Prayer: When God’s Perfect Plan just isn’t quite good enough for you.
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I’ve always heard Christians say how their goal is to be “a more Godly person.” Well, according to the bible, God is the most jealous, arrogant, insecure, egotistical, narcissistic, and homicidal being one can imagine. In which case I arrested untold numbers of Godly folks during my twenty years on patrol. So I’m fairly confident in saying pride and arrogance are likely NOT the obstructions preventing us from “seeing God”.
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I think most of them succeed. “You can believe as we believe or fuck off and burn in hell for all eternity. But remember we love you.”
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To compare the disparities between quantum mechanics and Einsteinian Relativity with the claims of religion does a substantial disservice to everyone involved.
There are things about relativity and quantum mechanics that we don’t understand . . . and that’s fine. We should not automatically invoke God just because we’re unhappy that we don’t know everything.
As an example that I often use, syphillis was once seen as divine punishment . . . now we give the syphillitic an injection of penicillin in his or her ass, and the disease goes away.
Or we can look at this in another way: A hero of mine is a man named Maurice Hilleman. He and his team formulated over 40 vaccines that have saved over 225 million lives.
Yet he has not been nominated for sainthood. In my mind, his accomplishments are a thousand times more miraculous than the miracles of any 100 saints combined.
If the human brain is made in God’s image, then why is Hilleman never mentioned as a modern miracle worker?
That’s because there’s a double-standard, and religion is (once again) proven to be fundementally based on hypocrisy.
This is Dr. Hilleman:
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What the fuck delusion does atheism have. LIST ONE.
You assert ‘God Exists!’
Atheism asserts: “I don’t believe that claim.”
Define the delusion in the above position. Many theists make inane assertions like the ones you have made. The last one to do that was a mouthy, second-rate, ignorantly irrational, repetitively unfructous, dishonest, pathetically disadvantaged, bombastically ranting, dweeb, who eventually got himself banned from the site.
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While @Quim is at it, he can explain why, if as he claimed atheists have no rational basis for caring about others, which principle of logic he thinks is being violated by me having such a basis for morality? He seems keen to dodge this by mendaciously asking me to prove the opposite claim that it is rational, even though I never made the claim of course. That’s when he’s not sententiously telling me to have humility, implying I am arrogant, or whining that I am attacking him.
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He was an atheist as well, rejecting the religion he was raised in, which rather destroys @Quim’s unevidenced claim that “he has never seen any atheist dedicate their lives to others” and his claim that “atheists have no basis for morality”, unless he thinks dedicating your life to saving millions of lives isn’t a moral action of course. To be fair the altruistic actions of this atheist do seem starkly at odds with the barbarically cruel and sadistic mass murdering genocidal deity, depicted in his death cult’s bible.
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I see the in tray is full again …
Poppycock. I’ll explain in full why very shortly.
BZZZZT! WRONG!
Again, I’ll explain in full why very shortly.
And it’s blatatly obvious at this point, that you don’t know what atheism actually IS.
Atheism, in its rigorous formulation, is nothing more than suspicion of unsupported mythology fanboy assertions. That is IT.
Atheism is NOT a “religion”, a “belief system”, an “ideology” or an “overarching world view”, though of course mythology fanboys have been peddling these duplicitous misrepresentations thereof for a very long time. The ONLY issue atheism concerns itself with, is pointing out that mythology fanboys have FAILED to support any of their assertions with genuine evidence, and as a corollary, those same mythology fanboy assertions are safely discardable, in accordance with the rules of proper discourse. Rules which you routinely demonstrate here that either [1] tyou don’t understand, or [2] duplicitously disregard because the application thereof to your assertions renders them similarly safely discardable.
As for the matter of other questions, when we want answers to them, we don’t turn to “atheism”, we turn instead to those rigorous disciplines constructed to answer those quetions. Quantum mechanics or relativity? We turn to physics. Origin of life? We turn to prebiotic chemistry. Behaviour of the biosphere? We turn to evolutionary biology. Consciousness? We turn to cognitive neuroscience, which has been rather more successful on this matter than vacuous assertionist wibbling about rocks purportedly possessing “sentience”.
LEARN THE ABOVE LESSON ONCE AND FOR ALL. Failure to do so will merely lead to observers of this and other threads, drawing unpleasant but entirely apposite conclusions about your discoursive honesty or lack thereof.
And guess what? There’s a REASON for this. Namely, that religions encourage adherents to treat unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as fact, even when the assertions in question are manifestly not merely wrong, but absurd and fatuous.
