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Creationism Museum To Open Next Summer
Aloriel writes to point out a story in the Guardian (UK) about the opening next year of
the first Creationism museum in Kentucky, just over the Ohio border. From the article: "The Creation Museum — motto: 'Prepare to Believe!' — will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct... The museum is costing $25 million and all but $3 million has already been raised from private donations." A lot of that money is going into the animatronic dinosaurs, which are pictured as coexisting with modern humans before the Fall. According to the article, up to 50 million Americans believe this. The museum has a Web presence in the Answersingenesis.org site.
"Aloriel writes to point out a story in the Guardian (UK) about the opening next year of the first Creationism museum in Kentucky, just over the Ohio border."
I am writing abou the closing next year of the first Creationism museum in Kentucky, just over the Ohio border.
Does first post count as a 'scoop'?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
From the linked site it sounds like it's a great place to go for a laugh.
Don't link to them. Don't give them the oxygen of publicity, of recognition.
Young Earth Creationism is fraud, pure and simple. By any sensible test, the world's age is far greater than 6000 years. People never co-existed with dinosaurs. If you would disregard all the evidence, you might as well believe the world was created 5 minutes ago by a spaghetti monster.
This wouldn't even fool my 3rd level Magic User.
And he'll pretty much believe anything I tell him.
The book of Job describes a creature called a 'behemoth' whose description can be interpreted as that of a dinosaur.
Some people understand religion in one way and some people in another, but most of the religious beliefs are in contradiction with science.
In modern science you not only have evolution, you also have biologically inspired sociology, computational neuroscience and a number of other disciplines that you just cannot understand if you believe in a human soul. The more progress in this areas of study, the more problems you have trying to match this knowledge with religious faith.
Even the soft religious beliefs like "there must be something different about humans" are being challenged. We are just animals, no soul.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
And a lot of the women looked like Raquel Welch.
Stalinism, Nazism, and Mao's Communism were religions. They were religions centred on the worship of a perfect God-like figure: Stalin, Hitler, Chairman Mao. Why do I think this?
- Absolute belief in the leader was required for all subjects (like a theocracy)
- The punishment for thoughtcrime (heresy) involved torture, imprisonment and death (like the Spanish Inquisition).
- A promised land of plenty (a workers paradise, lebensraum, or heaven) was just around the corner for the people that did what the leader wanted.
- Any failure to reach this promised land was the fault of the people, not the leader (just as continued suffering in the world is due to our continuing to sin).
These regimes were not atheistic. They were more like the later days of the Roman Empire, in which the emperor deified himself, or like Egypt, where the pharoah was believed to be a god.Religion achieves many good things, but total conviction can be very dangerous. It can drive good people to true evil.
People will take long ways to create illusion around them that something they believe in actually exists or have existed. Poor people, still linger to last leftovers of "belief".
Why I tagged this "ohhdear"? I believe in God, however, I don't think it has anything to do with Bible or this physical world. People simply can't believe something that doesn't not exist or at least have some evidence of it. People don't believe in God and Jesus because they want to be good, they want to feel good, just be a part of system of believe. They want to feel safe.
Jesus said love your enemies and forgive them. We don't. Jesus said don't kill and don't seek revenge (well, not directly, but...). We don't.
We don't want to believe. Creationism is just a "feeling-good-because-we-are-so-many-so-stupid" way of confirming that we are not wrong. That everything Bible says is true, because priest said so...and if they are wrong, religion and my belief should be wrong too, right? So it simply can't be.
Human is so weak when it comes down to reality and how we are selective to it.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I strongly hope you're joking and have terrible taste. First of all, there's BOUND to be an Inuit Creation museum somewhere, and if I ever find one in my travels I'll definitely visit it. Similarly, Australian Aboriginals' museums can be found down under, I've visited them and have taken tours describing the Dreamtime etc.
Yet if you were to joke about them you'd be labeled a bigoted fascist or some such utter crap. The main difference between this Creationist Museum and the ones I mentioned is that the religion this one is based on is alive and well, while the other ones are, how to say, fringe? Niche religions?
Sometimes I wonder why an atheist alwasy has to defend Christianity by attacks of idiots like you. It must be because I like freedom. Including their freedom to build their museum. You know what, you can build yours, too. Though I doubt anyone will find it interesting.
Global warming is a cube.
"You ever notice how people who believe in creationism look really unevolved?" - Bill Hicks
Plus you know those 9-11 terrorists. Totally motivated by atheism. *snort*
Philosophy.
(Oh great, here goes that karma I built up. Oh well...)
/. archive with a Python script, and no one would know the difference.
/.'ers {loath | fear} {a theocracy | George Bush | anti-abortion activists}.
/.'ers.
Could we please just skip the redundant parts of the conversations that sping up 100% of the time when we have creationism vs. non-creationism discussions? The arcs of conversation are so predictable that you could just rehash them from the
Some topics that I now view as complete noise (since we've hashed them over to death 400 times):
- how stupid Christians are
- how much
- details about why creationists are wrong.
None of these topics is uninteresting, except for the fact THAT WE HAVE THE SAME CONVERSATIONS EVERY TIME A TOPIC COMES UP PITTING RELIGIOUS VIEWS VS. ATHEISTIC ONES.
Seriously, I don't even know why we kick these articles around more than once every 5 years. Because clearly they don't stimulate any new thoughts in us
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
When I first saw this, I thought: "Great! Creationism is declining so rapidly that we need a museum to teach about this primitive superstition." No such luck.
Ok, so let me get this straight. A bunch of Bible-thumpers raises private money to build a museum to depict scenes out of the Flintstones, and everyone here is bitching about how these people should be shut up. The 1st Amendment separates church and state, but it also protects freedom of speech. These people aren't directly inciting violence or rebellion They're not spouting libelous falsehoods. Let them be.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
The opium that is creationism is some damned powerful stuff.
Basically, for about 4000 years, Man has believed that there are beings greater than Human. In fact, the belief is that these beings created humans and the world and the universe. They, for 4000 years, called these beings god or gods or God.
In the past couple hundred years, a few uppity atheists like yourself suddenly come along and demand proof of the existence of these beings. The reason the demand for proof is shoved back in your face by theists is that there is a long history of belief in these beings. The proof of historical "that's the way it was"ness.
If you want to disprove these beings, it's up to you to disprove. You'll never be able to get the theists to roll up their sleeves and get in the mud with you. They can point at Descartes or Aquinas or any number of philosophers who over the millenia have discoursed about these greater beings. Do you have any tangible position to argue from besides smugness?
Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll just follow me.
This first exhibit shows god with his little bag of mysteries. He is shown placing dinosaur bones in the rocks because even god likes a good laugh.
And further on we have another aspect of God. This is god in his aspect of 'having to make all the animals himself because he is too stupid to create a universe that can do this shit on its own'.
Now we have a stuffed monkey. You will see that the monkey, while superficially similar is not at all related to man. This is proved by the fact that the monkey is holding a placard stating that god made him as part of a batch job, 4103 years ago, on a tuesday. Further you will see that the stuffed Man we have next to him is also holding a placard, and this states definatelly that god made him the previous wednesday as part of an entirely different batch of wonders. This disparity, proved by our scientifically validated placards, is all the proof any sensible person should need.
Lastly we have the flood exhibit. This exhibit houses a model earth, three feet in diameter, and shows what it would look like covered in water. As you can see only the tip of mount arrarat is visible, even though it isn't the highest peak in the world. This is because it was a very curvy mysterious flood. If you look closely you will see one tiny wooden boat near arrarat which contains a pair of every species on the planet, their diverse ecological requirements and foods, all neatly seperated to stop them eating each other. Next to this model you will see the explanation of where the water went, and how, when the entire world was engulfed in a flood of sufficient depth to kill everything living, a boat made of wood was able to survive. As you can clearly see, that notice says 'shut up and go away, heretical unbeleiver'.
This concludes the tour, please give us loads of money as you leave.
First they made the Sex museum and now there's going to be a Creationist museum? When will they finally make one we nerds can identify with? I can only visit the Smithsonian Apple exhibit so many times. :sigh:
The problem with Fundamentalists is that they interpret the Bible literally. If it is written to forgive 70 times 7, they will probably start counting the number of times they forgive someone and when they reach 490, they'll probably say -- "that's it, the Bible says to stop". Ever since the books of the Bible were written, it was understood (see the writings of early Church fathers -- around II century) that a lot of the stuff was symbolic and typological. In other words the people who wrote the Bible, thousands of years ago, chose which books to include and which to not include, along with their contemporaries who interpreted and wrote about the interpretation of the scriptures, would _never_ agree with a literal interpretation.
Instead of spending $25 million on the museum, these people could feed and cloth a huge number of children from the developing countries, they could donate it towards AIDS research. To me that would be a more convincing witness to a Christian life than building a museum with animatronic dinosaurs...
I live in Southern Ohio, I would go out protesting against this museum along with anyone else who wishes to do so.
Yah, and atheists are such saints:
Religious Persecution in Soviet Russia
The Killing Fields of Cambodia
People can be motivated to kill by just about any ideology, religious or otherwise.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Apple sauce, coca-cola and honey are all types of beer. Why do I think this?
What a revelation! See how I did that? I just set aside the key features of beer (it's brown, it gets you drunk, etc) and all of a sudden everything is just like beer! Wow!
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm surprised that people here are so upset about it.
Here's a religious group exercising their freedom of religion and freedom of speech. They're building a museum with their own money to build an edifice to their beliefs. So what. The worst that you can say is they're exercising the freedoms that most people admire.
You may not agree with it, but heck, I don't agree completely with anybody on everything.
I think perhaps people need to be more tolerant, and that goes both ways.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
A lot of that money is going into the animatronic dinosaurs, which are pictured as coexisting with modern humans before the Fall
Let me start by saying I am an athiest. Now, about this. I have read The Bible several times and do not remember hearing anything about our ancestors playing around with dinosaurs?
Regardless of whether these regimes were truly religions or not, they were all based upon unreasoning belief in a concept or institution, and religion falls into the same category. Indeed, the belief they fostered allowed them to persist; one can't have a regime that encourages rational thought and persecution, otherwise you'd have people poking holes in your arguments when you try to pin the blame on scapegoats, or try to insist that a particular group of people are subhuman.
But these non-believers are per definition sinners and not innocents, so that's alright!
I love the religious logic.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Of course, you're right, but let's not forget that some people actually hold beliefs so strongly that they believe forcing those beliefs on others is the right thing to do. Ironically, "tolerance of others" happens to be one of those beliefs that is forced on a lot of people :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
Creationism purports to be some sort of Scientific view of the Earth's history.
