If a religion tells its followers to be intolerant because God said so, or wants there to be laws to enforce what they view is God’s morality, isn’t it reasonable to ask them the basis of their belief that their God exists and has said those things?
This is exactly when the religious retreat to the Faith argument Sam mentioned in the OP.
If all religions left everyone else alone religious debates would be like debates about which baseball team is best, and high explosives and gunfire would seldom be involved.
Atheism has nothing to do with science. You can be religious and a scientist, you can be a diehard atheist and still think that Global Warming is a lie.
Hardcore atheism is indeed a form of religion. They hold that belief strongly, without any proof, they ridicule other faiths and they proselytise.
Well, I would point out that there are many very religious people who are also prominent scientists. So, it’s difficult to support your division.
I would draw a line, but not quite where you propose - if I understand your point.
I’d propose that there are two different tool sets. There is science and there is religion. Any individual can use one or both of these tools to address some issue.
As an atheist, you won’t find me selecting the religion toolset.
For people who DO want to use the tools of religion, I would propose that they use the tool that fits the problem.
If they want to know how our universe works, they need to select the science tool set, because that is the toolset that allows progress in understanding HOW our physical universe works, the mechanisms of our universe. In fact, I’d point out that it is incredibly important that everyone be able to recognize this tool set and be able to detect if it is being properly used. It’s just made far too much progress and is at the center of far too many key issues for us to ignore that.
If someone wants to consider issues of why we exist, of purpose for humans, etc., those questions can’t be answered by science. So, in that case I don’t suggest that religious people need to shit can their religion - I don’t have an alternative for them, and besides that they aren’t going to follow my advice!!!
Let’s all thank “god” we don’t have to try to eliminate religion. Let’s just learn to focus on how the tools work and how to select the proper tool for the question.
“A sharp picture of a fuzzy image” has struck me as a good description of it.
I concur. I am willing to accept that for a short time they might have been a united monarchy, but certainly most of what the OT says about David and Solomon is legendary and even mythical. The dating is off, also. (this gives doubters plenty of ammo, allowing them to show that at the dates given, the united monarchy couldnt have occurred, but the dates are certainly off)
Josephus was able to cite Tyrian court records and Menander, gave a specific year during which King Hiram I of Tyre sent materials to Solomon for the construction of the Temple. We have lost those original sources, but I dont see why Josephus should be disbelieved.
So, perhaps maybe, David & Solomon had a united monarchy of sorts.
The trouble with using religious “tools” is that the responses they give depend entirely on the person using them. Two people go outside and use the same type of thermometer to take the tempurature, and they will(barring defects in the instrument) come up with pretty much the same answer, and that answer can be verified. Two different people using religious tools to answer the same question, and what do you get(and how can either answer be verified)?
Does it matter to you if your religious tools give you an factual answer, or is the purpose to verify what you already believe? If the answer one person gets differs a great deal from the the answer another person gets, which religious tool is working, and which isn’t?
If science had provided evidence of God’s hand in the world - as the early 19th century scientists thought it would - then science would support religion.
Sure, atheist organizations tithe to support atheist missionaries in Africa and India. :rolleyes:
By proselytize I assume you mean that some atheists have had the nerve to publish some books supporting their position, and not be ashamed of being heathen like we should be. Or maybe an ad or two to say that we are here also.
You are mixing up hypotheses, which might be provable, with statements of belief. I don’t know that there are no gods - the universe is a big place, and it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of a deistic god by definition. We can prove the nonexistence of some forms of God, but theists are usually pretty fuzzy about defining god.
Given the plethora of gods across human societies and history, and the lack of strong evidence for any of them, belief that none exist is perfectly justified.
How many times, and in how many different places, does Atlantis have to be “found” before we quit wasting our time? How many different gods do we have to look into, and discard one by one?
I mostly didn’t want to write the exact same sentences twice with the only difference being the once word. Also it’s quite common for theists to lump the two subjects together (like in this very thread) because they see both of them as the same - attacks on their little religions.
You can say this bullshit over and over and it never becomes true. “Hardcore” atheism, as in an assertive disbelief in any gods, is exactly as much a religion as disbelieving in dragons. Which is to say it is at best a single belief, not a system of beliefs, and in no way a structured system of beliefs like a religion even if it was a flimsy faith thing, which it’s not. It’s a belief that’s strongly based in reality - if dragons or gods existed, they’d leave evidence which was consistent cross-culturally and which could stand up to a examination. No such evidence exists because fictional things don’t leave evidence.
And yeah, stupid bullshit does get ridiculed sometimes. As for proselytizing, some snowflakes call it proselytizing when an atheist fails to agree with them.
A lot of the buildings Solomon supposedly built got built much later, and of course the Solomonic empire is as dubious as the Davidic one. Yet the temple got built, and the construction materials must have come from somewhere, but I’d have to research how believable the specifics are. Given the importance of the Temple in the centralization of Jewish belief, I can imagine the actual builders crediting a semi-mythical predecessor to give it more authority.
Maybe fuzzy picture of an even fuzzier image? I often ask drive-by theists who demand proof that there is no god to define the god we’re supposed to disprove. Very few respond.
