Atheists

[spiritual_spy]

Oh and any of you want i can tell you a good example of the stupidty of the system. (it involves my uncle and the millitary)

 

[Regulus]

There are some good theists but most of them veiw atheists as the very pinacle of evil. :bugeye:

Then they are ignorant dults.

 

[spiritual_spy]

SS is correct. I openly admit my atheism to coworkers (ones I know well enough that is) and even if they aren't particularly religious, they get sort of quiet and almost embarressed. The religious indoctrination is that strong over here.

It is almost sad isnt it? We live in a country that preaches equality yet if your a known atheist your treated like the scum of the earth.

 

[spiritual_spy]

Then they are ignorant dults.

I couldnt agree more.

 

[S.A.M.]

. And most of the time your testimony is useless becuase the jury just reguards you as a lying peice of scum. (You can tell by the looks on there faces)

lol sounds like you have some experience?

 

[S.A.M.]

Appreciate that and be glad you dont live in the US. Your shunned from society if you debate god over here.(Most of the time but not always so that way im not generalizing the good theists)

Thanks for the benefit of the doubt

 

[S.A.M.]

It is almost sad isnt it? We live in a country that preaches equality yet if your a known atheist your treated like the scum of the earth.

I have never understood why people cannot accept that religion and sexuality is personal.

 

[spiritual_spy]

lol sounds like you have some experience?

yes. I had to testify for my cousin (who also happens to be atheist). He was charged with stealing a radio from his neigbors car. (Me,him and is uncle were both out of town at the time of the crime). He got 4 months juvinile detention and 5 years of probation (Sp?). Mine and my uncles (uncle is atheist aswell) testimony might have well been thrown out. Plus some of his other neigbors said are car was gone but they didnt know if anyone was home. The system is screwed. :bugeye:

 

[draqon]

yes. I had to testify for my cousin (who also happens to be atheist). He was charged with stealing a radio from his neigbors car. (Me,him and is uncle were both out of town at the time of the crime). He got 4 months juvinile detention and 5 years of probation (Sp?). Mine and my uncles (uncle is atheist aswell) testimony might have well been thrown out. Plus some of his other neigbors said are car was gone but they didnt know if anyone was home. The system is screwed. :bugeye:

so...what? does this mean? atheists are more prone to commiting crimes and evil? is this what you are trying to say?

 

[spiritual_spy]

so...what? does this mean? atheists are more prone to commiting crimes and evil? is this what you are trying to say?

No. i am saying that the courts and the goverment overall doesent give equality to all people. Atheists mainly. Our testimony was basicly thrown out by the jurors becuase they knew we were atheist.

 

[draqon]

No. i am saying that the courts and the goverment overall doesent give equality to all people. Atheists mainly. Our testimony was basicly thrown out by the jurors becuase they knew we were atheist.

yeeeeahhhhhh righhhtt......

 

[Teg]

I do not have a problem with people believing in God or not, it is just the REASONS they give are just horrid.

Do you even have a clue why people believe in a high being? Do you even know how it started?

Because historical evidence is obviously lacking from the prehistorical period from whence religion and god originated, we can only infer, based on settlements and arytifacts, that society and religion had a symbiotic evolution. More importantly the two also brought the first internecine struggles. Any theory of religion must be inextricably linked to violence.

No one needs disprove a god. The burden is on the positive satement. That is the way that reason works.

That's because of peoples flawed idea's on God. Truely such a being with unconditional love does not wish to implicate such things as crucades.

People believening God is not the problem here, it's their ideas on what they think is the right things to do. Personally I don't think God wishes to force us to do anything really.

A billion theories with equivalent validity (which is to say none) does not a cohesive argument make. How would you ever know that (if God exists) he is nota raving lunatic bent on human suffering for his own pleasure? Based on the way the world has been shaped it seems this not only plausible but also neccessary to reconcile the violent nature of humans and their belief systems.

An all-loving God who wants peace seems incongruous with our world. Either that God is impotent or he doesn't exist.

A good example of this is in Montaigne's Essay XXIII of the First Book. Whereby people may proscribe one course to varying outcomes. Two cases can lead to diametrically opposed outcomes, etc. Perhaps even the better case may fail where the weaker case wins. God implies fate. Reality says otherwise.

