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Senate Atheism 4.0 - Now Discussing: Religiosity and intelligence

Discussion in 'Community' started by Lowbacca_1977, May 18, 2010.

  1. Emperor_Billy_Bob

    Emperor_Billy_Bob Jedi Grand Master star 7

    Registered:
    Aug 9, 2000
    Atheism is usually defined by outsiders as belief that there is no God, but Atheist means "without a god", and most who identify as atheist view themselves as lacking belief in God rather than believing the positive claim that there is no God. It is a subtle but important distinction.
     
  2. Darth_Yuthura

    Darth_Yuthura Jedi Padawan star 4

    Registered:
    Nov 7, 2007
    When a person proclaims that there is a God, yet lacks anything that can verify his existence, that person should be willing to accept that no one has reason to believe him. If such a person does make that claim, then he should be willing to back it. If he can't, then what do you expect?

    I don't present proof that God can't exist, as it's not needed... yet. God must first be proven to exist before a counter argument is required. And that's not my goal in any event. My constructive criticism isn't to just conform to the side of atheists, but to reevaluate your own beliefs. I would say that when something doesn't make sense to you, it is best not to just blindly accept what you're told.

    I'm not saying that there never was a talking snake, a great flood, or that a person could live in an enormous fish(not a whale) for three days... I am simply saying that such things are indistinguishable from fiction. If such things aren't believable, then to question their validity isn't unwise.

    Maybe. Maybe it just could be that such a God does exists and you really do know what you're talking about. Maybe I could very well be wrong... I have been many times in my life. But do you know what I do when I'm not so sure? I go back and evaluate my logic, gather information, speak with people who know more about it than I do, and (most importantly) I don't put much faith in my opinion unless I'm quite sure I understand the subject.

    And when it come to the supernatural, something which is not comprehendible to us, I don't proclaim to understand it as some people do. I respect a person who says he doesn't know. I don't respect a person so much for making something up that contradicts with the world around him.

    As a geography major, I can say for a fact that the great flood was impossible. That is one example that demonstrates to me that the bible can be wrong. After reading 'The Magic Animal' by Philip Whylie, I came to a very logical conclusion that addresses all the problems I've had understanding religion and beliefs. Given as humans are the only animal in the world that know they're going to die, they generate something like afterlife... to alleviate that fear of death.
     
  3. SuperWatto

    SuperWatto Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Sep 19, 2000
    Sorry, Yuthura, stories about floods, snakes, fishes, or whales don't equal belief in (a) god(s) either.
    If you really want to distance yourself from Christianity, and it appears you do, you might want to consider not highlighting it in every other post.
     
  4. Jabbadabbado

    Jabbadabbado Manager Emeritus star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 19, 1999
    Ah we're off to a pleasant start I see.

    So, I read through the posts, but the bit that really stood out is:

    "Education is to religiosity as water is to the Wicked Witch of the West."

    Catchy on the one hand, and on the other I think the perfect summary of an area of appropriate focus for atheists.

    Science has had a very short time on earth to have a real impact on the human mind. A few centuries of the scientific method standing against a few thousand years of human civilization and then tens of thousands of years of magical thinking stretching back until the dawn of when people first started doing language at each other and whenever it is that behavioral modernity is said to have begun.

    So, keep plugging away at promoting education, which means to me that atheists have an opportunity, if not a civic duty to be advocates for good public education, for good science education in particular and perhaps if they really value the proposition that it's useful to teach children the difference between facts and quaint fairytales, that we help fund and support efforts to fight the intrusion of creation fairytales into K-12 science curricula wherever it occurs.
     
  5. Lady_Sami_J_Kenobi

    Lady_Sami_J_Kenobi Jedi Master star 6

    Registered:
    Jul 31, 2002
    Hear, Hear!!! =D=

    I second the motion.

    In case you don't believe that I teach my children to follow science, regardless of their beliefs in other areas, my daughter is visiting from No. Carolina. She reminded me that when she was in 7th grade, when all her friends had pictures of the teen heartthrobs of the day on their T-shirts, she had a picture of Einstein and another physicist on hers.

    She is a Buddhist.









     
  6. Jedi_Keiran_Halcyon

    Jedi_Keiran_Halcyon Jedi Knight star 6

    Registered:
    Dec 17, 2000
    Yet atheism is the conclusion of skepticism applied to religious teaching, just as disbelief in UFOs is the conclusion of skepticism applied to claims of UFO sightings.