There is the warm fuzzy variety, god is good, god loves us, god answers prayers, god would never be mean enough to hate gays, and there is the God is just what is said in the Bible, internal contradictions and known falsities and all. And there are the God is defined by the parts of the Bible that I want him to be defined by, and the rest is just stories, though my set of stories is different from everyone else’s.
It’s the magic of compartmentalization, and it’s powerful magic. I have on several occasions watched otherwise intelligent and reasonable people give visibly stupider as they, shall we say, ‘change tool sets’. Their argumentative skills evaporate and their ability to discuss things calmly goes straight out the window, until the subject is allowed to die and they can allow their reasoning minds to restart again.
It’s really disconcerting to watch.
The difference is, of course, that one toolset actually produces accurate and useful results, and the other just craps out inconsistent who-cares nonsense while salving their insecurities. And it works as a salve to their uncertainties (which is why it’s employed so much) - but the answers they get out of it are crap nonetheless.
As for why we exist, science actually does provide an answer, at least as effectively as religion does - it’s just no kind of salve. We exist because that’s the way the dice of physics and chance rolled, and there’s nothing special about us aside from our own natural properties. There are similarly uncomforting answers about what will happen when we die (we die) and regarding how much inherent justice there is in the world (none).
People don’t like these answers, though, so they reach for the toolset of comforting lies.
The lack of a globally recognized decision making process is a detraction, of course.
The existence of this problem is demonstrated by the enormous range of religious thought. Even just within Christianity there really is no way to cause agreement through logic or testing, so we have Catholics, various protestants, Mormons, etc.
However, I’m not so sure there aren’t objectives met even without agreement on the specifics that science would want to focus on. Unfortunately, in some cases it also leads to focusing people on differences - like Evangelicals hating Islam, even though both religions are founded on the Bible, recognize that Jesus was a real person, the existence of heaven, etc., etc.
Re: the hiddenness of God…
Sure, and if God made a world which looks exactly like he doesn’t exist at all, then he would do it perfectly. That’s the world we apparently live in, so I guess that proves God.
I think my point is proved by your last two sentences- thank you.
People with various kinds of mental illness have. Talking to God is a common symptom.
Well, there’s the Holy Ghost for starters.
Which is not a “Ghost” in the normal sense of the word. You dont really know much about what you mock do you?
:dubious: If your point was that I’m willing to mock stupid bullshit, then congratulations! The stupid bullshit you posted certainly earned my mockery.
And because this is Great Debates, I’m going to continue analyzing your idiotic “argument” into small smoldering chunks. Like so:
You presented “they ridicule other faiths” as an argument for atheism being a religion - and not just by fallaciously begging the question and calling atheism a faith. This is odd, because in doing so you implicitly claimed that “ridiculing other faiths” is an identifying attribute of religions. As in, for your argument not to be gibbering nonsense, that would mean that you could say that christianity is not a religion, because it doesn’t mock other religions enough!
Suffice to say, I’ve never heard such an argument made before, on account of it being astoundingly stupid. No, it is not the case that religions can be identified by their tendency to mock other religions. That’s stupid.
The fact that you said it, though, is informative. In addition to highlighting just how incoherent the arugment for atheism being a religion is (you’re just throwing shit at the wall hoping it’ll stick), it also betrays what your real problem is with atheism - that atheists point out how stupid religion can be, which is bad because theism is vulnerable to losses of credibility. This is reflected in the other things you claim identify atheism as a religion despite it obviously not being one:
“They hold that belief strongly” - It’s scary that atheists can so calmly and casually dismiss your religion’s claims. That others don’t believe in it erodes the idea that it’s a natural unassailable belief, which religions often at least partially rely on.
“without any proof” - Atheism is, of course, a negative belief - it asserts the nonexistence of something. And uniformly it presents its evidence for this disbelief in the form of contesting the supposed evidence for theism or by providing alternate explanations for everything religions claim to cause. This is of course not something theism wants to admit is happening, so it instead rather desperately focuses attention on the true fact that, despite all the evidence supporting disbelief, you cannot actually prove a negative.
“they ridicule other faiths” - As noted, this is just snowflake whining. But the reason theist attacks are so painful is because they again undermine the unassailability of the theistic belief - by assailing it directly.
“and they proselytise” - Atheism doesn’t send out missionaries, of course, because there’s no organization to train them and send them out, because there’s no organization at all, because it’s not a religion. But that’s okay, because to a theist an atheist is proselytizing just by mentioning that they’re an atheist. Because the mere fact that an atheist lacks reason to believe in your faith is an attack on your religion’s credibly. By merely existing atheists attack theism - them mentioning it is beyond the pale.
Theists try to pretend atheism is a religion because what it actually is -the simple realization that the theistic beliefs are false- is a staggering attack on the flimsy foundations of theistic belief. If theists really did base their beliefs on faith alone, like the OP thinks they should, then whether or not somebody else disbelieves wouldn’t bother them - if they didn’t care that there was no flood they wouldn’t care whether other people believe there was no flood. However this isn’t the case - theism is actually a flimsy illusion that needs as much protection as it can get. Atheism existing threatens that illusion, so the wish to fraudulently present atheism as being an illusion too makes sense, in the same way that trying to find an ark to prove the flood was real does. Anything to shore up the eroding foundations of belief.