Core Christian beliefs require a personal (=communicates with man), immanent (=acts in the world) God. Christians have claimed various kinds of communications and acts in the past: revelations and religious texts, warnings of impending disasters, punishment of the wicked, etc. None of those claims have stood linguistic, historical, or statistical analyses.
If Christians want to come up with specific additional proposed behaviors of a personal, immanent God, we can test those too. Until Christians do, there is nothing else to test.
If you drop the requirements of a personal, immanent God, you're not a Christian or a theist anymore (you may be a deist; some atheists are deists).
is that no property can legitimately change ownership without the current owner's consent
It can if the law says it can. And we're having this discussion because there is some question as to whether Torrens title implies that, a question you don't address either. I don't know what Australian law actually requires, I'm just saying that would be a bad policy.
You hit your finger with a hammer, you hurt. Hence the hammer exists as far as you're concerned. You're nice to your gf and she gives you a bj. Hence your gf exists as far as you're concerned.
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
There have been plenty of investigation: physical experiments, attempts at communication, etc. None of them have ever provided any evidence that God exists. In fact, time and again, properties postulated for God by churches have shown not to be plausible. That is what "X does not exists" means; we apply the same standard to everything else whose non-existence we take as given.
Stating "I know..." about a thing that is, by definition, unknowable, is irrational.
Things that "exist" are observable, and hence knowable, as part of the real world. If something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist, by definition.
First link for "atheism" points to Conservapedia, which says:
Unlike Christianity, which is supported by a large body of sound evidence (see: Christian apologetics), atheism has no proof and evidence supporting its ideology.
If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?
The owner can't protect himself against fraudulent sales because he doesn't know a transaction is taking place. The buyer, on the other hand, knows that a transaction is taking place and that there is a certain risk that it's fraudulent. The buyer has all the power and information necessary to make sure it's not a fraudulent transaction and to insure against it. That's why the buyer should lose the house and it should go back to its original owner. The buyer should have title insurance (either privately purchased or through the state).
If you don't place the responsibility on the buyer, no party who knows about the transaction has any interest in preventing fraud: the real estate agent gets his cut, the buyer gets a cheap house, and the con men get their money. In that situation, they can all ignore signs of fraud to the maximum degree that they can plausibly get away with.
To me there's a much more significant conflict, which is that this kind of behavior is (as I see it) against Jesus's teachings. Love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.
One of the basic tenets of mainstream Christianity is that the only way to salvation is to believe in Jesus; in different words, anybody who doesn't will be condemned to horrendous suffering for all eternity. How much more hateful and intolerant can a religious message get than that?
Neither atheism nor most other religions are like that; they believe that there are many ways to salvation, many ways to live a good and moral life.
Doesn't make it right.
It isn't "right" to offend people without cause. But given that Christians have preached hate and intolerance towards atheists for two millennia, often using the Bible as a symbol, atheists have ample cause. And burning the Bible expresses the right symbolism: atheists do not respect the book and refuse to submit to its authority any further.
The only reason that should offend you is if you do believe that atheists should submit to the authority of the Bible after all, which, of course, would make you intolerant.
You shouldn't be too quick to assume you know what sort of person I am. You might just get it wrong.
Based on your response, it's pretty clear I got it right.
It doesn't work for fuel either. The algae get their energy from the sun, and with all the pumps and plastic, that's not even very efficient. You're going to capture more energy with a solar panel of the same size and then hooking that up to an electric car.
Growing algae requires maintenance, energy, and costly raw materials. And in the end, you get a fairly limited diet out of it.
If you want to grow your own food, just find food crops and plants that work in your climate and that require little maintenance, and set up a garden that yields food most of the year. All you need is soil, water, and rocks.
If you're living on the 25th floor of an apartment complex and don't have the space, you might as well just buy sustainable food imported from elsewhere; you'll never make up for the energy and raw materials required to grow algae in your living room.
It is a metaphor. It is a virtual slap in the face, an expression of the deepest loathing and utter disrespect for everything they believe in. It's like talking trash about someone's mom.
So what? "Deepest loathing and utter disrespect" is what prominent Christians and Muslims express for atheists.
Pope Benedict, in a new encyclical released on Friday, said atheism was responsible for some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" in history.
