Rejecting Evidence

Looking back… Just thinking about it… You should really thank the asshole for being such an asshole. Score one point for the assholes of the world.

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I strongly react to this. Do you think that sending a death threat is a reaction that is proportional to whatever someone else have done? Is it an ethically defendable action to send death threats, even if you have no intention of doing what you threaten with?

He did admit to being a teen.

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I was 21 and my morals needed work back then. It needed heavy improvement back then. I had no respect for anyone, not even my elders. Harrassing him was not a wise decision. I was driven by my own anger and hatred. I was frenzied. I was impulsive. Being 36 years old now, I have learned more self control and to refrain from making decisions that I will regret later. Sending him death threats was very immoral. All I did was embarrasse myself. I was lucky he didn’t take those messages to the authorities. Would I do it again? No. That’s not moral. You don’t threaten people. If I could slap my younger self, you’d bet I’d knock him on his ass. That was out of line. I look back and Im disappointed. There’s a 1000 right ways I could have handled things and chose to do them the wrong way.

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When I was young and dumb, I also did crappy things. The goal is to survive that time in your life.

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What you did could, under the right circumstances, easily having been rationalized as “he deserved it” or whatnot. But you seem to have self-corrected and learned, which counts to your favour. (Oh, bollocks, I now sound like a priest during a full confessional(*). I see it myself, and I feel ashamed. :flushed: Must I now obtain a rosary and say 28(**) incantations of something very secular or even blasphemic?)

(*) not that I actually know how that is done, I only know it from movies and TV series.
(**) Since 28 is a perfect number

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You’re correct. I’m not as bad as I was. But you’re right. Some of it is still a trigger for me. I’m like a vampire in a sense. It repels and repulses me. If someone or a stranger in my real life starts talking about their religion, I start scooting away from them or I try to look the other way or we get into it because I don’t like being preached at about a fairy tale man-made religion.

I think the anger started when I was 12. I was really hungry. We were at a family gathering. My great grandmother said it was time to say “grace” at the dinner table and I blurted out “I don’t pray, I want to eat!” and everyone gave my mom a dirty look that hinted “You need to teach him about GOD!” and I think that’s where I truly started as an Atheist. Not at the age of 15 or 18. I think my Atheism had always been there. I was very blunt and open as a child.

My mom indoctrinating me and trying to get me into religion was a major struggle for her. I have no doubts about that. I never took well to it. I always felt that when we went to church, I had to put on an act because I had learned that openly not taking this religion seriously was considered a “bad” thing by my parents. I had often wondered if having to go to church would be a life long requirement when I grew up.

I didn’t get the jist of Christianity at a young age. My teachers and peers were saying that magic and the Easter Bunny wasn’t real already. I was watching super hero movies and Saturday cartoons that I knew was not real. So I was getting a huge concept of what “fiction” was. It started with me finding out at a young age that Santa Claus wasn’t real. When you’re mom sits you down at the age of 9 with a child version of the bible that has a multitude of silly stories. It’s impossible to believe in those “stories” because your parents lied to you about Santa Claus and then came out and said “Okay ACTUALLY we lied! He’s not real!” and then you get the same feeling with the “god belief”. For me it was most of the bible. One of the dumbest stories was the great flood and that made me frown or how they crucified a man and he popped back to life. Another was a guy getting eaten by a fish and camping out in it’s belly for a while.

It just wasn’t convincing then. It’s not convincing now. I just had concluded at a very young age that Christianity was Santa Claus for adults. Those stories were so absurd. I was like okay, this is a joke. There’s no way any of this is real.

It’s not real to me. It never was and I was shamed for being that way.

I get that some people who are immoral without a religion, need a religion. My ex wife for example. She’s not on meth anymore because she found religion and apparently her belief in a god keeps her from doing bad things. That’s just disappointing that’s what it takes for some people to be moral and to make better decisions like @Tin-Man pointed out.

I admit I’ve made bad decisions in the past. But I want to do moral things to better myself and not because of some imaginary sky father who supposedly watches you do everything and then decides if you earned your gold ticket into OZ. I’ve always felt there was more to life than religion.