No, you're thinking of Intelligent Design. Look at this website. It's pure "the Bible is under attack!"
Property is theft.
While I agree on the negative impact of such an endeavor, I don't think religion as it is used in the USA corresponds to Marx's definition.
Marx meant it as a means to tame an oppressed class "Suffering in this life guarantees you Paradise in the afterlife!".
We can hardly call the american middle-class "oppressed" in any way.
Actually, come to think of it, I have no idea how come religion (specifically, christianism) is so powerful in such a developped country as the USA...
I wonder if it has anything to do with protestant evangelists taking up the methods of capitalism. Hmm...
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Yes, sure. If someone points out that religion is not the root of all evil, and provides some examples, then you redefine what religion is to include those examples as religion. Very clever.
I just wonder are you really so blinded that you don't see this fallacy, or being manipulative on purpose?
As far as I understand, suicide bombers (palestinian and otherwise) are often recruited from families that are either in debt, and get a way to clear their debt, or are just young men brainwashed enough with religion to actually go out there and explode themselves. Basically, they're manipulated to further the goals of some organization and again with the use of religion. So I wouldn't look at the actual purpetrators, but more at the masterminds behind it to discover what drives these people. My guess still is the good ole horseman of fear, hatred, power and riches.
Where is the foot icon in this article?!?
... they could have been deformed, diseased or something. I've seen people like that running round the streets of New York.'"
"Stephen Bates is given a sneak preview and asks: was there really a tyrannosaurus in the Bible?"
"[The museum] will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake."
"...tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story."
"As for the Grand Canyon - no problem: that was, of course, created in a few months by Noah's Flood."
"But what, I ask wonderingly, about those fossilised remains of early man-like creatures? Marsh knows all about that: 'There are no such things. Humans are basically as you see them today. Those skeletons they've found, what's the word?
"[The workers], too, know they are doing the Lord's Work, and each has signed a contract saying they believe in the Seven Days of Creation theory."
"'[Adam] is appropriately positioned, so he can be modest. There will be a lamb or something there next to him. We are very careful about that: some of our donors are scared to death about nudity.'"
"The museum's planetarium is his pride and joy. Lisle writes the commentary. 'Amazing! God has a name for each star,' it says, and: 'The sun's distance from earth did not happen by chance.' There is much more in this vein, but not what God thought he was doing when he made Pluto, or why." (what has happened to the heliocentric belief?)
About Ken Ham, the museum's director and is inspiration: "Ham is an Australian, a former science teacher - though not, he is at pains to say, a scientist - and he has been working on the project for much of the past 20 years since moving to the US. 'You'd never find something like this in Australia,' he says. 'If you want to get the message out, it has to be here.'"
"Poodles are degenerate mutants of dogs. I say that in my lectures and people present them to me as gifts." (I've always knew that poodles couldn't be real dogs!)
"It is full of books with titles such as Infallible Proofs, The Lie, The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved and even a DVD entitled Arguments Creationists Should Not Use."
So say we all
I'm quite sure that most of these bastards had/have a religion, so while I agree with your point that religion has been used and abused to murder in its name, that does not mean that the opposite of religion (atheism) is the true cause, nor does the above rant gives any argument why and how atheism leads to mass murder.
Communism in most countries has been militantly atheistic, engaging in harsh suppression of religion and programs for the spread of militant atheism. The Soviets even established an All-Union League of the Godless and museums of atheism in former churches. (North Korea still executes Christians.) At the same time, Communism was responsible for killing about 100,000,000 people in the last century. There were even incidents of cannibalism in the People's Republic of China to prove your loyalty to the party, literally eating the rich. The brutality of communism was one that repeated itself from country to country to country. Stalin outdid Hitler in body count, and Mao dwarfed Stalin. As a percentage of his country, Pol Pot outdid Mao. The vile regime of North Korea is still engaged in horror after horror after horror.
How is that that Communism, allegedly founded on a scientific basis, stressing rationality and scientific though, with principles regarded as altruistic (from each according to his ability to each according to his need), repeatedly produced such carnage and such leaders? Do you think it is possible that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of man at work there?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The real question is, if Jesus were to drop on by, would he approve of $25M being spent on religious idolism?
No, the real question would be how a dark-skinned, bearded religious fundamentalist from the Middle East got into the country without Homeland Security knowing about it.
most of the religious beliefs are in contradiction with science.
Until about 40 years ago, most scientists were religious people. For all I know, they still are (I don't go round asking them). Most scientific theories were developed in an environment of religion, and most religious beliefs emerged from cultures that had at least some vague concept of forming theories about natural phenomena and testing them by trial and error. Ever since long before Galileo sat in his Vatican-funded observatory (it's a pity he didn't keep out of politics, though!) and Newton took time out from his theological studies to formulate a few laws of motion, people have had, among various other things, religion and science.
It's just rational humanists such as you who have trouble with this. And it's fine for you to have trouble with it -- you have a perfect right to believe that religion and science are somehow opposites locked in eternal conflict. But you ought to be aware that it's just your belief, just as some folks belive the End Times are Coming or God Hates Fags.
computational neuroscience and a number of other disciplines that you just cannot understand if you believe in a human soul
The fact that you believe it's impossible is part of your faith -- it's not a fact about neuroscience and souls. Otherwise there wouldn't be any religious neuroscientists, which I observe not to be the case.
Put your faith down and talk about facts -- even Creationists can do that, on a good day, with a favorable wind. The main difference between a creationist and a rational humanist is that the creationist understands that they are running on faith.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The American version is "Pie in the Sky":
The Preacher and the Slave
Long haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They reply in voices so sweet
CHORUS:
You will eat, by and by
In that glorious land in the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky, when you die.
Chorus:
Oh the Stravation Army they play
And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they tell you when you're on the bum
Chorus:
Holy Rollers and jumpers come out,
They holler, they jump and they shout.
Give your money to Jesus they say,
He will cure all diseases today.
Chorus:
If you fight hard for children and wife
Try to get something good in this life
You're a sinner and bad man, they tell
When you die you will sure go to hell.
Chorus:
Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain
FINAL CHORUS:
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry.
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good,
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye.
-Joe Hill
KFG
The problem is not with the account, the problem is with some people's interpretation of the account. When I read the first 2 chapters of Genesis, it does not preclude evolution (yeah, go read it). It also does not demand a 7x24 hour creation period (since the Hebrew word for "day" has many meanings).
In fact, Genesis is NOT a scientific treatise on the origin of the world. The book is clearly about the origin and early history of Israel. The first 2 chapters only provide some context for Adam.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Except they didn't kill out of atheïsm, but they found communist reasons to kill and oppress those of different persuasions. There actions found it's base in the communist ideology which has no respect for the life/rights of the individual.
Don't blame the atheïsts for the horrible communist regime.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
"Do you have any tangible position to argue from besides smugness?"
Using logic only, you can't disprove the existence of anything. You can't disprove the existence of blue dragon. You can't disprove the existence of faery and gnome. In other word, saying "we always did it so" is an axiom, and no better than saying "god exists" as an hypothesis to prove that gods exists. But you cannot disprove god exists, because there is nothing you can start up with. You CANNOT disprove an axiom of existence. You can only disprove an axiom of INEXISTANCE. It ain't a question of smugness but a question of logic. The only way ANYTHING could be ever proved is that gods exists with a proof of it, the contrary cannot be proved. And for that there is millenia of philosophical discussion, LONGER than any discussion from aquinas or descartes (which spans hundred of years and not millenia as you supposed : Aquinas : 1200 ish and descartes 1600 ish. Philosophy : waaaay before 0-ish).
In other word it ain't a question from smugness from atheist which just point out at the philosophical logical discourse to base their logic, it is a question of religious people in general which refuse utterly to put their religion in question. Point. Final.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Or rather, as Dawkins points out, simply saying God did it is a way of explaining the world. It's a direct alternative to scientific method. Whether you take the bible literally or not is irrelevant, it's simply a laughable example of the same phenomenon. Why is the atom made up of protons, neutrons and electrons? To a believer the answer "God made it that way" is sufficient. It becomes case closed. With belief it must always at some point come down to "it's gods will".
If you're a believer, you might as well take the bible literally, it's as good an explanation as any other of the world as we see it.
Deleted
Frankly, I haven't seen many posts saying they should be shut up.
What most of us _are_ saying is that:
1) it's stupid. Sorry, the same first ammendment says I _can_ say I find it bloody stupid. Same as if I read about someone spending that much money on a magic ring of levitation to jump off a cliff with. Or spending that much money on animatronics to "prove" to everyone that Lord Of The Rings is 100% fact. (Sure, you can animate hobbits and orcs all you want, but that doesn't make it a scientiffic proof.) Sure, I'm not going to stop them, but excuse me while I laugh my ass off at the stupidity of it all.
2. this, and the whole "young earth creationsm" and "intelligent design" bullshit are part of an insidious battle to destroy science as a whole, via a barrage of fallacies, flawed logic, and redefining words. It's not just a "well, I think that god exists" issue, but a battle for mindshare trying to effectively purge the very fundament of the scientific method or reasoning from as many minds as possible. There's a whole scaffold including stuff like "burden of proof", "Occam's razor", etc, that these people systematically try to pervert and destroy. Each and every single notion, word and definition is systematically corrupted, perverted, distorted, and outright presented as the very opposite of what it used to mean.
If you want an analogy, it's not just like creating a "museum of fascism", for historical reason. What these people do is akin to instead trying to systematically pervert and corrupt the very notions of "democracy", "freedom", "elections", etc- Until the whole edifice is pulled from under you and you find yourself in a fascist dictatorship just because everyone forgot how a democratic country was supposed to work or what the difference is.
That's essentially what these people are trying to do to science and reason: pervert and corrupt and undermine it all, until you find yourself in an Iran-style fundamentalist theocracy, just because noone knows any better any more. Just because everyone's mind has been warped to think that "evidence" means "what the preacher told me", and "burden of proof" means "well, you can't disprove what the preacher said", and "theory" means "just another unfounded opinion."
Sure, I'm still not going to shut them up by force, but they do earn my heartfelt disgust and contempt.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Bah. I much preferred Richard Hawkings' book on the subject, "A Brief History of God"
Many do, I'm sure. Those applying the label "Christian" to themselves are a pretty diverse bunch. I couldn't say whether most do. For the record, I don't consider them crazy, although I'm sure they have their fair share of crazy people on board. I could say the same for evolutionists.