Many Muslim clerics demand the death penalty for atheism. And Christians and Muslims don't stop at loathing and disrespect: atheism is still being punished (occasionally by death) is Muslim nations, and it used to be severely punished in the West as well. You may say that you personally are more tolerant, but if you identify as a Christian or Muslim, you identify yourself with people like O'Connor, Pope Benedict and/or mainstream Muslim clerics.
People like you are apparently oblivious to the kind of intolerance and hatred your religious leaders spread in your name. If you view the Bible or Quran burning as a "virtual slap in the face", consider it a wakeup call to do something about intolerance and hatred in your own religion, because you seem to have dozed off in your complacency.
(And the GP's point is valid: many Christians and Muslims view burning of their holy books not just as a sign of disrespect against them, they view it as a religious offense; but that view is inconsistent with the prohibitions against idolatry.)
Based on polls about religious belief, it's clear that the vast majority of "Christians" (at least in the US and Europe) aren't Christians at all, they believe some tolerant New Age feel-good religion that has little to do with Christianity. (Islam seems to be the same way, but there is less data.) That's nice as far as it goes, and atheists generally don't have a problem with those kinds of pseudo-Christians.
But the religions and beliefs that the terms "Christianity" and "Islam" actually represent, are nowhere near as tolerant: the proselytize to convert atheists, they condemn atheism as immoral, and they often even call for atheism to be restricted or punished by law. Of course, atheists have a right to speak up against that, and according to atheist beliefs, they also have a moral obligation to speak up.
Proponents of Christianity (and Islam) are trying to be in a position where the vast crowds of moderate, tolerant people who use the names of those religions are used as a kind of "human shields" to deflect justified criticism and opposition to the intolerant and hateful interpretations of those religions. If tolerant Christians and Muslims don't want to be criticized by atheists, they need to come up with a way of referring to themselves that is different from the terms that the intolerant and hateful proponents of those religions use. That is not a problem that atheists can solve for these groups.
However, I do hope he's not doing it with the purpose of taunting, because I would view that as malicious.
And why do you hope that? To many atheists, Christianity and Islam are intrinsically morally wrong and evil and therefore to be opposed. One aspect of that is expressing that the "holy" books are neither true nor deserve special reverence. Of course, such a burning is supposed to get your attention and it is supposed to make you think.
Religions are the same way. Conservative Christians often preach in highly offensive ways against atheists and "desecrate" things that to atheists are objects of reverence. Conservative Muslims go as far as advocating and requiring the death penalty for atheism; how much more "malicious" can you get? And both religions do that in part because they consider it their mission to spread their message and recruit atheists into their fold. Well, it works both ways.
A more common use for Bibles and Qurans is for people to get money and power quickly by becoming preachers. Most commonly, this is then accomplished by preaching hatred and discrimination against a bunch of common minorities: atheists, homosexuals, "fornicators". And these people have their hate speech protected under freedom of religion and non-discrimination clauses.
He's perfectly free to say it. But he has to deal with the consequences. The government isn't saying a word about it. It's his peers and employer that are upset. And he'll face their wrath, as it should be.
He is an atheist. To an atheist, the Quran and the Bible are not holy and opposition to them is a moral duty because of the harm they have caused. Therefore, his actions are not just free speech, they are protected religious expression, making discrimination against him based on his actions illegal (Australia also has non-discrimination rules). (Furthermore, QUT seems to be a public university.)
What he did was thoughtless and inconsiderate,
Many religious offend each other; people are trying to sweep that under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist but that doesn't change the facts. To a Christian, Mohammed must logically have been an impostor and the Quran fake. To a Muslim, the holy trinity and the divinity of Jesus are fake and the Bible is corrupt. And both religions (and others) get away with heaping vitriol, lies, and committing highly offensive acts against atheists (and homosexuals, and others) who don't fit into their narrow world view, all under the cover of religious freedom and religious non-discrimination.
Freedom of religion and non-discrimination laws against religion have to protect you even if you offend other religions because offending other religions is pretty much inevitable. And atheism, for these purposes, is a religion.
Germany has strong privacy protections! They protect you from being photographed on public streets! Only the German can photograph, catalog, and track you, and as we all know, German governments have never abused that power! Certainly not in the last 100 years!
