion rights because there is no god, then we can talk. Until then, it’s just an attempt to throw out scare-words to derail the conversation and, again, falsely equivocate.
Incidentally, I also think this inane comparison stems from people not being able to understand that “atheism” is not a religion and that we don’t look at Stalin like Catholics do their Saints, or whatever.
And stifling religious conversation automatically favors religious viewpoints. It gives them a privileged position of being unassailable and allows them to escape the scrutiny that largely causes them to crumble.
As far as you in particular are concerned, I’m not sure why you don’t just avoid religious threads if they bother you.
Sorry, I’m calling bullshit on this. There is a small, vocal minority that is pushy about their religions, but you know what? I’ve some pushy atheists too. It’s a characteristic of the person, not a function of their religiosity. I had a boss who wanted to micromanage me, and another one who quietly listened to me and integrated my ideas into the company’s business strategies.
Speaking of which… it’s this sort of militant and aggressive attitude that makes me think that you have a belief. Your belief is rooted in your understanding of scientific theory, but why should that not be a belief too? Just because you’ve arrived at your decision through things you’ve perceived doesn’t mean you’ve perceived everything there is to perceive.
Noisy aggressive religious people picket the funerals of soldiers. Noisy, aggressive atheists do what? Write a few books? Send in letters to the paper? File court cases when convinced their rights have been violated? Post on message boards?
Hell, when I was in Charlotte NC once the local paper said that local residents should stop mentioning god in every sentence, because they were frightening the tourists.
That was when Mr. Zimmerman was deep in his religious period, and writing crap songs too. During a better period he had Abraham saying to God “Man, you must be putting me on.”
Both believers and non-believers claim the “authority” of science, whatever that means, because it works and has been verified to the best extent possible, and they realize that its findings are provisional. You are doing it yourself by using a computer. Religion claims true authority from god, and even when they change their beliefs they claim that they always actually held them.
Science is never infallible. The entire structure of science is built on the fact that all experiments can be wrong, all scientists can be wrong, and that we haven’t discovered anything yet. When Luther had a new idea, the church split, and then split again and split again. Today we have many Christian sects. Who is right? There is no way of telling.
When Einstein had a new idea, was there an Einsteinium scientific faction split from the Newtonian faction? Hell no. Experiments were defined to verify his predictions, they were verified, and in one generation everyone accepted relativity. That’s the difference. In science you hypothesize, predict, and test. In religion you make claims about the very nature of the universe by gosh and by golly, and if you are careless enough to make verifiable claims, and they get falsified, you tapdance around the problem.
As for me, I’ve never faced a situation which defies logic - but my logic includes emotion and coincidence. Do you have an example?
Hi** Cagey**, welcome aboard. This is like shooting sardines in a can of sardines. With a shotgun, and the can of sardines stuck on the end of the barrel. I am tempted to start arguing the other side because I tend to root for the underdog.
Everyone else, I’ll make it easy for you, the proper response is ‘I only counter the arguments of people who try to convert me to their belief system. If you don’t do that I won’t criticize your beliefs and associate them with others who show no such restraint’.
But now that you are in the non-religious fervor of atheism, you’ll probably forget to do that.
Apropos malleable definitions, I love how this thread has already seen mention of Mao and Stalin, and still that paragraph qualifies as “militant and aggressive” somehow…
More false equivalence. Pretending that “pushy” religious people are the problem ignores the fact that there is a huge bloc of them in the United States who literally try to shape law around their religious beliefs and not-infrequently succeed in doing so. There is absolutely no comparison between that and even the “pushiest” atheists. As Voyager notes, the atheists who fall into that latter category are usually derided for having the temerity to write a book or go on a talk show.
Science has nothing to do with belief because the acceptance of any scientific theory or hypothesis is provisional, and the ideal scientist is willing to reject anything which goes against the evidence. In 1875 Newton’s Laws was as much a basis of physics as the divinity of Jesus was for Christianity - yet, when the theory and evidence turned against them, the entire world of physics went to relativity in one generation.
Right. Now tell us what happened in places like the Soviet Union and China when the majority were atheists and the minority were theists. Again, it’s a function of the people and the climate, not the belief.
Also, dictionaries aren’t necessarily the best place to go for word definitions. Here’s the same online dictionary source godix used to look up atheism for their definition of abiogenesis:
a·bi·o·gen·e·sis
–noun Biology .
the now discredited theory that living organisms can arise spontaneously from inanimate matter; spontaneous generation.
Much more accurate:
If you want a definition of atheism, go to the atheists.
Go back and read his post. At the very least it is aggressive, dismissive, and full of blanket statements. If you don’t see it, it’s because you identify with it too much to see it objectively.
Ok, then we have a serious problem in our vernacular and atheists should really go about fixing it in the same way that vegetarians fixed the definition of vegetarian to have various levels of specificity (e.g. lacto-, ovo-, pesca-, vegan, etc).
SOMEONE MAKE 4 SEPARATE FUCKING WORDS FOR THESE CONCEPTS:
Someone who doesn’t give a shit about God one way or another
Someone who is certain that there’s no God
Someone who is interested in religion but doesn’t believe or disbelieve in a specific God
Someone who is just pissed about perceived theist hegemony in public life
Actually, the majority were communists, not atheists. Atheists didn’t legislate communism- communists legislated atheism. As has been pointed out in *every *“Atheists suck” thread.
I’m just tired of ‘fundamentalist’ atheists proselytizing their ideas on the nature of reality while asserting some kind of intellectual “beyond belief” superiority that underlies their argument, when it’s quite obvious to me that these people believe something, and are trying to convince others of it.
Why does everything need to have a specific word attached to it? There’s no word for “people who like hamburgers, but prefers them without pickles” either, but it’s really not much of a problem. Number 3 is atheist. Number 2 is a very specific, and quite uncommon, subset of atheist. Number 1, 2 and 4 comes up so rarely there was never much need to create a unique word for them.
Wow, that must mean that “People who don’t believe in Thor” are the worst group of people in history. After all that includes the aforementioned dastardly Communists, the Phelps clan, both sides of the Crusades, the 9/11 terrorists, Jack the Ripper…
I never realized that non-Thorists have so much to answer for. Too bad it makes so much sense to group people this way.
It is not clear that the majority were atheists. And the problem was noisy aggressive Communists. A form of religion, in a sense, with a “we are correct” view of the destiny of the world, holy books, and holy icons. Stalin, Mao, or Jesus - same role in people’s homes.
And I might remind you that Christianity in Soviet Russia did a lot better than Christianity in fundamentalist Moslem countries. Or Catholics in Elizabethan England, for that matter.