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Originally Posted by sillyputty
Originally Posted by cap1229
Snarky.I'm not Catholic thank God. My parents loved me.I'm Episcopalian and I will continue to laugh at your pain.
Originally Posted by sillyputty
cap1229 wrote:
Originally Posted by sillyputty
You are soooo. Are you in any position to come at anyone when you were exposed to be a man that wouldn't stand his ground for his beliefs? I mean really.I'll let you cook though and "preach" online to your followers. Lol I really think you should make an official thread though. Since your all about dropping "knowledge". A collective of "redditors". Get tags and $#%%. I dunno. At least make this amusing.
Originally Posted by Iamjusayn
That's ironic, being that you directly benefit from hundreds of people who afforded you the ability to do as much as you currently can do in ATL (Originally Posted by sillyputty
Originally Posted by Iamjusayn
cap1229 wrote:
You are soooo. Are you in any position to come at anyone when you were exposed to be a man that wouldn't stand his ground for his beliefs? I mean really.I'll let you cook though and "preach" online to your followers. Lol I really think you should make an official thread though. Since your all about dropping "knowledge". A collective of "redditors". Get tags and $#%%. I dunno. At least make this amusing.
If someone puts a gun to my head without giving me enough time to react and asks me to profess my love for the almighty god, Thor (blessed be his hammer), would you or would you not do it?
The point is to LIVE TO FIGHT ANOTHER DAY. Get him back tomorrow.
If your pride (and ignorance) prevents you from escaping a certain death by "standing up", there are only a few words I can call you without hurting your "feelings"
So no. I'm not losing my life over NOT believing in something. Too many have lost theirs defending "nothing" as it is.
) or wherever you reside,
attend those schools that slavishly indoctrinate you and many more freedoms.
Because all of us were english majors?
Its funny. How can I be the "indoctrinated" one? You're defending ONE religious position, and not ALL of them. Isn't it you thats a little limited?
Its funny how the more education you have, the more liberal you become. Maybe its the increased ability to reason on behalf of others that allows you to embrace more empathetic positions.
But again, correlation, doesn't equal causation...
They laid their beliefs on the line while being threatened, beaten, killed and disrespected all because they stood by what they believed in (how pridefully ignorant of them). Those must definitely be some bottom of the barrel ignorant humans according to your "runneth at the mouth" atheist facade. I guess it does not apply to them since their was no internet/niketalk/forum back then for them to front about their beliefs so on these grounds, you are safe homeboy.
I am safe.
I'm VERY safe.
I could go to jail in probably 20 countries right now for being a non-believer. Thats how messed up the system is.
However, I will not DIE over the fact someone wants me to temporarily say "yes, Spiderman is god"
Are you SERIOUS?
But yeah, if you die for a religion, I'd say you died a pointless death.
And before you try to say those in the civil rights marches died because of christian beliefs, then you're wrong again. Christianity didn't grant us equal rights, understanding secular humanism did. Human rights transcends any other division by granting equal identification and protecting under the law of the land.
This tells me a few things: you are a derelict,
Ad-hominem #1
Where is your proof of this?
you deliberately ignore your history (since you clearly do not know where you are going),
What history?
I'm not going to take a bullet to the head because someone says I don't accept their god. Thats not how you overcome religious indoctrination. When a gun is at my head then we've gotten really far off track from the original mission.
Spiderman commends you, you do not NOT believe what you deem atheist and, you like to argue for the sake of argument.
I don't even understand what you're saying.
Carry on P.Parker. I don't want to disturb you any more. You are clearly proving that you know a whole lot of nothing!
I don't understand what you're saying.
*Insert here* "I do not live in ATL", "that's a horrible example", "those are two different types of beliefs"
Quick! Which one are you...Bill nye the science guy or P. Parker? Oh yeah, that's right...you can be anyone you want based off how secure you feel at that moment. Ok, I'm done. You can telepathically motion your cronies to chime in and help you refute.
If there was ever a poorer worded, expressed, and confusing sentiment...
I'll say it here and now. If you die defending a religion, I think you're an utter fool.
If you wouldn't die defending Thor, Ra, Osiris, Shiva, or the Odin, then you're wasting your time dying for whatever god you THINK exists.
I can't believe you would equate the quest for HUMAN RIGHTS and autonomy to dying for mythology.