Let's see: downloading publicly accessible images from the Internet in order to build a searchable database is now illegal in Sweden? How do Google and Bing do it then?
Burning your own copy of religious book is not an "attack", it is a legitimate exercise of first amendment rights. And you're wrong: "all of Christianity" is not pissed off by burning Bibles; moderate Christians--the vast majority--simply shrug.
Any Muslim who is really "pissed off" by this should to do some soul searching about their religion, their beliefs, their anger, their insecurities, and their fellow Muslims. And that, in a nutshell, is what effective free speech is supposed to accomplish, which is why we protect it even if it does "piss off" people.
But if you say "Smith [1] demonstrated this fact in his paper" and [1] is a peer reviewed publication, you won't get laughed at. Note the absence of credentials.
The sort of violence you're talking about stems from social, economic, and political factors.
The death penalty for apostasy does not stem from "social, economic, and political factors", and neither do severe punishments for blasphemy or homosexuality.
It just happens that, right now, Islam is prevalent in some really crappy countries. The situation can (and has been) reversed.
(1) What is relevant right now is what Islam and Christianity are today, not what they can be in the far future or what you think they should be.
(2) Islam and Christianity differ fundamentally both in their epistemology and relationship to society, not just their metaphysics.
(3) Christianity started out grim and murderous but has progressed in spurts towards more human rights and more peace. Islam started out grim and murderous, then experienced a golden age, but then fell into decay again. Very different histories.
Again, you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Sometimes the paper does not exactly "establish the fact", but you can assert that you're claiming a fact by virtue of it being claimed in some other academic work.
Yes, and you give the reference so that people can look up that paper. If, instead, you write "Prof. Smith told me and he has two PhD's so it must be true, people are going to laugh at you.
If you think credentials don't enter into it, you're naive.
Well, what you had for lunch probably enters into it, but it shouldn't. If you were supposed to use credentials, they'd be listed on papers, but they aren't usually.
Slashdot Mirror
Core Christian beliefs require a personal (=communicates with man), immanent (=acts in the world) God. Christians have claimed various kinds of communications and acts in the past: revelations and religious texts, warnings of impending disasters, punishment of the wicked, etc. None of those claims have stood linguistic, historical, or statistical analyses.
If Christians want to come up with specific additional proposed behaviors of a personal, immanent God, we can test those too. Until Christians do, there is nothing else to test.
If you drop the requirements of a personal, immanent God, you're not a Christian or a theist anymore (you may be a deist; some atheists are deists).
is that no property can legitimately change ownership without the current owner's consent
It can if the law says it can. And we're having this discussion because there is some question as to whether Torrens title implies that, a question you don't address either. I don't know what Australian law actually requires, I'm just saying that would be a bad policy.
You hit your finger with a hammer, you hurt. Hence the hammer exists as far as you're concerned. You're nice to your gf and she gives you a bj. Hence your gf exists as far as you're concerned.
Any equivalent for your "God"?
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
There have been plenty of investigation: physical experiments, attempts at communication, etc. None of them have ever provided any evidence that God exists. In fact, time and again, properties postulated for God by churches have shown not to be plausible. That is what "X does not exists" means; we apply the same standard to everything else whose non-existence we take as given.
Stating "I know..." about a thing that is, by definition, unknowable, is irrational.
Things that "exist" are observable, and hence knowable, as part of the real world. If something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist, by definition.
First link for "atheism" points to Conservapedia, which says:
If you were a comedian, you couldn't come up with something better than that. Are these people really that stupid?
The owner can't protect himself against fraudulent sales because he doesn't know a transaction is taking place. The buyer, on the other hand, knows that a transaction is taking place and that there is a certain risk that it's fraudulent. The buyer has all the power and information necessary to make sure it's not a fraudulent transaction and to insure against it. That's why the buyer should lose the house and it should go back to its original owner. The buyer should have title insurance (either privately purchased or through the state).
If you don't place the responsibility on the buyer, no party who knows about the transaction has any interest in preventing fraud: the real estate agent gets his cut, the buyer gets a cheap house, and the con men get their money. In that situation, they can all ignore signs of fraud to the maximum degree that they can plausibly get away with.
Or you can define it as where the center of mass for the entire universe is.
Depending on the structure of the universe, that may not be defined. It certainly cannot be determined.