    You seem to be ascribing an inherent closed-mindedness to atheism that simply doesn't exist among most atheists. Most atheists believe there is no god in the same way students of science believe in evolutionary theory - we've examined the facts, and found this to be the explanation that best fits them. If new scientific evidence disproves evolution, we'll switch to the new model - just as if new scientific evidence proves the existence of god, we'll no longer be atheist.

    In absolute terms, science is agnostic on every conceivable level, because all it takes is new evidence to overthrow existing models. But in practical terms, it's silly to preface every statement of scientific "fact" with, "So far, it seems that..."

    Or as the wikipedia article on agnosticism puts it,

    According to Richard Dawkins, a distinction between agnosticism and atheism is unwieldy and depends on how close to zero we are willing to rate the existence of any given god-like entity. Since in practice it is not worth contrasting a zero probability with a probability that is nearly indistinguishable from zero, he prefers to categorize himself as a "de facto atheist".

     
  7. SuperWatto

    SuperWatto Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Sep 19, 2000
    Did you rig your Political Compass libertarian score?

    As far as I'm concerned, combining libertarianism and evangelical atheism don't match. It's either one or the other, or neither.
     
  8. Jabbadabbado

    Jabbadabbado Manager Emeritus star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 19, 1999
    I believe in public education, and I believe in evangelizing for good public education. I don't believe in evangelizing for atheism. There's a difference. I don't really believe atheists are obligated to do any of this, I'm just saying if you wanted to evangelize about something, evangelizing to keep fairytales out of science classes is worthwhile. I care more about that in particular than I do about separation of church and state in general. I don't really care for example whether some local government wants to display the ten commandments in a court room, or someone wants to put a cross in a national park. Those aren't the kinds of battles I'm very interested in fighting, personally.

    But the education stuff gets me angry, probably more because I come from a family of teachers than because of my atheism. That's just me. I'm offering it up as a stance for anyone who feels the same way.
     
  9. Lowbacca_1977

    Lowbacca_1977 Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Jun 28, 2006
    First of all, you will note that agnostic in your definition only addresses if an answer is knowable, not what one believes. Which is why Quixotic_Sith is an agnostic theist. Agnostic vs gnostic is if you think it is knowable or not, NOT do you believe in a higher power or not.

    Atheism, however, has two definitions, one is the belief there is no god, the other is the disbelief in a god. The two aren't the same.

    As to Yuthura's posts, in context, his position has been skepticism and people believing things with no evidence. It's the same reason why I'd not consider someone an evangelical anti-pork person because they followed biblical teachings that one shouldn't eat pork and campaigned against it. The anti-supernatural stance Yuthura's taking includes being an atheist, but he's been pushing the skepticism of everything. After all, Jesus was a wizard would explain things like walking on water, but his argument has tended to be "it didn't happen because that's unrealistic" not "well, god didn't do it, but it could have been magic".
     
  10. MrZAP

    MrZAP Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jun 2, 2007
    I'm going to number each of the points that I think is well...missing the point, and explain why outside of the quote.

    1-2. The problem is these two points are linked. A. People who are indoctrinated into something at a very young age have a harder time of thinking objectively about it. B. Because of this, they think that both the Bible and Sermon are factual proof on their own. And really, this isn't limited to Christianity at all. One could substitute "Bible" with "Qu'ran" or "Bhagavad Gita" very easily, and one could substitute "Sermon" with "Mentored Asceticism" very easily, even in such seemingly harmless religions as Buddhism, which is Hindu in root anyway, so they generally DO have some theistic tendencies. It's not that they don't want to think objectively, it's that they don't know how to. That is the fundamental flaw in your main argument for basically trying to convince a theist of your beliefs.

    3-4. Once again,linked. First of all, to #3, I say "Bravo!" because that really is what one should do, but saying you do that and actually doing it are entirely different things, and there is clear evidence in this thread that you actually don't do that. In fact, your last sentence in #4 clearly shows you don't all on its own, as you aren't being truly objective. Finally, we go to #4 proper, and your point that the supernatural is not able to be comprehended by us. I assume by "us" you mean "humans"? Modern science would disagree. Take for example the Earth-centric and heliocentric views held by most of the Western world for so long. They were widely held beliefs, that, while not supernatural in themselves, were stemmed in the supernatural. And we have completely explained these beliefs away today. That's actually a very good argument because it doesn't even use Christianity as an example for believers in the supernatural.

    EDIT: As a final aside, it is also worth noting a flaw in your other post regarding atheists who come to post in here. Sure, some of them probably doubt their beliefs, but isn't it equally possible that they're just trolls?
     