Exactly.Originally Posted by AntonLaVey
^^^^^Is that BSmooth's alternate SN, wth is he talking about?
The irony of not dying for your beliefs is the fact that most African Americans and Native Americans are Christian today because many of them (not all) didn't stand up for their beliefs
Of course, he took on God, a dangerous occupation in the United States, declaring him not great and religion the product of a time when nobody "had the smallest idea what was going on." Like Einstein, he viewed ethics as "an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it," a position that sparked conflict with his journalist brother, Peter, who has argued that, "For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself."
As my book ('The Rage Against God') attempts to explain, we choose the belief we prefer. The only interesting part of this discussion concerns our reasons for our choices. I have found atheists, for the most part, reluctant to discuss this...
Religious believers are entitled... to speculate on why someone would not wish to be bound by an unalterable moral law. And they are justified in asking why this wish should be so profound that such persons actively desire that the universe should be a pointless and meaningless chaos, without design or purpose.
This statement is erroneous. I don't believe the universe has intrinsic design or purpose, but that's not because I desire it to be that way. It's because I've concluded that that's what the evidence supports; my desires about the matter are irrelevant.
The bizarre claim that we all believe whatever we most want to be true is easily disproved by a few examples. I would prefer for there to be a supernatural being that's benevolently disposed toward humans and can be persuaded to suspend the laws of physics in our favor. I would prefer for my consciousness to survive the death of my brain. I would prefer for there to be an afterlife where all people are rewarded or punished as their actions deserve. In fact, I would also prefer for there to be a safe and effective cure for cancer, for global warming to be non-existent, and for me personally to be a billionaire. I would prefer all these things to be true, but I don't believe any of them.
Nevertheless, Hitchens is pretty confident that the only reason people become atheists is to follow their desires. In fact, he's confident that he knows what desire it is. In a subsequent comment, he explained:
An atheist in a society still governed by the Christian moral law has great personal advantages. The almost universal idea among the college-educated young, a sort of crude J.S. Mill belief that 'nobody has the right to tell me what to do' is a very powerful force in modern western societies, excusing as it does a great deal of sexual promiscuity and drug-taking which do immense damage and create huge unhappiness....
I wish I could say this rhetoric was shocking. In fact, it's the same kind of ugly prejudice that atheists hear far too often, the same accusation that's leveled against every social reform movement: that we're motivated not by honestly held convictions or a desire to right injustices, but a desire to overthrow morality altogether and live lives of mindless hedonism. It's an old silencing tactic, one that was used against the first advocates of interracial marriage, and as this quote shows, it's still going on today. (For the record, I'm happily married and monogamous, and the only intoxicant I've ever used is the occasional drink on social occasions. I have nothing against people who live their lives differently, but to suggest that this is the sole or even the most important motivation for being an atheist is ridiculous.)
Let me point out just the most obvious problem with this: if all we wanted to do was take drugs and have sex, why would we need to be atheists? We could just as easily convert to or make up a religion whose god blesses those activities. (The New Reformed Church of Dionysus, anyone?) The reason we haven't done this is because we see the atheist position as the best-supported by evidence, regardless of how we feel about it.
But Hitchens goes on to compound the insult, telling us not just that we become atheists to indulge our own selfish whims, but that we hypocritically do it while counting on religious people to support our wanton lifestyle:
My conclusion, after dozens of such arguments, is that the atheist can see quite clearly the advantages of his unbelief... But he can also see that if these advantages would pretty rapidly disappear if everyone discovered them and exploited them.
...an atheist in a society in which the postman and the policeman, the doctor, the civil servant, the politician, the banker, and your employer, not to mention your next-door neighbours, are entirely free from universal moral obligations is, ah, more problematic. As we increasingly find out.
Once again, this outrageous insult completely fails to accord with the facts. There are atheist charitable volunteers, atheist firefighters, atheist soldiers and veterans, atheist civil servants -- in fact, the deputy prime minister of Peter Hitchens' own country, Nick Clegg, is an atheist. All these examples debunk the simplistic and insulting falsehood that people only become atheists because they want to live lives of selfish hedonism, all the while relying on sober and dutiful Christians to support them in their dissipation. The truth is that, lacking belief in an afterlife, atheists have a far stronger reason to care about this life, and to want this world to be the fairest and best place it can possibly be.