It is true that the Bible is not a science textbook, but it does present itself as a documentary account of many things. Not all of it is figurative, and not all of it is literal. To the best of my knowledge, scholars of the Hebrew language do not consider the text of Genesis chapter one to be poetry, but rather documentary. You can accuse it of being false, but it's unreasonable to say that it was not meant to be read literally.
Indeed, I consider the "it's not literal" excuse to be a lame cop-out where Genesis chapter one is concerned: it's tantamount to saying "I'll interpret the text any which way I please without even paying lip service to textual analysis". That's the sort of treatment that follows on to denial of a literal virgin birth, and of Jesus being the literal son of God, and being literally raised from the dead -- not on the basis of whether the text appears to be speaking literally, but because they are miraculous. At that level of non-literalism, you just don't have a literal Christ in your Christianity anymore. It's not even clear that there's anything substantial enough to call a "belief" in such a system. What, specifically, is there to believe if none of the Bible is literal? Should we believe that God exists? Literally?
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
No. Marx said that religion is a social defense mechansim, the expression of problems in society, and develops based on the material and economic realities in a given society. Authorities can use religion as a means to console an oppressed class. Marx also said that people should transcend religion and take control of their own destiny.
If you have surrendered your capacity to take decisions, to think for yourself, and to control your own destiny, then you are oppressed (according to Marx and others). Religion is, by this definition, oppression.
Perhaps it has something to do with Spain starting the colonization of the Americas by imposing Catholicism on all natives and immigrants. Or maybe it was the pilgrims, puritans, quakers, and lutherans that followed them, avoiding religious persecution in Europe. Or maybe you should just read about the Eurpoean colonization of the Americas to understand why the USA was founded by a bunch of Christian fundamentalists.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Well, here is the thing.
I am an orthodox Jew. AND, incidentally, I speak fluent hebrew (my aramaic is passable). And well, I typicaly read Job at least once a year (In hebrew. With 1000+ years of various rabbinical commentary. That and ecclesiasties. On Shavout, if you must know). I would also like to say that I think creationism is fairly silly. Dangerous, sure. But, silly. I happen to think that MOST relegion is fairly silly (my own, included). There are lots of arguments you could use.
But just saying "eveyrone knows it's a metaphor, you dipshit" reduces your comment to. Well:
A. Wrong. Not everyone knows that. There is a lot of rabbinical debate. Some say it is a prophetic vision, others say it was actually God taking him around showing him these things. This debate appears all over in biblical commentary, esp. in regards to phatasmagorical prophetiky things. The only real thing that is constant in Rabbinical debate, is that there is a lot of it. And Pigs arent Kosher.
B. Ad Hominem. And who modded your silly ad hominem up, probably doesnt read hebrew, or know much about rabinical authority.
Look, I am a big fan of telling people "read it in the hebrew". If you had bothered to do that, you would see the passage he is talking about (Job 40:15) should almost certainly be translated (roughly) "here are the animals, that I made, along with you. Grass/Grain it Eats, just like cattle eat." Now, the interesting thing about this passage is the word (transliterated) "b-hay-mote". Hebrew, as lots of people will tell you, is written with consonants. So, the word is BHM#T (the # is something that normally represents an "Oh" or "oo" but can be a "V". A vav for those of you who know hebrew.) Under normal circumstances, you would just translate that as "animals". The problem with that translation, is that this chapter is God, showing Job all sorts of wonderous things of Creation. So why are some random animals so wonderous. That question is what leads to the discussion that the animals in question, are wonderous animals, and the trasliteration of a normal word "B-Hay-Mote" to behemoth. You really have to be reading the passage TRYING to force the word to mean "dinosaurs" for it to come close to that reading.
See, that would be a decent argument. "everyone knows its metaphor you dipshit" is just wrong, and personal.
Also, please dont give me ownership of the Old testament. I like to think my knowledge of it is better than most. But that doesnt mean I own it, any more that a classics professor owns "the Illiad". Other people can still come to these books, read them, and find what they may in them. Some of what they find might be because they want to see it. Sometimes a scholar of these books can show somone why a particular reading isnt likely. But Christians (though I think they are often wrong, because they rarely study the bible in any original source) are not to be dismissed out of hand because they are not "orthodox Jews". Further, why should an Orthodox Jew have any more claim to the bible then I Conservative, or reform Jew. They have the same traditional connection I do, they just choose to make a different reading.
In short, please mod parent down. He is an AC, doesnt really say anything constructive (or even correct), and belongs at 0 where he started.
I think the reason why creationism and other balony can grow in the US is a general "all or nothing" attitude in a lot of people there. I've noticed it in a few people while I was in the US, many of them have an approach to things that allows no middle way. Things are black or white, good or bad, there or not. Yes or no. Very binary.
Creationism and clinging to the bunk is a necessity for the religous zealots there. If God didn't create the world, he cannot exist. All or nothing. Either the Bible is 100% correct or God is gone. Now, that must not happen, of course, so Creationism MUST be correct.
Even the most zealous religious groups here in Europe take a rather moderate stance towards Creationism. God can exist without it, the Bible needn't be literal. "Created in seven days" is a metaphor for a creation in a "whole way", that's what the seven symbolizes. That can take millenia (hey, who are you to dictate to God how long one of his days is? Remember, he's beyond and above space and time). He also created the animals before man, so those dinos can exist way before man came to be. A millenia old earth? No problem, those "seven days" are a metaphor.
I've had lengthy talks with very devout theologists and without failure they all said that you cannot take the Bible literal. Doing so would most likely make you either crazy or turn from the faith, because you'd have to realize that it cannot be true if taken literal. You don't even want to count the translation mistakes (it was translated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English... talk about bablefish) or the interpretations. And a lot of things changed meaning in the millenia since its creation, a lot of the figures and parallels used to describe things don't make sense anymore to a modern person. Do you REALLY want to try taking something like that literal?
The general belief here is (if you are so inclined to take it serious and believe in it) that God created the world in seven "steps", which is also in sync with the original text ("days" is only a way to translate it. The original text talked about "daily tasks", in today's commerce it would be translated as "man days"). And that's by far not the only translation mistake the various people who copied it made.
And you want to take one of those babelfishy documents literal? Must be nuts to do that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Karl Marx was right. Was he? I thought time and trial had proven otherwise.
Why does a person of Faith need scientific proof?
This is why you shouldn't take Dawkins so seriously when he talks philosophy: he's an expert zoologist, and a crummy philosopher. Contra Dawkins, saying "God did it" is a direct alternative to saying "it happened all by itself".
Anyone who lacks a spirit of scientific inquiry will be satisfied with a metaphysical answer like "God wills it" or "the anthromorphic prinicple makes it inevitable". The scientifically curious will say, "I wonder if I can smash apart those protons, neutrons, and electrons to find even smaller particles and understand how they behave" -- which has very little to do with why protons, neutrons and electrons exist in the first place.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
So, just as Catholics belief that murdering heretics (preferably as painfully as possible) was doing god's work justified the genocide of the Cathars (as just one example), the communists' belief that they were hastening the arrival of post-capitalist society justified their own murderous depredations.
The point is that unquestioning belief in any set of propositions (whether mystical or secular) leads people (not all of them, but certainly enough, as history has shown us, to be a concern) to do very bad things.
It's a Power engine of the highest order. Its proponents begin by asking you to suspend logic and assume an anti-entropic premise. From there, the orthodox doctrine is One of Many interpretations. It gets worse. For the newbie, they can either listen to glorious affirmations, or face the grinding universe. It's like a mathematical proof with a division by zero in it. It's an "illegal operation" for a reason. If that step is allowed, quite literally anything can be pseudo-proved. The fun part is the computer era has contributed a whole new slew of reasons to show it all up.
"God hasn't answered my prayers."
"He is Busy."
"No he's not, he's God."
"Oh. Well, then you're too puny to understand Him."
"Hmm. Then can I talk to the cool souls of dead people? Like Edward Gibbon?"
"No. The Other World is removed from this one."
"That's no fun. Can I send an email?"
"No."
"What?? God has no IT staff?? Where did all the Slashdotters go?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Um.
Adam being naked with his Tingling Naughty Bits hanging out is too much for their more conservative donors to handle, but Adam squatting naked behind a sheep is okay?
I guess that doesn't surprise me.
I know a lot of Christians who seek to oppress their neighbors, as Christ didn't teach. You're lucky your experience has not been the same.
Can I bum a sig?
Tyrannosaurs on a boat? Hey, I just had a great idea for a Hollywood blockbuster. Get me my agent...
Quite the contrary, the "Starvation Army" provided all of the furniture in the house I grew up in - for free; and we weren't even Christians and not going to be.
Still have a few pieces of that "junk" furniture, only now it's valuable Mission Oak. My mother has always said that she wishes she took more (the offer was for anything she wanted, just help yourself), only pride prevented her.
Still, it is my experience that the one thing the average Christian can't abide is a Christian. Just read The Name of the Rose.
KFG
Seriously... who cares? So some people built a museum... why is this news? If you got a distinct sense of pleasure in ridiculing these people and their museum maybe you should evaluate yourself and question why your world is so small.
Don't forget that atheism is a religion too. "Militant atheists", as described above, believe that God does not exist, despite having no direct evidence to support that belief. No one gave them an exclusive peek outside the universe to see that nothing is out there. Holding an unsubstantiated belief is the definition of religion, and like any other religion, it can be used to justify extremism.
You are, of course, wrong.
The problem is this - the ONLY position that atheism maintains is that there is no god (or at least, that there is no reason to believe there is a god). That's it. Atheism makes no positive statements about anything. It does not tell people what to do, believe or think. It is not a political or military viewpoint.
Let's assume that you are correct, and that atheists killed lots of people. What does this tell us? Nothing. Presumably those murderers also did not believe in unicorns. Therefore, it is just as reasonable to state "People who don't believe in God committed genocide" as "People who don't believe in unicorns committed genocide".
The problems you are linking to atheism are really more to do with the political systems and leader-cults, not disbelief in a particular supernatural entity.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
I would like to understand why exactly this is. Does the Bible say that it should not be taken literally? Should the whole thing not be taken literally or just parts of it? If the latter, how do you know what parts? And if we are not supposed to take it literally, what are the contents actually supposed to mean (given that interpretation of nor literal material is highly subjective)?