  11. Fire_Ice_Death

    Fire_Ice_Death Force Ghost star 7

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2001
    It's hard to be an advocate for good education when there's so many school boards that are hostile to the very thought. To them they care about test scores and how to keep funding their sca--I mean, 'schools'. You can notice what sort of priorities a school has by which departments get the most funding and they're usually the after school sports teams. So there's the proper education, folks. I can testify to this inanity as I had to deal with the stupid school board to help get funding for my graphic communications program as it wasn't getting proper funding. Anyway, the whole experience has left me jaded and I wanna hurt something now as I'm thinking in retrospect about everything that was wrong with my high school and middle school.
     
  12. standalone

    standalone Jedi Youngling star 1

    Registered:
    Dec 15, 2009
    In terms of this so called 'new atheism', I would gather that some of the more hostile portrayals of it are either satire or those who advocate being nasty towards religion are in fact theists themselves and support a strawman antitheist view in order to make atheism look bad. But that's just my personal view.
     
  13. VadersLaMent

    VadersLaMent Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Apr 3, 2002
  14. Fire_Ice_Death

    Fire_Ice_Death Force Ghost star 7

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2001
    Yeah, I can pull a big conspiracy theorist rant out of my ass as well. I agree that some of these things are happening, but overall I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy on the part of Christians. I know quite a few who are as liberal as can be and they go to a liberalized church. So there aren't complete mindless bozos out there. This whole opinion piece just seems really far-fetched ranting based on disparate cases of idiocy on the part of the religious.
     
  15. Lord Vivec

    Lord Vivec Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Apr 17, 2006
    Eh, the conspiracy is more among right-wing pastors who, not the ordinary conservative christian.
     
  16. DorkmanScott

    DorkmanScott Manager Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 26, 2001
    A conspiracy implies they're moving in secret. The Right, on the other hand, is working quite openly toward a theocracy.
     
  17. standalone

    standalone Jedi Youngling star 1

    Registered:
    Dec 15, 2009
    This is just my opinion, right, as alarmist as the religious are this comes across as sounding like a fundamentalist wrote something he thinks an atheist might say.
     
  18. Jedi_Keiran_Halcyon

    Jedi_Keiran_Halcyon Jedi Knight star 6

    Registered:
    Dec 17, 2000
    Please, everyone,
    [image=http://www.russiablog.org/DontFeedtheTrolls.jpg]
     
  19. Lord Vivec

    Lord Vivec Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Apr 17, 2006
    [image=http://i697.photobucket.com/albums/vv335/DarthVerrick/Funny/1275706320408.jpg]
     
  20. standalone

    standalone Jedi Youngling star 1

    Registered:
    Dec 15, 2009
    If you noticed the satire I wrote was edited to better explain my thoughts. To me the link reads like a poorly written strawman for theists to knock down.
     
  21. Ramza

    Ramza Administrator Emeritus star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Jul 13, 2008
    I think you shouldn't link it, because now I've clicked it and given this idiot a hit he doesn't deserve.
     
  22. standalone

    standalone Jedi Youngling star 1

    Registered:
    Dec 15, 2009
    Does sir have a complaint about those with a different view exercising their privilage to voice their opinion?
     
  23. Darth_Yuthura

    Darth_Yuthura Jedi Padawan star 4

    Registered:
    Nov 7, 2007
    I respect other people's opinions, even if I don't agree with them, so long as they're just as willing to show the same respect. When I person complains that you don't have all the answers, which diminishes the validity of a claim, THAT PERSON HAD BETTER PRESENT A BETTER ARGUMENT.

    I can stand having my own argument shot down, so long as the other side presented something that made better sense. And when you present the argument that God can do anything, therefore making anything possible... that's a circular argument. The only way that a person can present a different opinion is if they can provide more than just assumptions to back it. If they say they believe it, but are not trying to convince others... I respect their beliefs and don't seek to change it. But if someone tries to shoot down someone else's argument without providing a better alternative is just being lazy and willfully ignorant.
     
  24. Ghost

    Ghost Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Oct 13, 2003
    A question I have for people here... why do you think people are spiritual/religious/theist?

    (I hope no one minds, there doesn't seem to be a lot of discussion right now, hopefully this will help! :) )
     
  25. LostOnHoth

    LostOnHoth Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2000
    Because we have complex emotions and a highly developed sense of 'self' such that we find the idea of eternal death/nothingness terrifying. At the end of the day, religion promises eternal life. That is powerful stuff. In terms of spirituality, I think that is purely an emotional phenomena. We see the beauty of things and get all emotional about it and want to be a part of it on some level. We therefore invent some mystical link between ourselves and nature, a spirit world which bridges the gap.
     
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