In all seriousness, that depends on how you define “ghost”, and also in how your religion defines “the Holy Ghost”. Mormonism, for example, doesn’t buy into the whole oneness-of-the-trinity thing, and to them the holy ghost is an actual spirit, a spectral person distinct from God or Jesus. As far as I know that particular spirit was never asserted to have once been a living human, but mormonism doesn’t categorize ‘spirits that have spent time in bodies on earth’ and ‘spirits that haven’t been physically incarnated’ as different types of entities, so to them, at least, the Holy Ghost is indeed a ghost.
Obviously your mileage will vary on this if your religion defines thing differently.
Missionaries are not required to proselytise.
proselytise: Convert or attempt to convert (someone) from one religion, belief, or opinion to another.
which is *exactly *what you are doing.
In fact, your entire post proves strongly that you are preaching atheism as a religion. You are here preaching and proselytising.
“My religion”? What ismy religion, do you think?
Note that many others consider that hardcore atheism is a religion of sorts, I am not original or alone with that.
Hardcore atheism does not need proof, any more than hardcore “there-isn’t-a-flaming-propane-torch-on-my-friend-Wayne’s-head-right-now-ism” needs proof. All you have to do is look. Saying “you’re not looking enthusiastically enough” is ridiculous. Glancing up toward the sky and saying “Nope, don’t see him” is a perfect and final refutation of the existence of God, IF God is a being.
If God is not a being, then show what God is, and we can start again.
Nope. I don’t believe for one single second that it’s possible to turn a theist into an atheist by talking to them over the internet. Hell, I don’t think it’s possible to make a theist into an atheist by talking to them in person in real life!
All I want you to do is stop with the stupid bullshit about atheism being a religion. It’s slanderous, and deliberately intended to be slanderous, and you know it. It’s assholish bullshit and I’d much rather you just argue your damn points and go on with being religious without resorting to it.
Me calling your arguments moronic bullshit isn’t proselytising - even if I wanted to turn you atheistic, I certainly wouldn’t go about it that way. But then you apparently think that insulting people is something religions explicitly do, so perhaps I can understand the confusion.
But no, I’m not trying to “convert” you.
I don’t know and don’t much care. To be honest I haven’t heard of any religion that includes insulting other religions as being among its major tenants, so I may not have even heard of it.
Yeah, this line of stupid fallacious bullshit is hardly unique to you. You are not the first to sling it, not even close.
Interestingly in the first link the legal fiction was presented as a way to protect the first amendment rights of the atheist in question, and in the second it was presented as a way to protect theism from the government preferring secularism. But in either case it’s a legal fiction - atheism is no more a religion than Microsoft is a “person”.
I’m very sure we have no clue concerning what god would do in just about ANY circumstance.
After all, one interpretation is simply that this life is a test - a test about which we have been given clues, including that faith is a central issue.
There is no way to suggest that this “test” is somehow detectably different than the universe we can explore with science.
I agree, in theory, but the problem is that that idea itself provides clues. That is to say, in the hypothetical that this life is a test, then the god or gods (or so on) that created can have “Would create life deliberately as a test” to their definition. And so we would have a clue; the hypotheticals are narrowed.
Pretty much all the monotheistic religions do, as opposed to the pagans who had no problem with other religions who worshiped other gods. Look at the Romans who more or less didn’t care what gods you had so long as one of them was the emperor. (Unless you were Jewish and thus crazy.)
Today each religion just denies all the other ones, which is better than the old days where they tried to kill the others.
Atheism just denies the same gods as the religions do, and just adds one more.
I’ve seen this point a lot, but I’m not totally convinced this is looking at the same thing. An atheist’s lack of belief isn’t dependent between religions; lacking belief in Christianity doesn’t have any affect on lacking belief in Buddhism. But for a religious person, I don’t know that that’s quite as true. A theist’s belief in Christianity might well have a strong affect on their lack of belief in Buddhism, in that they might well think there’s some convincing parts to the latter but their faith in the former overrides that.
Put another way, I don’t think that for a religious person who lost their faith, it would be a simple matter of going “Well, I already don’t believe in anything else, so I guess I’m an atheist now.” It could be “Ok, well, maybe that way is wrong, but what I still believe means this other way makes more sense to me.” The denial is tied up, at least partially, in the affirmation.
This is a warning for personal insults. There’s no realistic way to construe calling something assholish that is separate from attacking the poster.
Really, this whole post, and #100 only bear a slim resemblance to being on the right side of civility. If you want someone to abandon a position, you are free to refute it. You are not free to insult them.
Science examines how things work in our universe, using evidence. It’s only assumption is that we can make meaningful observations.
There’s no legitimate way to consider that a religion.
Science is merely a methodology of exploration.
Being a Christian or an atheist or a naturist(?) or whatever doesn’t have to conflict with science, so we see people of all religious contributing to science both today and in the past.
If some religion says they conflict with science, then I guess there is a conflict. But, that’s not caused by science.
I see that as destructive in that it presents to others an attitude that is negative, does NOT represent science and does NOT move toward a resolution of any differences.