Forgive me for flying off the handle right away, but it seems to me this is just a technique believers use to shield themselve from inquiry when it is clear that their beliefs are downright outlandish (and they know it). If the Bible is not meant to be taken literally then honestly what could it possibly be good for? (Aside from the reasons we read The Odyssey or similar classics.) You cannot be sure of anything in such a text as it is intended for the audience to make their own decisions. It is like basing beliefs on interpretations of Fight Club or Rocking-Horse Winner. Those stories could mean anything and specifically do not present absolutes, drawing on the reader to make sense of them.
Why bother.
Of course, this doesn't get around the fact that usually the religious reasons are a pretext used by those with power to justify actions for their own gain. But therein lies part of the problem; when a leader uses a religion or ideology to motivate people to do wrong for his own gain, is that religion/ideology culpable? If a political figure or a preacher tells his followers to kill in the name of X, does X therefor share some of the blame? Does communism get the blame for what Stalin did, or Christianity the blame for what the Crusaders did? After all, the people doing the actual killing have probably been led to believe that what they're doing is right. The people in power may not be true believers, but you can bet their goons are.
And that gets you to a second problem. If the religion or ideology is not to be blamed for the evil it can be used to justify, should it therefor get any credit for the good it can cause? Christianity brought us intolerant fundamentalism on the one hand, and numerous charities on the other. If it can't be blamed for the former, can it be given any credit for the latter?
I'd suggest that one of two positions is possible. Either you can claim that religion is an ideology that can be used for good or evil, but is itself neutral, or that religion is a driving force that can cause people to turn into saints or monsters. Too many people on both sides want to cherry pick their facts to support both ideas when it suits them; fundamentalists would have you believe that when Christians do good, the credit lies with the religion, and when they do evil, the blame lies only with themselves, while people who dislike religion would blame it for all the evil it causes and ignore the good.
(Side note: I should probably mention that I'm a strongly secular agnostic. I don't dislike religion, but I don't particularly like it either.)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Maybe you should study a little economic theory before purporting to evaluate an economist. Marx's seminal work, his theories on the unemployment cycle, remain fundamentally unchalleneged and virtually unchanged to this day.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Now really, would you even trust someone who goes around cuckolding someone else, never mind worshiping them and their bastard kid?
Worked for Zeus and Herakles. Of course they were Gods of cuckolds and bastard kids. When asked about adultery in Sparta the reply was "There isn't any," because Sparta had a culture of wife "sharing" and children as the property of the city.
Think about that the next time someone says, "It takes a village to raise a child." Read a history of Sparta - and ants.
KFG
And by definition that includes every believer. A believer by definition thinks that god created everything, there is no alternative to that answer no matter how deep into the nature of the universe you delve at some point, god dun it. By asking the question, why, at all, you're giving intent and assuming right from the start that god exists.
You're really missing the point of my post (and of Dawkins), perhaps I didn't present it well. Believers state that god did it, they are claiming ownership of both the how and the why. The question of how is in direct opposition to science and the question of why is answered by assumption implicit in the question itself.
Deleted
The big question on my mind is: If you don't believe in this, why do you care? They're not funding it with taxpayer dollars, they're funding it on donations. If people want to spend their money on something, why is it anyone's business but their own?
I think people are idiots for paying thousands of dollars for a console on Ebay that they could buy in a store in another month for a couple hundred dollars. However I'm not writing an opinion piece on Slashdot, presenting it as news, and inciting a lot of community anger at a group of people just because I don't agree with their priorities.
When a public school has a school trip to it, then it's cause for news. Until then this is no bigger news than the construction of a really big church. And anyone who finds themselves being angry at these people (which is the general tone of this entire discussion) for spending their money in this way needs to take a step back and examine where their hate comes from, because such attitudes are bigotry, even if (especially if) you don't agree with it.
Last I checked, freedom of religion was still a constitutional right, and this is no more than exercise of that right. And as a personal disclaimer, I'm a non-creationist Christian (yes, we exist). I think this is exactly as much of a shame as the hype and zealotry over console releases, but it's their money to do with as they will.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I have a MA in physics from Berkeley, and I understand only very little of what we currently understand about the creation of the universe. I certainly couldn't explain what parts of it I know it to my wife, a smart, well educated but not technically inclined woman. So how would a guy with an ancient egyptian education be able to understand the creation of the world? What value would there be in trying to tell it to him literally?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Ah, thats you're problem. You're trying to use logic against a religion. It doesn't work like that.
a) If evil happens, it's due to the fallibility of Humans, or the interfrence and corruption by a "bad" power.
b) If good happens it's due to God.
So, if you have a car crash with a drunk driver that paralysis you and kills your family, thats a human problem.
If you help an old person across the road, that's god at work and he should get the credit.
Sooo, anything Good = God, anything Bad = nothing to do with God. Except if you're a bad perosn and are being punished.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
I would say that religion limits you further...with atheism, there is no limit to what you can discover...with religion, you discover as much as what is written in a book. A book which was written by men who thought the world was flat.
One of my favorite quotes of all time:
"God must be greater than the greatest of human weaknesses and, indeed, the greatest of human skill. God must even transcend our most remarkable-to emulate nature in its absolute splendor. How can any man or woman sin against such greatness of mind? How can one little carbon unit on Earth-in the backwaters of the Milky Way, the boondocks-betray God, ALMIGHTY? That is impossible. The height of arrogance is the height of control of those who create God in their own image."
Living With a Nerd
To me, advocating atheism to adults is a little like telling little kids there is no Santa Claus. People follow organized religion mostly because they would fear death without it and there isn't much to lose claiming affiliation with a religion. I do however believe atheists are within their right to draw the line at protecting their own freedom of religion.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Just because one has a god, doesn't mean they're good and just because one is good, does not mean they are shackled by a god. If people would just strip the dogma out of their life it leaves them free to do good things for the sake of helping out a neighbor, not because after ignoring all the negative things religion has contributed to the world, one found a grain of goodness in it to inspire them.
IAA (i am an atheist). i do not have any evidence against the existence of many things that i still do not believe in: unicorns, fairies.......and even the flying spaghetti monster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Mons ter
It's one thing to ask us not to believe the creationism myth, but now you want us to believe that there is intelligent life in Kentucky?!?!
From Article 11 of the treaty, as approved by the Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1796:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tripoli
The founding fathers were Deists, not Christian fundamentalists.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Actually, as a friend of mine once said, "you can't argue people into believing what you believe." It might be more useful to point out that they themselves change the modes with which they interpret the bible. In some places, they claim not to be 'interpreting' it - they say they're just 'reading it' when they quote passages which say the only way to heaven or to be 'saved' is to believe in jesus. Yet in other places they don't take scriptures so literally. Good examples are Deut 23:1 that says you can't go to church with damaged testicles or if your penis has been cut off and Deut 23:2 that says if you're a bastard (even ten generations out) you can't go to church. Also, god is powerless against automobiles (iron chariots) - Judges 1:19. fundamentalists will claim that you can violate Old Testament laws all you want, and Christ's sacrifice will deliver you from judgment if you believe in him. Yet, Christ said that not one bit of OT law will be given exception to - Matt 5:17-19. In other places, christ's sacrifice does supersede OT laws - Luke 16:16/ Eph 2:15/ Rom 7:6. Do OT laws still hold? Or not? If I hit god with my subaru, will he be able to get back up?
Those are just theological contradictions. Then there are places where a story is told one way and accounted for differently in another. In Matthew, christ was taken into egypt (Matt 2:14,15,19,21,23) but in Luke he wasen't (Luke 2:22, 39). In Matthew, jesus gave the beatitudes on a mountainside (Matt 5:1,2) and in Luke he gave the beatitudes on a plain (Luke 6:17,20). The list of course goes on and on. The point is that fundamentalists and evangelicals take the bible as a unified authority and believe its contents have been carefully arranged by god to tell us how to live and what to believe. And just by reading it, this isn't the case which pokes holes in their claims to the be the only true religion, and in most of the founding theology they live by. You can't let them get away with "we're not interpreting the bible - we're just reading it factually." (which they'll fall back on to avoid complex theological discussions) Point out they do in fact interpret the bible, and their is just one on many interpretations. You might even need to point out that the bible wasn't even written in english or even one language, so by definition they are reading an interpretation. There are lots of good examples of contradictions at evilbible.com.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Um... I don't know if you'd noticed, but the question "why does blah blah" has an implicit assumption. It assumes that there is intent. It assumes that there was a reason for "blah blah blah". It assumes that god exists.
By asking "why" you are already assuming that god exists. There's no other alternative.
What I'm saying is that "why" questions are circular.
Deleted
This should be under politics, or perhaps a new category called "superstition".
For anyone interested, here is some good general information on religion and some specific info on religious skepticism including videos by Sam Harris, George Carlin and some informative stuff on Mormonism and a great video on why Atheists care about religion.
The bottom line is that people can believe what they want to believe. But when you start affecting public policy and public education, there needs to be an open dialogue on whether or not this is a good thing, and this involves examining religion's role in society and its validity as well. The problem is, as Sam Harris puts it, even the liberal and moderate theists are part of the extremist problem because they are part of the lobby which is against ANY discussion of the legitimacy and accuracy of religion. When the moderates won't even allow skepticism to be legitimized, they are almost as bad as the extremists.
This has nothing to do with science. Science by its nature requires that its theories always be open to scrutiny and change. Religion is the opposite of that. As long as religion is a personal thing, it need not be made into an issue, but when fundy extremists start spouting total bullshit, and start lobbying for their superstition to be promoted as legitimate knowledge, responsible, sane people have an obligation to expose this delusion.
Are you still here?
Agnostics and Atheists dismiss gods, not faith. Most (I would argue nearly all) still have faith in mankind, and that is what their moral foundation rests on.
Once again, the boogeyman gets drawn out of the closet, "Atheists have no Gods therefore they have no Morals!", which is untrue, or else they'd all be out in the street killing people for fun.
If you do not understand how a person can have morals and not believe in a god or gods, the problem is not with them, my friend, it is with you.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Because they get in my way. They bring up religion and then expect me to be tolerant of them. I'm tired of people spouting off religious bollocks at me and keeping silent. I don't go around converting people to atheism but if they bring up the subject I'm going to make sure they know that they believe in a fairy tale.
Deleted
The only thing worse than a christian fundamentalist is an atheist fundamentalist.
As an atheist - I more or less agree with this. I have a problem with fundamentalists of any stripe.
Why the hell do you people want to convert everyone?
And then you go and say something like that. "You people"? I understand if your passions is inflamed - but don't do that.