But the most serious problem with Hitchens' viewpoint is that it's contradicted by the evidence. What we see, in countries around the world, is precisely the opposite of what his theory would lead us to expect. Even as more people turn to atheism, rates of crime, divorce, and other societal ills don't skyrocket: quite the contrary, they stay the same or even decline.
As sociologist Phil Zuckerman has documented, some of the highest rates of organic atheism in the world can be found in Canada, Australia, Japan and Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. And many of these same countries show up near the top in worldwide rankings of societal health indicators like life expectancy, child welfare, educational attainment, gender equality, and per capita income. As Zuckerman has found in his research, despite still having state-sponsored churches that they belong to for cultural reasons, most Danes and Swedes are completely indifferent to religion. It simply doesn't play an important role in their daily lives. And far from collapsing into depravity or anarchy, these societies have remained free, secular, prosperous and peaceful.
And the correlation runs in the other direction as well. Sociologist Mark Regnerus, among others, points out that in America, the highest rates of teen pregnancy, divorce and sexually transmitted diseases are highest in the religious, socially conservative "red" states (in most of which abstinence is taught to the exclusion of all else), while in the more liberal and more secular "blue" states, young people tend to marry later, start families later, and have lower rates of divorce. The conclusion from Regnerus' research: "religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and... this gap is especially wide among teenagers who identify themselves as evangelical."
Despite what this data seems to show, I don't believe that atheism makes people better or that religion makes them worse. I think there's a third, common factor that explains both patterns: as societies become more prosperous, more stable and more peaceful, people see increasingly less need for the consolations of religion. On the other hand, in societies that are wracked by instability or suffering from pervasive poverty and severe inequality, people are more likely to turn to religion as a means of solace.
But this fact still undermines Peter Hitchens' claim that religion is necessary for morality. The truth is that, in most cases, religion isn't especially important to morality. Material factors like education, per capita income, and job availability are far more potent predictors of a society's success. As Zuckerman puts it, "high degrees of non-belief in God in a given society clearly do not result in societal ruin, and high levels of belief in God do not ensure societal well-being."
I do agree that belief in a divine origin, whether true or not, makes moral ideas harder to change. But that's only a good thing if those ideas are themselves good -- and many religious ideas manifestly are not. The "nonhuman source" that religious authorities appeal to is the same one that's been invoked in support of absolute monarchy, of theocracy, of slavery, of genocide, of patriarchal demands for women's submission, of racial segregation, of anti-gay prejudice, of the diminution of reason and free inquiry, and of many other evils past and present. Precisely because all these ideas were claimed to come from a non-human source, it was and is much harder to change them than it otherwise would have been.
But despite resistance from religious conservatives, we have changed our moral views in many ways, and humanity is far better off for it. We no longer legally sanction the buying and selling human beings as slaves, as the Bible permits us to do; we no longer stone disobedient children to death, kill friends and family members who convert to a different religion, or require rape victims to marry their rapists, as it commands us to do. Hitchens' argument fails to come to terms with all this progress. (Also, need I point out the irony of a confirmed member of the Anglican church arguing that we have to depend on unchanging religious laws? You know, the denomination that was founded because one guy wanted to change a religious law forbidding divorce?)
The expansion of rights for women and minorities, the spread of democracy and separation of church and state, the rise of science and the Enlightenment -- all these undeniably positive trends occurred in the teeth of fierce resistance from religious defenders of the status quo. Every time, the church authorities warned that changing the way things had always been was in opposition to God's will and would surely bring disaster. And almost every time, once the change happened anyway and no disaster resulted, those same authorities switched sides and pretended they had been supporters all along.
This proves the point that every moral code, whether theistic or atheistic, changes over time as we gain new knowledge and our perspective widens. Churches and religious apologists don't like to admit this, since it undermines their claim to be in possession of perfect moral truth from the beginning; which is why they're usually the staunchest defenders of old and unjust systems and the very last ones to bend to the tide of progress, causing much needless human suffering in the meantime. They'd be much better off if they'd simply admit that there is no non-human moral authority, admit that their holy books and doctrines contain moral errors, and then join the rest of us living in the real world and using conscience to figure out how we can achieve the greatest good.
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1. Why are you addressing ONLY me? Am I the only non-believer on NT or this thread?Originally Posted by cap1229
Silly Putty it's your life and you have to live with the choices that you make and so do I. End of discussion. I now see that we're just wired differently and that has nothing to do with my religion or your lack of religion.
