I do treat individual theists with basic human respect. Their ideas and beliefs, not even a little bit. Their theistic organizations? No fucking way. If you are one of those rare theists who aren't members of organizations trying to control society, then kudos, I wasn't referring to you anyway. Otherwise, no, I'm not going to tolerate your activities, and I'll fight them with every legal tool I have at my disposal, including public ridicule.
I don't give a flying shit if they agree with me or not. They can privately believe I'm going to hell or anything else. And I don't even care if they don't want to do business with me(within the boundaries of the law). But the moment they try to rewrite society to incorporate their irrational bigotry, they need to get slapped down. I'll do everything in my power legally to deny them that ability.
Why would I be tolerant of someone who does not repay the favor? The gays aren't knocking at my door, telling my children that they are going to burn in hell forever. They aren't shooting abortion doctors. They aren't launching suicide attacks on my neighborhood. They aren't polluting science with their fictional delusions. When the theists abandon their irrational bigotry, grow up and stop trying to control their neighbors, they'll be worthy of tolerance.
Funny. Where I live(the US Midwest, FYI), the Christians are at the forefront of attacking human rights, demanding that non-believers kowtow to their deranged fantasies and attacking science when they aren't flailing about in fear of the devil driven liberal conspiracy. That's not what I would call being a good citizen.
Here's a few:
"As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves." - Deut. 20:14
"So that is what the Benjamites did. While the girls were dancing, each man caught one and carried her off to be his wife. Then they returned to their inheritance and rebuilt the towns and settled in them." - Judges 21:23 (read the preceding chapters to get a context, as well)
"Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." - Numbers 31:17-18
I'm sure all those virgins were quite willing after being kidnapped or watching their families being slaughtered.
Then again, this is the same religion that said that rape could be used to get yourself a wife, as long as you were willing to pony up some cash to daddy for taking his property without asking.
"If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." - Deut. 22:28-29
And what do you do with rape victims?
"If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man's wife. You must purge the evil from among you." - Deut 22:23-24
And I call bullshit on you. None of those things are core to Dawkins' point, which is that religions are unsubstantiated, mythological piles of bullshit which are causing harm to the world in general. It doesn't matter how many contradictions are in the bible. It doesn't matter whether Catholic theology conflicts with Calvinism. Those are all secondary concerns, which are frankly immaterial until you've started proving any of the underlying assumptions. And, of course, no theologian has managed to even get a start on that.
The books as a whole are mythology. Even the Greek myths incorporated bits of historical elements into the narratives. The fact that there may be kernels of historical truth don't make the whole anything other than myth. A bad, morally disturbing myth.
You must have been reading some weird translation of both holy books. The root of the Abrahamic religions is a monstrous tribal blood-god whose laws dictated the death penalty for all kinds of trivial transgressions, who treated women as property and who, in general, was a war-mongering, murdering bastard. He is as unpleasant a character as any of the other various gods that humans have contrived. The thin veneer of positive ethics slathered on later does nothing to mitigate the unbridled wickedness of this whole edifice of evil.
Yeah, I've read it. That's why I don't believe a word of it anymore. A couple of nuggets of decent ethics wrapped up in an utterly atrocious and quite ridiculous, morally corrupt mythology.
I mean, "educators" can not possibly be so stupid as to waste tax dollars on such ignorance, can they? The sad part is, even with this, they still aren't as bad as some parts of the USA.
Obvious troll, but I'll bite. How is this any different than the rampant and completely unsupervised genetic twiddling that has been happening in nature for the last few billion years?
Can you please point to an organisation the size of the Church that is paedophile free?
Can you point to an organization claiming to be the Body of Christ and the prime moral authority on the planet which also practices the cover up of child rape(which is just one facet of the abuse that the Church is dealing with now)? The (in)actions of the Vatican speak far more clearly than their public positions.
What you also fail to realise is that priests are on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: unlike 9 to 5 secularists who can engage in their little perversions outside of office hours and where the organisation they work bears no consequences when their employee commits a crime.
And this has what to do with the institutional practice of covering up crimes, pray tell? Are you suggesting that I cut the priests slack for diddling kids, or the bishops for hiding their crimes? How pathetic....
The way you present your opinion, you'd think 2010 was first time that Rome has been aware of this issue.
The way you miss my entire point, you'd think that your reading and critical thinking skills were in serious decline. It's almost as if you didn't read my post about cover ups.