If everything came down to chemical reactions, all doctors, psychiatrists, counsellors, cosmologist, mathematicians and physicists would end up becoming chemists.

Doctors (check). Psychiatrists (check). Cosmologists (check). Physicists (check). Counsellors are a special case, but they do try to act on chemical reactions (albeit to varying degrees of success because of imperfections in their very unscientific technique). Chemistry and Physics are based on math, but still you are right pure mathematics is an abstraction.

I sense the primary argument here is against specialization. If there were very few possible chemical reactions and very few applications of those reactions, then you might have a point. But there is Bio-chem, the chemistry of physics, basic chemistry, etc. It would be a fatal mistake to try to fit all of these into one profession. And yet the predictive element of the five forces do make for a unifying world view (so long as you don't go off a cliff like string theory or its variants).

 

[Teg]

I have never understood why people cannot accept that religion and sexuality is personal.

Sexuality (far from what some would have us think) has absolutely nothing to do with outcomes. That is unless you count the modest reduction in population to lack of want to produce children.

Religion on the other hand seems to provide impetus and authority to some of the worst human acts on record. For every positive outcome there are probably thousands where the human crisis has been exacerbated.

 

[S.A.M.]

Sexuality (far from what some would have us think) has absolutely nothing to do with outcomes. That is unless you count the modest reduction in population to lack of want to produce children.

Religion on the other hand seems to provide impetus and authority to some of the worst human acts on record. For every positive outcome there are probably thousands where the human crisis has been exacerbated.

I think its more likely that people have a tendency to feel threatened by what they cannot understand

 

[Zephyr]

Again:

a-moral: not moral.
a-typical: not typical
a-theist: not a theist.

We don't have beliefs, for the billionth time. We have a LACK of belief in a god. How simple is that?

Sorry, I thought atheism meant "certainty there is no god", and a mere lack of belief was agnosticism.

Oxford English dictionary:
Atheism: Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of God or gods (opp. theism, (formerly) deism). Also, godlessness.

I'll keep your definition in mind, though.

Nope. That's the thing about it. That social experiment has never been done to my knowledge. Religion seems to have been the overwhelming organizing force behind societies since the dawn of man.

Communism included atheism, but of course it wasn't the main principle involved.

Also, "coming out" as an atheist is definitely dangerous in a rural, fundamentalist christian area such as where I live.

I have a friend who was called "satan" in his Catholic highschool because he didn't toe the dogmatic line. But in non-fundamentalist areas, among thinking people, it's not usually a problem...

 

[superluminal]

Sorry, I thought atheism meant "certainty there is no god", and a mere lack of belief was agnosticism.

Oxford English dictionary:
Atheism: Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of God or gods (opp. theism, (formerly) deism). Also, godlessness.

From Websters:

disbelieve
One entry found for disbelieve.

Main Entry: dis·be·lieve
transitive senses : to hold not worthy of belief : not believe
intransitive senses : to withhold or reject belief

So "Disbelief" fits my definition pretty closely. Lacking a belief sounds like disbelief to me. Fairies may exist. But based on a current lack of compelling evidence, I disbelieve in fairies. I have a distinct lack of belief in fairies. I am a fairy atheist(?).

 

[Ophiolite]

Lacking a belief is different. It implies a lack of interest, or time, or resources, or capacity to form a belief or a disbelief on a specific topic.

 

[S.A.M.]

As a point of interest, I would like to know, given their lack of belief in any God, do atheists ever feel a spiritual vacuum?

 

[KennyJC]

As a point of interest, I would like to know, given their lack of belief in any God, do atheists ever feel a spiritual vacuum?

I don't know. Some people call a profound respect from the nature of the universe a 'spiritual' thing, and atheists typically have this respect on a deeper level than childish theists.

I think spiritualism is bullshit, I don't need it. It's just something people give a name. I mean look at the spiritual 'atheists' on this forum like c7ity and emptyforceofchi - they are idiots.

 

[Ophiolite]

As a point of interest, I would like to know, given their lack of belief in any God, do atheists ever feel a spiritual vacuum?

No, no, no. It is is agnostics who lack a belief. The atheists positively do not believe. That is the difference between them.