With every belief system, there's a bell curve of evangelisation. Some are content to live according to their system, others to "live as an example". Some answer when asked, some preach, some confront, and some harass.
That's true of every group - so there's no sense in getting your knickers in a twist over atheists, unless you've got a particular axe to grind. But then the issue is with you, and not them.
Jesus said we should be kind to one another and forgive and not judge. If theis message makes someone a better person, couldn't you say that person was saved by Jesus?
Is it wrong to appreciate life in all its forms? Is it wrong to think that life is something special in the Universe? "God loves you" is just another way of saying that.
On these statements - you and I can agree, and using religion as a metaphor for appreciating nature and trying to live in harmony with your fellow man...hey - I'm all for that.
Unfortunately, there are as many on "your side" that would disagree with us as on "my side". So that leaves us in a pickle.
I used to be an atheist. But the problem with atheism is that it limits you. Science can answer the "How?" questions but not the "Why?" questions. Why are we here? Big bang, evolution, yada yada yada. That tells us how, but not why.
With respect, that's not a limit of atheism. That's a limit of science, and to a certain extent, that betrays a limit of your own imagination.
To start with, you should realise this equation ( atheism == scientific belief ) is not true. Science deals with how, not why - that's not a flaw, that's just what it is. Personally, I think we'd be better off if religion stuck to the why, and stopped trying to decide the how - but that's for another day.
Atheism doesn't "limit" you any more than it frees you - again, same as religion...
Someone who lives in fear of an invisible man, and attempts to abide by a codified rule set lest they face an eternity of torture and punishment is not free.
Someone who marvels at the fact that we are the only known piece of the universe that is aware of itself, and trying to figure itself out - who sees the universe as a conscious entity, through us - is not limited.
I present that contrast, not to attempt to characterise your beliefs, but to point out that it is we who limit ourselves or free ourselves. Religion can be a way to do either, depending on how it is used, but it is not the only option.
Atheism is not fundamentally flawed because it tells us no one will supply a "why" for us. It is not limiting because it requires the individual to set their own purpose, and chart their own beliefs. There is beauty. There is mystery. There is inspiration.
I'm sorry you could not find it. I genuinely hope that you have found it in Christianity. Either way - I don't think you serve yourself or us by relating your experience as anything more than your experience.
Judge not.
Cheers.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
So we have to make shit up instead? Then build on that shit, with more shit that has nothing to with the original shit we made up. Then modify and ammend that shit to make people believe in that shit to the extent that they live in terror of demons and hack off parts their childrens genitals?
Eventually what we get is a pile of shit so collossal that people begin to build bigger peaks on top of it then fight each other over the height of peaks and the consistency of the shit that makes them up. Some people will try to change the shit or move it about, or add more shit. Then others begin to fling the shit around at one another and anyone who happens by. Still more try to pull or shove innocent people into the shit. Children are saturated with the stink from birth so when people tell them in later life, "You shouldn't put up with all this shit.", they won't understand in the slightest what is being said to them.
I say no. I say the rest of us shouln't have to put up with all this shit. How about we make all these nutjob activities illegal? Frankly I don't see why the rest of us should have to suffer the effects of religion when we don't tolerate the effects of illegal substances? Freedom of religion. Where our freedom from religion?
May the Maths Be with you!
While others have already brought up that the poster was only talking about a small part of Marx's work, your point is also invalid because you seem to be assuming that the Soviet Union caried thourgh on his ideas. But in fact they sort of missed the whole point.
Marx said that Capitalism would run its course and come to a point where it was no longer workable. That so much of the wealth would be concentrated in a small group while the rest of the masses (the workers, or proletariat in his parlayence) would become more and more poor and oppressed. He then postulated that a revolution would then occur and the workers unite forming a workers paradise.
What the Soviet Union had was Marxist Leninism, because Lenin came along and said "why wait, we can have that paradise in our lifetimes", and started a revolution that he declared to be the revolution that Marx had envisioned. The big problem with this is that Russia at the time was not especially Capitalist (it was still a Monarchy), and Capitalism in the West was far from running its course (I think that it still is, but is starting to show a few cracks).
Of course, there are a few things that people at that point could not have known: the power of the media to keep people who would be otherwise discontent in check, the enormous productivity increases that have happened (suddenly it is much harder to starve... in comparison), and the push towards a service economy (servants for hire). All of these things set back Marx's ideas quite a bit.
Great post! But I think you might have gone farther in illustrating the depth of Jewish scholarly tradition in analysing and debating scripture. Much of what Christians think of as "the bible" is drawn from this tradition; the bible is like an onion, containing commentary on the earliest parts, commentary on the commentary, etc. A fascinating and very readable survey of this tradition (in English) is James Kugel's The Bible As It Was.
A common thread in this sort of commentary is drawn from the perfection of God and his works; there can be nothing wrong or accidental in the bible, which therefore repays the most careful study. In extreme form this idea can lead people to look for coded messages, but generally it amounts to inference from close reading. An example from the very begining of the bible has to do with light and darkness. God created light and separated it from darkness on the first day of creation, but he didn't get around to creating the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day. So there must have been some other light involved. What was the nature of this light? Is it still around, or was it dispensed with after the fourth day? In this simple fragment there is food for endless thought and debate.
You can begin to see that fundamentalist Christians who claim to be reading the bible literally do no such thing - they are heavily editing the bible to pick and choose the "literal" bits that suit them. For example, a literal reading of Genesis states that the world has a roof - the vault of heaven that separates the waters above from the waters below. This view has gone out of fashion but it was commonplace in medieval Christendom. The medieval cathedral wasn't just a big church - it was a model of the cosmos, with the high roof of the building representing the high roof of the world, the lights fixed in the roof like the stars fixed in the world's roof. All this made perfect sense to the medieval mind. It explained why the sky is blue; where rain came from (leaky roof); and how God flooded the world when he decided to start over (really big leak.)
So along with the dinosaurs, this Creationist museum really ought to have a display showing an Apollo rocket bonking its nose cone on the roof of the world.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
In that respect he is much like Jesus.
Nice guy, rotten followers.
Compartmentalisation can be verified easily. Take an issue, for instance, "Does God exist?" then once you have answered the question, check: "Under what circumstances do I believe that something exists?" (You need to be specific.) You might answer: "everything that has a characteristic or property that cannot be witnessed by any living person does not exist" And that would be consistent with atheism, as almost all the properties of "God" cannot be witnessed or verified (e.g. omnipotence, his will, his form, etc) Such an answer is also consistent with the scientific method, but not with "faith".
Stupid answers might be:
"Everything that Fred tells me exists, I believe exist as well"
"Everything that is real, exists" (begs the question)
"Everything that has evidence that exists, does exists" (begs the question)
Basically, any reason you have for rejecting the existence of unicorns and living trees made of chocolate would also have to apply to God, so you must reject his existence in order to be consistent.
HTH
Its proponents begin by asking you to suspend logic and assume an anti-entropic premise.
This is a canard--actually the reverse is true. It is the Christian faith alone that can account for logic, reason, and rationality.
Why should anyone be rational if the Christian God does not exist? Why are men under any obligation to be rational in a materialistic universe?
As a Christian Theist, I believe all men should be rational. I believe people should believe things on good evidence. I think we are under obligation to use our intellectual tools to glorify God, and to learn about this world--we should be consistent. I believe that becasse God requires all men to be rational. I can make sense of the obligation to be rational.
If this world is sound and fury signifying nothing, why must men be rational? Why don't I just live moment by moment and be inconsistent: thinking on thing one time and another thing another time, caring nothing for logic? After all, logic has no place in the material universe--it is an abstract, non-material set of laws. How can laws of logic actually exist in an atheistic universe?
The odd thing about the materialist is this: the materialist who wants to be rational has already departed from his materialism.
If you are a materialist, you have a naturalistic explanation for everything we say and do. What's going on in this gray matter in my cranium is controlled by the laws of physics and chemistry and biology. I don't really think, I'm really like a weed that's growing. Weeds don't think, and neither do I, we're all subject to the laws of physics, I'm just at a more complicated/complex level.
If naturalism is true, there's no such thing as rationality, there's just whatever people end up thinking and doing. Why call men to be rational then?
However, the Christian God calls men to be consistent and rational. For the Christian Theist, I can expect all men to be obligated to be rational. Not so for those who reject the Christian God.
Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.
Well no, evolution doesn't "teach" anything, evolution is a fact. The current theories of evolution, on the other hand, pretty much tell us this yes.
Yes and no. Many "moral requirements" vary from country to country, or person to person, yet some obvious stuff stays: killing people of the insider group without any reason for example (while killing people outside your "group" is not absolute at all), which can be inferred as coming from evolution: humans are social animals, they come from close-knit groups (tribes and the likes) which meant that killing fellow members of the tribe/group was a huge hit on their survival chance. Evolution would therefore have favored groups of people who didn't kill each other (not giving a fuck about killing people outside the families/camps/tribes/groups), hence the reason why it's pretty much universally considered immoral to kill close relatives, family members or people who're close to you in general, while most humans don't give a damn about people from an other country being slaughtered.
There therefore are some kinds of "moral absolute" coming straight from our evolutionary past.
It's funny how religious people always derive that humans can't grow up their own morals, their own personal morality, and that they must always have someone with a huge stick imposing arbitrary morals on them.
If anything, this mostly shows that religious nutjobs are nuts, and would like nothing more than to kill and maim everyone.
I find it bizarre that you religious guys find youself "quite sane" when your only desire is to kill, rape and eat fellow humans. Your guys truly are sickos.
I myself am a human, and an atheist, I have no "absolute morals" but I do have my own set of moral rules mostly derived from "don't do unto others what you don't want other to do unto you", and some other pretty logical "rules of thumb".
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Muspell
The first world to exist was Muspell, a place of light and heat whose flames are so hot that those who are not native to that land cannot endure it.
Surt sits at Muspell's border, guarding the land with a flaming sword. At the end of the world he will vanquish all the gods and burn the whole world with fire.
Ginnungagap and Niflheim
Beyond Muspell lay the great and yawning void named Ginnungagap, and beyond Ginnungagap lay the dark, cold realm of Niflheim.
Ice, frost, wind, rain and heavy cold emanated from Niflheim, meeting in Ginnungagap the soft air, heat, light, and soft air from Muspell.
Ymir
Where heat and cold met appeared thawing drops, and this running fluid grew into a giant frost ogre named Ymir.
