Religion
noun
- the belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers, especially a God or gods.
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Oh I am pretty sure that was always going to happen.
If this is any indicator of the level of integrity we might expect, nor is it isolated of course.
This was after implying I had lied about it as well, and again not the first time he’d sent me on a fool’s errand to prove he said something after he denied and implied I was lying, only for him to roll on as if nothing at all had happened.
Well @Sherlock-Holmes I have shared the quote twice now??
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Like science, I am not absolute, so when I concede I cannot be sure, you can assume that leaves very little room for doubt. Infinitesimal.
Once one invokes the claim of magic, science collapses and the rational world vanishes.
No difference. Agnostics reject current claims to deity; their claim to “not know” is something of a philosophical dodge IMO.
UK Atheist
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I’m afraid this is now very much a Kafka novel, reminiscent of the The Trial by Orson Welles.
We are discussing atheism and when the same questions or issues come up then one will have the same answer and responses to those and of course that will happen across threads.
If I am asked a question or presented with some situation or challenge then my answer and response will be more or less the same as it was the previous time I was asked.
You posted this bizarre message earlier:
That was in response to me saying:
That post of mine was a reply to @UKAtheist and so far as I can tell violates no forum rules and @UKAtheist did not object to my post.
It would be more honest if moderators avoided making judgements based on their own prejudices and bruised egos and only get involved if another poster files a complaint or there’s an egregious violation of the rules like posting pornography or violent images.
I’m not “beating a dead horse” I’m debating supposedly competent atheists I do not have an “obsession” any more than the regular foul mouthed and abusive members here do with their self congratulatory juvenility regularly on display. You only want to talk about atheism on your terms, you consider it effrontery to be disagreed with.
The fact is very few here are competent to discuss this subject like adults, and I have some of you on the ropes all the time because you are no match for me, that hurts doesn’t it…
I’m afraid I will not be participating in this thread any further Sir, it is toxic and the moderation is far from impartial. I won’t put you in the difficult position of expressing a view on this here, but I will say you were one of the very few competent and composed people here.
Why is it you Theists always blame everyone else and act like a sore loser every time you lose a debate?
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I don’t think your opinion will carry much weight, given your dishonesty thus far. For example:
Well there are the quotes, for the third time, quod erat demonstrandum.
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That can’t be true, else your pretentious intellectual showboating and vapid apologetics would’ve fitted right in.
The net closing in on your dishonesty more like. I did try to warn you about the lying and the trolling right at the start, people don’t have infinite patience for that sort of behaviour.
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Haaaaahahahaha
Nice try.
Still applies. You have your answer to the whole “atheism/atheists” question. Now answer some of the questions other posters have asked if you.
This is a discussion.
This isn’t your board. Go set up your own if you don’t like it.
This is the second time you’ve tried manipulating and controlling.
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What is it about YOU can post in this thread along these lines BUT not carry it over to the other threads that your “superior” mind can’t comprehend? 
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Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to dedicate this next smash-hit musical favorite to our good buddy @Sherlock-Holmes It is his participations in several active threads that has allowed us to repeat the definition and meaning of “atheism” a bazillion times so that there is no possible way for any other person visiting this site to miss it. Thank you, Shirley, for all your hard work and dedication.
(Edit to ingest a handful of dramamine.)
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If atheism were just an antithesis, this site wouldn’t exist. However, the site does exist and therefor it describes a belief system. You can’t raise a flag saying Christians are stupid (a very benign description for your persecution of them) and then claim that it’s not a belief system.
I’m late to this particular party, so forgive me not wading through all the other posts beforehand, but I’ll deal with this topic simply and succinctly.
Is atheism a belief system? No.
Atheism, in its rigorous formulation, is nothing more than suspicion of unsupported mythology fanboy assertions. That is IT. Equivalently, it consists of “YOU assert that your magic man exists, YOU support your assertions”, preferably with something resembling proper evidence. “My mythology says so”, and vacuous apologetic fabrications that an astute primary school child would point and laugh at, do not constitute “evidence”.
Quite simply, NOT treating unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as fact, is the very antithesis of a “belief system”, though of course the usual suspects continue peddling the familiar lies in this vein.
As for the usual canards that are resurrected with tiresome regularity by the usual suspects, let’s deal with some of these, shall we?