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@MrDawn I pointed this out, as a friend who hopes it helps you get past the evil of religion. I have been fucked up on issues in the past, and when it was pointed out to me, I was able to identify what was wrong, I was able to “get better”.

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I think one of my issues as of why I see red at times is because I mainly identify Christianity with control and censorship. A previous issue that I had was my daughter was upset. She’s bisexual and she understands that the Bible preaches against homosexuality and sexual immorality in the Christian religion. I felt angry towards the religion and it’s supporters on how it made her feel. Her mom being a religious idiot doesn’t like that she’s bi. So I sat down with her and we talked about Atheism. I did make a claim to her that I didn’t believe that deities were real, that they were fairy tales, that they were made up so people could control the lives of others. I told her I accepted her for who she was and that Atheism is the path to a real hard truth. That there are no gods and religion is all about control. She was a lot happier after that. I set her free from her mother’s indoctrination. I felt genuinely proud of myself because I refuse to let my daughter go through the same round of superstitious bullshit I went through and I really felt like I got something back from doing that.

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@MrDawn And even if she believes in a god, tell her this:

God knows everything and god loves you. God made you the way you are.

You can prove that a lot in the bible was written by barbaric goat herders. It was those assholes who placed the prohibition on homosexuality in that book.

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I don’t think she sincerely does. She’s always making jokes towards her mom about it now. It’s either a joke about Santa or she says something like “Oh that so magical!” after her mom has said something religious to her. I know she came home one day and told me that she believed her geology / history teacher to be an atheist because he was talking about dead religions like Greek Mythology being invented by man and kept hinting to the class that Christianity is much of the same. She even told me that about another teacher of hers who is overly religious and was giving out scripture to students who wanted to talk about Christianity with him and that made her uncomfortable and she said she didn’t like it. I don’t 100% know what my daughter does or doesn’t believe. But I don’t think Christianity is for her after the struggles she had with it. She didn’t like the homophobias in it and she has a major problem with the misogyny towards her gender. I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to promote a religion either that degraded my gender or degraded or ignorantly villainized a quality that I was incapable of changing.

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This caught my attention and actually made me chuckle a bit to myself. I find it amusing sometimes the way a similar experience can have such different effects on different people. In this case, in regards to your reactions to “religious encounters”, please allow me to share a few words that I hope will help you cope better with them.

As I have said many times on here, I grew up in a religious family, surrounded by a religious community. And the bible and all the stories I was ever taught about God/Jesus/Satan never made sense to me. But, as an obedient child, I went along to get along, despite never being comfortable in a church or around any religious event.

Fast-forward to my adult years. For the most part, I avoided church and religion as much as possible. Although, there was a brief period of a few months during my twenties when I got back active in a church. Was going through a stressful and depressing personal crisis, and a good buddy of mine suggested we go to a church where another friend of ours was a youth pastor. Became very active with the youth group, and the distraction did seem to help a bit. Even then, however, I never did feel comfortable in the church. Always felt like an “outsider”… Like I didn’t belong there. As such, after a few months, my attendance and participation gradually started to dwindle, until I was once again avoiding religion as much as possible.

From that point on, I was pretty much in the same position/mindset that you say you are in now. If I was ever around a church or any religious event, I wanted to get away from it ASAP. If anybody tried to talk to me about religion, it would make me extremely uncomfortable, and sometimes agitated. I was constantly torn between what I was taught about the bible as a child vs. all that I was learning from education and real-life experiences. An annoying psychological conflict that was always present and often causing uncertainty and indecision. And there was no escaping it. Until…

Long story short, I met my wife. She was a yoga instructor at the time, and a religion research fiend. She was able to clear up much of the confusion that had always plagued me. Over the course of four or five years, that and a couple of other events eventually led me to here (The AR). And I haven’t looked back.