You'll find that many abuse victims that populate these protest marches have already made settlements with the Church and they and their families are coming around for seconds in the compensation stakes. They see a wealthy organisation on the ropes and they're going in for another greedy swipe. This time, they won't be so lucky. There will be no double-compensation pay-outs. The Vatican's legal team will not budge on this matter.
Yup, blame those damned victims for getting raped. The fact that you continually ignore the point of this outrage, namely the cover ups, shows that you've followed the Church's example. Go ahead, ignore the problem. Just don't be surprised when you peek out of your blinders and find that the world has no use for your Chruch anymore.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your prejudices and your bigotry.
Given that you haven't refuted a single statement of mine, you apparently aren't worried about facts at all. But don't mind me. I'll just be here laughing at the antics of your entire irrational Church as it hobbles from one scandal to the next, bleeding out moral authority while it tries desperately to inject it's payload of bronze age ignorance into a new generation.
Yeah, cry me a river. It might surprise you to know that most people don't consider the actual abuse to be the main problem. It was the widespread and systematic cover ups that raised our ire. Being an ex-Catholic atheist, I am no fan of the Catholic Church. I was quite willing to leave them alone to wallow in their doltish and retrograde beliefs, but the revelation of these high level, systematic coverups lead me to conclude that they deserve every heaping helping of scorn that they receive.
And, yes, I am no respecter of beliefs. I have no problem with criticizing stupid beliefs no matter where they originate. Judaism holds no sacred position in my view, either.
You seem to think that thousands of years of accumulated bullshit is somehow more palatable than a few decades of bullshit. I have news for you: it's all bullshit, and it stinks just the same.
I agree. My desktop, which is not top of the line, can play two sessions of WoW at a time without taking a major hit in performance. And this is the stock wine that comes with Debian. I just mount up the Windows partition and run it.
Slashdot Mirror
I do treat individual theists with basic human respect. Their ideas and beliefs, not even a little bit. Their theistic organizations? No fucking way. If you are one of those rare theists who aren't members of organizations trying to control society, then kudos, I wasn't referring to you anyway. Otherwise, no, I'm not going to tolerate your activities, and I'll fight them with every legal tool I have at my disposal, including public ridicule.
I don't give a flying shit if they agree with me or not. They can privately believe I'm going to hell or anything else. And I don't even care if they don't want to do business with me(within the boundaries of the law). But the moment they try to rewrite society to incorporate their irrational bigotry, they need to get slapped down. I'll do everything in my power legally to deny them that ability.
Tell it to the Christians. Or is this yet another stab at the "No True Scotsman" fallacy?
Why would I be tolerant of someone who does not repay the favor? The gays aren't knocking at my door, telling my children that they are going to burn in hell forever. They aren't shooting abortion doctors. They aren't launching suicide attacks on my neighborhood. They aren't polluting science with their fictional delusions. When the theists abandon their irrational bigotry, grow up and stop trying to control their neighbors, they'll be worthy of tolerance.
Funny. Where I live(the US Midwest, FYI), the Christians are at the forefront of attacking human rights, demanding that non-believers kowtow to their deranged fantasies and attacking science when they aren't flailing about in fear of the devil driven liberal conspiracy. That's not what I would call being a good citizen.
The flexibility and freedom from reality that religion affords is really unparalleled, outside of politics.
Here's a few:
"As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves." - Deut. 20:14
"So that is what the Benjamites did. While the girls were dancing, each man caught one and carried her off to be his wife. Then they returned to their inheritance and rebuilt the towns and settled in them." - Judges 21:23 (read the preceding chapters to get a context, as well)
"Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man." - Numbers 31:17-18
I'm sure all those virgins were quite willing after being kidnapped or watching their families being slaughtered.
Then again, this is the same religion that said that rape could be used to get yourself a wife, as long as you were willing to pony up some cash to daddy for taking his property without asking.
"If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl's father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." - Deut. 22:28-29
And what do you do with rape victims?
"If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man's wife. You must purge the evil from among you." - Deut 22:23-24
And I call bullshit on you. None of those things are core to Dawkins' point, which is that religions are unsubstantiated, mythological piles of bullshit which are causing harm to the world in general. It doesn't matter how many contradictions are in the bible. It doesn't matter whether Catholic theology conflicts with Calvinism. Those are all secondary concerns, which are frankly immaterial until you've started proving any of the underlying assumptions. And, of course, no theologian has managed to even get a start on that.