Indeed, practically the only fact one draws from mythologies, is that humans have exhibited in the past, a propensity to make shit up on a grand scale, and then treat that made up shit as fact. If the absurdity of doing this is not blatantly obvious to you, then you might want to re-take all of your school classes from the ground up.
Er, no. This is just another piece of tiresome assertionist cant on your part. When we exert the diligent effort to take facts properly into account, that exercise has a habit of exposing errors, not compounding them.
A duplicitous piece of apologetics, that fails to note an important fact - namely, that it’s only in recent history that developed societies have thrown off the shackles of religion and its manifest associated malignancy. However, I point you to a peer reviewed academic paper, that blows several mythology fanboy myths in this vein out of the water with a nuclear depth charge, namely this one:
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(11): (2005) [Full paper downlaodable from here]
I’ll quote sections 19 and 20 from that paper, which are apposite here:
You’re also neglecting another demonstrable fact, namely that in the past, religious societies were held together via ruthless and frequently homicidal enforcement of conformity to doctrine. No such measures are needed in modern secular democracies such as those studied in the above paper.
But I’m used to dealing with lies on this topic from the usual suspects.
Wrong, it’s a blatant piece of apologetic puffery that’s destroyed by recourse to the facts.
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Not believing in mermaids doesn’t explain anything either, this doesn’t demonstrate that mermaids are real, or even possible.
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My point, obviously, is not that our ignorance justifies a belief in some myth, but rather that when we strive to be rational, we often end up with contradictory models of reality. This demonstrates how our rationality can sometimes lead us to completely wrong or illusory conclusions.
There have been many heroes in history, and among them were theists and atheists. But we often overlook the significant influence of religious beliefs on the structure of societies and their values.
Atheism is the rejection of inherited myths based on the premise that they cannot be understood or proven. The only problem with this idea is that myths do not claim to be reasonable or logical in the first place; their purpose is to ensure internal and external behavior that promotes the survival and development of societies over thousands of years, not just decades or centuries.
(This is a simplified example, don’t take it literally.)
You may think that believing in spirits of the forest is unnecessary, but those who stopped believing in them might have, at some point, begun overexploiting their environment, leading to their ultimate self-destruction. Only those who shared a set of beliefs that prevented such actions survived.
This principle can be applied to a broad range of phenomena, encompassing external relationships with the environment and internal relationships with oneself.
As I mentioned before, when people are confronted with misery and suffering, they have a strong need for religion. However, when people start experiencing high living standards, they no longer feel the same need for religion, so they often forget about it. This does not imply that religion is the cause of misery.
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Hmmmm… Reeeeeeally?.. 
… I dare say Joel Olsteen, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland, and other such malignant slimy parasites would disagree with you on that.
(Edit for repulsive riches.)
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Well, if you use these people as an example of religion, then I can use North Korea as an example of an atheist regime, right?
Certainly, I observe what happens when you question “atheists” too much, similar to what happens with all forms of organized belief - you risk being banned or excluded.
So, have a nice day…
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Well, technically, I suppose you can do that but you would sound idiotic (at least to me) doing so.
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This is exactly how you sound to me when you use these people as examples of religion…
Anyway, is there a guide to remove my account from Atheist Republic? Thank you.
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To repeat what I said in another string, your account cannot be removed, however, you are welcome to abandon it.
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Another one bites the dust.
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I hope that one day you will at least learn what atheism is.
Do you see difference between non-theistic idol worshiping and atheism @Quim?
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Which principle of logic are you claiming is violated by someone endeavouring to adhere to the principles of logic? That is one of the stupidest claims you have made thus far, and that’s no mean feat. FYI violating the law of non-contradiction is by definition irrational.
No it doesn’t, you are invoking the word logic purely as rhetoric.
No it isn’t, atheism is the lack or absence of belief in any deity or deities, you can Google it ffs.
It’s not a problem for not believing myths, that they are unreasonable and irrational.
You keep saying this as if it objectively strengthens your beliefs, when quite obviously the opposite is true.
Indeed, the more obvious inference is that human misery makes us desperately seek unevidenced superstitions for succour, but that they have no objective basis in reality.
No, because the people in North Korea are living in a totalitarian regime. Also you have tried to wave away the fact that societies with higher rates of atheism globally, commit less murders per capita than societies with higher rates of theism.
Oh please, you have just regurgitated the same unevidenced and irrational bullshit you’ve been fed, and absorbed uncritically.
Well there you go, atheism is not a belief and you are a liar.
Only if you violate the forum rules, and your sententious preaching, and aversion to honest debate is the only risk there.
Yea! The guide is… You follow the other theists out the door and don’t let the handle hit you where you think the good lord split you.
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