Now, after all my rambling, you are probably wondering what point I’m trying to make. Basically, it is this: All that uncertainty, indecision, anxiety, muddled thinking that was caused by religion for over forty years of my life is now GONE. I am FREE. Religion no longer controls me. I am completely at ease (and often amused) around any given religious situation. Matter of fact, I am more fascinated with it now than I ever thought possible. I actually ENJOY religious conversations/discussions. Hell, I literally invited JW’s to my home many times to chat. Let me repeat… Religion no longer controls me. Please let that sink in. Because, whether you like it or not, YOU are still controlled by your religion. Just like Dave and others have said, you may not believe in the whole nonsense of it anymore, but you are STILL allowing it to maintain its hold on you. Okay, so it “tortured” you as a kid and made your life miserable. Nothing you can do to change that. So WHY allow it to CONTINUE to make your life miserable as an adult? THAT you absolutely CAN change. Hope this helped.

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I’m not that much into philosophy, but I am attempting to teach myself epistemology.

The theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

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Actually, no. The bronze or iron age goat herders would have been illiterate. Writing something down requires some degree of literacy, and back then this task would have been performed by scribes, specially educated for such tasks. In short, the religious fairy tales would probably have been dictated by priests and written down on parchment/whatever by educated scribes.

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Good point, I stand corrected.

Would I be correct to state that the culture and laws where the scribes lived influenced such writings?

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I don’t think it controls me. It’s not an all of the time thing for me. There are some days or some months where I don’t even think about it at all. I’m not out with a stake and a crossbow hunting down Christians like Blade.

In fact I’m so free of the religion that I refrain from talking to people who are Christian. I refrain from making and keeping Christian friends. I don’t talk about religion with my mom anymore. She refuses to talk about it now. We went to a grill out and my mom and the entire family didn’t pray before the meal. That was great.

The mistake I made was marrying a woman who was a Christian who tried forcing it back down my throat and I learned my lesson. So this time, I chose a girlfriend that shares my non beliefs. She doesn’t like being around Christian men because she feels they’re misogynists and her ex husband was abusive and controlling.

Now with that said. I’ve been cutting off any and all outlets to keep this religion out of my life. By that I mean anyone who questions what I do and when I do it. I’m not afraid to talk about Christianity. I enjoy slamming it and degrading it. I enjoy making fun of Christians on here.

Sure. I hate the religion not only because it made me miserable. But I also see it’s influence in politics and I have a problem with that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to keep it separated between the church and state. For the fact that Christianity enslaves women and takes away their rights and I have a daughter and a girlfriend whom I respect and I just can’t tolerate that. In fact we’re seeing that with Wade Vs Roe. We’re seeing religious idiots mix religion with politics and that shouldn’t be allowed. America was not founded under Christianity. It should stay that way. But I see religion and I see control and that pisses me off because the two are the same thing. I don’t want a government that promotes religious control. That’s what I want to prevent. I learned my lesson growing up in a household where it was forced on me.

But you say religion no longer controls you? Hmmm… :thinking:… Well, you can SAY that as much as you like. Your ACTIONS, though, paint a different picture. Again, like it or not, you are STILL allowing religion to manipulate you and negatively dictate how you feel. If you don’t mind my making an observation, it almost seems that you think you can completely eliminate religion from your life by simply pushing it away and pretending it doesn’t exist in your personal world. Obviously, that is an unrealistic expectation, so that when religion does “invade” your personal barriers it sets you off in attack mode. In other words, it still controls you.

Hate to be the one to tell you this, but religion is not going anywhere anytime soon. Certainly ain’t gonna disappear within OUR lifetime. Granted, its presence is mildly less pronounced now compared to when I was a kid. Nevertheless, it is still a major controlling factor in our society. In other words, unless you are a self-sustaining hermit living out in the middle of nowhere, you CANNOT AVOID RELIGION IN YOUR LIFE. Damn near impossible. That being said, you have a couple of choices…

  1. Continue on the course you are on. Stay annoyed. Stay pissed. Be aggressive and antagonistic. Throw spite and insults into the faces of those who DARE utter a religious word in your direction. Alienate yourself from a large portion of society. Congratulations! You have just fully demonstrated to those of faith how RIGHT they are about those terribly hateful godless atheists. You have freely given them every reason they need to cling tighter to their chosen faith. Bravo!.. (golf clap)…

You say you HATE religion, right? Are you aware that hating something is really not much different than loving it? You actually have to care about something to love it OR hate it. In either case, whatever that “something” might be still has some amount of control over you. (Food for thought.)

