The World Beyond BetterMost > Anything Goes
Atheists: Come out, come out, wherever you are
ednbarby:
Not to compartmentalize people, but I've found that our Catholic and Jewish friends have never once asked us whether we baptised Will/want to take him to church or to Temple/are raising him to believe in God. Not ever. The people who have asked us are Christians and go to some denominational church or other. Which is not to say that *all* people in that latter category are like that. But just that the ones who have asked us have been in that latter category.
I guess I should answer them this way: Well, you believe in God and that Christ is his son and the Holy Bible, right? So you generally teach your kids to do the same things, right? Well, we don't believe in God and we don't go to church, so generally we're going to teach our son the same things. But if he came to us and said, "You know what - I believe in God and I want to go to church," not only would we say, "Good for you." We'd drive him there and attend with him until he was old enough to attend on his own. I would hope if your son came to you and said, "You know what - I don't believe in God and I don't want to go to church," you'd be every bit as supportive. Right?
Yeah. Right.
Impish:
If anyone thinks I'm being alarmist and paranoid about the state of affairs in the U.S. today, take a look at this article about christian fundamentalists who a) believe that American should not be a democracy; and b) advocate the stoning of gay people:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40318
The scariest thing of all is that these people are not on the fringes of society; they actually have influence in Washington.
vkm91941:
--- Quote from: Impish on August 19, 2006, 10:34:17 am ---If anyone thinks I'm being alarmist and paranoid about the state of affairs in the U.S. today, take a look at this article about christian fundamentalists who a) believe that American should not be a democracy; and b) advocate the stoning of gay people:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40318
The scariest thing of all is that these people are not on the fringes of society; they actually have influence in Washington.
--- End quote ---
Well I certainly don't think your paranoid Bill. Fanatics for any cause or religion are dangerous and deluded folks and heaven or providence help us all if they combine their religious fanaticism with some social or political obsession.
Marge_Innavera:
--- Quote from: Impish on May 27, 2006, 10:26:27 am ---By Sam Harris
Editor’s Note: At a time when fundamentalist religion has an unparalleled influence in the highest government levels in the United States, and religion-based terror dominates the world stage, Sam Harris argues that progressive tolerance of faith-based unreason is as great a menace as religion itself.
Assuming you agree with Mr. Harris, what form do you think intolerance of 'faith-based unreason' should take? Do you think that people who believe in a deity should be able to vote? Hold public office? If not, how would you change the First Amendment, assuming you're in the US?
An Atheist Manifesto
Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
--- End quote ---
This is one of the questions that what is sometimes called "Holocaust theology" wrestles with: if one was saved from Auschwitz by divine intervention, what about people who were not saved from it? Some people in Holocaust theology thinking go the atheist route; others do not.
--- Quote ---The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious.
--- End quote ---
Unfortunately, we live in a world in which even people with beliefs well across the borders of Goofyland consider them "self-evident" or "obvious."
--- Quote ---The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87% of the population) who claim to never doubt the existence of God should be obliged to present evidence for his existence and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day.
--- End quote ---
"Obliged" how? What sort of penalties are you advocating?
--- Quote ---We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss. Most people in this world, however, imagine that there is a cure for this.
--- End quote ---
According to panentheist beliefs (not to be confused with "pantheism", the notion that there should be a "cure" or divine rescue mission for a universe that has imperfection built into it is nonsensical. The universe is functioning exactly as it is supposed to; static perfection isn't part of its reality.
Impish:
There are five articles (and a long preamble ) in this document. As I was impressed with it -- especially when I learned the year of publication -- I plan on transcribing an article a day. All capitalization, boldface and spelling is directly from the document itself. Best, Impish
"1. I IMPEACH CHRISTIANITY IN THE NAME OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE.
Because it is the great organized Superstition of the Western world, perpetuating in modern times the false beliefs, the degrading fears, and the benumbing influences of the Dark Ages -- in proportion to it power over men paralyzing their intellectual faculties, keeping them in the bondage of childish fancies, and governing them by means of an utterly irrational religious terrorism.
Because it is the great enemy of science, retarding the spread of natural knowledge, opposing new truths and discoveries as irreligious, perpetuating popular ignorance on all but permitted subjects in order that is own empire may be unshaken, and making blind faith in impossible doctrines the highest virtue of the human soul and the only protection against terrible yet purely imaginary dangers.
Because it is the greatest stumbling block in the pathway of civilization, inasmuch as it withdraws attention from the natural affairs of this life, concentrates all its earnest thought on a future life that is to be eternal bliss or eternal misery, makes a merit of neglect of this world's riches in order 'to lay up treasures in heaven', frowns on active enterprise as a dangerous devotion to 'carnal things', and thus unfits men for the attention to all those objects of honourable ambition on which the progress of civilization so largely depends."
From: "Impeachment of Christianity," Francis E. Abbott, as published in The Index magazine, January 6, 1872
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