Frost ogres
Ymir slept, falling into a sweat. Under his left arm there grew a man and a woman. And one of his legs begot a son with the other. This was the beginning of the frost ogres.
Audhumla
Thawing frost then became a cow called Audhumla. Four rivers of milk ran from her teats, and she fed Ymir.
Buri, Bor, and Bestla
The cow licked salty ice blocks. After one day of licking, she freed a man's hair from the ice. After two days, his head appeared. On the third day the whole man was there. His name was Buri, and he was tall, strong, and handsome.
Buri begot a son named Bor, and Bor married Bestla, the daughter of a giant.
The story continues with birth of Odin and some siblings, the slaying of Ymir, the creation of the earth, trees, mountains, dwarves, the sky, clouds, stars, the fortress Midgard, the creation of man as we know it from trees, the building of Asgard, and Odin having Thor and creating all other divine entities. It also tells of the rainbow bridge between heaven and earth that will only break under the strength of the sons of Muspell and of Yggdrasil, the ash tree where the gods hold their daily court and whose branches spread out over all of heaven and earth.
Personally, I find this fiction much more compelling than most other creation myths - it'd be much easier to pompously tout this epic as fact than the sillyness and/or drabness of most other creation myths.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Then it's easy to believe.
People will walk through the museum. See dinosaurs playing with humans, and since it looks so gosh darn natural believe it without a doubt. Just like everyone in my class believes that wave mechanics can be used to describe very small simple harmonic oscillators. I'm not saying that it doesn't. But we sure as hell (heh) haven't been given enough empirical evidence to form opinions on the validity of the model. What we did have was a professor who seemed to know what he was talking about, with a pretty movie of a probability distribution function sweeping back and forth and some ancient book written by a dead guy (textbook) that agreed with everything he said.
There are also quite a few post Marx theories that suggested the Revolution would be permanently postponed since the industrialized west coul shift the oppression to undeveloped nations. As long as the West could carefully balance developing the third world enough to produce useful labor but at the same time keep them undeveloped enough to prevent the critical mass for Revolution. So that's what gave the justification to many of the communist leaders of the 20th century to act in such fascist ways, they felt unless they could break the cycle by any means necessary they would never be free.
I do think we see aspects of this playing out in the world. For example in India, during the last election cycle, the poorer people in the country expressed their unhappiness with the fact that properity from outsourcing and other things seemed unequally distributed. And as India develops more, you see Western nations turning to other countries for outsourcing. The issue is will we ever get to the point were the whole world is developed enough that local labor has no disadvantage?
Complicating this is the degree to which some countries will embrace aspects of socialism. For example, in the USA most automobile companies are in big trouble because they can no longer afford retirement and health care benefits for their already retired workers. This is a HUGE expense for them. Many of their overseas competition doesn't have to worry about this, because the gov't provides healthcare and retirement benefits. In this case a gov'ts degree of socialism can provide an advantage to a particular industry by removing a large category of expense.
The question of which direction competition between countries will drive work rights is still undecided. The India example is heartening, but most other developing countries don't have such a democratic institutions. Will workers in China start to demand more involvement in gov't? After living there for 3 years I am not sure anymore.
Peace, or Not?
Marx also lived in a time when capitalism meant something quite a bit harsher than what we have today (even in the US). In some ways he was right -- pure capitalism turns out to be pretty nasty so pretty much every decent sized economy in the world has some non-capitalistic features.
>What's going on in this gray matter in my cranium is controlled by the laws of physics and chemistry and biology. I don't really think,
Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. Everything going on in your head could be entirely chemical and biological, and can still be considered thought. There is no violation of physical laws going on when you think.
>If naturalism is true, there's no such thing as rationality, there's just whatever people end up thinking and doing.
Once again, an unfounded logical leap. What is your evidence that rationality is anything more than 'whatever people end up thinking and doing'?
>However, the Christian God calls men to be consistent and rational.
No, he does not. The very premise of the religion, that man is born in sin because of the acts of the original man and woman, is illogical. If Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil before they ate of the tree, they had no idea it was evil to disobey god. "When you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." If you don't know that an act is evil, how can you (and all your children for all eternity) justifiably be punished for it?
Your religion is no more rational than any other. Get used to it.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
"What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea."
* * * * *
The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
You need to get yourself a dictionary. Atheism is not a doctrine on how to treat your fellow man. Whether an atheist kills or not is about as important as whether a pants-wearer kills someone. If I kill a person while wearing pants, would you say that pantsism is the reason for the murders?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
And yet so far. Your explanation seems reasonable, but is a bit off. God is not capricious.
There is a distinct difference between discerning whether something is good or evil, and understanding that a boundary has been set and should not be crossed.
My 20 month old son does not discern that touching a hot stove will burn him, but he does comprehend that he must not touch the stove. Adam and Eve knew what God said, and that breaking the rule was BAD. In fact, God told them, if you break this rule, you will die.
Eating the fruit allowed them to understand the basis for discernment of good and evil. Before that, they clearly understood that there was a rule, and that violation of that rule made them subject to punishment.
The root problem is that they (like us) want to do what THEY want rather than obey God. When they chose to disobey God, the consequence was separation from Him, and ultimately, death - for themselves and for their offspring.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Or perhaps SOME people DO realize that theft doesn't stop being theft if it's government doing it, and calling it "taxing the rich". And some of them do even have the moral fiber to stand against injustice, even if they benefit from it?
Except the people in question are the worst welfare leeches we have, so your "moral fiber" argument is worse than laughable.
Try it again when they give up their farm subsidies nad their utility subsidies and all their other entitlement programs and start pulling their own weight for once rather than leeching off of my productivity and then whining like little bitches about *exactly what they are doing*.
Sorry, but the completely contradictory and nonsensical nature of their various positions demonstrates their total lack of anything approaching morality. If not, why are they on the obviously wrong side of every moral issue?
That one is easy to explain. He rolled a 20.
The word 'atheist' is completely pointless to begin with and should be rejected as useless jargon. How many words describe what you do not believe? How about:
Aquinist: A person who does not believe in unicorns.
Adentite: A person who does not believe in the tooth fairy.
PCB
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
7 states amended their state constitutions to ensure their already existing laws against same-sex marriage could not be struck down by state courts as being unconstitutional IN THE LAST ELECTION. That brings the total number of states to have done so to the number 27. Only 1 state (Arizona) that has had the amendment on the ballot has voted against it. On the bright side, that was also in the 2006 election, so maybe it suggests a very slow change towards rationality.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
How is that that Communism, allegedly founded on a scientific basis, stressing rationality and scientific though, with principles regarded as altruistic (from each according to his ability to each according to his need), repeatedly produced such carnage and such leaders?
Because it wasn't really founded on that basis. It was founded on a *religious* belief in Communism.
Just because you replace worship of a god with worship of the state doesn't make it any less of a religion.
I don't think anyone is denying that these people have the freedom to practice their religion or believe what they want. But we have the freedom to express and criticize what we feel is silly, stupid, or even mildly dangerous delusions. For some reason people tend to feel that religion is the one topic that is beyond criticism. You can deride someone's politics, but you have to respect their cherished religious beliefs. No you don't. You only have to respect their right to hold them and practice them so far as it doesn't infringe upon other more basic rights (e.g., so murder in the name of religious belief is unacceptable).
My point is that people have a right to believe and practice their religion, and they have a right to express themselves verbal (I can't just beat people senseless because I don't agree with them), but there is no right not to be offended. Not only would such a right be completely incompatible with freedom of speech, it is completely unpractical to enforce. I, as the speaker, do not have complete control over whether I offend my listeners. Many important things that must be said will offend some either intentionally or unintentionally. This has as much to do with the listener as the speaker. And someone can always claim offense if they don't like what they hear, and such a right would quickly translate into a right not to hear anything you don't want to hear. Such a right would be nearly the opposite of freedom of expression, giving anybody the ability to silence anyone. No, a right not to be offended would quickly lead to a very silent world.
So one might say, "who cares what these people believe and profess; just let them live in their deluded world." I think that is the wrong way to look at this. While they have the right to believe this young Earth creationist crap, their evangelism of such beliefs has a real impact. Science and the pursuit of knowledge is endangered whenever we have pseudoscience that fools people or we replace science with dogmatism that we mislabel as science. Education of our youth is what is endangered here. I don't care if a particular person does not value science and chooses to live by faith while completely forsaking reason. Not everyone is even interested in science, and there is more to life than this one topic. What angers me, and what must be stopped is people being intellectually dishonest about science and twisting it. It degrades and pollutes science. Be honest. Say that science and literal interpretation of the biblical creation story don't match but that you believe the creation story by faith, which triumphs reason for you. I know Christians who do this. At least it is intellectually honest. But don't tell me black is white and hot is cold. Don't accept science everywhere else but be the biggest skeptic in the world only where it challenges your faith. These are the people that readily accept everything else in science, accept the play up the "it's just a theory line" only for evolution (or geology, cosmology, physics and nearly every other discipline if they are young Earth creationists instead of just "intelligent design adherents").
So in conclusion, there is no right not to offend, and this is a serious issue with real consequences. We should not be silent or complacent on this issue.
That anyone modded that shit insightful just goes to show how cool it is to bash religion, especially christianity, on slashdot.
Do you believe that there are mile-high monsters made of orange marmalade living on the moons of Jupiter?
Unless you do, by your own reasoning you are a member of the religion which denies the existence of the Great Jovian Marmalade Monsters.
Or do you have direct evidence to support your otherwise unsubstantiated belief that such beings do not exist?
Do you see the problem here?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
but for me an atheist has always been someone who believes there is no god (a religious belief), and an agnostic is someone who merely doesn't believe there is a god, but allows it as a possibility.
Well, quite simply, you're wrong.
I am an atheist as everybody in the world started out.
Many people arbitrarliy choose some particular fantasy to start believing in, most often becasue their parents threatened them with eternal torture if they didn't.
There is not one single scrap of evidence for any gods or any religions, therefore, there is not one reason to buy into that silly crap.
This doesn't mean that there is no possible way that there ever could be a god, but it does mean that it's pretty stupid to believe that some ignorant desert nomads magically got it right.
if you want to use the word "atheist" to mean "agnostic" what word do you use to describe people who believe there is no god?
First this isn't using "atheist to mean "agnostic". Second, there is pretty much nobody who "believes" there is no god. For that to be a reasonable position, you would already have to assume that there is some valid basis for believing there is one which is putting the cart before the horse.
Heck, you could come up with all the wild delusional fantasies you want, but the fact that I don't drop all reason in order to magically start believing in them doesn't make my skepticism about your totally unsupported fantasies into a "belief".