  1. Let go of all that anger, rage, and resentment. Dude, you ESCAPED. You are now FREE. You should be able to deal with any religious situation now without a care in the world. YOU understand it is a con game, while those around you are still stuck in the delusion. You should be HAPPY. You should be setting the example of how to be happy and carefree and moral without the need of some imaginary Sky Daddy. Somebody wants to discuss religion with you, enter that discussion relaxed and with a huge grin on your face. Be pleasant. Be polite. And when they try to “force their god down your throat”, just smile and use their own holy book against them. But do it NICELY. Having done this many times myself, I can assure you it really scrambles their brains. (Plus, it has the benefit of being fun and entertaining.) And if you do it correctly, it is entirely possible you might plant a few seeds of doubt along the way. See what I mean?

Anyway, didn’t mean to ramble so much. I just hate seeing anybody still having difficulty with such things. Just trying to help.

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What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Solution

Reptiles laid eggs and evolved into dinosaurs. Dinosaurs laid eggs and evolved into proto-birds. And proto-birds laid eggs and evolved into chicken. Thus, the egg came first.

I don’t think it would be a far stretch of the imagination to think that socially accepted behaviour, rules, and laws came first, and that they started out as being orally transmitted from generation to generation, while evolving into the rules and laws that were finally written down by scribes once the art of writing had evolved to such a point as to allow their written formulation, and the need to have them in written form was there. There are two other alternatives, namely 1) that someone powerful enough (like a king or a priest) pulled some laws out of their arse and had them written down and implemented, and 2) that the laws were directly dictated by a sky daddy. Unwritten laws of society are documented to exist, dictation of laws by powerful persons like kings are documented to exist, but a sky daddy dictate of laws has not been documented. So I think your suggestion would not be too far fetched.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert, and not even formally educated, within the fields of prehistorical <whatever>. I’m just an interested amateur.

Edit: minor grammatical and formatting improvements.

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@Get_off_my_lawn Thank you, now I have more to ponder. What appeared to me as a simple yes-or-no response has grown into a more diverse and complex area of study. I like that, it allows me to ponder and scratch my head.

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@MrDawn

Growing up religious in Texas gives me some unique perspective on this. I have some Christian friends, who are, without a doubt, intelligent people. However, they are overpowered by cognitive dissonance and willful ignorance when it comes to their own religion. They do what I call, bad error correcting where instead of recognizing something as being wrong or far fetched, they disregard or change it in their minds so that it doesn’t conflict with their world view. People in all religions do this to some degree. It’s worth noting that human tribalism causes this too (politics, sports teams, general “us vs them” mentality). I’ve seen Atheists do this too. They partition their minds and treat their religion or group differently without really knowing or confronting it.

On the religious side, these people usually understand that evolution is real and the book of Genesis is a bunch of fairy tales. However, they still believe in the all knowing god, that’s male for some reason, who can see the future but decided to design a interdimensional legal system called sin where he would have to impregnate a married teenager and go on a suicide mission to make it work they way he wanted it to. Normal stuff :stuck_out_tongue:

I also know some Christians who are dumber than a bag of rocks…

If I had to guess (without trying to strawman), I would say you, like me, are probably annoyed with the religious people around you because they affect your life with their beliefs. Like abortion being made illegal today was because of people around me who believe that their imaginary friend doesn’t like it so we must make it illegal for everybody. Or some 2000 year old book says homosexuality is wrong so let’s keep people from doing that too. I had some, a while back, suggest that demons were why pedophiles exist. I don’t care if people have some ridiculous beliefs, but don’t change things in reality based on them.

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