The books as a whole are mythology. Even the Greek myths incorporated bits of historical elements into the narratives. The fact that there may be kernels of historical truth don't make the whole anything other than myth. A bad, morally disturbing myth.
You must have been reading some weird translation of both holy books. The root of the Abrahamic religions is a monstrous tribal blood-god whose laws dictated the death penalty for all kinds of trivial transgressions, who treated women as property and who, in general, was a war-mongering, murdering bastard. He is as unpleasant a character as any of the other various gods that humans have contrived. The thin veneer of positive ethics slathered on later does nothing to mitigate the unbridled wickedness of this whole edifice of evil.
Yeah, I've read it. That's why I don't believe a word of it anymore. A couple of nuggets of decent ethics wrapped up in an utterly atrocious and quite ridiculous, morally corrupt mythology.
They do. They also try to undermine nuclear physics. It's quite sad, really.
Pseudo-science seems to apply nicely.
I mean, "educators" can not possibly be so stupid as to waste tax dollars on such ignorance, can they? The sad part is, even with this, they still aren't as bad as some parts of the USA.
Obvious troll, but I'll bite. How is this any different than the rampant and completely unsupervised genetic twiddling that has been happening in nature for the last few billion years?
You think this will stop them? The same old stupid arguments are already popping up. ID proponents are amazingly dense as a whole.
Well, he was nice enough not to say that ALL of Christianity was a nonsense PR spin, which makes him nicer than me.
I treat them with exactly the same reverence, personally. That is to say, none at all.
Can you please point to an organisation the size of the Church that is paedophile free?
Can you point to an organization claiming to be the Body of Christ and the prime moral authority on the planet which also practices the cover up of child rape(which is just one facet of the abuse that the Church is dealing with now)? The (in)actions of the Vatican speak far more clearly than their public positions.
What you also fail to realise is that priests are on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: unlike 9 to 5 secularists who can engage in their little perversions outside of office hours and where the organisation they work bears no consequences when their employee commits a crime.
And this has what to do with the institutional practice of covering up crimes, pray tell? Are you suggesting that I cut the priests slack for diddling kids, or the bishops for hiding their crimes? How pathetic....
The way you present your opinion, you'd think 2010 was first time that Rome has been aware of this issue.
The way you miss my entire point, you'd think that your reading and critical thinking skills were in serious decline. It's almost as if you didn't read my post about cover ups.
You'll find that many abuse victims that populate these protest marches have already made settlements with the Church and they and their families are coming around for seconds in the compensation stakes. They see a wealthy organisation on the ropes and they're going in for another greedy swipe. This time, they won't be so lucky. There will be no double-compensation pay-outs. The Vatican's legal team will not budge on this matter.
Yup, blame those damned victims for getting raped. The fact that you continually ignore the point of this outrage, namely the cover ups, shows that you've followed the Church's example. Go ahead, ignore the problem. Just don't be surprised when you peek out of your blinders and find that the world has no use for your Chruch anymore.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your prejudices and your bigotry.
Given that you haven't refuted a single statement of mine, you apparently aren't worried about facts at all. But don't mind me. I'll just be here laughing at the antics of your entire irrational Church as it hobbles from one scandal to the next, bleeding out moral authority while it tries desperately to inject it's payload of bronze age ignorance into a new generation.
Yeah, cry me a river. It might surprise you to know that most people don't consider the actual abuse to be the main problem. It was the widespread and systematic cover ups that raised our ire. Being an ex-Catholic atheist, I am no fan of the Catholic Church. I was quite willing to leave them alone to wallow in their doltish and retrograde beliefs, but the revelation of these high level, systematic coverups lead me to conclude that they deserve every heaping helping of scorn that they receive. And, yes, I am no respecter of beliefs. I have no problem with criticizing stupid beliefs no matter where they originate. Judaism holds no sacred position in my view, either.
You seem to think that thousands of years of accumulated bullshit is somehow more palatable than a few decades of bullshit. I have news for you: it's all bullshit, and it stinks just the same.
No, but that doesn't mean that they don't exert a selection pressure upon the Y chromosome via sexual selection, which is exactly the point.
Dude, Bing gives me the warm fuzzies. Of course, that's because I am a fan of a particular bing.
Dry Land?
I agree. My desktop, which is not top of the line, can play two sessions of WoW at a time without taking a major hit in performance. And this is the stock wine that comes with Debian. I just mount up the Windows partition and run it.