You can calculate a center of mass for the visible universe, but that's not the same thing.
It's actually not the Earth that's at the center of the universe, it's the moon. Earth is just its slime-mold infested neighbor.
To me there's a much more significant conflict, which is that this kind of behavior is (as I see it) against Jesus's teachings. Love thy neighbor as thyself, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.
One of the basic tenets of mainstream Christianity is that the only way to salvation is to believe in Jesus; in different words, anybody who doesn't will be condemned to horrendous suffering for all eternity. How much more hateful and intolerant can a religious message get than that?
Neither atheism nor most other religions are like that; they believe that there are many ways to salvation, many ways to live a good and moral life.
Doesn't make it right.
It isn't "right" to offend people without cause. But given that Christians have preached hate and intolerance towards atheists for two millennia, often using the Bible as a symbol, atheists have ample cause. And burning the Bible expresses the right symbolism: atheists do not respect the book and refuse to submit to its authority any further.
The only reason that should offend you is if you do believe that atheists should submit to the authority of the Bible after all, which, of course, would make you intolerant.
You shouldn't be too quick to assume you know what sort of person I am. You might just get it wrong.
Based on your response, it's pretty clear I got it right.
religion != theism
It doesn't work for fuel either. The algae get their energy from the sun, and with all the pumps and plastic, that's not even very efficient. You're going to capture more energy with a solar panel of the same size and then hooking that up to an electric car.
Growing algae requires maintenance, energy, and costly raw materials. And in the end, you get a fairly limited diet out of it.
If you want to grow your own food, just find food crops and plants that work in your climate and that require little maintenance, and set up a garden that yields food most of the year. All you need is soil, water, and rocks.
If you're living on the 25th floor of an apartment complex and don't have the space, you might as well just buy sustainable food imported from elsewhere; you'll never make up for the energy and raw materials required to grow algae in your living room.
It is a metaphor. It is a virtual slap in the face, an expression of the deepest loathing and utter disrespect for everything they believe in. It's like talking trash about someone's mom.
So what? "Deepest loathing and utter disrespect" is what prominent Christians and Muslims express for atheists.
Many Muslim clerics demand the death penalty for atheism. And Christians and Muslims don't stop at loathing and disrespect: atheism is still being punished (occasionally by death) is Muslim nations, and it used to be severely punished in the West as well. You may say that you personally are more tolerant, but if you identify as a Christian or Muslim, you identify yourself with people like O'Connor, Pope Benedict and/or mainstream Muslim clerics.
People like you are apparently oblivious to the kind of intolerance and hatred your religious leaders spread in your name. If you view the Bible or Quran burning as a "virtual slap in the face", consider it a wakeup call to do something about intolerance and hatred in your own religion, because you seem to have dozed off in your complacency.
(And the GP's point is valid: many Christians and Muslims view burning of their holy books not just as a sign of disrespect against them, they view it as a religious offense; but that view is inconsistent with the prohibitions against idolatry.)
Based on polls about religious belief, it's clear that the vast majority of "Christians" (at least in the US and Europe) aren't Christians at all, they believe some tolerant New Age feel-good religion that has little to do with Christianity. (Islam seems to be the same way, but there is less data.) That's nice as far as it goes, and atheists generally don't have a problem with those kinds of pseudo-Christians.
But the religions and beliefs that the terms "Christianity" and "Islam" actually represent, are nowhere near as tolerant: the proselytize to convert atheists, they condemn atheism as immoral, and they often even call for atheism to be restricted or punished by law. Of course, atheists have a right to speak up against that, and according to atheist beliefs, they also have a moral obligation to speak up.
Proponents of Christianity (and Islam) are trying to be in a position where the vast crowds of moderate, tolerant people who use the names of those religions are used as a kind of "human shields" to deflect justified criticism and opposition to the intolerant and hateful interpretations of those religions. If tolerant Christians and Muslims don't want to be criticized by atheists, they need to come up with a way of referring to themselves that is different from the terms that the intolerant and hateful proponents of those religions use. That is not a problem that atheists can solve for these groups.
However, I do hope he's not doing it with the purpose of taunting, because I would view that as malicious.
