Religion – Just remember, atheists did not launch the Crusades. Atheists have not burnt people alive on the stakes. Atheists do not instruct the meager to turn the other cheek in hopes of rewards that consist entirely of invisible conditions in some posit called the afterlife.
While I am a recently converted Christian, I generally respect the views of atheists more than I do most Christians I have met. At least atheists generally have thought through their beliefs, which cannot be said of most Christians I have known, who almost always became Christians by following the path of least resistance in a God-pecked society of so-called literal believers. Still, atheists can be as dogmatic about their beliefs as Christians. In the final analysis, the existence of God can be neither proven nor disproven. Both religion and atheism are matters of faith.
Good comment scribble. You have a good perspective on your faith.
I think even Billy Graham constantly had questions about his faith that he had to work through.
Personally, I am long on faith; short on religion. I feel part of something larger than myself and that feeling gives me comfort at times.
As a Christian, I have a lot more going for me than just faith in an afterlife; I have seen God working in my life and in other people's; I have seen lives changed totally for the better. I know that I'm not smart enough by myself to be the person I was created to be (and I'm considered to be a smart person). I don't think I've missed anything except trouble by living the way I do; I don't find what lots of people seem to think is "fun" particularly so in comparison.
A good example of the fruits of atheism is China; even after 50 years of enforced atheism there are millions of people in China who have risked their lives to worship God.
And of course, not everyone who uses the name of God pays any attention to what that would really mean; Jesus himself said that there are people who do things in his name that do not know him.
(((A good example of the fruits of atheism is China;))) No, you are missing the point here; China is an example of the fruits of communism. (((even after 50 years of enforced atheism there are millions of people in China who have risked their lives to worship God))) This just shows that is you can get people to believe a lie, they will die for it.
-I am not afraid of the priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries, of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering, without being able to give me one moment of pain.
-The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it's indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence.
-On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
-- Thomas Jefferson
-I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
-I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
-It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
-- Albert Einstein
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Atheists have a lot to live for! We don't have an afterlife to fall back on! Er...fall forward on?
How very much more sad that some people's belief systems offer so much but on a totally false promise. Just think of all the fun they could have had in their one and only life form.
If you are stating that i cannot categorically prove god's non existence, you are 100% correct as i nor anyone else cannot prove/disprove a negative. This also includes the fact that i cannot disprove that we were all created by a pink elephant wearing blue trousers and pink polka dot braces. What i can do is look at the more than abundant amount of evidence that we have available to us in order to arrive at a conclusion that makes the case for god almost non existent. That is not faith by any stretch of the imagination. Believing in something that flies in the face of all the observations we have at hand can be defined as faith. Another definition of faith is to believe in a superior being beyond all comprehension which is exactly what atheism stands against. Either way atheism is not a faith and i don't have to live my life worrying about any afterlife or worrying about god reading my thoughts (even though they are all good).
All hail the pink elephant wearing blue trousers and pink polka dot braces.
I found it funny.
BTW good comment.
Much as I dislike most of your commentary, ronin, you are right about this.
Top 10 myths about atheism
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/10-myth...
Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.
1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.
On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness â;¦ well â;¦ meaningless.
2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
-Harris
3) Atheism is dogmatic.
Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
-Harris
No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the "beginning" or "creation" of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.
Chance? As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, "The God Delusion," this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase "natural selection" by analogy to the "artificial selection" performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.
5) Atheism has no connection to science.
Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God â;; as some scientists seem to manage it â;; there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.
-Harris
8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.
Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.
From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.
9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.
Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.
In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?
The foundation of atheism is not that there IS "no god". The foundation of atheism is EVIDENCE! I don't believe just any guy on the street who says he is the son of God. BTW, I am Jesus.
6) Atheists are arrogant.
When scientists don't know something; like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed; they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.
There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely â;; because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.
There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.
If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran; as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery; and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture; like the golden rule â;; can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.
No, atheists did not start the Crusades or burn witches at the stake. But they did put Jews in the ovens in Germany and slaughter millions in communist Russia. They are much more brutal and efficient.
No, it was christians who put Jews in ovens but not in the name of christianity. Communists slaughtered millions in Russia but not in the name of atheism.
Actually Hitler did believe he was doing god's work.
That's a pretty debatable point of view. Hitler's god was the state. He used the catholic church to rise to power and then turned afterwards.
In the last one hundred years, more people have been killed in the name of atheism/governments than all religious wars combined. Mao, Stalin, Hitler (arguably), Mussolini, Saddam (pre-islamic buyin), Castro -- the list goes on and on and on.
The whole "religion causes wars" thing is so over simplified and arrogant it can hardly be taken seriously enough to hear it out.
No nobody has been killed in the name of atheism. Please respond to my earlier comments on this. None of Stalin's or Mao's massacres were in the name of atheism but in the name of their political dogma. The day that a group of atheists goes to war on a nation on purely religious reasons then i may agree with you but i know that will never happen. Mussolini? Saddam? How the hell do you come up with these guys as atheists? I would check your history books a little closer. If you cant accept that many (not all of course) wars have been started in the name of religion then it is extremely sad that you cannot take this seriously and you are willing to sweep it under the carpet.
the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it.
Talk about historical revisionism. Hitler believed he was doing God's work. The Wehrmacht Soldaten had "Gott Mit Uns" (God is with us) embossed on their belt buckles!
Great avatar, Ricky! (Stephen Hawking) Terrific thread here. You might also be interested in the following one posted by one of our "conservative" friends:
http://religion.netscape.com/story/2007/06/22/c...
lol