Item one: I, and many other atheists here, do NOT assert that a god type entity in the most general sense, does not exist. Instead, we recognise that the question is unanswered. Not least because if a genuine answer had been presented in the past, said answer would now be part of our mainstream body of knowledge, and no one would be arguing about the issue. What we do state, and with good reason, is that cartoon magic men from pre-scientific mythologies are absurd and incompetent candidates for the “god role”, as it were. If someone presents to us a non-mythological candidate, one bereft of the absurdities attached to mythological cartoon magic men, one that is either consonant with known physics or provides consistent extensions thereto, and the existence of which can be tested, then we’ll sit up and take notice. Until this happens, we’re not obliged to treat vacuous assertions about mythological cartoon magic men with anything other than amusement or disdain.
Item two: As for the duplicitous and darkly amusing hilarity that is the appeal to “design”, I’ve already dealt with this mendacious edifice in detail here. If you think a cartoon magic man is needed to explain the observable universe and its contents, then be prepared to be woefully and wonderfully surprised, when several million peer reviewed scientific papers present to you, the evidence presented therein in exquisite detail, that testable natural processes are sufficient to explain the vast body of observational data obtained over the past 350 years. As a corollary, cartoon magic men from pre-scientific mythologies are superfluous to requirements and irrelevant.
Of course, I understand that the above does not rule out an entity that actually uses testable natural processes to achieve a given outcome, because humans do this on a regular basis - indeed, the entire basis of human science and technology is grounded in understanding and applying testable natural processes, so the existence of another entity employing the same methods isn’t a particularly remarkable idea. We still need evidence for that other entity of course, but such an entity is going to be somewhat less improbable than a cartoon magic man. Which brings me to:
Item three: The mistaken and frequently dishonest coupling of ethics to religion.
But of course, such an entity - one that deploys testable natural processes, even if with greater virtuosity than humans, isn’t emotionally satisfying to mythology fanboys. Many of whom want a cartoon magic man to exist, and one moreover that delivers misery, suffering, horrific deaths and and “afterlife” consisting of eternal torture to people they don’t like. In short, these are people who engage in a metaphysic in order to impose an ethic upon the universe, a practice that was treated with well-deserved scorn and derision by no less a person than Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote the following words on this topic:
Indeed, he expanded upon this in Beyond Good And Evil. From pages 12-13 of my own print copy, we have this in the preamble to the text proper:
On page 36, we find what Nietzsche himself wrote on the topic, viz:
Personally, I find the idea of an ethic being an intrinsic part of the fabric of the universe to be a laughable notion, not least because an ethic requires the existence of ethically aware beings to justify itse existence. A universe in which it was impossible for neutral atoms to exist, let alone any structures more complicated, for the first 370,000 years of its existence, and within which ethically aware beings did not appear until after 13.5 billion years had elapsed, would hardly be a suitable candidate for the existence of an intrinsic ethic. That’s before we cover the matter of the evolutionary and biological basis of [1] our capacity for ethical thought, and [2] the motivation to act thereupon, which renders the whole ludicrous edifice of “divine command theory” farcically null and void, and with it any idea that we need a cartoon magic man in order to function a ethical beings. Another refutation of this absurd notion is thoughtfully provided by this academic paper:
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies by Gregory S. Paul, Journal of Religion & Society, 7:
which can be downloaded for free from here.
From that paper:
[quote][19] If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, proevolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards.
The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data – a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.
[20] The United States’ deep social problems are all the more disturbing because the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth among the major western nations (Barro and McCleary; Kasman; PEW; UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). Spending on health care is much higher as a portion of the GDP and per capita, by a factor of a third to two or more, than in any other developed democracy (UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). The U.S. is therefore the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health. Understanding the reasons for this failure is urgent, and doing so requires considering the degree to which cause versus effect is responsible for the observed correlations between social conditions and religiosity versus secularism.
It is therefore hoped that this initial look at a subject of pressing importance will inspire more extensive research on the subject. Pressing questions include the reasons, whether theistic or non-theistic, that the exceptionally wealthy U.S. is so inefficient that it is experiencing a much higher degree of societal distress than are less religious, less wealthy prosperous democracies. Conversely, how do the latter achieve superior societal health while having little in the way of the religious values or institutions?
There is evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002). It is the responsibility of the research community to address controversial issues and provide the information that the citizens of democracies need to chart their future courses.[/quote]
I think that wraps up several canards in one go quite nicely.
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How silly of you to say. No one is persecuting xtians on here.
Of course it’s another religion - Satanism. Because it’s based on Christian persecution .
Where did you get Satanism from?
Huh?
This makes no sense to me.
Riches, are you a theist?
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