And why do you hope that? To many atheists, Christianity and Islam are intrinsically morally wrong and evil and therefore to be opposed. One aspect of that is expressing that the "holy" books are neither true nor deserve special reverence. Of course, such a burning is supposed to get your attention and it is supposed to make you think.
Religions are the same way. Conservative Christians often preach in highly offensive ways against atheists and "desecrate" things that to atheists are objects of reverence. Conservative Muslims go as far as advocating and requiring the death penalty for atheism; how much more "malicious" can you get? And both religions do that in part because they consider it their mission to spread their message and recruit atheists into their fold. Well, it works both ways.
A more common use for Bibles and Qurans is for people to get money and power quickly by becoming preachers. Most commonly, this is then accomplished by preaching hatred and discrimination against a bunch of common minorities: atheists, homosexuals, "fornicators". And these people have their hate speech protected under freedom of religion and non-discrimination clauses.
Canada? QUT is in Australia.
In any case, even Canada protects religion and religious expression, and atheism is usually considered a religion for the purposes of such laws.
He's perfectly free to say it. But he has to deal with the consequences. The government isn't saying a word about it. It's his peers and employer that are upset. And he'll face their wrath, as it should be.
He is an atheist. To an atheist, the Quran and the Bible are not holy and opposition to them is a moral duty because of the harm they have caused. Therefore, his actions are not just free speech, they are protected religious expression, making discrimination against him based on his actions illegal (Australia also has non-discrimination rules). (Furthermore, QUT seems to be a public university.)
What he did was thoughtless and inconsiderate,
Many religious offend each other; people are trying to sweep that under the rug and pretend it doesn't exist but that doesn't change the facts. To a Christian, Mohammed must logically have been an impostor and the Quran fake. To a Muslim, the holy trinity and the divinity of Jesus are fake and the Bible is corrupt. And both religions (and others) get away with heaping vitriol, lies, and committing highly offensive acts against atheists (and homosexuals, and others) who don't fit into their narrow world view, all under the cover of religious freedom and religious non-discrimination.
Freedom of religion and non-discrimination laws against religion have to protect you even if you offend other religions because offending other religions is pretty much inevitable. And atheism, for these purposes, is a religion.
Germany has strong privacy protections! They protect you from being photographed on public streets! Only the German can photograph, catalog, and track you, and as we all know, German governments have never abused that power! Certainly not in the last 100 years!
They certainly download thumbnails.
Let's see: downloading publicly accessible images from the Internet in order to build a searchable database is now illegal in Sweden? How do Google and Bing do it then?
Burning your own copy of religious book is not an "attack", it is a legitimate exercise of first amendment rights. And you're wrong: "all of Christianity" is not pissed off by burning Bibles; moderate Christians--the vast majority--simply shrug.
Any Muslim who is really "pissed off" by this should to do some soul searching about their religion, their beliefs, their anger, their insecurities, and their fellow Muslims. And that, in a nutshell, is what effective free speech is supposed to accomplish, which is why we protect it even if it does "piss off" people.
But if you say "Smith [1] demonstrated this fact in his paper" and [1] is a peer reviewed publication, you won't get laughed at. Note the absence of credentials.
The sort of violence you're talking about stems from social, economic, and political factors.
The death penalty for apostasy does not stem from "social, economic, and political factors", and neither do severe punishments for blasphemy or homosexuality.
It just happens that, right now, Islam is prevalent in some really crappy countries. The situation can (and has been) reversed.
(1) What is relevant right now is what Islam and Christianity are today, not what they can be in the far future or what you think they should be.
(2) Islam and Christianity differ fundamentally both in their epistemology and relationship to society, not just their metaphysics.
(3) Christianity started out grim and murderous but has progressed in spurts towards more human rights and more peace. Islam started out grim and murderous, then experienced a golden age, but then fell into decay again. Very different histories.
Again, you aren't always citing the direct proof of an experiment. Sometimes the paper does not exactly "establish the fact", but you can assert that you're claiming a fact by virtue of it being claimed in some other academic work.
Yes, and you give the reference so that people can look up that paper. If, instead, you write "Prof. Smith told me and he has two PhD's so it must be true, people are going to laugh at you.
If you think credentials don't enter into it, you're naive.
Well, what you had for lunch probably enters into it, but it shouldn't. If you were supposed to use credentials, they'd be listed on papers, but they aren't usually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credential