Your entire argument skips the most important fact which is that atheism is the default position of every person who has ever lived.
Nazism was responsible (directly) for 11 million deaths, indirectly perhaps twice that. No religion has ever come close to that.
You need to move this one over to the religion column as Nazism was explicitly and aggressively Christian, not atheistic.
Morality and faith are not arbitrary to an athiest. They are arrived at through logical thought and rational deduction. Faith and morals are arbitrary to a deist because one's choice of God and religion is arbitrary, and even when one has chosen, one can choose which precepts to follow and which to reject. God says not to eat shellfish, but you know that part is just ancient tribal belief. God says not to kill innocents, but you know those guys are evil sinners so grab a stone!
Moral athiests have arrived at their morals through thought and introspection. There are good, solid, selfish reasons not to light children on fire, we don't need some arbitrary and unverifiable book of rules to know that. The fact is, either morals and rules come from outside the universe and there is no way of verifying their correctness because they are outside all possible experience, or they come from inside the universe and can be deduced from experiences had inside the universe.
If there is no God, then people who believe in God are not only more delusional than those of us who know that God's existence or lacjk thereof simply doesn't matter, they are less likely to arrive at correct action in any given situation. By correct action I mean the action that will most efficiently bring about the greatest satisfaction among the greatest number. Admitedly, it is an arbitrary definition, but you will find that it is one many can agree with and from a pragmatic standpoint, that is what counts.
Because "believers" have subjugated their ability to think for themselves to religious dogma, they will be unable to act flexibly and creatively in situations that cause cognitive dissonance within their religious framework. People who have arrived at their morality through logic and introspection can adapt and be good people in any situation.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Actually the "yuo people" was addressed to all the fundamentalists, not to all the atheists.
Ah. Fair enough
I would argue Atheism is just another religion.
And you have. To the extent that we might define "religion" to be a philosophical belief system about the nature of god - I would agree. It is a fact, though, that the vast majority of religions share general characteristics that you will not find in atheism. It all depends on how broadly you want to define the word "religion."
I just chose not to limit myself to any one belief system. I just pick and choose whatever seems right from whatever religion I'm exposed to. Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, Mohammed all hove some very insightful knowledge of the universe. Why limit yourself to one?
An approach I can support wholeheartedly.
It's interesting that you would immediately assume that someone who is contrary to your beliefs is Christian.
You can rightly say that I got carried away with an assumption - do not then make the mistake of doing the same.
I assumed you were a Christian because you cited Jesus and his teachings. You referred to the (generally understood) Judeo-Christian notion of 'God loving you'. You did not directly refer to characteristic figures or teachings from any other religion.
If I drew an incorrect conclusion from what I was presented - then I retract it, and I apologize for any offense. Allow me to note, though, that it was a (flawed) conclusion based on your text, not my prejudice.
I'm reminded of a quote from dune I saw in someone's sig: "What do you despise? By this are you truly known."
It's from Frank Herbert, if you're interested.
I think this is a trap that many atheists fall into. They simply define themselves as simply being against christianity (and by extension all religions).
Well, first of all - it is not at all a natural extension to say that to be against Christianity is to be against all religions.
Your main point, though, which I would interpret to be that atheism is better understood by what it is not, rather than what it is, is well taken from this corner. A point I reflected on after writing my post above, in fact.
However you are again, IMHO, continuing to take characteristics and attitudes that would well apply across the board, and projecting them simply on atheists. It is true that for many atheists, it is nothing more than a rejection of religion, or perhaps the rejection of a specific faith - but the same is true of non-atheists. Many of them also have a simplistic view, and one that is only relative to their own particular faith.
I have heard many christians discuss atheism solely from the perspective about what it is about Christianity we reject. This was further emphasized the first time I spoke with a muslim about my atheism - and he immediately put atheism into a context of Atheism vs. Islam.
So this narrow view of a philosophical system - the fact that one may limit themselves by only its simplest tenants is (I would argue) a human characteristic - and not an imagination-deficit that atheists have a monopoly on.
So when an atheist asks "Why are we here?" he has to reject any answer that might resemble something from religion. This is what is so limiting about atheism.
Again, I don't agree that you can take it that far. We must reject anything 'that might resemble something from religion'? I have beliefs that religious friends have described as "deeply spiritual." As I said before, there is room for beauty, imagination, and inspiration in atheism.
Atheism implicitly rejects the notion that we are given our purpose from some external entity, this is true. Religions, by and large, also implicitly reject the idea that we might actually choose to answer that question for ourselves.
They're both limiting - not because there's something wrong with them but because to b
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
So Christianity is valid because there's an old book about it?
There are older books about other religions, you know. Are those more valid than Christianity?
Yes, but the Christian Bible says that if you reject it, your reasoning is reduced to foolishness. Which, when you examine the presuppositions of those who reject the Christian God, is as plain as the nose on your face.
Anyone can make claims--you can have some guy walk in off the street and say he's God.
However, saying that rejecting the Christian God will result in the undermining of all human knowledge, morality, dignity, and science--that's extraordinary proof for an extraordinary claim.
You see, once you assume laws of logic exist, and you obligate other men to adhere to them--you assume the Christian God exists. Your engaging in debate becomes your own refutation.
Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.
But at the same time there are plenty of Atheists, Muslism, etc. who put a lot of work into feeding and clothing the poor and what's more , in the case of atheism, there is no religious incentive, these are humanitarian acts.
Software Freedom Day!.
Screw that, we've got them beat in the greater San Diego area. Located in lovely Santee, CA (or Klantee, or Santucky depending on your preference...) A bunch of my grad school friends took a field-trip to the Institute for Creation Research and went on their museum tour. Apparently is quite well done, with out-of-context quotes of real peer-reviewed science papers, superb rhetorical slight-of-word, and a veneer of 'research.'
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
The story of adam and eve is, in my opinion, allegory that is often taken WAAAAAAY to literally. This is obvious to many devout christians I'm friends with, but seems not to be to many millions of others in this country.
Here's the fallacy of that concept. Jesus himself talked about Adam and Eve as if they were real, not allegory. And in one of the key treatises on Christian theology, Paul portrayed Christ as the "second Adam." If the first Adam was allegorical, there would have been no need for a second Adam.
prevents many of the affluent from doing their share to help those less fortunate
Why should the affluent help anyone? If Christianity is an outdated mind-virus, why should any individual do anything to help anyone besides themselves?
is it *really* possible for god not to have known what adam and eve would do?
Nope. It's not. But that does not change the fact that Adam had a choice to make, and he made it. He "chose.....poorly." God is not responsible for Adam's choice even though He must have known the outcome before the beginning. Adam is responsible.
could jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?
The question is nonsense. Could God make 4=6? Can God smell the color nine? Nonsense. Tripe. But you may ask nonsense if you like. Don't expect a sensible answer, though.
Do you kick him out of the house and stop talking to him?
Well, if my kid was self-destructive, I might kick him out of the house and set up boundaries about what constituted a healthy relationship with him. FWIW - God did not stop talking to Adam. Adam still had some relationship with God - it was simply fundamentally different from the previous relationship. Adam had hope of fully restored relationship with God on the basis of God's mercy.
I'm personally not capable of belief in that which is directly contradicted by reason
I'm intrigued by this statement. First, not capable, or unwilling to submit to that kind of truth (if it exists.) Secondly, can you give an example of Christian teaching which exemplifies this?
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Everything that happened in Eden occured within a closed system God designed and implemented. As such, any bugs in that system are his responsibility. If he couldn't abide having Adam and Eve around because they rebelled, that was God's choice. God made the decision that if Adam and Eve ate some fruit, they couldn't ever be with him unless they performed the right sacrifices or unless God's son died a horrific death. God designed the system, he wrote the book. if you turn the oven on and put a pot on one of the front burners and fill it with boiling water and have the handle facing out where a kid can grab it, it is not the kid's fault that he got boiling water on him, it's your fault.
I believe there may be a Supreme Being, but the "God" of Christianity seems like a fricking lunatic, an embodiment of the fears and flaws of his followers. A created universe makes a fair bit of sense. An eternal heaven and hell does not make sense. If you're determined to limit yourself by thinking of yourself as a dog compared to God, that's your fault, and honestly I think it makes you a smaller and more limited person for it. You're the sort of simple mortal that Q would love, because you're completely willing to bow down and worship a God you think is beyond your understanding. I'd rather keep looking and keep asking.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Those are no more Christians than the guys with bomb belts are Muslims.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Their thesis is "there is no god", and have developed a whole line of reasonings to "prove" this thesis. The Antithesis is "There is a god", and I have rarely seen any atheist spend the amount of time on this consideration.
What a bunch of crap.
There isn't an atheist thesis.
There is a religious one "There is a God".
The reasonable response to which is "Prove it".
At this point the theists point completely falls to shreds and they generally start babbling about needing faith or threwatening to burn you alive or something since there is not one single shred of evidence for any of their religious beliefs.
You fall into the all too common trap of assuming that there is some arbitrary default weight to the religious belief which there isn't.
"Consider the alternative"?!? Seriously, "the alternative" is shoved in your face everywhere in this country.
Thinking it's silly to believe in far out delusions without a single shred of evidence is just simple basic common sense.
But I am one of those wackos, who believes the Scriptures, namely because none of the claims found in it have been falsified.
The thing about that makes you a "wacko" is the fact that there are plenty of proven falsehoods in the bible and you chose to ignore them if you ever actually did any investigation at all.
If that were really your reason, then you would equally believe in the invisible pink unicorn and the flying spaghetti monster as neither of those have been proven false either.
Heck, if you were telling the truth about your reasons for faith, then you would believe just as much in every single wacky insane nutjob theory that hasn't been explicitly disproven and probably some that have since the exact same argument works for anything.
Oh yes! Christians are soooo repressed and vilified in this country! Just the other day I was saying to a friend how nice it was that we got Beltane off as a nationally recognized holiday. And I was signing up for one of the weekly Bible burnings we hold in each city. And of course, thinking of the upcoming day of thanks to Brahma for all the good in our lives, I was so happy that we had elected so many atheists to national office.
Tell me, does that persecution complex of yours get old after a while?
That is all.