For real why are you addressing only himOriginally Posted by sillyputty
1. Why are you addressing ONLY me? Am I the only non-believer on NT or this thread?Originally Posted by cap1229
Silly Putty it's your life and you have to live with the choices that you make and so do I. End of discussion. I now see that we're just wired differently and that has nothing to do with my religion or your lack of religion.
Originally Posted by Boys Noize
I will probably be one of the few to read all of what sillyputty wrote up there. It was well thought out and clearly written. Most of all, it makes a lot of sense. It presents a different perspective to the story a lot of christians were raised to believe (myself included.) It's kind of scary to think that all those years I was a christian I never really thought "well, why exactly is this satan character considered evil? just because god said he was? what has he actually done to warrant this?" Those of you that still consider yourselves christians, before you get riled up, read and ponder what is actually being argued before you settle for ad hominem attacks please.
You say "live with your choices" like there will be some type of consequence after you dieOriginally Posted by sillyputty
1. Why are you addressing ONLY me? Am I the only non-believer on NT or this thread?Originally Posted by cap1229
Silly Putty it's your life and you have to live with the choices that you make and so do I. End of discussion. I now see that we're just wired differently and that has nothing to do with my religion or your lack of religion.
2. Why are you waving the white flag? No one was responding to you, or even challenging you.
3. Stop making it seem like "well i'll just do what I want and you just do what you want". Thats all its EVER been. If you choose to participate in the discussion, don't start backtracking like people are just free to believe what they want. If that was the case, you wouldn't have contributed. Whenever one side doesn't have anything to say its always "well just let us believe what we want, so there!" ...no one was stopping you in the first place. We said our piece. You said yours. Stop acting like people saying things you don't like is grounds for you to declare that your rights have been infringed upon. Thats just skewing the argument on your terms.
4. Its not the "end of discussion." Its just where you choose not to respond any more. Thats a personal decision and has no bearing on what others have to say or should feel.
Oh and for the record, you're not wired differently in this sense. You have common sense, you're just choosing to overlook it. Use whatever method you want to disprove that Thor exists, and then apply it to your god.
Originally Posted by sillyputty
1. Why are you addressing ONLY me? Am I the only non-believer on NT or this thread?Originally Posted by cap1229
Silly Putty it's your life and you have to live with the choices that you make and so do I. End of discussion. I now see that we're just wired differently and that has nothing to do with my religion or your lack of religion.
2. Why are you waving the white flag? No one was responding to you, or even challenging you.
3. Stop making it seem like "well i'll just do what I want and you just do what you want". Thats all its EVER been. If you choose to participate in the discussion, don't start backtracking like people are just free to believe what they want. If that was the case, you wouldn't have contributed. Whenever one side doesn't have anything to say its always "well just let us believe what we want, so there!" ...no one was stopping you in the first place. We said our piece. You said yours. Stop acting like people saying things you don't like is grounds for you to declare that your rights have been infringed upon. Thats just skewing the argument on your terms.
4. Its not the "end of discussion." Its just where you choose not to respond any more. Thats a personal decision and has no bearing on what others have to say or should feel.
Oh and for the record, you're not wired differently in this sense. You have common sense, you're just choosing to overlook it. Use whatever method you want to disprove that Thor exists, and then apply it to your god.
Originally Posted by sillyputty
Iamjusayn wrote:
cap1229 wrote:
Originally Posted by sillyputty
You are soooo. Are you in any position to come at anyone when you were exposed to be a man that wouldn't stand his ground for his beliefs? I mean really.I'll let you cook though and "preach" online to your followers. Lol I really think you should make an official thread though. Since your all about dropping "knowledge". A collective of "redditors". Get tags and $#%%. I dunno. At least make this amusing.
Funny how we all ignored that part. That's some sadistic #@%!. Is that how Episcopalians roll?Originally Posted by cap1229
Snarky.I'm not Catholic thank God. My parents loved me.I'm Episcopalian and I will continue to laugh at your pain.
Originally Posted by ATGD7154xBBxMZ
Funny how we all ignored that part. That's some sadistic #@%!. Is that how Episcopalians roll?Originally Posted by cap1229
Snarky.I'm not Catholic thank God. My parents loved me.I'm Episcopalian and I will continue to laugh at your pain.