Atheists do not believe in God. Usually this is because they view the existence of God/god/gods/a higher power as tremendously unlikely based on quantifiable physical evidence validated by the scientific method. Similarly, a humanistic approach to morality also relies on quantifiable physical evidence. Humanistic morality is usually a combination of rules that amount to the negative form of Christianity's Golden Rule: Do not do unto others what you would not want them to do to you. (Understanding that the spirit of the rule is important. For example, a masochist can't arbitrarily cause pain just because they like to experience it.) Humanistic morality relies on following the general laws of societal morality--the laws that have kept humanity around.
As such, if society deems it wrong to light children on fire, then it is wrong for a humanist to light children on fire. Those who do not follow society's mores are misfits and rightly considered disfunctional. Contrary to your claim, this standard is not arbitrary, but many Americans don't like it because of our cultures emphasis on individuality. They don't like the idea that they don't get to choose what is right and wrong for themselves. There are variations that give more power to the individual, but from a philosophic standpoint, these variations are more prone to logical attack and personal abuse.
The weakness of this system is that society's values can be hijacked (and example are strewn throughout this thread). An element of pragmatism, intelligence, and personal responsibility is necessary for a practicing humanist.
Interestingly, both religious and nonreligious people behave in largely the same way as is evidenced by the fact that the United States has a single society rather than two parallel societies. Faith forms subcultures, but not new societies. Religious people can readily interact with irreligious.
To validate this point, observe that atheists aren't running rapant in the streets, causing mayhem and chaos everywhere. Most people do whatever they want to do, regardless of religious belief and we seem to be trundling along just fine. Is it nature or nuture?
religion and faith are not the same thing. If you accept any premise such as axioms in math or scientific data, you have to believe that it has some truth to it. As you said, you don't just believe that Napoleon is that guy on the street.
You seem to have some kind of hatred going against religion which is based on a few people you don't like and so you make broad generalizations. Faith is required in science to believe that what you are seeing is real. That's simplifying it but that is the basic. If you read my post then you would see I said that it could not be proved that God is exists. Certitude is the fusion of faith and reason which leads you to a belief system. Yours is that "Jeebus and religion suck, LOL!" Certainly people have right to believe that religion has been misleading and controlling. Why is that? because of what man has done to religion. The bible doesn't say anything about clergy or needing to believe that christ was resurrected.
You also seem to have ignored the part where I said that miracles are for those who were present. The reality of the resurrection is a spiritual one, whether jesus existed exactly as people think he did, i.e., unmarried, married, actually crucified, not even killed etc. what matters is the spiritual reality. People get pissed off at religion when they have to accept a premise that is absurd or unnecessary. Religion is not an exclusive club of control it is humanity unified(hopefully.) As G.K. Chesterton said: "Christianity has never succeeded because it has never been tried." People who hate Christianity and who are Fundamentalists both have one thing in common, they think in black and white. It's either religion is evil or it's completely and literally right.
For some, yes - it's boredom, and the "meaning of life thing" - (packaged up in a neat little book that just about anyone can understand, for the same reason that a McDonald's Cheeseburger is packaged into a neat little box that just about anyone can enjoy).
At least in America, anyway, I think that over the past 40-50 years or so, there's been a growing sense of loss of control of our country, our laws, and our governments. The Evangelical movement has arisen primarily as a tool, a corporate tool, to make money, and keep people distracted from the real problems that affect their lives and make them angsty. Don't worry about Sony installing rootkits on your computer, Jesus is Coming! Don't worry about Wal Mart tracking you with RFID tags, Jesus is coming! Don't worry about nightclubs scanning your driver's license, Jesus is Coming! Don't worry about the bank giving your purchasing information to the FBI, Jesus is coming!
(then there's - Worry about the evil terrorists, Mohammad is coming!)
The nature of this movement is evident when you look at the sheer ruthless industrial efficiency of the new suburban "mega church". A tax-free enterprise, with relatively low operating costs; all they need to do is tell sweet stories a couple hours, one day a week, 2000 or so believers at a time, and sit back and rake in the tithing. Occasionally sponsor a mission or a soup line. And all those angsty people learn is; don't associate with those heathen hippies and their commie ideas.
This is coming from someone who DOES believe in a God, and Jesus.
I used to go to my local suburban megachurch, after I relocated to a different part of the country. What they're teaching, is not the Christianity I was raised with. A whole new set of memes has taken hold. A set of memes that used to be relegated to lunatic fringe wingnuttery. For example: The official stance of the Catholic church, as long as I've been aware, was that Evolution was God's way of making Mankind on Earth - and if it took hundreds of millions of years - well, that's how long it took, and don't hold the scripture to perfect inerrancy, because some parts are allegorical. That shit's just out of style now.
I don't really know what, if anything, can be done to stop this trend. Maybe after a few more scandals, people will stop realizing that their leaders are not God's Messengers. If nothing else, this has brought their leaders great power, and power always always corrupts. (and stealing God's power is "absolute power"). And from that corruption comes arrogance. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
So there are immutable, absolute, and correct laws of logic - nice to know. Out of curiosity which ones would those be? Intuitionistic logic? Modal logic? Classical logic? Relevance logic? Some Paraconsistent logic? Computability logic? Fuzzy logic (as a particular specialisation of Intuitionistic logic)? Free logic? Tense logic? Linear logic? Quantum logic? If there's an absolute logic that is true, then all these others must be wrong - so which one is the true one? Or is it perhaps possible that logic is simply a human construction based on reflection of thought - the application of analysis to itself to determine the most effective ways of thinking? That would certainly provide good reason for the profusion of logics - each serves a different purpose depending on the sorts of results one wishes to determine with their thoughts. One last thing - is the Continuum Hypothesis true, or false?
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
My father-in-law and his wife. In every other aspect of life, I admire the man, but his stubborn adherence to anything that comes out of Pat Robertson's mouth is very troubling. I don't care what he believes, as long as he doesn't waste our time trying to convince me of it--and stays away from my children with that nonsense.
He's been talking about this "museum" for at least five years. He gets way too excited about it, like an Amway distributor inviting you to something that features his personal Amway hero.
This weekend should be interesting; first time we'll have spoken at length since the mid-term elections.
PS: Did y'all know that The Rapture Is Not In The Bible? I think I'll research this factoid thoroughly before we drive to Northeast Texas to celebrate Thanksgiving in an RV park.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
> I don't go around converting people to atheism but if they bring up the subject I'm going
> to make sure they know that they believe in a fairy tale.
Actually, if you accept Popper's definition of scientific questions, you can not tell them that they believe in a fairytale. You can not envision an experiment which would falsify their premise of the existence of God, neither can they come up with one to falsify your statement of God's non-existence.
That question is scientifically undecidable, thus can not even be the subject of scientific debate.
It is pure belief on both sides. If you think about it, you can not disprove a statement like "the world was created just a picosecond ago, with space, time and all particles suddenly popping up from nothingness in their present (quantum) state and all of our memories have been created so that we think that we (and the Universe) have been around for ages". Your argument against such a statement is that why on Earth (or Heaven, rather) would a god do such a thing, trying to fool us? The believers would argue that you can't comprehend the reasons behind God's actions so you shall not ask that question; the agnostics would point out that since it is undecidable, Occam's razor tells them to assume that there's no God until positive evidence pops up and the atheists just discard the whole thing as complete rubbish. However, all of them do it based on their personal beliefs, not solid logic or scientific arguments.
When creationists come around with easily falsifiable pseudo-science, by all means whack them on the head. When people come around and do nasty things "in the name of God", ditto. But you can not attack them for their believing in a god, for you have no way of telling that they're wrong.
I highly recommend people read their "Get Answers" section. You'll either laugh or cry (perhaps both) at the incredible claims they make. A few choice selections
On Dinosaurs:
On "Young Earth":
At first I wasn't sure if the author of both of these articles (Ken Ham) was simply ignorant of the existance of half-life dating and other dating techniques. Then I saw that he simply dismisses science as "so-called 'science'." Good to see that he's putting those logical faculties he received from God to good use.
So read on if you dare, but be careful! It's full of mind bending spin... excuse me, corrections.
So... you don't want to be known as a young-Earther but acknowledge that you believe the Earth is young... riiiight.
I am thinking of starting the Flat Earth Museum. Ticket payers suddenly fall into an abyss (after they pay, of course).
Table-ized A.I.
Bertrand Russell coined the term agnostic (in the context of religious belief) as a way of making it clear that his atheism included a willingness to consider evidence. But I just call myself an atheist for the reasons stated. I have no reason to believe in a deity. If such a reason presented itself, I'd rethink my beliefs. But for now, from my perspective, the evidence is no more compelling for YHWH than for the FSM.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
>> in the case of atheism, there is no religious incentive, these are humanitarian acts.
>It's called serving your own pride.
Welcome to the "Lincoln's Pigs" paradox. I'll give you the short version (the story is apocryphal, but the lesson is not). One day, future-President Lincoln was walking down the street around a small town. He walked past a farm, with a pig sty, and in the sty he spotted a small piglet that appeared to be drowning in the mud. Without heed to his expensive clothing, he climbed into the sty and pulled the piglet from the mud, saving it. On exiting the pen, someone exclaimed what a truly kind and generous person he was, to do such a selfless act. Quickly, he replied that his act was not selfless, but exactly the opposite: merely selfish. "Had I simply walked past and let the piglet drown, I wouldn't have gotten any sleep tonight, thinking about it. In order to make sure that I would, I had to save the pig. I did it purely for my own benefit."
The onlookers thought about this for a few moments, until someone said "But, Mr. Lincoln, that doesn't make sense. If you were as selfish a person as you say you are, then why would you care about the piglet at all, enough to have lost sleep over it, if you had just kept on walking?"
My point here, is that it doesn't really matter if the immediate motivation for a virtuous act is 'selfish,' such as alleviating one's own conscience, or stroking one's pride or ego. A truly selfish person wouldn't need to help others in order to have pride in themselves, or to sleep better at night -- they wouldn't care.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Essentially this argument is a form of projection, where a religious individual views an atheism as a "religion", and then proceeds to impart many negative aspects of religion, which they will not consciously admit to themselves, onto atheism.
Religions are altogether invalid as logical arguments. Even in their best case scenario, with n distict religions in the world, at least n-1 of them have been completely fabricated out of nothing. They contain no divine revelations or truths. Any honest individual, when confronted with the argument, must admit that all religions are essentially baseless within their own framework. They call upon divine entities, but these entities are simply fabrications of human thought.
Atheists are simply stating the truth. Gods and godesses are fabrications of the human mind. They exist only as considerations in the minds of those considering them. That is the truth, but it is one which most people will never admit to themselves, and will bitterly reject in any way possible those who try to convince them of it.
May the Maths Be with you!